Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Should You Launch A Software Startup? (theguardian.com)
Slashdot reader ben-hnb is a developer who loves the idea of running a startup, or being one of the ones who got in early. But how exactly does he get there?
I've got no "business" experience. Everyone seems to want to get on the startup incubator train -- the latest U.K. model I've seen, Launchpad, would even train (MA!) and support me financially for a year while developing the initial product. This just one in a long list of different models, from the famous Y-Combinator three-month model to the 500 Startups four-month seed program and simple co-working spaces with a bit of help, like Launch 22.
If you wanted to get a startup going, where would you go to first and why? Or would you just strike out in your bedroom/garage?
Leave your best answers in the comments. How would you launch a software startup?
If you wanted to get a startup going, where would you go to first and why? Or would you just strike out in your bedroom/garage?
Leave your best answers in the comments. How would you launch a software startup?
Keep a job. Write software after/before work.
I don't respond to AC's.
It sounds like you don't have any real ideas, so don't start your own business.
If you want to join a startup, there are certain recruiting firms that specialize in startups. Every recruiter who contacts you, tell them you are looking to join an early stage startup. It also helps to go to meetups and such.
Finally, if you don't have "full stack" ability, then it's going to be a lot harder for you. Maybe build up your skills a bit.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Please check out my Building Your Startup series at Envato Tuts+. In it, I walk people through every step of building Meeting Planner. There are upcoming episodes on crowdfunding vs angel or VC investing. A lot if is development-oriented but there are wide-ranging anecdotes throughout.
... developer who loves the idea of running a startup, or being one of the ones who got in early. But how exactly does he get there?
Bzzzt! Wrong answer.
Ask yourself this question: could I start a project on SourceForge (or more like GitHub nowadays) and keep it going for 2, 5, 10 years?
The early days are all fun. The company is growing, you are having Nerf gun battles in the conference room, etc. However, after a couple of years the shine starts wear off and it starts to feel more like a job.
Not only that, but if your goal is a "startup" in the Silicon Valley sense of the term (grows quickly and then gets acquired or goes public), you will have deal with most of the following:
You will notice that none of those things involve writing software. Don't get me wrong. The core technology that underpins your idea is absolutely critical. However, ideas are a dime a dozen. It is much more difficult to get a working implementation that people are willing to consider investing in is much more difficult. More difficult still is the other 90% of the startup gig that has to happen if you want to be a success.
So, back to my original question. Could you see yourself managing an open source project for the long haul? Open source projects only have to deal with a tiny fraction of the non-programming things that you would have to deal with in a startup environment.
Incidentally my perspective is based on my experience several years ago almost deciding to make a run at it myself. I took some classes at the local Small Business Development Center, talked to some local startup folks, and then promptly decided I don't have what it takes. I stuck with my consulting gig that I've been doing for some years. That suits me much better; someone else gets to deal with all that nonsense and then all I have to do is find companies with problems that match my skill set, which is much easier for me that trying to run a startup.
no successful company has been founded in some shabby ass garage, you need...
a trendy office about 1/3 larger than you need in the most expensive part of your nearest large city
lavish furniture, course dont buy any of it, use credit as much as possible
the highest tech bleeding edge supercomputer laptop's
the biggest ass UHD TV screens you can fit on every wall
a indoor water feature
and a small army of young marketing people, in fact 2 more than your entire software team, you are going to need them to sell your startup to someone else cause otherwise you dont seem to have any idea's or products, otherwise people would already be giving you money.
Joel Spolsky blogged his way through his startup experience, and since he has an office in NYC and founded Stack Exchange (along with surviving a Bill Gates questionnaire and serving in the IDF) I'd imagine he's a decent source of enlightenment upon the topic. Everything from venture capital to office space, business models, etc.- he blogged about it.
I'm reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez. The author and his two engineers leave the startup they worked at to create a startup at Y Combinator to create a better version of the Digg toolbar (remember toolbars?) for Google advertisers in 2010. I'm at the part where they get served with an intellectual property lawsuit, as one of the engineers wrote half of the code base at old startup. Fun times.
