"Wannabe entrepreneur"

I came across an interesting blog post by Gabriel Weinberg on symptoms and cures for wannabe entrepreneurs. It would probably be even fair to say that it was an eye-opener. The inconvenient truth is that I have been procrastinating for too long - I really need to stop using lack of time as an excuse for not acting upon my ideas. In the light of the upcoming changes in life it might be a very good idea to sit down and actually do something about this.

Symptom: a year has gone by and you have nothing to show for it.

Cure: get stuff done. That's what real startup founders do. Customers don't care about excuses.

Symptom: you haven't really talked to any real customers/users.

Cure: read Steve Blank's book. Get out of the building. "No plan survives first contact with customers." A related (non-wannabe but first-timer problem) is confusing the user with the customer. I did this on my first startup, and it was one of my primary problems.

Symptom: you're going around calling yourself a CEO.

Cure: you're a founder. You're not powerful. No one cares about what you're doing...yet.

Symptom: you aren't knowledgeable about startups, especially your own space.

Cure: read stuff & regularly talk with the smartest startup people you know. At the very least, you should know the whole history of your space--failures, acquisitions, IPOs, reasons for such, etc.

Symptom: you just need 10-25K in investment.

Cure: get your own 10-25K. Do consulting. Maybe convince friends and family. If you can't raise that much from yourself and your existing circle, you aren't going to be able to raise more from strangers. I did consulting for a few years, max 4hr a day, so I could focus the rest of time on my startups.

Symptom: you have spent months researching the right architecture to build your site.

Cure: build it already. You seem like someone more interested in technology than startups.

Symptom: you don't understand your startup's assumptions.

Cure: make a spreadsheet and try to predict the key metrics of your business. Yes, the financial projections that come out of the spreadsheet are probably worthless (or grossly inaccurate), but not their underlying assumptions. Those are the things you need to prove and the first step is knowing what they are. As a side note, this exercise will help you understand how much money you need to raise, if any.

Symptom: you've written more than a 5pg business plan (intended for others).

Cure: spend that time talking to real customers or building your product. If you think it will help you understand your business, build a spreadsheet with assumptions instead. If you think investors will read it, know that they won't. Note: I have no problem with people analyzing their businesses internally through brief writing; I do that too.

Symptom: you now just need a programmer to code up your site.

Cure: either convince a real tech co-founder to join you, or learn how to code yourself. It's not that hard, and if you think of startups as a career, it's a great skill to have even if you just manage tech people. You don't have to major in CS in college to be a programmer, e.g. I was a Physics major.