I was naive. Its surprising how 3 months of research can change you. Here’s what I thought one needs to do to build a start-up:
Have a great idea.
Build a website around the idea.
Get it made from India.
‘Somehow’ get users and traffic.
Investors will come.
Bingo, where are the keys to my DB9?
Like I said, I was a fool. But how could I have known better? I was born in an educated middle-class Indian family. The stress is on Indian. We’re taught to go for job security. We’re taught to work for someone. We’re taught business is scary. We’re taught to follow. But we’ll play the blame game some other day. You can already tell I get side tracked easily. Anyway, I want to build a company. I’m not passionate about too many things but starting a company is one I am passionate about. So I started researching how to go about building a start-up. Here’s what I now think one needs to do to build a start-up:
Have a great idea.
Question your own idea (very tough to do).
Ask yourself, will I use it?
Will I come back to it after using it once?
Will it need manual work to scale?
Can I defend the concept behind the idea at Techcrunch disrupt or a similar conference where investors, peers etc will rip you apart in seconds?
This is just the idea part and the list is already longer than my original list. Once you have your idea in place:
Build a team.
Pick a founding partner. Humans work better in pairs. 2 is great, 3 maybe okay too. 4 is a definite no.
No, the team should not be in India. Maybe part of it.
Investors are as interested in your team as they are in your idea. This is why Google did not buy Stockpickr. James Altucher will himself tell you so.
You need an advisor. Not just to woo investors either but to keep you real. Since its your idea, you’re biased. You’ll ignore warning signs and be less flexible. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you this.
So with your team in place, next comes execution:
Execution is as important as your idea.
Be stubborn. Listen to developers when they tell you this is the right way to do it but not when it comes to functionality or interface design. Lead. Like Steve Jobs.
Don’t present to investors until you have executed part of it at least, and executed it well.
If you are able to, then have a monetization plan in place. Every body will love a great idea executed properly by a great team that knows how it can make money.
This is not a comprehensive list by any means. I will update it as I continue to learn. I am still a fool. One thing I am sure about though is that I want to build a platform, not a product. Something where I can sit back (meaning work hard on building a great platform) and let the users do their thing.
