If you’ve been wanting to start a business for awhile now, but lack the time, money, or whatever else is stopping you, take a look at What To Do When You Are Waiting over at Business Pundit. Rob presents ten activities he did or wishes he had done before starting his business. Two points I liked in particular are:
Learn More About Entrepreneurship
The best way to learn is often by doing, so start something smaller on the side. One important lesson we learned by trying a couple of businesses before moving to California and starting Wufoo was the amount of time a business requires. We were originally planning to bootstrap the entire process with full time jobs on the side backing us up, but realized very quickly that it would have taken us way too long to build a product (at least Wufoo) that way. With that knowledge, we were able to fund our company with angel investments without any regrets.
Read Books
It is so useful to learn from the people who have already been there and done that. If you’re looking for a good place to start, I’d recommend pretty much anything by Seth Godin and Peter Drucker. With Godin and Drucker by your side, you’ll be a marketing/management expert in no time.
In addition to those points, I’d like to also recommend two additional exercises I’m glad we underwent before creating our startup.
Blog About Issues Related To Your Business
Blogging is great for us because writing helps us document the learning process and create an audience to showcase and review our work. Since our goal has always been to create a business based on a web application, it makes it easy to know what we need to blog about. We write about the problems we have, the code we use, and the experiences we encounter. The code part has been especially helpful because when thousands of readers are looking at your code, you tend to research a little harder and make the code a little cleaner. For us, it translated into a better product for our business.
Blogging about topics related to your business is also beneficial because if readers are interested in what you’re writing about, chances are pretty good that they’ll also be interested in the business you’re starting. And if your readers like you, they’ll also evangalize your product to like-minded friends.
Start Something With Your Co-Founders
The number one question for the YCombinator founders at Startup School was “How do I find a co-founder?†We’ve seen groups break up despite the fact that the founders were brilliant or composed of best friends. Before you create a startup with another person, I’d recommend giving the relationship a test run. You may find the arguments and stressful situations, which are ever-present and magnified during the beginning of startup, are too much for your friendship. According to Kevin,
> “Asking someone to be your co-founder is like asking them to marry you and have kids right away. It’s an intense and ridiculous relationship and chances are that you just won’t find the right person.â€
For us, we did a couple of small projects to test how we’d work together under similar conditions. Gradually, we realized that we could handle working under pressure and together through projects like the Yahoo Y!Q Challenge, the gMap Workout tracker, and Treehouse Magazine.
I definitely agree with the ‘Start Something With Your Co-Founders’ statement. Some friends and I are currently starting a business and we’ve all worked together on other projects. Having this past knowledge of how we work together is immensely useful as I wouldn’t feel comfortable working, or living, with them. Absolutely more than anything else, finding good co-founders is the key to the success of a business.