What questions you should ask yourself as a startup founder?
What are the most important questions you should ask yourself as a startup founder. questions if you got right, they will increase your odds of success.
- Are you willing to spend the next 7-10 years of your life on this idea?
- If you run into hard times and it’s not working out (this could be years), would you be willing to push through?
- Do you have real conviction and passion for the space or do you just want to start a company?
- Are you willing to compete against 15-20 competitors with the same idea, and do you think you will win? Why will you win?
- Is your personal network supportive of you starting a company?
- Do you have sufficient savings set aside to sustain you while you fundraise?
Is this person better than me at X?
What new skills or knowledge will make me a better leader?
- Is this a real problem? How big of a problem is it? Is there urgency or an impetus (regulation, policy, competitive landscape, foreign policy)? How do I know that? Is this valuable and profitable? For example, one organization tried to avoid one event where each occurrence could result in human loss, damage to a $9bn piece of infrastructure, about $100MM in loss, six to eight weeks of non-productive time, likely fines, PR hassle, and definitely destabilizing markets with huge ripples. They were motivated to solve that problem. Another company was losing around $480MM/year due to a phenomenon and improving that was a win. Very rarely, you'll have an organization that tells you "We want this done, period. Money is not a problem. We're paying a vendor X. Instructions came from way up high to replace that vendor and own the IP. We're willing to pay you 10x if you accept being paid in Y currency". That's the type of urgency that is extremely rare but very real, and a lot is on the line. Again, rare.
- Do I have distribution down? Can I find and reach the relevant people? Do I have a lever to get my product into their hands? Can I leverage something to distribute my product?
- Is this a market I want to be in? Is this a market I could solve another problem for if/when I find out I was wrong and amortize contacts/knowledge/information I have accumulated? Can I have a lot of conversations with people in that sector?
- Have I talked with people who I assume have that problem?
- Is this something they actually are paying to solve? Will solving it for them save them money or make them money? What are the consequences of not solving that problem? Does it touch any critical part in their value chain? What are they doing to solve it right now? Am I talking with someone with purchasing power? (for example, if you're talking with an engineer at some organization who starts talking about the procurement process, you may want to take that with a grain of salt, because they may be talking about the way they prefer purchasing software as an individual, it may not be the actual process at their organization. You may ask probing questions about the procurement process at their organization, and it often shows that they didn't know what they were talking about because they're not involved in that process).
- What's the complexity of the sales process? (it's a spectrum. It is great whenever you can reduce the complexity of the sales process with engineering because you bring down the slider on the high-low touch spectrum without necessarily touching the price, but it gives you the latitude to touch the price at a point. Not that you'd want to do that by default, but just in case, it's good to have the option. Simplifies hiring and training sales people at some point).
- How fast/expensive is it to falsify my hypotheses?
- Can I be profitable first?
- Do I have to keep building features to keep up with other products?