nate's musings

How to start a business, updated & revised

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1. You can start it in your *spare* time, just carve out x hours / day / week to do *damage*.

2. Keep your expenditures down, be creative. Money doesn’t create great companies. Hard work & great people create great companies. In fact too much money will make you fat & happy (that’s not good). Stay lean and mean as long as possible. And don’t sell your soul to the devil for outside money. They want control for their money. It generally is not worth it to give up your control. If you and your management team don’t have 51% of the controlling votes, be very worried and fix that asap.

3. Pick something you like doing, then it won’t be much of a chore to do.

4. Social media and networking (both online and in-person) take marketing costs down to zero. Again, it’s just a time investment. Network, network, network…

5. Test. Measure. Refine. Rinse, repeat.

6. Never stop learning. Become a student of your business, business in general and of life.

7. Give back, help others.

8. Now is the time to start, now is the time. (here is Seth Godin’s entry on “When to start”)

9. When you are hiring employees, hire people smarter than yourself & that share your values. Otherwise you will find out about the law of crappy people pretty quickly. The same applies to finding co-founders. This is like marrying, you need to court first. Don’t rush in, fools rush in as Elvis said. Try before you buy. If you are in doubt, pass. A lot of the best deals in your life are the ones you don’t make.

10. Outsource, automate and eliminate as many annoying non-core to your biz tasks as possible. Put your focus where it should be. If you are a designer, focus on design and the biz of design. If you are an accountant focus on accounting and the biz of accounting

Outsource automate and eliminate what others can do better and cheaper than you can. E.g., I handle all the essential but bothersome tasks of registering domains / hosting email and developing websites / web hosting (link). These are all tasks that can nickel & dime small biz’ time and energy. *shameless plug, over.*

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Resources:

How I spent a million bucks and ended up with 2 chairs.

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

Neil Patel has a pretty comprehensive list of resources.

The Entrepreneur’s Handbook – 59 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0: Top 25 Applications to Grow Your Business

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s seminal essay  “How to start a startup“

Mark Cuban’s — A Couple of My Rules for Startups

In Mark’s post there’s a link to Jason Calacanasis’ “How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)”

Kevin Patrick’s “Ten Commandments of Endurance”, I believe they apply to starting and running a company.

Simon Sinek’s presentation @ TED video: How great leaders inspire action. Start by asking why.

Rework

Built to Last & Good To Great

The 4-Hour Workweek & the http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

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Summation:

Create very small goals that are attainable and scale up from there. You will become disillusioned if you decide you’re going to create the next huge company that’s a fusion of Apple, Google, Facebook & Walmart. Those are lightning strikes. Mark Zuckerberg says start by doing the easy tasks. This way you gain momentum, and before you know it you will be passing milestone after milestone. Paul Buckheit creator of Gmail & Friendfeed said with Gmail, they tried to get 100 happy users inside Google. It was harder than they thought, then they scaled up.