Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

63 pointslyime53 comments

So I have been given the opportunity to speak at the university I graduated from (Portland State University) about my experience starting Mugasha while I was an undergrad.

I thought I would get some of your thoughts on starting a business.

Here are few questions I plan on talking about.

- Why start your own business? Why start early?

- How to be a domain expert?

- How do you know if you have the right Idea?

- Why it will be the hardest thing you will ever do?

- How do you bootstrap?

- How do you find investors?

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>> What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

You are not as experienced as you think you are.

I wish someone I respected had told me this when I was a college student. In college, I thought I was super-awesome. I thought I was already a leader. I thought I was qualified to manage a 100-person company. I thought I didn't have much else to learn; I just wanted to start a company so I could grow it and sell it and make a ton of money like everyone else.

Now I know that I am merely above-average and lucky. I know that for every problem I face, there is someone more experienced than I who has already solved that problem, thrice-over, and wants to help me. If I had known this 10 years ago, I think I would have sought out a lot more advice, been much more receptive to criticism, and been a better entrepreneur.

Note: obviously this is 100% personal and anecdotal. I may have been the only a-hole in college who needed to hear that message, so YMMV.

You are not alone, I'm the same boat here. The thing is the experience is something that you don't get until just after of needing it.

(Still a college student, but what I've been told...)

-Use the resources available to you as a result of your undergrad status. Free multi-thousand dollar industry reports, free legal advice from law experts/professors, free tech advice from tech departments, etc -On-campus tech transfer offices offer further advantages

I'd advise against taking on any debt in your own name- It's a very tempting offer, particularly if you have good credit coming out of school, but it will mean that if the business does go south for whatever reason, even if it is outside your control, you may be paying it off for decades.

Instead, build something that can raise profits immediately, and start building from there. That will help to keep you focused on what your revenue stream can support- Borrowed money allows you to have unrealistic ideas, and overspend too quickly.

Along the same lines here, I would say just don't make mistakes or large commitments in general that will tie you down. Don't get arrested for underage drinking (or DUI), don't risk having kids, don't take stupid chances with your life or health, don't screw up your credit, don't take on lots of college loans if you can avoid it, etc. Being able to live anywhere and on almost no money will make it a lot easier.

Additionally, do talk to a potential long-term partners about the entrepreneur lifestyle (and not having a high-paying job for a few years), do read as many blogs and books on entrepreneurship as you can (you won't have time once you actually start a company), do go out of your way to meet as many people as possible, and stay in touch with the smart ones.

Also, TAKE PROGRAMMING CLASSES.

Tell them that they need to weigh the upside and downside of risks they are taking (financial, time, value) before they take the leap. More often than not starting young has a lot of upsides. No golden handcuffs, More agile/lean , No family to support, Ramen profitability is OK and the delta in learning is huge. Tell them that the upside to failure(which is the worst outcome not considering going into debt) in their first venture is way better than their downside.

Also tell them that the hardest part no one talks about is how starting a company means you are the boss and how you need to plan stuff everyday and get it done. Also, its not the amount of work they get done but the results they get and how driven they are to get those results that matter in the end.

I'm a college student who wants to start a business, these are the questions that I'd like answered:

- do it full-time or on the side?

- what kind of advice should I not listen to?

- My skills are programming and designing, what kind of stuff should I learn?

- do I really need to move to a technology-rich country? (For the effects of your talk, maybe you should change country for city.)

- how do you get customers and do sales if you are an introvert geek?

- what to look for in a cofounder?

Ditto. I would emphasize the second to last one -- sales and marketing are parts of the business stack that I have little experience in, so they are the most daunting to me. I'd imagine that's the case for a lot of other technical people as well.

Excellent sales and marketing applied to a medium product -> microsoft

Lousy sales and marketing applied to great stuff -> DEC, SGI and plenty of others, now defunct.

The technology is but a very small part of all of this.

That I do not doubt! Hence my desire to learn.

I think one of the quickest ways to learn this is to jump in on the 'hard' end of sales, cold calls and approaching strangers.

Have a look at this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUct4NlxE0

There's a lifetime of experience in there, not quite 'cold calling' but he's got amazing talent.

I heard one really great line in there "You only want one? Ok you've got no friends. Just like me." after the the whole "buy a bunch for your friends," that line had a nice balance of making people feel like they suddenly needed to show off how many friends they had and yet not making the guy feel so terrible. Other than that I really don't see what makes this guy so special, I just kept waiting to be like "oh wow!"

