Startup Gold Rush

Today it’s very fashionable to do startups. In some ways, it looks like a gold rush.

A huge number of people, having read the ready-made algorithms, want to open their startup.

Personally, I get a couple of times every six months (before - every month) friends who are obsessed with the idea turn to me. They have only one thing in mind - now I have an idea, now let’s you make me a project (draw, make up, program, advance, etc.), and profit in half.



In response to questions about strategy, about competitors in the market, about expected income, about risk management - silence. Therefore, they write less often.

So, I strongly recommend that anyone who is doing their startup or is just about to reconsider a number of issues.

1. Startup is a business. Any business is aimed at making profit from the results of its activities. If you do not have this, you are engaged in charity work. Therefore, the sooner the question “how do we make money on this chip?” Appears in your thinking, the better.
   
   
2. Any business is created by man. This means you must be prepared to become a professional businessman. There is a point that skills are required in three areas: sales, management, and finance. In addition to related technical (we are still in IT), legal, accounting and so on. Then, look, any company rests on a person and develops them (Apple - Jobs, Microsoft - in the past Gates, Google - Bryn, Facebook - Zuckerberg, etc.). Keep in mind that about 4% of people have the talent to be an entrepreneur (according to statistics, of course). Are you sure you want to develop this area in your life (where you will have to compensate for the lack of talent with hard work for non-stop for 7 days the first two or three years), or do you already have skills and experience in programming, management, and something else? Life is given only once.
   
   
3. Do you know how to manage risks? At one of the start-up meetings, I asked the team - what will you do if the investor leaves you and the lead programmer laughs? The answer was silence. It is necessary to take risks into account and work out reliable protection against them. So that you are ready for troubles, and if they happen, you know what to do without wasting time worrying.
   
   
4. How efficiently do you work? Most startups do not require investment at the initial stage. Moreover, it does not require endless presentations, parties at startup meetings, and so on. Everything that does not relate to the development of the project is an extra waste of time - and time is the only resource that cannot be restored.
   
   
5. Do you know how to turn the unknown into certainty, quality into quantity? The first is the ability from nothing, from the idea to see a specific implementation of the project and organize people to achieve the result. It’s also a vision of the strategy - for breaking into the leadership is not so difficult as maintaining leadership in a situation where competitors will grow by leaps and bounds (in fact, the ability to think strategically, to see how your market will change in the future). The second is the ability to calculate any indicator, for example, the efficiency of each programmer in money, or to estimate the approximate profit (several scenarios - from excellent to worst) in numbers 3 months after the launch of the project, and a year later.
   
   

Please, if you come up with the idea of ​​earning millions on the Grupon clone, ask yourself these questions before you get familiar programmers and project managers, promising them money that you can’t even count?

If you read this and realized that you are close in spirit with the idea of ​​your business, and not a startup - I wish good luck to your brainchild!