If I want to become an entrepreneur, where do I start?
  • Motivation
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Mindset
  • bussiness
3 Answers
Eden Abdisa
updated: 27 December 2019
Never build out a product or service until after it has paying customers. (an exception might be a competitive advantage, like a rare technical skill or large audience. There's luck involved in business and billions of smart people who also hate their jobs competing with you to get out of hell.) Timing is everything. Arrive 6–10 years ahead of mainstream. Keep your job lest you become homeless. Nobody owes you a loan or investment just because you have an idea and hate your job/s. Talk to customers or potential customers every day. Never outsource this to others on your team while you're getting started. Every founder must be chief evangelist and witness strangers' reactions to your offering. If you don’t get rejected 5x/day, you slept in too late. Do everything yourself before you hire. Key people tend to disappear during deadlines but you must keep your word and deliver on time. Hire slow and fire fast. Hire people smarter than you and pay them before you pay yourself. I slept in my car for years to keep the dream team happy and loyal. If you are not good to your team, they become your sales prevention department. Your customers wish they never met you. You are an inconvenient expense on the way to solving their pain. Make this about what's in it for them rather than how great you are. Be comfortable spending indefinite time alone. While you are broke, nobody will ever love you. (i.e. you'll look like hell and you can't afford time or money to socialize) Say goodbye to friends, family, weekends, holidays, paychecks, showers and sleep. This could take years. Nobody wants you to succeed. People rarely even like themselves so don't expect them to like you. Nobody wants to steal your business idea. Most are too lazy or poor to try. If you are lucky enough to know other entrepreneurs, they are busy tending their own dreams. Develop warm relationships with your competitors. Make bold promises that almost kill you. Then overdeliver. Don’t be stubborn or defensive. If you want to succeed, follow your mentor’s footprints and make only things that customers will buy. Customers determine your product, niche and brand. If you are broke, it's most likely because you ignored valid criticism, or you're selling something nobody wants or needs. Don’t get investors. If your product requires huge capital investment, choose more than just a wallet or you'll cringe when they call. Having investors is worse than having a job because they are more permanent than marriage and they don't even pretend to love you. Choose someone who already has relationships with your potential acquirers and a track record of large exits. Choose an investor who has been an entrepreneur. If it takes too long to raise money, you don’t have enough customers. Even if it’s not your first rodeo, it’s rude to ask for money without evidence they'll get a return (purchase orders). If you’re not willing to replace yourself, sell your company and move on, then you’re not building something scalable. Nothing wrong with being a small business owner but don’t expect investment or sizable returns for a lifestyle business. Be ruthless with your time. Don't watch netflix or use personal social media. Events are also a waste of time. You attract what you are, so hold off on dating until you have something to offer. Make a to-do list before you sleep. You cannot urinate until the most horrible task is crossed off. Consider a sleeping pill once you can afford the time off. Your cortisol levels will be through the roof. Also, you must exercise. If you gain weight you appear out of control and disheveled— try running and selling a company when it's obvious you can barely manage yourself. Everything is your fault.
Anuj Makol
updated: 27 December 2019
Sit down, make yourself comfy. Grab a beer. This might take a while. There are two basic choices. You can either become a Silicon Valley Style Capital-E Entrepreneur™ (SVSE), or a small-e entrepreneur. I won't say anything about the former. I've said enough in other places, and there are many other good sources. Small-e entrepreneurship Now there is another style of entrepreneurship, known simply as entrepreneurship. No capital E unless you use the word in the beginning of a sentence. How do you learn this kind? The secret is ridiculously simple. You'll kick yourself once you hear it. I recommend you kick someone else near you instead; displacement of anger is a key skill to learn in entrepreneurship, and the fight that follows will do you good, since small-e entrepreneurship is very much like picking a fight. Anyway, the secret is... Fail to keep a real job. That's how I started. Failing to keep a real job. Actually, I started by failing to keep a job that was not even real: graduate student. I failed out of my first stab at doing a PhD and joined a non-SV startup as first employee. Then I went back and finished, failed again to get a real job and took a postdoc instead. Finally, I got a real job, but four years later, I finally failed to keep it. Cleverly, I walked out on my own terms before somebody got sick enough of me to attempt to fire me. So the formula is: Try to get a real job. If you fail, you're done. You're an entrepreneur. If you succeed, try to keep the job. If you fail, you're done. You're an entrepreneur. Many of you young 'uns are very lucky to be hitting the job market during a recession, it now easier than ever to get there in just 2 steps instead of the 4 it took people like me. If you fail to fail to keep a real job, keep trying till you are unemployable. This is rather like the formula for learning how to fly in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The key there was to jump from a high place and miss the ground. Failing to keep a real job is approximately as difficult. Employment is like gravity. Others have compared it to crack cocaine. Drags you back. Once you've failed to keep a real job, you have to keep failing at it. This takes enormous grit. So good, now that you're an entrepreneur, how do you become a successful one? You just have to keep failing to keep a real job till you die. That's it. Whether you die proud owner of an apple cart or a billion dollar company, you still get to call yourself an entrepreneur on your deathbed. So long as you can claim