What makes it special to me is this:

- the crowd that he draws in on a potato peeler

- his continuous performance, not a gap in it, he never loses the attention of the crowd

- his salesmanship, indeed, selling a bunch where he should only be selling one, and a few more little instances like that

- the fact that the guy made an absolute fortune selling a $5 product to passers by

- the fact that in spite of being a street salesman his presentation is impeccable

- the fact that you can look at it and it looks so ordinary :) Now try it for yourself...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ades

> do it full-time or on the side?

What's worth doing is worth doing well, consider your college education over and done with when you start down this path. A startup is time consuming, the first year is the hardest, it takes usually about three years to become established, though of course that changes from case to case.

> what kind of advice should I not listen to?

You should weigh every advice you get (including this!), as to applicability, sanity and whether it chimes in with your gut feelings or not.

> My skills are programming and designing, what kind of stuff should I learn?

If your skills are programming and designing you want to become very good at dealing with people. That's probably more important than either of the other two.

> do I really need to move to a technology-rich country?

No, you don't need to move to a technology rich country, but it helps if you intend to fish in a larger pool of talent, and it may make it easier to divest. Plenty of people have done this from 'non technology rich' countries, there are challenges and advantages there.

> how do you get customers and do sales if you are an introvert geek?

Better change that or you will not be doing well. That's the number one challenge you face I think.

> what to look for in a cofounder?

Trustworthiness, dependability and adaptability.

> Better change that

You can't change introversion, because it's not an externally-visible face you "put on," but rather part of your utility function: extroverts (re)gain energy from social interactions, and spend energy working in solitude, and vice-versa for introverts. You can't change what tires you out, although you can fake not being tired.

Being an introvert can have many reasons, some of them are 'born in', and are hard to overcome others are caused by a lack of confidence or bad experiences in the past.

You can overcome some of it, but not all of it, your mileage will definitely vary on that one, but almost everybody can shift their attitude, even if only a bit, and usually more than that.

Read 'darkxahnthos' blog on this: http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com/

Giving up before you've started is a great way not to succeed at anything.

I never said to give up—I just think there are ways to succeed at external tasks that don't involve changing the kind of person you are internally. Because otherwise, it's basically equivalent to saying "only extraverts can do this job"—that if you aren't one already, you need to turn yourself into one. And that sounds like a defeatist attitude to me—why can't I do that job and still be myself afterward?

But in generally programmer-y terms: I don't think it matters what you've got on running the inside, as long as you can manage to conform to the right protocols :)

Protocol is exactly the right term, but 'introverts' can have issues with protocol.

I figure that at heart I'm an introvert, I'm just very good at masking it :)

And over time it got better, I no longer have a problem approaching total strangers and starting a conversation, it became something of a sport. And that kind of ability is priceless in a sales situation, as long as it is genuine.

You can be yourself just fine, it's just that if you appear unapproachable or if you can't approach others that your chances of success as an independent take an instant nosedive. So you man up and overcome your limitations, you try to do your best and in time you'll look back at that 'introverted geek' that you used to be and you wonder what happened to him or her.

It doesn't mean you're going to 'turn yourself in to an extrovert', it simply means that in order to succeed you will have to behave more or less as predicted, protocol as you call it. And that such protocol has a lot in common with extrovert behaviour is unfortunate, but that doesn't mean that you are changing your base character.

I also think that there is way too much emphasis on being 'introvert or extrovert', I hardly ever come across people that fit the stereotypes well enough that the label alone is sufficient to predict their response in every situation.

> Better change that or you will not be doing well. That's the number one challenge you face I think.

This is a very serious problem indeed. Please read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209303

Ok, I did, left you a message there.

I think customer development (from steve blank's book: the four steps to the epiphany) is a really important subject rarely touched upon in schools. Often times you can sell the product before you even create it. That needs to be communicated to students.

First of all I think you're doing a great service to the student body. I have really had to reach out in order to gain advice and information as a college freshman doing a web dev business and a summer storage franchise. I think many think about time management a lot. Here at Emory there is a ton of pressure to do well and aim for a 4.0 for Grad School. The time commitment necessitated for venture is difficult to deal with. So please talk about time management. The most inspiring words I heard about the subject probably were along the lines of, take advantage of the free time you have now because later on you'll only have less and less. I think that came from HN.

