Ask HN: How do I learn more about entrepreneurship/startups?

Stop reading books, stop getting courses and start doing things.

Some people have tendencies to never learn from other people, and they make the same mistakes other people have done again and again.

Other people, like you (it is obvious), go the other way, they want to know everything and not fail ever. The way they do it is procrastinating, never getting in the arena or over the stage until they are 100% prepared. And they are never "prepared", because failing hurts emotionally.

You are like a skier that tries to avoid falling down so much he just can't learn.

I created my own business when I was a kid, it is not that hard, offer things or services people need or want. Someone with a CS degree can figure it out.

You need to get out in the real world and fail. Then you can read books and ask for advice. Now you will be able to calibrate all the info that you get from books and people in real scenarios. Without real world experience, most info is worthless.

Spend the minimum amount of time reading, you should be experiencing life and writing down those experiences. Writing every day is much better than reading every day. One in active, the other passive and looks like work but it is not.

Minimize passive things and activities in you life, like TV, until most of your life is active.

This man was a serial entrepreneur: https://steveblank.com/

Start getting more aggressive, learn from this man: https://www.john-carlton.com/

You look too "soft",a "wussy", learn resourcefulness in films from people that go to war. You look too weak for making a company and need to get stronger.

You need to develop some habits that make you stronger, like making decisions fast, dealing and handling the consequences. Get used to risk every day, manage it, minimize it.

You learn those things while doing and trying. Accept failure in your life, accept rejection by other people, accept the pain and over time you will master it.

Accept failure in your life, accept rejection by other people, accept the pain and over time you will master it.

Sounds like a sure path to being the guy who has "1 year of experience repeated 10 times" instead of "10 years of experience." Just failing over and over again doesn't ensure that you're going to learn anything. Ideally you want to also acquire new externally sourced knowledge at the same time, and constantly integrate both that external knowledge and your empirical learnings so that you maximize your overall learning experience.

Stop reading books, stop getting courses <snip> Some people have tendencies to never learn from other people, and they make the same mistakes other people have done again and again.

Oxymoron much?

This man was a serial entrepreneur:

He also wrote a really good book. Which you apparently would prefer the OP not read?

> You look too "soft",a "wussy", learn resourcefulness in films from people that go to war. You look too weak for making a company and need to get stronger.

Insulting the poster is really useful here. Thanks for your insight.

But isn't that the grandparent's whole point?

If you can't take being called "soft" or a "wussy", you ARE...and need to toughen up...ignore trite insults, and be able to withstand the torrents of potential backlash/hardships (from customers, competitors, whatever externalities...or even from internal sources, eg: partners - you WILL fight).

OP is a young (I assume) college graduate, asking for advice and open to the fact that their current thinking may be wrong.

I see no weakness here.

Unless you consider thoughtfulness and introspection to be weakness?

Not everyone in business has to behave like they’re The Wolf of Wall Street.

I love your comment, specifically as it pertains to getting up and breaking yourself in. People want to believe that moving in an uncertain path can actually be predetermined to avoid failure, but that is exactly what the hurdle is - breaking through the unexpected which typically never go your way.

But, once adapted to, it is a thrill to see one’s effort progress, however minuscule (which is how most news starts progress). And, you’ll notice the division of those who can act in the presence of uncertainty and those who cannot. It can be generalized into “leaders” and “followers”.

> Spend the minimum amount of time reading, you should be experiencing life and writing down those experiences. Writing every day is much better than reading every day. One in active, the other passive and looks like work but it is not.

That doesn't make much sense. Great writers read copiously, it's one of the reasons they start writing. Reading does not necessitate that one not write.

> You look too "soft",a "wussy", learn resourcefulness in films from people that go to war. You look too weak for making a company and need to get stronger.

I can't even tell what the hell this means. Watch war movies to avoid looking "soft"?

I agreed with some of your sentiment until I got to this:

> You look too "soft",a "wussy", learn resourcefulness in films from people that go to war. You look too weak for making a company and need to get stronger.

Hmm.

