How to Create a Software Startup
There is a glut of overly optimistic literature giving advice and
encouragement on entrepreneurship, innovation, and fearlessness in the
face of risk. The advice can be quite misleading due to its authors'
success bias, because they represent the tiny percentage of people who
have succeeded and are given a voice among the infinitely many more
people who have failed. Since chances are against most of us who try,
the goal of this article is to offer suggestions on how to build a
company and give it a chance to stand on its feet, while spending
nothing more than the legal fee to register as a company and a domain
name. Hopefully it will afford you more time to try to build your
company well.
Bootstrapping: What You Can Expect to Achieve
During the bootstrapping stage, as many as possible of the below
milestones have to be accomplished in order to ensure the company is
able to survive moving forward:
* A small but solid team has to be gelled and chugging along
* An early version of the product has to be put on the market
* Figure out a way to earn a little bit of revenue in the early stages
* The product has to be gaining some traction
The more of the above a company can accomplish, the better. If none of
these are established, there is little chance that the business will
become a viable one and the entrepreneur has to take a look at what he
or she has accomplished. If, on the other hand, everything falls nicely
into place and you are able to accomplish all four of the goals, you
may have an incredible new business on your hands that might one day be
very successful. If the business is somewhere in the middle, it may be a
good candidate for an investment and still have great chances to be
successful in the future.
Now we'll go through all the necessary steps, pitfalls and
considerations to get on the road to accomplishing the above milestones.
The Beginning: The Value of the Original Idea
You probably had a little laugh at the title of this section. Many
first-time entrepreneurs and dreamers live in the hopes of a
"million-dollar idea." In reality, it is very rare for an idea to be
even remotely close to being that valuable. Only years of top-notch
execution, continuous innovation, and very hard work will create value.
No matter your previous background, there are some common pitfalls.
Engineers tend to overdo and business people tend to over-plan; not
because they are incompetent, but rather because they are hard workers
who are excited about the prospects of their ideas and do what they can
before the other parts of the business come along. This is often
crippling to the company. One of the first tasks is to build a
well-rounded partner team and validate your idea. I won't get into
specifics of idea-validation here, as Steve Blank does an amazing job of
it in his book "Four Steps to Epiphany" which is a must-read for every
entrepreneur, but I will discuss how to build a superstar founding team,
starting with the differences in approaches in case your background is
technical or in business.
What I often hear business people say is, "I am not very technical ..."
If this sounds familiar, don't worry, that is understood. Just find a
partner who is technical, communicates well, and in whose
professionalism you can trust. They will get you up to speed to a level
where you need to be.
Engineers tend to jump in and do-do-do. But without a clear vision and
direction, they often run themselves in circles, over-building
unnecessary or overly-complicated features. For their part, engineers
might say something similar to "I don't understand business." I myself
have been guilty of such a quote. If I could go back in time, I'd
advise myself to listen and learn as much and as fast as I can because
after a short while, the business environment becomes second nature, fun
and fascinating.
Why You Need Partners
Sometimes engineers who have become confident in the business world can
pull
of a start-up by themselves, but most people need partners. Business
people always need engineers for the obvious reason that someone has to
actually build the product. Engineers need business people and
additional engineers because it is just too difficult for one person to
write code, go to business meetings, network, deal with legal issues, do
marketing, branding, social media, a slew of other tasks, while keeping
a clear mind to maintain focus on their entrepreneurial vision.
Source: http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/44068