I doubt this book will replace Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan as my favorite Silicon Valley startup book.
The intent of a startup is to develop a product that people will buy from you. It should be a product that isn't already on the market. If you are thinking another facebook/google/youtube/dropbox/trailers/angrybirds/office productivity clone of existing products: Stop, go back to your desk at work and keep churning out code for someone else.
You need a unique/newish idea:
If you have an idea you think is actually new and useful. Do some googling on the idea to see if anybody has considered it (or similar overlapping ideas) and the response to it. Do some basic patent research to see if anyone has staked ground on your idea. Do some informal research to see if people are interested in (and would pay money for) your idea. If you feel you have to to mask the purpose of the research, go for it (it just takes more time). Surveys can be written to show interest in one item while simultaneously drawing out information on a not so obvious second. Now you have an idea that should be relatively unique, patent free and people want (even if they don't know it or can't articulate it). If you can't answer these questions, stop now.
Get a lawyer
You will need to incorporate at some point and a business lawyer will be able to point your in the right direction on the pros and cons of different company types. Also plan with the lawyer on your future end goal (expand or buyout) so your company can be structured properly for future action. You need manpower, budget and a business plan:
How many man hours will it take to have a demo model (no matter how crude)? How many man hours will it take to bring it to market? What is your time frame to bring it to market? Do you need to quit your current job to work on it? Do you need to hire people in order to meet your deadline? How much runway do you estimate you need in order to get off the ground with a saleable product? This is the basis of your development and launch budget. Your business plan is your estimate on keeping the company operating: what are your liabilities, assets, income and burn rate of reverses?
Where is your budget coming from?
If its just yourself you have to go back to a day job when you bank account is empty. If you are employing other people you need to continuously be out there pitching for seed money (which takes away from dev time). So having a working demo that you can pitch is needed. Have your pitch smooth and bullet proof and be ready to field all sorts of outlandish questions, be told "we'll think about it" and then ignored, and to be told NO many many times.
What is your end goal?
Do you want to develop into a larger company or be bought out for a pay day? Do some research on your Phase II goal. It doesn't need to be now, but you don't want to be surprised when you turn around and realize that you are suddenly employing 35 people and you have a large company knocking on your door with an offer and you don't know what to do with it.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I didn't ask for your opinions! Give me your fucking ideas you fucking neckbeard!
I believe your corporate strategy has been properly expressed as DAIKATANA.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Have a product and a customer in mind.
Step 2: Write a functional proof-of-concept
Step 3a: Find a customer.
Step 3b: Worry about "being a startup"
I own Noventum Custom Software. Noventum is a small company (me + 1 full time W2, and 3 part time 1099s) that offers software development services to others. This isn't exactly a high growth startup, but we do have two intellectual property projects we're working on (that customers paid for, which we own the IP.)
I have two rules:
1.) Know how we're going to get paid before working on a software project, and where the money came from (past tense - already exists and can be talked about using concrete terms.)
2.) Don't work with people with zero business experience, even if they meet the first criteria.
Our model is based on very low risk, slow growth, tried and true business practices. All of our customers are successful companies that have come to rely on custom software for their businesses to function, and it's immediately clear how they plan on paying us. Mine is not the kind of business that other people invest in, or that brings a brand new, innovative, product to market quickly. I am building a team, and involved in activities that I believe will help me with the skills needed to actually have a product.
So, for you, what I would recommend is to start contracting, and gain business experience. If you're able to offer your services to others at hourly, or in fixed-rate, contracts you will start to develop all of the ancillary skills that are related to selling software, which are only tangentially related to the actual coding. There are many such skills, with the primary one being sales. Unless your organization has some ability to sell, it won't really matter how awesome your product is if no one knows about it, no one is buying it, and you have to work another job to pay your bills. Also correctly paying taxes, and managing the books for a business is another skill that I wish I was better at. Aesthetics are another skillset that I lack - it's important to make things look nice. All of these skills take time to develop, or even to be able to evaluate in others. If you have a mountain of cash, you'll burn through it learning what it means to manage salespeople, designers, and accountants, unless you have some skill in these areas.