with a straight face that you never learned to keep any real job. What does this continuous failure to keep a real job teach you? In order, the longer you keep at it, the more of this list of things it teaches you, by forcing you to do them: Dollar Number One: Congrats, you've failed to keep a job. Make money by any means necessary, other than getting a job (in the US, there is a preliminary step called "get health insurance by any means necessary). A shocking number of people with entrepreneurial ambitions have never made a non-paycheck dollar. Do it now. I am not setting a high target. Just ONE dollar that's not from a paycheck. "Making money" is a very different activity from "earning a paycheck." For one thing, it's like P. T. Barnum's definition of PR. In a job, if you do nothing for long enough, somebody might eventually notice and get rid of you. Even if they do, you might actually be able to stay (cf: Wally of Dilbert, or Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener). But there's a good chance they won't even notice until you're ready to retire, and they have to think of something nice to say about you. And you'll still get paid all the way. Surprisingly, they won't make you give the money back when they notice you haven't been doing anything. But as an entrepreneur, if you do nothing, a very scary thing happens. NOTHING. And when nothing continues to happen for exactly one month after you use up your savings, you are out on the streets. There's nowhere to hide. You default to destitution. Revenue: Once you've made your first buck by any means necessary, you make your next buck. Then your next buck. And so on. You'll notice something very strange about your Rate of Incoming Bucks (RIB). It is very, very uncertain. So you have to learn a strange kind of arithmetic known as book-keeping just to figure out whether or not you are financially alive. In a paycheck job, you keep track of money with the formula: Paycheck - Expenses = Retirement Savings. As an entrepreneur, you keep track with the formula: Vague Money-Making Activities - Expenses = Varying Levels of Anxiety. Operating Cash Flow Positive: If you're lucky, you'll keep surviving one rent-check at a time, so you can continue to "fail to get/keep a job" one month at a time. This is like when Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel San to punch while standing on the sides of a dinghy in the Karate Kid (original version). The punches are your rent checks. The dinghy is your revenue. Mr. Miyagi shaking the boat is also known as VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. The ability to keep doing this no matter how hard Mr. Miyagi rocks the boat, is called cash flow generation. Falling into the water and NOT clambering back into the dinghy immediately is called "failing to fail to keep a job." It is necessary for, but not the same as "keeping a job." Keeping a job is an entirely different skill that maps, in our convoluted metaphor, to learning to swim. So if you fall into the water, you either keep climbing back into the dinghy, or you learn to swim, or you DROWN. If you manage to stay on the dinghy for more than two quarters in a row, congrats. You are "operating cash flow positive." Vision: Now, once you can keep your footing on the shaky dinghy and keep punching well enough that you can dare to actually look around, you'll notice stuff around you in the universe that is NOT a rocking dinghy or punches or Mr. Miyagi. It's called the "environment." You probably noticed it before, but you never really noticed it. You cannot really see see the environment for what it is unless you are throwing punches while standing on a wobbly boat. Seeing the environment while throwing punches on a rocking boat has a special term to describe it: vision. Any idiot can look around while standing on firm ground. It is also easy to look around while swimming (it's called the back stroke). Innovation: Now once you've got the vision thing down, you'll start noticing tempting, alluring, attractive flying fish occasionally jumping out of the water. These are of the species called slipperius opportunitus, otherwise known as "opportunities." But if you try to reach out and grab any of them, you'll most likely fall into the water. Then you get back in (unless you accidentally learn to swim), find your footing again, get going with the punching again. Eventually after enough falls, you'll notice that you can catch some opportunity-fish without falling into the water. Once you get a fish into the boat while continuing punching, congratulate yourself. You've risen above merely making rent. You just learned a skill known as "innovation." Some people just get tired of falling into the water and switch to just excitedly yelling out each time, "there's an opportunity, and THERE goes another one." This is not innovation. This is an activity that looks superficially similar called "R&D." These people eventually fail to fail to keep a job, fall into the water, and learn to swim. Many go on to win Olympic gold medals in the back stroke. Marketing: Eventually you'll notice that certain things you do -- certain combinations of wobbly punches -- seem to actually create opportunities (=flying fish, remember). This is called "marketing." You'll notice that these opportunities tend to be better than those you randomly catch flying around. The more of this voodoo behavior called "marketing" you do, the more such opportunities are created. Unlike "grab 'em as they fly by" opportunities, created opportunities are an autocatalytic thing. The more you create and grab, the more show up. Yeah, those fish are kinda dumb that way. This is called "creating a customer." Once you're past this step, and have learned a few of these voodoo patterns, feel free to make and print out a certificate declaring yourself "Drucker-Certified Real Businessperson." You get this because you just learned innovation and marketing and have "created a customer" rather than simply paid yet another rent check. Your life now has Business Meaning. It is doing more than just surviving and failing to keep a job. Doctrine: Now, many people stop here. They just grab all opportunities as they fly by, and dump 'em in the boat, where they thrash around until they jump back into the water accidentally. This is like unintentional catch-and-release fishing. If you stall here, there's only one useful thing you can do, which is to tag the fish with RFID chips before