Not sure if you found this to be the case with Mugasha, but as an undergrad currently in the same position my biggest advice would be "get mentors". It never occurred to me how useful and willing to talk people who had successful businesses would be.

Another one is the importance dedication and hard work. I have friends who've dropped out to start businesses. They work harder and longer hours than my friends who stayed in school (myself included).

I'm going to write this as a high-school drop-out that did very well:

Finish that college and forget about that startup, assuming you're in a halfway decent college and a somewhat useful discipline.

I know you've been asked to speak about your experience, but keep in mind you've been asked because of your success, and the road behind you is littered by the corpses of those that didn't make it.

Starting a business, while in college, or out of it, is in large part luck if it is successful. By talking to people about what you've achieved you may give them the impression that this is easier than it looks, so stress the amount of luck that went in to it, to make sure they can weigh the odds accordingly.

Starting early or late isn't really much of a decision, the longer you wait the more knowledge you have, so the bigger the chance that you will succeed the first time, but by then the people that started earlier will have failed once already and will have learned from that as well. It works out about even.

Being a 'domain expert' is limiting your business to something very small right away, better to be general and to know how to procure the services of domain experts!

You know you have a 'right idea' when it starts moving under its own power, instead of you having to push it.

Finding investors is for a very lucky few, better concentrate on realistic scenarios for bootstrapping.

Possible additions to your list:

- the value of networking

- keep your fixed costs DOWN! (even today I still do this)

- make a nest egg as soon as you can afford it

- live healthy, running a startup is like top sport

What's the first step to getting started?

(or in other words, "Just start building something")

As a current college student, I'd recommend they try their hand at starting a student organization that does something entreprenurial (a microfinance organization, or a group providing tech services to the poor, for example). I suppose I don't have the experience to compare it to launching a startup, but from what I've understood about startups there are a lot of similarities:

- You are the one in charge, you have to make stuff happen

- You have to figure out where money is going to come from and how to make it last (if you don't have a legitimate budget sheet you're doing it wrong)

- You have to think about recruitment and retention of members (hard when payment is not an option)

- You have to manage and motivate people

- You have to set goals, develop a vision, and convey that to your members

- You have to find organizations who can help you, and learn how to form mutually beneficial partnerships

- You face hard times and good times, but have to keep going regardless

- You learn your strengths and weaknesses as a leader (good for knowing what to look for in a co-founder)

- If you are really passionate about what you're doing, you'll learn what it's like to really devote yourself to an organization

- Somewhat trivially, you'll need to learn how to handle lots of emails, personal contacts, and competing time commitments.

The nice thing is that the cost of failure is pretty much 0 in a student organization. If it doesn't work, no one will really care that much. But if it does, you've made a mark on your university and probably learned a lot in the process.

THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Saying that doing a student organisation is a nice thing because it's cost of failure is 0, is not a very good logic.

In fact, it is the risk factor that mostly forces us to go above and beyond when everyone else is giving up. Persistence is the key, and a good way of achieving that could having limited high risk, so that you don't quit during tough times.

Sooner or later, there comes a point, when you have to make a lot of tough decisions, which mostly comes down to giving up versus fighting and finding your way out somehow.

Oh, and I totally agree that you probably should try and keep your actual money investment close to 0, and maximise your time investment. But, I also think you can build a business with minimum money involved, and by that I mean less than 500 bucks.

I am assuming a tech startup, where the main investment required is your time and code, and you can at least get a "proof of concept" working...which can be used to raise money and/or make sure it is the right idea.

Last, but not the least, if you know you are going to do a startup, or are at least curious if you can do it, you owe it to yourself to see it through. To go ahead and build it, or at least fail trying to build it.

The biggest upside to this startegy is that you only "learn" doing a student organisation. Whereas you actually succeed building a startup.

I don't intend to be rude, but this kind of sounds like you want to do a college degree right after high school, and you are confused, and you decide to go do a assosciate degree or something, to get the "feel" of a real college degree.

I repeat. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Right, they are not the same thing: they do share similarities, however. I must not have made my point clearly. My own experience has to do with starting a group that has a non-trivial operating budget (O(10k), decent for a student org), customers, technology that we developed for our projects, and funded by grants for which we are required to show demonstrable progress. There are a few groups like this at my university, so I figure it is a relatively common setup. We actually considered launching it as a for-profit business, but realized none of us had the time to get fully behind that. When I say cost of failure is 0, I mean to say you're not going to be out a substantial amount of your own investment if things go bad. And you are still working towards something you consider valuable (a degree) during the whole process, so it's not a total waste of time. But there are certainly social costs for just walking away from something you start, especially if you make a big deal out it to begin with.

