From Student Side Project to Startup | Hacker News Reader

From Student Side Project to Startup

blog.ycombinator.com

94 pointscraigcannon16 comments

> If you’re like most busy students, you’re probably spending about 90% of your time on some combination of academics, athletics, extracurriculars, and social activities, leaving 10% for your side project. But for your side project to even have a chance of becoming a successful startup, you’ll have to flip that ratio and spend almost all of your time on your company.

I've got a high tolerance for risk. This seems crazy.

It depends how you do it. If you have the financial means, you can take a semester off (or register only for one easy credit) and focus 100% on your project during that time. That would delay your graduation by ~6 months, but that can be worth it. This is what Mark Zuckerberg did before dropping out completely.

From [1]:

> Mark Zuckerberg strolled back onto the Harvard campus, having taken the semester off to devote full time to his startup, thefacebook.com

From [2]:

>Despite staying at Harvard for his final year, he’s continued to work on TheFacebook “basically full-time,” he says. (Saverin took only two classes last semester.)

[1] http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/11/02/10-years-ago-mark-...

[2] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/24/business-casual-...

I think the issue here is social. You lose pace with all your friends that you've been going through school with- which can be tough for a lot of people. Plus none of those people can relate to the work you're going through. They probably treat you like you're on vacation.

Maybe this is just good for founders to go through.

> If you’re a student entrepreneur, turning a side project into a startup is one of the most important steps in your journey as a founder.

Considering the audience that YC is talking to, I get this statement, but I don't think the process of turning a side project into a startup is restricted to the "student entrepreneur". IndieHackers is full of seasoned and experienced professionals (mostly engineers / developers with a few years in the real world) who have turned their side-projects into successful startups with enough growth and income to quit their day jobs and focus on it fulltime. https://www.indiehackers.com/

One particularly inspiring story I found on there was that of Tyler Tringas - the guy who created StoreMapper. I do remember he did a Show HN here and I loved it. He says he wrote the MVP for StoreMapper on a plane ride to Argentina, contacted a few of his clients for whom he'd done Shopify work for, and was generating income from week 1. Now he says StoreMapper is bringing in 21K / month

Story here => https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/storemapper

> I have no idea how I found the time at the very beginning, since I was already spending 80% of my time on a startup and 40% on freelancing. But I built the first version of Storemapper from nothing to live-and-accepting-payments in one 30-hour flight.

Having gone through this process, this is all excellent advice. I would add that if your university has a business school, see what resources they offer student entrepreneurs. In our case, RPI has an excellent business school with staff that offer free services to students:

- We had entries for business plan competitions looked over

- We were notified of (and given) relevant grants

- There was photography and film equipment that could be rented out for free

- We were introduced to several local angel investors

- Free tickets + transportation to networking events

- As a team composed entirely of technical people, we were given a business/financial crash course.

Without that initial support and grant money, I don't know that we would have kept going. We kept chugging along and applying to YC and eventually got into the fellowship (F2 batch).

> Done half-heartedly, the transition can be toxic for both the fledgling startup and the rest of your commitments.

From my experience, the rest of your commitments kinda go out the window once you switch to 90% company 10% school + everything else.

I have since left the company, and I'm now working to rebuild some relationships I've neglected for the past 2 years.

As a RPI engineering grad myself, we had a business school?

Slight joking aside, I do wish that while i was there, I knew more about these services.

Heyo! Class of '08. You?

They had us take, I think, a business class each year, covering the basics of interpersonal stuff, interviewing, etc. At the time I thought it was pretty neat.

In hindsight I still think it was neat, but now I know how much was lacking. There's a lot about RPI I find that way, in hindsight, and mostly because of what you said: you didn't really know about them.

'13. So comparatively inexperienced. We had business classes but not much in the way of 'if you ever want to start a company, we have a incubators for that'

I found the "flip the time around, 90% on company" part interesting. Is it not possible to do a side project which matures to a small business providing consistent income? I'd be surprised if anyone could create a multi-multi-million dollar company like that, but surely there's something between "10% of time, not going anywhere" and "90% of time?"

That's a good observation. I think it comes down to the distinction between a startup and a small business. It's certainly possible to continue working on a side-project part-time and build it into a successful small business, but I would argue that that's not a startup, since one of the defining features of a startup is fast growth. Paul Graham has an interesting take on that distinction here: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

one of the defining features of a startup ~according to Paul Graham~ is fast growth. Much of what he writes about is geared towards the type of startup that YC wants to accelerate - the type of company that could go from college bedroom to bought by Google in 2-3 years. There are plenty of other companies in the startup ecosystem that aren't entirely driven by VC strategies.

Enjoyed writing about some of the lessons my twin brother and I learned as we built our college side project into a startup called Meetingbird. Will be following this thread to answer any questions!

Biggest issue I see with this article is all of these suggestions assume you can keep motivation for a project as a student.

But, for example, there's an enormous amount of risk in delaying a semester or completely flipping your priorities, and then like most projects, losing interest when it becomes uninteresting/too expensive/fails/you find a competitor that trumps you hands down.

More likely to burn out giving it 90%, too.

Agree with everything except:

> how fixing bad meetings could literally improve the world’s GDP

This seems a bit much..

Quality work, looks good.

Isn't this really just google calendar, though? It looks borderline identical.

Good work though.

Does "entrepreneur" really just mean relentlessly pursuing riches?

Every person I've met that describes themselves as an entrepreneur is only interested in their own personal wealth, but they always seem to have some bizarre, self-serving narrative about "disrupting" their industry.

Aren't "student entrepreneurs" just young, greedy people who have decided they want to be rich, they just aren't exactly sure where they're gonna get the money yet?

Maybe I'm just old fashioned but I don't believe these mentalities should be encouraged. They are toxic.

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