| Top things I learned doing this successfully: 1) Find a customer. Don’t worry about your website and your logo and blah blah blah. Find a customer and solve a problem for them. Then worry about the other stuff. The best way to find customers early on is connections and taking to people, not google ad words or search or whatever. Call someone you know and solve their problem. 2) The initial problem you solve might not be the problem you end up solving. That’s ok. Keeping solving problems for people and eventually you’ll hit on one that works. 3) Have happy customers. Do everything you can to make your customers happy. Don’t worry that what you’re doing doesn’t scale. If it’s totally manual that’s fine, but make them happy. Answer their calls. Connect with them. Your first customers are everything. They establish your reputation. 4) Don’t do it for the money. Do it because you want to do it. Maybe you’ll make a bunch of money. Maybe not. Starting a business is not about money. It’s about the experience. 5) I actually didn't have my business going before I quit. That's pretty common advice, but I didn't follow it and I'm glad I didn't. Trying to balance a job and a startup is really hard. If you can get your living expenses low and you don't have dependents, I'd suggest just quitting and throwing yourself off the deep end. That way you basically have no choice but to get things going. Even if your business isn't making enough money yet, you can pick up consulting work to make ends meet. 6) Decide what you want to make it. You don't need to raise VC money and make billions. If you had your own business that paid you, say $150k/year, that's success. Maybe one day you could scale it, and make millions, but pick your metrics of success. Don't feel like a failure because of money. Good luck! It’s hard. Keep going. |