Agreed until you said the OP was too 'weak'

If you want to learn the nuts and bolts of launching and growing a startup, we focus on doing that as a bootstrapped (or mostly bootstrapped) founders at https://microconf.com.

We've been around for a decade and we have in-person events, online events, an online Slack community with 2100+ founders, and around 300 videos at https://youtube.com/microconf that focus on the day to day decisions you have to make as a founder.

From ideation to validation to launch, growth, hiring, selling your startup, etc. Most of what we offer is free, and we support it by charging for tickets to our in-person events.

Highly recommend Micro Conf videos. Adam Wathan & Jason Cohen are some great ones to start with.

Rob's (above poster) podcasts are often very good as well.

Disciplined Entrepreneurship books by Bill Aulet & his online courses (on either EdX or Coursera) are great.

Tons of other great amazing info, but incorporating your first business & talking to potential customers is an absolute must first step. Don't become another person who just reads about businesses for fun & dreams. You need to spend most of your time testing out ideas on people & trying to build your business. Books & videos are great for relaxing & edu-entertainment.

I am a technical cofounder and bootstrapped three companies: 2 acquired, 1 failed. I would not bootstrap a company in today’s climate unless you do not want to exit. The VC playbooks for growth are now mature, standard and effective. So being able to leverage the funds and execute a standardized revenue generating plan is important.

Bootstrapping mostly leads to extremely slow growth unless you have skilled sales expertise on team or get lucky. Which is not all bad unless you are looking for a 3 to 5 year exit.

Could you please elaborate more or provide links on below?

> The VC playbooks for growth are now mature, standard and effective. So being able to leverage the funds and execute a standardized revenue generating plan is important.

Where can I find this standardized revenue generating plan?

I think what GP is saying isn't that there is one standardized playbook for revenue generation in the software space.

Rather, GP is saying that VCs have become very efficient at identifying opportunity areas in software, injecting money into founding teams in those areas, and using that money along with their influence on the founders and outside connection to create rapid growth.

Unless you can build a sales team to compete with that model, you get maybe two years before a VC-backed competitor shows up and starts acquiring big enterprise accounts at an astonishing pace due to their advantages in funding/connections. For an example, just look at Notion - they had to take on more funding to compete with Coda, Slab, and the half dozen other similar applications with deep-pocketed backers that have sprung up since Notion proved the market for such a product. (To be clear, IDK if that's why they took on more funding, I am speculating)

This means its now much harder to create a company like Github, Qualtrics, or Ebay, which reached mega status despite being bootstrapped.

Yeah, this is exactly what I meant.

By standard I mean cookie cutter: org charts, spending and strategy for targeted ads, trade show marketing, sales pipelines. With slight variations for target market/vertical.

It obviously requires a heavy spend but is also effective.

I totally agree VCs have become more aggressive in identifying opportunities and entrepreneurs aggressive in targeting small niche companies and can easily get VC funding.

Thanks for the explanation. I got confused there. :)

The best way to learn is to do because learning requires tight feedback loops.

You have more or less the correct idea with these steps, however they should be weighted (and continuously re-weighted as you progress).

I would add an additional step 0: commit to yourself that this is something you're going to see through. Do you want to start something because of a sense of FOMO or because you genuinely enjoy creating? Are you ready to quit your job and start, having the confidence in your tenacity? Importantly, your internal motivations will inform the amount of weight that should be put into each step.

For example, if you're building something to solve a problem that you yourself experience, steps 1 through 4 can be weighed at 0 and 5a (5 should be split into distinct parts) should be weighted at 1. Assuming the behaviors which give rise to your need are distributed, within the general population, on a bell curve and you fall somewhere within a standard deviation of the median, you are your average customer and don't need to prove the market ahead of time.

Overall, YC's advice to "build something people want" is spot on. Do that systematically and everything else is more likely to fall into place in spite of your weaknesses.

If you are a fullstack dev, I think you should learn a simple growth hack strategy that is helpful:

- Take your idea, build a simple UI (not the app at all, just the UI)

- Take that UI, and get a sign up modal on it

- Take that and run ads that point to it.

