Advice for the new entrepreneur

Adam Kalsey — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:08:32 +0000

Matt Mireles from SpeakerText writes a bullet-point list chock full of advice for the first-time entrepreneur.

No one is interested in the company you’re going to start in the future. Starting is a declarative act. Just go for it.

I talk to a great many erstwhile entrepreneurs that tell me all about their ideas and all the things that they’re going to do when they start their company. Or people who have started but aren’t really getting anything done because they can’t find the right co-founder or they need to design every last detail first, or they don’t have the marketing copy for their web site quite right yet.

Entrepreneurs do. We take an idea and a market and drive to make it happen. Figure out what’s standing in the way of you getting stuff done and just go through it. Once you’re actually building your company, a lot of those things that looked insurmountable turn out to be no problem at all.

Lots of business-y, idea-type people who say they’re looking for a co-founder are, in reality, looking for what is best described as an “engineering bitch.” Here’s how the pitch sounds from the engineer’s perspective: ‘For ten whole percent of equity, you will slave away to build a prototype out of my shitty idea, not have any say in the decision-making process…and oh yeah, you could be fired at any point.’

I don’t think a lot of business people get this point. Engineers aren’t just sitting around awaiting input so they can build something. They aren’t machines into which you feed an idea and a finished product pops out the other end. They have ideas, too. So why would they want to build yours for no compensation when they could spend their time building their own?

Want to have a good technical co-founder? Make your idea theirs.

Over the last 15 months, I have pitched nearly every sentient being I have met. This includes a guy I met at 4am after doing CPR on his mom (I’m a paramedic). The dude turned out to be a senior partner at a major international corporate law firm, and 6 weeks later he offered to take me on as a pro bono client.

As a startup, obscurity is your biggest problem. Constantly pitching your ideas helps solve that. How’s the great tech co-founder, the lawyer, the perfect first customer ever going to find you if they don’t know about you?

Pitching constantly also means you’ll get a constant stream of advice. Most people you talk about your company with will offer up thoughts about it. Free consumer research? Free marketing advice? Yes, please.

Every lawyer will give you an hour of their time for free. Remember that. Need 10 hours of legal counsel? Talk to 10 lawyers. … when you need to actually hire a lawyer, you’ll know what a good one sounds like––and have a fat rolodex of people you’ve already talked with to draw from.

The world is full of free and cheap advice. There’s all sorts of resources out there like this. For $100 I spent an hour with a CPA over coffee and picked her brain on how to set up the books and ensure I was filing taxes properly. I sent my exec summary to a half dozen angel investors and asked them for a critique. A couple of patent attorneys bought me lunch and spent two hours explaining to me exactly what’s involved in getting a patent and why I probably don’t want one.

Excerpt:

Matt Mireles from SpeakerText has a bullet-point list chock full of advice for the first-time entrepreneur.

Want a healthy startup? Grow your network.

Adam Kalsey — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 03:34:07 +0000

To put it simply, this is why SacStarts exists.

After an eight-year study of successful and unsuccessful startups and their founders, researchers have concluded that founders of startups are more successful if they have a strong network of other entrepreneurs.

The authors found that firms whose managers have more social relationships with peers at other software start-ups have a better chance of surviving external shocks, such as the burst of the dot-com bubble earlier in the decade. This result suggests that cultivation of strong and relevant social networks among a firm’s managers can be an important determinant of the success of a startup venture.

Knowing other entrepreneurs can help you build your business. By hanging out with other startup folks (at dinner perhaps?) can help you with advice, sources of funding, customers, and emotional support. The only people that know what it’s like to start a company are people who have done it.

Thanks to Business Pundit for the pointer.

SacStarts - founder

Advice for the new entrepreneur

Want a healthy startup? Grow your network.