Ask HN: How do I learn more about entrepreneurship/startups?
I took an entrepreneurship class in college where we read the Lean Startup. My mental model of creating a startup is this. This could be completely wrong and probably is but it's the idea that I developed in my head in college. Steps could be out of order as well, and there might not be an order to these things.
1.Think of an idea/ find co-founders (starting a company with friends has risks)
2. Interview possible customers and see if this idea solves a great “pain” they are having. A “pain” for Patreons' customer would be that before Patreon existed it was hard to earn money from fans as a content creator.
3. See if enough people have this “pain” to even pursue the startup.
4. Make a financial model and figure out the business strategy and how the business will make money
5. Make an MVP/proof of concept and try to get customers that pay you on day 1
6. Grow/market and gain more customers??? No idea how this works
7. Secure funding or be self sufficient cash business? Pitch to VC/investor??? No idea about this
There is a lot of marketing, sales, financial modeling, and accounting that goes into this. My colleagues and I just know about tech (embedded/ systems, fullstack) and a little bit of entrepreneurship from the lean startup.
What's the most efficient resource to learn more about startups and these concepts? A buddy of mine from college whose startup recently got 200k in seed money told me to look at free videos/materials from incubators/accelerators. Are there any other books or resources Hacker News recommends? I’m probably wrong on a lot of what I think I know.
70 comments
[ 0.34 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadThis is it. Forget everything else, this is the one that matters most for starting out. You can/will learn about most other things along the way.
For materials I'd start from Microconf's youtube channel.
- Take your idea, build a simple UI (not the app at all, just the UI)
- Take that UI, and get a sign up modal on it
- Take that and run ads that point to it.
- See if you get enough conversions that justify you actually building the thing. What's that number for you? Dunno, but you'll learn quickly. And then you'll have a small mailing list of beta testers.
You can toil away and build a thing, or you can find an audience, and then build a thing that those people will pay for.
Everything will follow from that.
(or if you are going for a 'global scale' leveraged play -- you need to get users, cover the costs of the platform, and then get VC backing to figure out your monetization strategy)
But since you mentioned landing pages, I can recommend this great talk by one of the “Refactoring Ui” folks. He explains how he built the landing page for Tuple - https://youtu.be/hlI6xGfBjkQ
Overall, the Refactoring UI folks have done a brilliant job of demystifying visual design.
Search for landing page templates. There are a lot that are free, some you have to pay for (but not that much).
Another option is to find a design co-founder.
https://www.indiehackers.com/
- How to start a startup: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
- Do things that don't scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
If you're not getting referrals then you may not be solving the problem or the problem isn't that valuable.
Once you have 10-20 customers from outside your network it's an early indication of product market fit.
Next, hire a full time marketing leader.
Over simplifying a little, here's a more product focused answer from a few weeks ago (the other answers in the thread were excellent): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059370
You have more or less the correct idea with these steps, however they should be weighted (and continuously re-weighted as you progress).
I would add an additional step 0: commit to yourself that this is something you're going to see through. Do you want to start something because of a sense of FOMO or because you genuinely enjoy creating? Are you ready to quit your job and start, having the confidence in your tenacity? Importantly, your internal motivations will inform the amount of weight that should be put into each step.
For example, if you're building something to solve a problem that you yourself experience, steps 1 through 4 can be weighed at 0 and 5a (5 should be split into distinct parts) should be weighted at 1. Assuming the behaviors which give rise to your need are distributed, within the general population, on a bell curve and you fall somewhere within a standard deviation of the median, you are your average customer and don't need to prove the market ahead of time.
Overall, YC's advice to "build something people want" is spot on. Do that systematically and everything else is more likely to fall into place in spite of your weaknesses.
Lastly, as a full-stack engineer who has made the transition into 'successful' full-time startup ceo, I advise to to focus less on the technology than on the sales and customer relationships. Tech skills will be your competitive edge, but personal relationships will be the foundation of the business.
If you want to learn about startups, best is to go work for one.
Having spent a decent chunk of my career at both start-ups and at a Big Tech company, there are lots of things that make sense to do at one that don't make sense at the other. As you make the move yourself (or, if you hire others, as you onboard people who are making that move), it's important to keep in mind how the risks are different between large companies and small companies. That probably doesn't answer your question directly looking for books or resources, but I think it's important to keep in mind as you consume books or resources.
Honestly my advice would be to jump head-first into it, and learn as you go. Some up-front “theoretical” knowledge would be nice to avoid completely screwing up, and lots of other folks have linked to good reading material for that, but it’s a high risk and ambiguous environment where “best practices” don’t always apply. IMO your efforts should be focused obsessively on iteratively understanding your product market fit and your customers’ needs, rather than theorizing and trying to figure out up-front if existing advice applies to you or not, obsessing over competitors, etc. Those things can definitely help but should be constant feedback loops based on what you’ve done, and not super hypothetical.
Also prepare yourself for an emotional rollercoaster. That’s the hardest part in my experience, having the grit to keep going despite feeling awful or scared or incompetent (and all at the same time).
We've been around for a decade and we have in-person events, online events, an online Slack community with 2100+ founders, and around 300 videos at https://youtube.com/microconf that focus on the day to day decisions you have to make as a founder.
From ideation to validation to launch, growth, hiring, selling your startup, etc. Most of what we offer is free, and we support it by charging for tickets to our in-person events.
