You can still get angel investors to help you without traction, including myself. Anyone looking for advice can feel free to email ha@hackerangels.com, and we'll try our best to help.
That's a great idea, it really helps the community, unfortunately for me, I got some casual advices that couldn't really help me, it reads like a copy paste answer, I was trying to figure out what's the best strategy to gain traction for a mobile service targeting mobile devices and I got an answer saying I should create some slides....that email was extremely annoying, but maybe I just set my expectations too high, a reference to your traction vertical blog entry would have done it at the time.
In part, they gain headlights into deal flow at an extremely early stage.
I can vouch for the Hacker Angels' willingness to help just for the sake of it, though. I pinged them when their announcement first hit HN, and while I am sure they were deluged, and my business is "pre-traction", they still took the time to respond in detail to my questions. This type of advice is difficult to get, especially from angels themselves. It's a great service to the community, and personally I don't mind them extracting a little value of out it!
