Ask HN: I'd like to start a company, where should I begin?
I'm a programmer in my mid-30s with a decade of experience. I've got a communication degree, and speak three languages. Dual US/EU citizenship. Single with no financial obligations. Only a year's worth of expenses in savings.
My only business experience so far is being a member of FBLA in high school, doing some freelance programming, an attempt at a drop shipping store, and designing a card game that hasn't gotten past the prototype stage.
There isn't a specific business idea or opportunity that I'm ready to start right now. I'd probably want to start something in a year or two, and there's no shortage of ideas. But when I say "start a company" I mean a startup with a team that is working on something innovative together. I don't mean being a freelancer, or starting an agency.
The only thing is that I don't know where to start. What kind of reading/studying should I do beforehand? How would I build a team? How would I get to a point where I could get initial funding to start something? What other questions should I be asking?
20 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 85.6 ms ] threadThat to me is a big red flag. If you want folks to join you as team members you better get this right.
Assuming you cater to dev community here's some examples...
You need a story. e.g. I wrote code for 10 years and am extremely frustrated at how underrated build pipelines are. A bad pipeline is all it takes for bugs to creep in.
And a vision. e.g. I built this prototype so that devs can build a pipeline themselves. They can cater to their own needs without needing any devops intervention on their own clusters.
Sprinkle buzzwords. e.g. It is declarative first. Supports YAML. Service mesh compatible. Ships in various formats including a distroless docker version.
And finally the hardest part. Drop some names. Put a website up with logos from some random companies on it.
Done. You're up and running.
Now keep it going is another game altogether.
If you want a full book, I recommend The Startup Owner's Manual: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/09...
The latter is actually a step by step process, and it's worked very well for me. It answers what you should do before getting funding. Once you've built something people want, apply to Y Combinator (or some other good accelerator) and they'll show you the next steps on how to build a team, raise funds, expand, and so on.
YC also has a free library:
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/
Some of the same materials, just a bit more free form/choose your own adventure.
If you have no idea at all what, specifically, you want to do, I recommend you start with the library and move on to Startup School when you're a little more focused and ready to commit.
I think you will get more out of it if you have some idea already and are more ready to commit. If you aren't there, you can watch the same materials available for free until you are more clear and ready to commit.
/2cents
IMHO you've got the horse before the cart. Please, don't start a business without a concrete plan and a problem to solve.
There was far less venture capital floating around, things like “crowdfunding” were non-existent, websites were incipient, social media wasn’t a thing, businesses nearly always had a “brick and mortar” store presence etc.
Today, your options for starting a business are endless...
I am a bootstrapped SAAS founder in our 7th year. It took me a while to build a real team especially bootstrapped (2+ years). So I will share my experience and thoughts.
Don't aim so high right away. You will be disappointed. You want a team right away AND innovative stuff ? That's like having your cake and eat it too. Forget about that. Start low. Forget the team. Build something yourself first. You are a programmer with decade of experience. List down your ideas on paper. Then choose 1 and run with it. Try to find product market fit. If you already know your competitors, the idea is most likely validated and you just have to focus on execution.
"How would I get to a point where I could get initial funding to start something? "
Do you really need initial funding ? Is that really the goal or do you think you can start it bootstrapped and go from there ? I am obviously biased as a bootstrapped founder but this is also something to think about. Ok some concrete steps :
1. List down your top 10 ideas on paper. Do competitor search on those ideas [0]. If you cannot find competition, i would say forget about that idea for now. No need to change the world yet.
2. Every 24 hours, cross one idea out that you can out of the list. Repeat for next 7-10 days. Whatever you are left with, go with that idea. Yea that's it. What's the alternative ? You are going to analyze and paralyze ?
3. Build a prototype alone. Forget partners. Forget freelancers. Figure shit out. You are a programmer with decade of experience. Get it done. There are tons of tutorials out there for your favorite language or framework of choice.
4. Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. While building the prototype, setup a Landing Page (use CMS like WordPress if you have to). Use the fastest an d most tested way. Don't look at shiny tools that increase time to market even if they are technically cooler.
5. Get access to tools like moz [1] or ahrefs and learn how to do SEO, content Marketing etc. Yourself first. Forget about partners.
6. Once steps 1-5 are in motion, only then even think about getting help because unless you have done steps 1-5, no serious person worth their time would want to talk to you unless you can convince a buddy or you are famous already.
7. Use your own money initially if you can. Programmer with decade of experience. I assume you can spend a few hundred bucks ? Sorry if I am assuming too much but forget about funding.
8. More marketing. SEO, Content Creation, Backlinks [2], keyword research [3]. Yes they are required. Doesn't matter if you think it is scummy. Work on it. Create good content. It works.
9. At this stage, try to find experts/freelancers who can help you. Still hard to convince someone just with equity unless you are well known. Ideally, you want someone who is really good at Marketing. Yes Marketing.
10. All the best. If you put time and effort, you may see results. But you could totally fail. Don't give up too quickly. I would say 12-18 months before you call it quits. If you fail earlier, you wouldn't learn much. My 2 cents.
[0] https://ahrefs.com/blog/competitive-analysis/
[1] https://moz.com
[2] https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building/
[3] https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-research/
Most likely I don't want to start out too early with a large team. But I can only get so far as a team of one. I at least need a co-founder and would like to know how to handle a relationship with one and what kind of agreements we should have about money and decision making. I worked with a designer on a small side project, a few months into it we had a disagreement. I wanted to pay a fair price more more work, but the designer wanted control over the direction of the project instead. Ultimately, the designer asked me not to use their work, and I ended up redesigning the whole thing from scratch. Barely salvaged the personal relationship from that. I want to get better at making agreements with other people and potentially building a small team when the time is right.
> Do you really need initial funding?
I at least need a plan for paying my bills until I start making money from something. Not to mention getting help with things I'm not good at, like design, marketing, etc. With only enough money to pay my basic bills for a year, the amount of time and money I can invest into a project would be limited. If I'm investing my own time and money into starting something, I'd have about 6 months, maximum, before I'd need to start looking for a day job again. This is just my thinking about it. I welcome any pushback or different perspectives.
Edit: whoa, while I was writing this comment you added quite a bit to yours. :) The concrete steps are helpful. I can focus on the first 5 for now.
As you can see from the above description, starting a business is not a click-of-a-finger activity. It takes a lot of time just to identify a problem that needs solution; and then build that solution.
Get involved with networking to find people and organizations that you can talk to, see what they are doing, things will come up over time where you see an opportunity.