I understand what you're getting at -- they are not the same thing. But I do think that some of the leadership aspects are similar, insofar as starting any organization (student, startup, community, or otherwise) requires certain common skills. If you can't/don't want to drop your studies to go do your Startup, then this might be a means to exercise a similar skill (sub)set in the meantime.

I have done something similar and I share your viewpoint, it is not a replacement for a real company in real economic circumstances but I did need to develop a lot of skills that I wouldn't have learned in classrooms.

I'm still in college though so I can't tell you how beneficial these skills will be when I either startup or enter the workforce.

You might want to talk about the different styles of businesses (lifestyle business, owner-operator, founder/starup, franchise, hell, you can through MLM/network marketing in there if you want).

A lot of times people have an idea in their head of 'this is what a "business" is'. Showcasing the alternative styles of business might bring more students to realize that starting a business can fit their goals even better than they imagined.

> Why start your own business? Why start early?

I start because I have an undeniable urge. I start early (now) because I want to be able to harness this urge while it's still here, and while the opportunity still exists.

> How do you know if you have the right Idea?

Test your idea by getting it out asap. That's the only way. Anything else would just be guessing.

> Why it will be the hardest thing you will ever do?

Maybe not giving up?

Why start early? Early is probably the best time in your life to do it.

I actually just had a discussion with a group of students and advisors from the UofM center for entrepreneurship Friday. I think the 3 take-away points from my speech were:

1. You know you want to be an entrepreneur when you don't feel right doing anything else. This life is too short to spend it doing something you hate.

2. Be Flexible. Be passionate. But don't let your passion get in the way of your flexibility. We're all attached to our ideas. But sometimes you have to be open to the possibility that no one wants what you want them to want.

3. (this is the single most important piece of advise I could give anyone, no matter what they decide they want to do with their life) Learn how to tell a story. If you can become a great storyteller, you can succeed in whatever it is you decide to do with your life.

Cash flow is king.

People always talk about 'cash is king', but more importantly...'cash flow' is really king.

If you get them to focus on generating cash flow early, then from there you can lead into getting a prototype/lean product into early customer's hands early.

You can be 'profitable' and still go bankrupt.

- Don't be afraid to seek out resources at your school (alumni, entrepreneurship programs, professors, fellow students, etc.)

- Don't spend too much time planning; think through some basics, then build a prototype, and launch it. From then on it's all about listening to your users and iterating. I think this is tough for college students, who are used to overanalyzing things, and not used to just doing things.

- Don't waste away your college years over a start-up. It's great to start a company in school. But college is a one-shot opportunity. Don't forget that.

The single most important thing I'd tell new college graduates is to not buy a new car. Time and time again I've seen so many people acquire moderately paying entry level employment and then immediately go and yoke themselves to a huge debt that will deeply affect their finances for the next several years. Better to go without a car for a while, if practical, and then buy used. If possible pay cash, but in any event avoid anything that takes more than a year or so to pay off if you have to borrow money.

A cardboard box makes for a good table.

So much good advice that's high-level so here's a real simple one...

Trim your nails.

- Why start your own business? Why start early? So that you won't have to work some stupid boss and complain all for the rest of your life. We all make mistake along the way. Better to learn from any mistakes early.

- How to be a domain expert? Got to love the subject, and be really really really good at it.

- How do you know if you have the right Idea? There is not right idea, just a solution to solve a problem.

- Why it will be the hardest thing you will ever do? f!

- How do you bootstrap? Try to be a bit creative here alright.

- How do you find investors? See above.

Although it doesn't address your questions directly, this talk about making money online by David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of 37Signals and creator of Ruby on Rails, makes quite a lot of sense when you're juggling around all the thoughts about becoming an entrepeneur. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-mone... Enjoy. Take care, Karl

From all I've seen, I would bring home these points:

1) Have a full-time job and do the startup on the side until you're simply not able to anymore.

2) Read, read, read about modern successes and failures. Studying management of the 80s doesn't make you a good manager - it makes you a historian. Find people you look up to, and learn what you don't want to do.