- See if you get enough conversions that justify you actually building the thing. What's that number for you? Dunno, but you'll learn quickly. And then you'll have a small mailing list of beta testers.

You can toil away and build a thing, or you can find an audience, and then build a thing that those people will pay for.

Everything will follow from that.

(or if you are going for a 'global scale' leveraged play -- you need to get users, cover the costs of the platform, and then get VC backing to figure out your monetization strategy)

as a backend dev, it's very hard to make a UI and landing page that looks presentable, especially in 2021

I'm probably going to get some downvotes for this, but take half a day to go through the learnin resources at tailwindcss and you'll be able to make a (albeit generic) landing page and UI the day after.

generic isn't good enough to catch a user's eye and get them interested though

It's not even talking about an app. Just a sign up page.

even then, even a slightly janky looking page signals a lack of trust

Outsource it if you have the money?

But since you mentioned landing pages, I can recommend this great talk by one of the “Refactoring Ui” folks. He explains how he built the landing page for Tuple - https://youtu.be/hlI6xGfBjkQ

Overall, the Refactoring UI folks have done a brilliant job of demystifying visual design.

For the UI you might have to find someone to do that for you. But if it's just a mock-up and not an actually UI it might be for a reasonable price.

Search for landing page templates. There are a lot that are free, some you have to pay for (but not that much).

Another option is to find a design co-founder.

So when you say sign-up do you mean sites that say something like "register your interest and we'll email you news when ready"?

People will also even put a credit card form on the site. See if people are actually willing to put down money. If you decide not to pursue the startup, just email them and tell them you are refunding their money.

(not OP) Yeah, something like that. Status updates or something, hopefully more involved than just no contact until shipped. You may want to use those people to help shape what you're building.

Exactly right. You'll want to work through some wording to get conversions, but also, that's a skill that you'll need to build anyway.

Sounds like you want to do a startup for having the startup.

You should watch "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares", I am not joking.

People who fare the worst are the ones that want to have a restaurant because they want to have a restaurant for themselves or it is their childhood dream of some sorts.

If you have to think of an idea to setup business for it you are already at a losing position.

Go to create startup when you have an idea that you think is sooo good that you have to setup a business because otherwise you cannot go on with that idea. But don't just pursue finding that idea it should be something you can do better than other, something that you can provide as a service a lot easier than others could do.

> A buddy of mine from college whose startup recently got 200k in seed money told me to look at free videos/materials from incubators/accelerators.

Since this is your friend, I have a suggestion: Ask him how you can help with his startup for free. Obviously not huge tasks like building their entire backend or website, but any startup is bound to have loose ends that need more eyes. Maybe you can help test things or review copy or even work on bits of code here and there.

Getting exposure and proximity to a startup is the best way to learn how it works. The books and theory and videos are helpful, but nothing compares to actually seeing how messy and difficult these things are first hand. If your friend is going through the steps right now, having a front-row seat to see and help is perhaps the most valuable education you get possibly get. Doing little bits of free work for your friend is a small price to pay.

The steps you outlined sound great in theory, but in practice few successful startups come from people looking for random ideas, building a product, securing paying customers on day 1, and then collecting piles of investor money. It happens, but more commonly people gain industry experience first and then use that first-hand experience to solve problems they had in their own industry first and foremost. These startups aren't the Instagrams or Clubhouses of the world, but there are many startups solving real industry problems that you never see or hear about. Having that first-hand experience, or at least someone on your team with that first-hand industry experience, is crucially important.

> 6. Grow/market and gain more customers??? No idea how this works

This is it. Forget everything else, this is the one that matters most for starting out. You can/will learn about most other things along the way.

For materials I'd start from Microconf's youtube channel.

I second this

Y Combinator's own StartupS chool (https://www.startupschool.org) is probably a good place to start.

I also recommend the library: https://www.ycombinator.com/library

Something I learned the hard way: You really need to be your own first customer. You need to solve a pain you have a deep understanding of, especially if you want investment from VCs. It's the only way you'll have the necessary credibility short of already having good traction or pre-existing relationships.

