Ask HN: What are the first steps to starting a startup?
I feel like I've been doing a whole lot of learning about entrepreneurship, yet I never take the plunge and actually act, and I really don't know how to get started.
A little bit about me: I graduated with a CS degree from a very strong engineering university in May, and I'm now a software engineer at a major tech company. I took lots of elective classes in school about entrepreneurship, from idea generation, to funding, to legal aspects of startups. I've been to plenty of talks and ask questions whenever I can at them, from people like Max Levchin (PayPal), Roger Dickey (Gigster), and Jess Lee (Sequoia Capital). At times I feel like I'm being quite proactive towards my goal of one day starting a startup...
And then I realize that I don't output anything. I know backend and frontend web dev, infrastructure, some machine learning, and other odds and ends, but the most I find myself actually doing is writing little scripts to save myself a couple minutes here or there. I find myself so enthralled by consumer tech, and I have plenty of ideas, but I find it very hard to actually act on them. Any time I start to work on a project, I end up getting caught up trying to brainstorm how to build the perfect application, or I'll start programming it but I'll just keep adding more and more complexity before I even get an MVP. And the result is probably 15-20 projects that are all only between 5 and 30% done.
Some of you guys have experience taking a vision you have, and making it a reality. You juggle creating a product, marketing and selling it, iterating, coming up with a decent business model, and a hundred other things. Can you offer me any advice on what I should do first? Because I can't keep sitting on my couch reading Paul Graham essays.
A huge thank you to anybody who's willing to give me some pointers.