Bootstrapping mostly leads to extremely slow growth unless you have skilled sales expertise on team or get lucky. Which is not all bad unless you are looking for a 3 to 5 year exit.
> The VC playbooks for growth are now mature, standard and effective. So being able to leverage the funds and execute a standardized revenue generating plan is important.
Where can I find this standardized revenue generating plan?
Rather, GP is saying that VCs have become very efficient at identifying opportunity areas in software, injecting money into founding teams in those areas, and using that money along with their influence on the founders and outside connection to create rapid growth.
Unless you can build a sales team to compete with that model, you get maybe two years before a VC-backed competitor shows up and starts acquiring big enterprise accounts at an astonishing pace due to their advantages in funding/connections. For an example, just look at Notion - they had to take on more funding to compete with Coda, Slab, and the half dozen other similar applications with deep-pocketed backers that have sprung up since Notion proved the market for such a product. (To be clear, IDK if that's why they took on more funding, I am speculating)
This means its now much harder to create a company like Github, Qualtrics, or Ebay, which reached mega status despite being bootstrapped.
By standard I mean cookie cutter: org charts, spending and strategy for targeted ads, trade show marketing, sales pipelines. With slight variations for target market/vertical.
It obviously requires a heavy spend but is also effective.
I totally agree VCs have become more aggressive in identifying opportunities and entrepreneurs aggressive in targeting small niche companies and can easily get VC funding.
Rob's (above poster) podcasts are often very good as well.
Disciplined Entrepreneurship books by Bill Aulet & his online courses (on either EdX or Coursera) are great.
Tons of other great amazing info, but incorporating your first business & talking to potential customers is an absolute must first step. Don't become another person who just reads about businesses for fun & dreams. You need to spend most of your time testing out ideas on people & trying to build your business. Books & videos are great for relaxing & edu-entertainment.
Since this is your friend, I have a suggestion: Ask him how you can help with his startup for free. Obviously not huge tasks like building their entire backend or website, but any startup is bound to have loose ends that need more eyes. Maybe you can help test things or review copy or even work on bits of code here and there.
Getting exposure and proximity to a startup is the best way to learn how it works. The books and theory and videos are helpful, but nothing compares to actually seeing how messy and difficult these things are first hand. If your friend is going through the steps right now, having a front-row seat to see and help is perhaps the most valuable education you get possibly get. Doing little bits of free work for your friend is a small price to pay.
The steps you outlined sound great in theory, but in practice few successful startups come from people looking for random ideas, building a product, securing paying customers on day 1, and then collecting piles of investor money. It happens, but more commonly people gain industry experience first and then use that first-hand experience to solve problems they had in their own industry first and foremost. These startups aren't the Instagrams or Clubhouses of the world, but there are many startups solving real industry problems that you never see or hear about. Having that first-hand experience, or at least someone on your team with that first-hand industry experience, is crucially important.
He found it much more educational to start a business, and learn as he went.
So if you want to learn about startups, the fastest way is probably to start one.
My opinion on the second fastest way is to work at one; that's what I did/am doing as employee #1.
Starting a startup is human activity, and you - the human - can have multiple activities, hence multiple start-ups (add to that pivoting). So while the 1st startup might fail, do it long enough and you'd be successful.
IMO the key is to work hard at MVP and iterate a lot.
Since you're here, have you thought of https://www.startupschool.org/ ?
As far as your point 1 to 7, not bad; I have a different approach but that's where we are all different. At the end of the day, if you build something that people want and are willing to pay (MVP/Lean Startup concepts) the money (investment) will follow.
Now, going from the garage stage to "#6. Grow/market and gain more customers??? " it's a different skillset; by the time you are there, you'll know more about your product offering, your audience, yourself and you'll have co-founders, early employees and investors to help you out.
It sounds like you are trying to over optimise before stating. eg. worrying about what books to read, or about having a business plan and a financial model. These are distractions and they'll make you feel overwhelmed and not ready. I started my business with friends in college, it's still going 9 years on, and we did none of those things.
If you build something that's useful and you find people to pay for it, everything else will figure itself out in time.
A 'good idea' isn't enough. Knowing and talking to lots of potential customers isn't enough. If you can't make big decisions with speed, clarity and confidence without outside input, you're dead.
This is very good advice.
Possible, yes. Although, it will cost you lots of time and money getting what you need second hand. Those 'other people' don't care how much runway you have, or when your next release is, or what meetings you have coming up. They WILL slow you down. Succeeding with a startup is a game of squashing risks, and that's a massive risk to have out of the gate.
For example, I have many times fallen into the trap of building something I thought was awesome and would sell well, only to find then that nobody wants to buy it.
I thought I was doing the real thing (building something), when in reality I should've talked to customers, or built an audience.
Actually, I'm still not 100% sure what constitutes as 'the real thing' in the kind of business I'm trying to build (creating educational technical content).
If you succeeds try and sell the company sell or expand the business.
If not move on to another product, rinse and repeat.
It's not different than any other thing in this world. Start small, use your experience to gradually build bigger and bigger.
You do not *find*, you are *found* by an idea. Anything else and you're setting yourself for failure. I know it sounds esoteric but once you realize what it means to be found by an idea, you'll naturally start down the path of creating something cool.