The three successful product companies I've worked with/for all began contracting. This allowed them to get paid to learn their customers' needs, since the customers would then sign a contract with them to have these needs met. This is the approach I recommend.
I am also from New Mexico. Culturally, we don't look highly upon the 18 companies that VCs fund that go broke in order for there to be one home run. This model is not attractive to me, even if I understand the basic mathematics behind it, and consider it an effective method of wealth generation. Depending on your values, geographic location, tolerance for risk, and perception of the passage of time, there may be a better path than contracting for you.
Starting one with just 3 engineers is a bad idea. Trust me.
First off, I'd like to say that I don't have much experience in startups, but here's my story and hopefully you can get something out of this (anon for obvious reasons):
I currently consult for a non profit startup aiming to provide economic opportunity to the needy (how they'll actually pull it off is another story). My role is effectively to get the data and do analytics for them. Turns out, their data is terrible not only in quality, but also quantity (number of observations) and scope (number of variables). I provided my suggestions tackle this first to the "Director of Networks" and even got a professional developer on board to help out pro-bono. At first she seemed excited about the prospects, then backtracked saying my idea wasn't good. When I asked why, her response? "I don't want to learn another system." That's it. May also be worth mentioning that 1) she's an Education major with a computer background equivalent to one course of photoshop (or something similar), and 2) she has no idea how to use the current system to begin with. Naturally, suggesting to loop the CEO in for his thoughts on my proposals was met with a brick wall and defensiveness. Moral of the story: hire someone who knows what the hell they're doing or, at the very least, is willing to accept advice from more experienced professionals.
with a trebuchet
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Read up on Lean Startups. Think of the initial phase is to find a need that people will pay for, and keep tuning that product to best match the market. If the market or need is too small, flip to something else.
You can do a lot/most of the checking on that market fit BEFORE you leave you job. Do so, then show the VCs what you've found in terms of this 'market traction'.
If you want to join a startup, go to these incubators and ask them to give you their elevator pitch. If the basic concept sounds okay, ask if they need more staff, what they'd show a potential investor and what skills they're looking for then negotiate a deal. Remember start-ups usually don't have a lot of cash so your income will probably depend on the company's future, joining a poor start-up doesn't do you any good. Make sure you don't end up in a position where you accept crap pay but they'll run away with all the profit if it succeeds.
If you're looking to actually start a software company, how do you know if you have a viable market if you don't have any "business experience"? The most important part of a software company isn't the code, it's the business plan. Essential points:
Who are you planning to sell to?
What will be the key selling features?
Why hasn't anyone else done it?
How will it reach the market?
When do we expect product revenue?
If you think I'll just create the product and they'll come, stop. Nobody knows you exist, nobody understands your product/solution and nobody cares. If you haven't got a grip on those, that's okay but then don't quit your day job. Start creating it, try selling it and get some actual experience. That way it'll only cost you time and you'll probably learn that selling it was much harder than you thought. At least that was my limited experience running a start-up, even if we thought we had the product they needed the customer was rarely more than lukewarm.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
blow all your investment cash on flashy marketing and ads that say nothing, vital team building sessions in exotic vacation destinations, season tickets to your favorite pro sports teams, and office perks like an employee spa and gourmet kitchen. then outsource actual development to the lowest bidder on freelancer.
See subject: It won't if you don't try & results = "I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine. Your software is well written, functional. The Host File Engine performs exactly as promised" by mmell
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant
I've never tried to belittle (APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon
APK is kinda right. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works by bmo
I like your host file system by Karmashock
I find your hosts file admirable by vel-ex-tech
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg
* Recommended & hosted by Malwarebytes' hpHosts!
APK
P.S.=> This one's hobby/fun (& doing the right thing/paying it forward) but I've had hobbies like it turn into parts of commercially sold successful ware to this very day by certified MS partners (you can too or better)... apk
If you go through a startup incubator, please be aware of the following:
Investors will want three things from you - a business plan, an exit strategy and at least 70% ownership of your startup (probably more actually)
Investors may not want you in the startup company in the role that you had in mind. ("What do you mean I can't be CEO of my own startup?")