A 'good idea' isn't enough. Knowing and talking to lots of potential customers isn't enough. If you can't make big decisions with speed, clarity and confidence without outside input, you're dead.

I am not sure this is true. If so, we'd be building a world that serves people who start tech startups and leaving out huge markets of people who are not this customer. Instead, I think you need to understand whether there's a real opportunity. If you have the problem yourself, that's one data point, but it is also possible to have humility and learn from other people who have needs. What doesn't work is trying to serve people who aren't you and also you don't listen to or understand.

> but it is also possible to have humility and learn from other people who have needs.

Possible, yes. Although, it will cost you lots of time and money getting what you need second hand. Those 'other people' don't care how much runway you have, or when your next release is, or what meetings you have coming up. They WILL slow you down. Succeeding with a startup is a game of squashing risks, and that's a massive risk to have out of the gate.

Thanks for this. I'm in no way planning a start-up but it helps me to focus on the "right" side-project, i.e. the one that solves the most of my own pains.

> You really need to be your own first customer.

This is very good advice.

Do The Real Thing https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thin...

The problem here is that to someone from the outside, it's not obvious what 'the real thing' is.

For example, I have many times fallen into the trap of building something I thought was awesome and would sell well, only to find then that nobody wants to buy it.

I thought I was doing the real thing (building something), when in reality I should've talked to customers, or built an audience.

Actually, I'm still not 100% sure what constitutes as 'the real thing' in the kind of business I'm trying to build (creating educational technical content).

A friend of my wife's in B-school once relayed the story about his time in the entrepreneur club there, and how it was just a bunch of people standing around talking about starting businesses.

He found it much more educational to start a business, and learn as he went.

So if you want to learn about startups, the fastest way is probably to start one.

My opinion on the second fastest way is to work at one; that's what I did/am doing as employee #1.

Your framework looks good enough and there’s lot of great advice on this thread already.

Have you considered narrowing down on a market segment? A segment could be an industry (banking, finance, e-commerce), or a delivery model (B2B SaaS, B2C SaaS, mobile apps) or a technology domain (ML, analytics, cryptocurrency, mobile). Depending on your skills and experience, you’re more likely to identify problems to be solved in a segment that you understand well.

Have you made stuff that people wanted, in the past? It could be a small app or library, or even a piece of writing that became popular because you anticipated what people needed and catered to it. If not, give that a try as it will force you to walk the customer discovery process in a concrete way.

The “org” and “business” parts should come much later if you’re a first time entrepreneur. Identifying a concrete customer pain point (even if small) and building a solution for it should be top of mind and occupying most of your mental bandwidth. Attention to other details should be only in service of that.

The grow / marketing step is the hardest part for technical folks and where most side projects fail in my experience. Building the product, figuring out if it makes sense financially, these kinds of things will probably be easy for you. Finding enough customers to make any meaningful amount of money is the killer. I would focus on answering that first.

You will fail right out of the gate if you take #1 literally.

You do not *find*, you are *found* by an idea. Anything else and you're setting yourself for failure. I know it sounds esoteric but once you realize what it means to be found by an idea, you'll naturally start down the path of creating something cool.

I have a somewhat contrarian perspective to your #1/2. Instead of starting with an idea, start with a market. Maybe even a problem in that market. Then go out and have as many conversations as possible with people in that market to really wrap your head around what problems they have and how they currently solve them. Only after that, start testing solutions to their problems to find marketable products or services. The 'idea first' mentality so often leads to confirmation bias.

Lastly, as a full-stack engineer who has made the transition into 'successful' full-time startup ceo, I advise to to focus less on the technology than on the sales and customer relationships. Tech skills will be your competitive edge, but personal relationships will be the foundation of the business.

Others mentioned MicroConf. The organizer of MicroConf, Rob Walling, wrote a book where he gives very similar advice: https://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching..., both around starting with a market and focusing less on technology and more on sales. He is writing for a particular niche of smaller, non-VC-backed startups, but the general approach still seems similar.

Others have mentioned "learn by doing," which I think is absolutely necessary. At the same time though, it doesn't help if you start off doing it wrong, bringing assumptions about how a company works that are based on big-tech.