3) Don't make a copy of something until you've tried to fix what you don't like of the original.

- Why start your own business? Why start early? Have you seen the job market? Most of the job offers you will get (if they get any) will be low pay and low responsibility, essentially digging yourself a hole at the beginning of your careers. Even if unsuccessful, starting your own business builds experience and skills making yourself more marketable in a few years when the job market is better.

I will advise students to first get some experience at either at a big company or well funded startup. Work for a couple of years and then do your own thing. Right after college, one is usually full of hypotheses and an unreal model of real world. Best way to test all those hypotheses and get a good understanding of how outside-college world works is to work at some other company.

Get Organized: I found that in college you can get away with being un-organized, with a business you really can't. Dropbox, Google Docs, Zoho, various Chrome extensions, and other Task MGMT software have saved my life.

Workout in the morning:I found this is a great way to start the day, make time to workout regardless. Morning if you can

Those are great topics, and I would add: "Choosing your team wisely".

A former college entrepreneur myself, it was easy in the early stages to ignore "feelings" that our founding team didn't mesh well, but as the company grew in size and responsibility, those initial feelings became show stoppers.

Just because it was the hardest thing you ever did doesn't mean starting a business has to be the hardest thing every student's done. Plenty of businesses have grown out of hobby sites set up in the spare time by college students.

"Don't be afraid to take an old school concept and reenergize it. Modern methods are essential to success" via @MassachusettsRealtor

- Why start your own business? Why start early?

Success takes practice. The sooner you start, the more likely you will be to end up successful in the end. I started my first .com while I was still in college. Start it because it's a learning experience. It's a way to test yourself against a larger pool of competitors. It'll make you stronger and better able to empathize with future bosses if you don't succeed right away. It'll help you be a better person, more persuasive and help you understand the world better.

- How to be a domain expert?

Do it for 10,000 hours according to Gladwell.

- How do you know if you have the right Idea?

The market pays you money for it.

- Why it will be the hardest thing you will ever do?

It's not the hardest thing you'll ever do. Not by a long shot. Well, it may be. It's not the hardest thing I've ever done. But maybe I'm not working hard enough. Really it's about finding balance in your life and being happy. Setting your own path. Finding your own success and reaping more of what you sow.

- How do you bootstrap?

Get a good job for a couple years. It'll give you valuable experience and maybe help you find your right idea. Save EVERY penny you can. Get a cheap car or better yet take public transit. Live close to work and walk. Get a cheap apartment. Cook at home. Take your lunch to work. Save up 2 years of living experiences. Then quit and move back home. Code in your basement.

Do consulting on the side. Pick up projects from the internet. Work with friends. Tell everyone you know that you are trying to do something great and they'll give you work or help you find it or refer you. People will admire you for trying your hardest and trying to achieve something on your own. They'll live vicariously through your success and feel good for helping you create it.

- How do you find investors?

Network. Build a good product and they'll find you. You'll start getting calls from VCs. When that happens contact the ones you want. Try thefunded.com for an introduction. Look for angel lists. There's one floating around here.

Don't start looking for VC until you are 18 months into your 2 year runway. That'll give you 6 months. If it doesn't work, you still have something that may be generating some side money for you if you are not making enough money to live -- that's where you want to strive to get. Don't expect to make millions, you'll be discouraged. If you do, great! But don't set your pass/fail lines at the same level of the startups you read about on TC or here.

General advice:

It will take way longer than you imagine. A large part of success is proving your commitment to a great idea to the world by dedicating your life to it. Don't spend money on PR firms, corporations, big contracts, or to demo your product. Get incorporated when you get a customer. Don't spend a lot, go to legalzoom or fill out the paperwork on your own.

Don't be burdened by all the legal stuff. You can get your ducks in a row if a big deal comes along or investors want a piece. Worrying about the hurdles will only slow you down.

Use cloud computing providers. Don't buy servers and infrastructure. Host for as cheap as you can, then move if you or your users feel sluggish responses from your app.

1. Don't mess around, just do it.

2. Aim high

Read Paul Graham's essays.

My nr 1 advice: don't forget to make money.

Finish school.

Hardest thing in my opinion: perseverance. There are going to be ups and downs with starting and running a business. I don't know if anyone really started with the "right idea" -- but as you persevere and keep going ideas evolve and things will hopefully work out in your [business's] favor.

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