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Basically, you have three components of the future organization that get "architected" early on - how it sells things(marketing, sales, support), how it makes them(engineering, manufacturing, services, etc.), and how people in the organization are treated(hiring and management). These things need a design to them, or at least a rough strategy, and they have to cooperate in some way. Once you have a design in place, then you have your work cut out for you. It is possible to make viable businesses by leaning on any one of those three elements. You can find the anecdotes: "I sat in my basement making weird computer art and it turned out internet people fell over themselves to get their hands on it", or "I pitched something that I made up while in the waiting room and they funded me to make it", or "We were a bunch of talented school friends and decided to go into business together without knowing what the business was". Those are all at the extreme ends. A balanced approach is also possible - you make a little bit, then you try to pitch it to some people, then you try to convince people(perhaps even the same people you pitched to) it's worth working on. Step by step you go from "we don't know what we're doing or know what's going on or who should work on what" to "we've solved all the major questions of this market and have a team that delivers good value." The way in which you execute on these plans should ideally stay in line with how you feel comfortable doing business - your philosophy, your ethics, your motivations, etc. There are plenty of ways to cut corners and do wrong, or to try to lead when you aren't actually a good fit, and this may stop you from pursuing an otherwise worthy concept. Entrepreneurship isn't a job title or even necessarily about business so much as it is an extension of the act of poking at things and people and seeing if it gets some gears turning. So, in any case, the validation is good, but the most important thing a company needs to continue operating is to close deals - hence there's always an undercurrent of "build up your pitch, build up your leads, product later" to a lot of biz advice. You know you can execute on the technology again - you already did it once - so that's not a big issue, as long as your technical ambitions stay in line with the original work. But progressing on the sales front is a big deal, and with the client work you're at a generous "0.5". A clear next step is to distill everything you learned from working on it into a better, more saleable pitch, and build up contacts and leads. You may want to get someone already in the industry to do some of this work, but at no point can you expect to be completely hands off. |