Having spent a decent chunk of my career at both start-ups and at a Big Tech company, there are lots of things that make sense to do at one that don't make sense at the other. As you make the move yourself (or, if you hire others, as you onboard people who are making that move), it's important to keep in mind how the risks are different between large companies and small companies. That probably doesn't answer your question directly looking for books or resources, but I think it's important to keep in mind as you consume books or resources.

Start your company with friends. Make something you all think will be cool. Starting a company with friends has risks, but so does anything worthwhile. It also has lots of upsides, like, you can trust them.

It sounds like you are trying to over optimise before stating. eg. worrying about what books to read, or about having a business plan and a financial model. These are distractions and they'll make you feel overwhelmed and not ready. I started my business with friends in college, it's still going 9 years on, and we did none of those things.

If you build something that's useful and you find people to pay for it, everything else will figure itself out in time.

I'd think less about "I want to start a startup" and more "I have a product idea that I think I can build, people will want and I can charge for it" and go from there.

If you want to learn about startups, best is to go work for one.

Lots of great suggestions in other comments. An addition for a possible route; Join a startup as an early employee with proven founders. Looking back on my past 15 years of entrepreneurship, that had probably been a shortcut for me, not failing on as many simple things (even though I'd read, studied and tried lots of things, I still made in hindsight pretty "simple" mistakes).

Also; There are lots of different ways to start a startup. There's no "right way" (although a lot of generic thoughts that usually apply to most cases - ie see Blank)

Based on what you wrote here, you do not need to learn any more things by reading -- you need to start DOING. *EVERYBODY* will be happy with "starting a self-sufficient small cash business" but that is easier said then done and you will never get there until you do it. BTW, you may lose money also, that is entrepreneurship/startups so you are overthinking it. If you are risk-averse (aka you have to "learn more" before doing something) ... then entrepreneurship/startups may not be for you -- and that is OK

You are on the right path with the steps you outlined above but there is NO holy grail or "the path" (I'm sure you've read enough and all the paths are different) so everybody has 24 hours per day to do something so you just need to do "enough right things". The lean startup model is good because you do not have to wait for "funding" (may never come) and you can just start doing something.

You may have to fail a couple of times to get it right -- again, that is OK -- this is how entrepreneurship/startups. So the first thing you really need to get right is "Do I want to do this?" Entrepreneurship/startups is NOT a job where you get PAID to do X (and whether it works or not, you still get paid). This is a lot of ups-and-downs but mostly fun journey if you are ok with taking risks.

Good luck!

You mentioned a sequence of steps, it's pretty good but I would always say start with the customer and their needs not your idea. Put the customer at the center.

As you probably know most businesses operate off of this structure. Customer wants a result so they use a mechanism(your idea or business). Focus on the finding a result that a customer wants that you can offer. Another way to look at it is customer, problem, solution, offer.

Also you don't have to raise capital if you don't want to. You could have customers pre-pay for your MVP before it's finished this also helps validate if people will buy your product/service.

Here are some resources. This consultant/coach has built multiple software companies. https://www.startfromzero.com/

https://www.eofire.com/

https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/no-ideas-no-expe...

The overall steps are pretty good, but depending on your product and market they may be less or more important (or maybe completely irrelevant).

Honestly my advice would be to jump head-first into it, and learn as you go. Some up-front “theoretical” knowledge would be nice to avoid completely screwing up, and lots of other folks have linked to good reading material for that, but it’s a high risk and ambiguous environment where “best practices” don’t always apply. IMO your efforts should be focused obsessively on iteratively understanding your product market fit and your customers’ needs, rather than theorizing and trying to figure out up-front if existing advice applies to you or not, obsessing over competitors, etc. Those things can definitely help but should be constant feedback loops based on what you’ve done, and not super hypothetical.

Also prepare yourself for an emotional rollercoaster. That’s the hardest part in my experience, having the grit to keep going despite feeling awful or scared or incompetent (and all at the same time).

> We understand that 90% of startups fail

Starting a startup is human activity, and you - the human - can have multiple activities, hence multiple start-ups (add to that pivoting). So while the 1st startup might fail, do it long enough and you'd be successful.