Business incubators offer 'free' seeding money, but you often won't get it until 1 or maybe even 2 years after incubation starts.
A good business incubator will bluntly tell you what you need to do/change to make your startup successful.
There is such a thing as incubator 'sluts' - companies that literally bounce from one incubator to the next, barely scraping by on the seed money from each.
Personally, if I were to launch a software startup, I'd build an MVP in my spare time and then shop around looking for investors/clients/incubators to take it to the next stage.
2) Get discouraged by a bunch of jaded developers
3) ???
4) Give up
The best advice I can give is save a year's salary first, then start with consulting/contracting work while building your product. Maybe you'll be able to stay alive long enough and transition from consulting/contracting to your product. Also, identify what you're not good at and find people who are and will give up their successful career to roll the dice on a shot in the dark ( not easy ). Finally, if you have a spouse make sure they're on board 100% and make sure they understand the odds and what failure means like no house, car, health insurance, savings etc.
"Being successful at these things is about as likely as getting struck by lightning at the bottom of a swimming pool. Well that's a bit much, the odds aren't that good actually." - paraphrased quote i read in some random startup book
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
APK! You're alive! Holy shit!!
Find a lawyer to make sure your all set up for tax, payments, your brand is legally good, and that your secure from questions by your own gov later.
Ensure payments are done in a very standard and secure way and that its all ready for tax.
Work on support so a contact form is easy to find with a tracking number and a provide an email back with that tracking number.
Create a blog with updates, news, a forum for feature requests. That allows users to feel like they are part of the brand.
When your product is ready contact many different online public relations firms.
For a small fee they can build global interest in your software and brand.
Tech sites and blogs like to copy and paste news so provide them with a press kit. Logo, a few photos in different sizes ready for print and web or social media, branding, a short history of why, who, how, when and where of software creation and what the software supports, offers.
Be ready to reach out to other tech blogs, online voice and video interviews globally.
If such an interview is live at 3am, ensure a good camera, lighting, mic, and background setting.
Look at the different nations that are interested in your work. Find a translator if needed and then offer support in that language.
Be ready with insights into an OS, code creation, code support, working with the internet, apps, optimizing code.
Do not give any secrets away but be ready to talk in depth on software, OS and todays tech issues. Thank the interviewer and ensure any mentioned website, social media or contact details are easy to remember and appropriate for that nation, language or media.
If you need some interview filler, reflect on past tech, cpu, gpu, bandwidth, changes in web use, compilers, OS support tools in a positive way.
Stay positive about any other brand, product or service. The key is to come a regular for that blog or voice or video and been able to place your brand while talking to any emerging topic. That could be free branding over many conversations to a world wide audience.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
software is all shit. we don't need more shit.
Provide services.
For you I would suggest- stop. You're asking all the wrong questions. The question on whether to use an incubator or not is so far down the road its not even funny. That's step 12 or so. You're at step 1.
Find a problem. Figure out a solution. Market test and focus group to try and figure out if your idea for a solution actually is a solution. Then come up with a business plan- a fully detailed one. Make sure you think you can actually be profitable in a reasonable time. After that, write your MVP (here is where you may consider hiring or quitting your job, but it may not be time yet). Then, depending on the business plan you have, either start selling or go to investors.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
1. Move to Silicon Valley in the early 1980's.
2. Buy real estate.
3. Profit!
Assuming you will reach any achievable goal in a startup is delusional. That includes getting anything out the door, making any money, having a life outside of work, or having anything to show for your time except war stories.
You can have a lot of fun if you realize that you are doing it for the experience, and you understand it will eat your life. If you don't understand how much of a gamble you are taking you are in for a rude awakening.
As an alternative, consider going to Alaska and panning for gold. You will get a lot more exercise and get to be outside a lot more. And you chance of success is roughly the same. And you'll also have cool stories to tell afterwards.
