| I was in your position 21 months ago - loved reading startup books, money in the bank, fantastic co-founder, but no idea! Advice is cheap but I figured I'd share my experience: Our attitude was to work on something, anything, no matter how stupid. Which requires a pretty deep font of enthusiasm - it's not easy to get people excited about a self-consciously ridiculous idea. Take the startup seriously, but be willing to drop it if a better idea comes along. Here's what we worked on in 2016: - Retro-Zine: subscription service for Playboy magazines from the '60s and '70s - Fruit Mistakes (https://twitter.com/fruitmistakes): pre-sliced fruit subscription for startups - Rat Dog Capital: trying to buy friends' lifestyle SaaS businesses - Panel Ninja v1: admin panels as a service (think a SaaSified version of https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin) - Panel Ninja v2: productivity analytics for enterprise customer support teams Thanks to YC, Panel Ninja v2 eventually turned into Loop Support, our current startup. We're solving a real problem now (customer support as a service for high-RPU B2C companies [1]) - and like you guys, we had very little to show after a year in the woods. All the same, I'm really glad that my co-founder and I spent a year eating quail and manna - we got really good at working with each other in a lower-stakes, lower-stress environment. Like training wheels and flight simulators. So don't get discouraged :) [1] If you work at one of these companies, you're likely stressing out over holiday customer support. 1) Get back to work! And 2) I would love to help! My contact info is in my HN profile. |