they escape, a weird kind of evil anti-business known as "patent trolling." There's a famous, smart and rich guy named Nathan Myrhvold who is really good at this. But he's still a troll. You later make money by blackmailing the people who do manage to keep those specific tagged fish from wriggling away. Anyway, getting back to our story, at this point, you can only progress further if you learn a REALLY neat trick: knowing when to quit. You'll find that you can only hold on to some fish longer if you actively throw out other fish faster than they wriggle away naturally.When you are able to quit effectively and intuitively, and without recourse to things like patent trolling, and can state with precision your principles for holding on or letting go, you've learned the business skill known as doctrine. You Now Know What You Believe. Strategy: (sometimes spelled "strategery"): At this point, you're standing on a wobbly boat, catching fish without falling off, doing not-too-evil things that make more fish jump out at you, and deciding which fish to keep and which fish to throw back into the water. But you still haven't learned the master trick required to avoid learning how to swim long-term. At some point, you'll recognize that having certain fish in your boat is even better at attracting more fish than your voodoo punch combinations that we identified earlier as "marketing." You keep the opportunity-fish that most increase the rate at which MORE opportunities jump out at you, constantly trading up along the way. This is called "getting inside the tempo of the market" for people who believe in a mysterious business religion called OODA. When more fish start jumping out at you than you can catch, you've hit a state called Product-Market Fit. At this point, you are in danger of your boat sinking due to too many fish in there. Getting yourself a bigger boat that can hold more fish is known as SCALING (hehehehehe! this whole answer was an exercise in getting to this one pun). You can also scale by getting some good swimmers to swim alongside your dinghy, throwing them dead fish to eat, so they can concentrate on swimming. In return, they do various useful things for you that will really push the limits of this metaphor. At this point the punching-on-a-wobbly-boat metaphor fails. If you do all these 8 steps correctly, you'll be an entrepreneur. And remember, all along you still have to have the grit to continue failing to keep a real job. That task never ends. There is ALWAYS a danger that you'll accidentally learn how to swim. The journey actually goes on beyond point 8 (it's called "building a company") but I won't get into that. That's a different question. And just to round out the metaphor: 1. Retirement is swimming to the shore quickly enough to enjoy a few hours on the beach before you die. 2. Inherited wealth is finding yourself on the beach at adulthood, rather than on a wobbly boat.
Rupali Singh
updated: 27 December 2019
Learn to sell OR learn to code. First: It comes down to this question - Why do you want to become an entrepreneur. For me it's simple. I've been on this journey for a few years & have been in this for far too long that I cannot even get a corporate job. All I can do is succeed, there's no other way. Literally, I've backed myself into an uncomfortable corner that I actually enjoy. Extra motivation, my wife's father went bankrupt & ive been paying his loans for 4 years. They live in a basement, borderline poverty & homelessness - I cannot get more of an incentive than this = Rocky-like Fire. Learn to sell: I'm an entrepreneur. Last week I couldn't afford to even pay my rent. What did I do? Fixed it & took up some consulting work for early stage startups (my forte). Today I had a client who needed to onboard 10 beta businesses that would pay. He tried to do it himself & failed. I made him come along so he could learn how to do it. My selling test today: Walked into 3 businesses and got a sale. Now I know how to sell his service & will go out on Thursday to get the other 9. I will make $500 bucks for 2 days work (technically one day plus 30 mins for the test). Not bad, and I have a backlog of small tasks like analyzing startup early stage marketing strategy plans. Learn to code: Learn how to build cool fun stuff. If you want to be an entrepreneur, coding will definitely be involved. Myself: I can't code but can hack up small things like a simple website. When, I eventually do make an exit - I'll take a full year off & learn to code. Then after, might become a VC. My tips: I have some theories that may help you (currently interviewing at some colleges to further explore my ideas) - 1) Startup Gap: A solo founder whom has a marketing background should not focus on finding a team or getting an investment. Rather, just get shit done, attract talent and have investors come to you by putting your startup in their face (they keep seeing & hearing about it). 2) The Full Stack Dilemma: A solo founder that is full stack (both front end & back end) often just builds it and ships it. Then has that dumbstruck moment, "nobody is coming to my website, oh I need a marketing cofounder." Often, it's too late and they have wasted part of their runway. The second issue I have identified with this - full stack devs often are not coders (sorry if this offends anyone) but more like hackers. Web scrape, take code from here and there & their MVP is buggy with bad web copy and poor design. 3) Investor Rapport: This starts from Day 1. Email investors, not to pitch or ask them to invest in you, but to introduce yourself. Something like this: "Hey XYZ, I'm making this. I plan to partner with this startup who's already in your portfolio. I'd like for you to keep an eye out on what we're doing." Drop small tips occasionally on your progress - if they like what your doing & how you're going, they will come to you. My present startup, I met with an investor the next day, without a website, no name, no pitch deck - it works. You need time to establish a relationship with investors, and if you do this right from the start, it will be easier for you to get funding. Make investors aware of what you're doing so they end up chasing you. Note: Some of my theories have received over 1000 social media shares & I've had investors call me not to invest in my startup, but to talk about my theories. I'm just a guy with all heart and no successful exits yet (and a couple of startups making some cash).