Why is Snark Required?
A business is about taking money in faster than you are giving money out.
Do you know how to do that?
If NO: Work in someone else's small business and ask for exposure to the management/operations of it until you learn:
(1) How to make money (Marketing-Sales-Delivery-Customer Service chain)
(2) How to manage cashflow (and make payroll)
If YES: Use Business Model Canvas to sketch out your business model, and just start doing it.
Finance options:
1) To keep control longer and have a high probability of success: Get to positive cashflow as quickly as possible, use sweat equity, savings and friends and family. Later when you need more cash, you can borrow from banks against your business cashflow.
2) To give up control and have a high probability of failure: the incubator/accelerator/VC route
Most businesses should do (1)
Some businesses, with a high chance to become the "next big thing" should do (2) under specific criteria. Most of the folks who get rich doing (2) did (1) first.
The endgame of (2) is still a cashflow positive business some day. If you don't know how to run such a business, then you won't be the one running it by the time your business gets there. Your investors will install new management.
Community,
How should I suck dik 4 coke?
.
shaking head...
read a book, go to school..
Oh, that's not what you were asking?
Almost certain to be a success.
1) Find a venture capitalist.
2) Start sucking his cock. (Don't worry, "female" venture capitalists also have cocks.)
3) Keep on sucking that dollar dong on a daily basis.
4) Keep sucking it until you are magically reborn into the "right" kind of family, and get automaticallyâ admitted to Stanford even tho you're dumb as a rock.
5) Come up with a really dumb idea
6) Get your son-of-a-billionaire butt buddy from the Stanford dorms to "invest" a couple million dollars of his pocket change
7) Profit!
You don't "just" start a business, any more than you "just" start writing code (unless you want to fail...) You start a business with a business plan. You get a rough idea if it's going to work at all, on paper. You use that business plan to guide your efforts. You check that business plan against reality, frequently.
Who cares WHERE you go if your business has no plan. You can't expect people to magically give you money for existing.
Guy who claims his app will protect you from advertising spams forum with ads for said app? Use one of the many free and open source alternatives and don't support a spammer.
Get someone who knows social media and SEO really well. Have them do the market research to find out what people want, then build it.
Build your customer list while your software is in development, and make sure you can notify them all when you launch.
Nothing is more depressing than busting your butt to make a release date, and launching to crickets...
You may have heard a statistic that nearly all businesses fail within the first few years.
The one and only reason that they fail is you need to support yourself with food and shelter for several years while you build your product. The only alternative to funding yourself is all the incubators and investor crap that is mentioned elsewhere in this thread. What happens if you choose to not self-fund:
- You must spend 100% of your time either doing or developing a dog and pony show to get more investment. The dog and pony show will not work unless it is all pizzaz and no functional code that you can use toward your actual product.
- You have to give up almost complete ownership of your company
- You essentially become a brick in a pyramid scheme
- You will not be able to develop your actual product until about year 2-3 when you start to get "series" funding
- Just kidding. Once you get "series" funding you will need to spend 100% of your time making an even bigger dog and pony show to satisfy investors
- Your idea can't be innovative or revolutionary, it must be evolutionary and only incrementally different than everything else the investors have seen before
- Your idea has to be really stupid so that investors can understand it
Of course, if you choose to self-fund you must:
- do a minimum of 5 fulltime jobs all by yourself (no way to do this in your "off hours")
- wish that there was UBI so that you don't starve and die
- give up your entire life savings
- hope you don't get sick or have anyone to take care of-- not even dogs
- eventually die under a pile of government paperwork which all requires filing fees up the wazoo
Actually starting a business isn't
There are so many hurddles.
First a god idea and implementation of said idea.
Then getting the word out and marketing.
You would gennarly think that a good product would be sufficient but not so. There are many good / better products that died becus no one knows about them or the inferior product have brand recognition and good adds.
And then being able to find investors or coming upp with startup money.
And then you have the market pricing bracket.
Third fucking SPAM post you've made so far in this article.
