So, you want to startup, do you?
Noble thought my friend…
You probably have a nice, cushy job and are bringing home your hard-earned moolah every month, putting food on the table and generally doing everything you can to make sure your family is taken care of. You now dream of being the Lord of your own venture and making an exit in a blaze of glory.
Or you’re probably in a job that you don’t care much for.
Some of you might be in a job that you hate. A lot of you might hate your boss and dream about bopping him on the head if you ever got the chance to.
If I might be so wild as to make a guess, a few of you might have lost your jobs and are unable to find a new gig.
Whatever your reason for wanting to venture out on your own, be aware that this is absolutely the last thing you should ever be thinking of doing.
I’ll go so far as to say…don’t do it..You are probably going to fail and fail badly.
How do I know and why should you listen to me? My dear, young, wide-eyed, fresh faced friend…simply because I have been there, done that…not once, not twice but thrice and still counting…
You heard me right. I’m sort of a serial entrepreneur-failure who is still searching for the kind of success I had dreamed of in the beginning.
I have been through the school of hard knocks, have roamed the dusty streets and by lanes of business, met, spoken and dealt with the inhabitants and have drank wholeheartedly from the cup of knowledge they offered. It took me years to figure out how to build a business that was most likely to succeed and without spending your life’s earnings on it.
So sit back, put your feet up and listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.
Never startup for the glory of the exit or because you think you can emulate the guy who had the 10 million dollar exit.
You don’t know his business and you don’t know the circumstances he was in. For every 1 successful startup, you see a hundred lying strewn in the graveyard.
Don’t startup unless you are so consumed by the thought that you cannot sleep at night. It affects you so much that you cannot concentrate and you spend most of the day dreaming about your own gig.
An idea means nothing.
Yeh, you had probably thought of building an Uber or an AirBNB long before those businesses ever launched. But did you execute on that idea? I bet not…An idea costs nothing, it’s all in the execution. So if you have a fire burning bright within you, you need to know how to execute it.
Every idea needs validation
You need to know if the market needs what you offer. The last thing you want to be doing is running off and building something no one wants. The trick is to get your validation done in the most frugal way possible. “Spend money to make money” is not what you want to be doing at this stage of your business.
Stay tuned for my next post on market validation.
Build your business one step at a time
This is most important otherwise you will end up wasting your hard-earned money before you get a penny in return.
This one is probably least thought of but is vitally important — Make sure as far as is possible that you have the money to sustain yourself for at least 3 years.
It will take that much time to build a substantial user base. Most startups fail not because they have a horrible product but because they do not have users.
You see my radiant faced, wet-behind-years puppy, there’s a ton of hard work, blood, sweat and tears involved in building a profitable startup. It is not for the faint hearted.
If you are looking for an easy way to make money, or a get-rich-quick scheme, this business is not for you. Stay far away from it and save yourself years of mental torture.
If planning, organizing, playing the waiting game and taking things one step at a time is not the road you’d like to go down on then this is not for you.
If you are not the one who likes to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, don’t even think of starting up.
If you think that your startup will be successful only because you have a great idea and you think it will succeed…run the hell away as fast as you can. You need much more than wishful thinking to succeed.
But if you have paid close attention to what I have been saying, and you identify with what I’ve said, then maybe, just maybe you will find yourself a likely candidate to jump into the big, bad world of entrepreneurship.
While failure can be dismal and heartbreaking, if you do happen to make it, there is nothing on earth that will give more satisfaction than building a company that is profitable and that adds value to the lives of people your business touches.
In my next post, I will show you how to go about validating your idea quickly and without spending a bunch of money.
Till then, stay cool…