IMO the key is to work hard at MVP and iterate a lot.

Since you're here, have you thought of https://www.startupschool.org/ ?

As far as your point 1 to 7, not bad; I have a different approach but that's where we are all different. At the end of the day, if you build something that people want and are willing to pay (MVP/Lean Startup concepts) the money (investment) will follow.

Now, going from the garage stage to "#6. Grow/market and gain more customers??? " it's a different skillset; by the time you are there, you'll know more about your product offering, your audience, yourself and you'll have co-founders, early employees and investors to help you out.

Might want to check out some of pg's essays:

- How to start a startup: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

- Do things that don't scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Create a small simple product/service, try everything you know and read about to see if you can make it successful.

If you succeeds try and sell the company sell or expand the business.

If not move on to another product, rinse and repeat.

It's not different than any other thing in this world. Start small, use your experience to gradually build bigger and bigger.

#6 - our first 10 customers came from customer development interviews, then our next 10 were referrals from them, etc... (did this twice).

If you're not getting referrals then you may not be solving the problem or the problem isn't that valuable.

Once you have 10-20 customers from outside your network it's an early indication of product market fit.

Next, hire a full time marketing leader.

Over simplifying a little, here's a more product focused answer from a few weeks ago (the other answers in the thread were excellent): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059370

What you need is a "seller". You seem to be a "builder" type. Most successful businesses have a "seller" and "builder". Find someone with very strong marketing skills and tell him you build.

Also check out https://www.indiehackers.com/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/ for ideas

I'm planning a web app to help people with this. If you're interested in getting updates follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonfi

Get somebody who can sell. All of the points above where you say you have "no idea" are sales. Selling to customers, selling to investors.

Startups are more about sales than tech (most of the time).

Fail a bunch of times.

Have you checked out Indie Hackers?

https://www.indiehackers.com/

Are there any other books or resources Hacker News recommends? I’m probably wrong on a lot of what I think I know.

Reading / studying The Lean Startup is good, but I recommend going back to the origin of the whole movement, and read The Four Steps to the Epiphany by @sgblank. It really is an amazing book that walks through the process of starting a business, and explains the "Customer Development" process in excruciating detail. If you take nothing away from it, it will (hopefully) be the idea that a startup is all about search. Not "search" as in "web search" but "search" as in searching for a business model, market, distribution channels, promotional activities, etc. that work. Especially note the iterative aspect, and how the choice to "pivot" should occur in response to specific indicators, and isn't just some random whim that prompts a change of focus.

Another book I like is The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. You might find it worth a read.

I also recommend Alan Kay's video series on "How to Invent the Future" which can be found on Youtube.

1.Think of an idea/ find co-founders (starting a company with friends has risks) <snip> 7. Secure funding or be self sufficient cash business? Pitch to VC/investor??? No idea about this

That's a reasonable approximation of the idea, but again, note that iterations are part of the process. And it's a little bit more structured than that. Here's an example of what I mean:

Where you say "See if enough people have this “pain” to even pursue the startup." I would argue that that's incomplete. The question isn't only "do enough people have this pain" but also

1. Does the "thing" I'm proposing to build solve the pain?

2. If it does, does the customer value solving that pain enough to pay money for the solution?

3. How much will they pay?

4. Given the answer to (3) above, and my cost of developing and distributing the solution, can this be done profitably?

And that's before you get into the other questions you're trying to answer during the CD process like:

What channels do my customers learn about solutions like this from?

Should this be a purely self-serve / transactional sales model on a SaaS model with credit card payments, or is this a high-touch, direct-sales kind of thing?

What's the distribution channel that works for this "thing" and these customers? Maybe I need to sell through a VAR or System Integrator instead of direct.

Blah, etc. etc...

YCombinator YouTube is a great place to learn: https://www.youtube.com/c/ycombinator/videos?view=0&sort=p&f...

know your strengths, and find a partner to cover your weaknesses. then just start building and do-ing

you become one.. no class book or mentor can give you the real experience