Have lots of PR that explains how you are unsinkable and could never fail. You might get lucky and not hit an iceberg, that's how the vast majority of software companies make it in this business, blind faith and pure luck.
(if you meet anyone who says they have a system that leads to success in business, they've not done their research. And they are probably bad at math because they were using too small of a sample size.)
At least he's keeping the length of his posts short.
They will provide you with equity free money, contacts and a huge neywork of contacts.
It is one of the largest incubators/vc in the world.
Then read it again.
Then read it again taking notes.
The you'll know what to do.
Good luck!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... I'd try a e-rused Falcon 9 - although the Soyuz family DOES offer more configuration flexibility.
Check out my novel.
Now in the TOP drawer we gonna put the credit cards that are due to pay for the Software Business, and down in the bottom drawer we gonna put the cards that pay off the DUE cards. It then goes back and forth like a FLiP Flop Counter, but unlike a counter, we get MORE CREDIT.
The middle drawer is for wallets and property deeds and pink slips and shit like that.
Then you have no business starting up a software company.
You can't go from zero to hero in one fell swoop. All you are going to accomplish if you try now is to give all of your hard-earned money away to business "consultants" who will turn around and dilute your stock to 0.1% of the capitalization, fire you, and take all your money.
Just steal an idea from others and let the lawyers fight it out. You can also see that you do something, call it something else, because you have an app and let the lawyers fight it out.
e.g. I am working on selling beers in the US to people under the age of 21. However they order via an app, in the general conditions it is said they are only allowed to look at the closed bottles.I also do not call it "selling beer in a bar" I cal it "Filled container dispention with the opportunity to look at it". They are not buying the beers, they are renting the bottles and are required to bring them back within a 250 year period. At return they have to pay an extra 1USD handling fee. ...
See? I am not selling beer, just like Uber is not a taxi company and Paypall is not a bank and
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Keep your day job. Develop in your spare time. Consult lawyers locally who specialize in your field to ensure you are on the right track legally. Use _solid_ Non-Disclosure documents for everything.
Those incubators are money making endeavors that are able to absorb losses from the failed attempts and still profit from the ones that succeed. There are enough drains on business capital, esp for startups, I don't want another hand in the pie. And what do they really offer you? A pretty office? You can rent one of those by the day IF your success depends on it.
there are tons of people who start a small business in the sense of getting an Employer ID Number (or whatever it's called in your country), registering the name, getting various licenses, then it languishes essentially unused for years while they don't spend much, nor do they have much revenue.
There are also lots of people who start a "business" as a way to take advantage of tax treatment for things like deductions for business vehicles over 6000lb, etc. In the US, there's no law against running a money losing business that confers tax advantages for its owners.
These businesses tend to last forever, because the "maintenance costs" of the business are small ( a few hundred $/year)
But they're never really a "going concern"
Don't.
Startups are businesses. You need business acumen and people skills, neither of which are engineer qualities. If you do decide to do a startup, realize your first hire is not yourself, but the CEO who will handle the initial pitch, finance and all that non-engineering jazz. Also know that your priorities as an engineer are out oa whack with that your startup will need, unless you're already used to doing things in an agile manner.
But realize that the traditional startup might sound sexy but it sucks. If you can at all bootstrap it, do it that way. If you never have to pitch to a VC, then that's the best outcome for you, even if it takes a little longer. VC funding is only when you have hurdles to entry that you can't cross on your own, or you are racing to market because of a timeline.
Once you bring in a VC, you no longer own the business, they do, despite whatever equity agreement you have.. You wanted a start-up to be your own master, but having other people's funding makes them the master.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
What the "business people"will tell you is that ideas are cheap, implementations are important, and elegant implementations are useless if no one needs/wants your product.
If you are writing software to solve a problem you have, and then hope that other people will find your software useful - that isn't a business
If you know that (* large number of people, who are willing/able to pay for your software *) have a problem and your software will help them with that problem - that is the beginning of a business ....
for more (and better) advice - Guy Kawasaki has written several useful books - "The Art of the Start 2.0" is very good ...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
Lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers.
First get your idea, make proof of concept, market it to your niche.
Then hire programmers to make the idea into a full-blown revenue stream, hire marketers and an advertising team to drive up sales. Then get sued out of existence by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, or SCO.
Most of success is NOT the GREAT IDEA. Most of success is getting people together to work on any feasible idea, then success is actually getiing a lot of people to want and to buy your idea, --- and then success is defending that idea against all those who want to take what you have.
Me? I just do what the boss says, I do not care about "making it big", there are just too many ulcers and heart attacks that go along with "success".
A wise man once said, "One measure of success is the amount time do you have to do the things you like doing."
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Money money money.
With a trebuchet.
Irony Alert: Pet Rock ?
Well alright, you see it was this mat... that you would put on the floor and it would have CONCLUSIONS written on it, that you could JUMP TO.
This idea... it's horrible
We'll make great pets
Over ten years I have taken 3 Sandhill road venture businesses through scale and exit as a technical CEO/Founder. I have been a paper millionaire twice and had ten years of 6 digit Fortune 500 enterprise work before doing a decade in startups.
Honestly I would have more money today if I had never left Enterprise development.
I can sum up the state of the Bay Area Incubator business pointing at the 2013 Y-Combinator company Meta, they have taken $73M from 20 investors and are considered a leader in the AR industry, despite
- 0 product market traction
- 100% market Hype
If you visit the main Meta campus it looks like "the next Apple" and superficially it's all very impressive. But this superficiality is best shown when you find out that the person leading the design of the interface for Meta, Jayse Hansen has ZERO EXPERIENCE BUILDING REAL INTERFACES. All of his experience prior to Meta was building fake interfaces for Hollywood. Very pretty stuff, don't get me wrong, but are they useful?
When Hollywood is leading UX design for a Y-Com Startup it becomes obvious why today's incubator industry has FAILED TO PRODUCE any startups of meaningful value in years. It's more about putting the investor's money to work so that everyone can start making salaries and attend incubator bro-grammer parties.
I grew it to 11 employees making more than a $million a year of profit. Sold it for multiple millions.
I've started companies around an "idea." (most of these failed. Some were ok)
I started a second custom software company that is still going strong. It works primarily with software startups. We've launched about 50 companies (all around an "idea") so far.
I'm actually working as the CTO of one of the companies we've launched as they've grown explosively around their "idea."
My advice:
Pre sell. Do not think of something, go build it, and try to sell it. Don't do that. As others have pointed out, that requires sales, business, etc. You don't have that.
You say you can code. Talk to anyone and everyone around you (focus on existing business owners). Try to see problems that they might not even see that can be solved by computers. Anything that a human is spending a lot of time on that a computer can do better.
Offer to build that computer program for $x. Ideally you've already learned that they are spending 10x in labor costs on that issue. If they say no, move on. If they say yes, you have your first sale. Delight them.
Repeat.
If you start seeing the same types of problems or if you start getting skill in a particular area, a natural business will grow out of it. You'll naturally realize you are making more with these other projects than your full time job and you'll quit the full time job to do this.
(As an aside, you can start a software company around an idea, but you need deep domain expertise so your idea is already vetted by your expertise in that industry as an industry-wide problem that you *know* lots of people will pay $x for)
Good luck. Happy to help more if I can.
You wish you were capable of getting results like he does but you never will be able to.
Get a Jewish business connection/partner. If you are Jewish yourself then you already have an advantage.
Ben what's your idea? I can help you with the business side if your not dead good enjoy enough just reply to this and I'll get back to you c
See subject: I'm on topic. You downmodded my posts for no good reason so I got you to blow your bogus "downmodpoints" so you couldn't anymore. Awwww, poor you.
APK
P.S.=> You just don't get it, do you, UNIDENTIFIABLE jealous little worm? You waste your time vs. me. I will outsmart you EVERY single time (& certainly outperform you - I create good things people like & use that are of benefit to them. A skulking WORM like you can't & NEVER WILL wasting your time being the reprehensible SCUM you are)... apk