Ask HN: I'm doing a series of lectures on entrepreneurship - what should i say? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm doing a series of lectures on entrepreneurship - what should i say?

4 pointsmixmax12 comments

I've been asked to do a series of 12 lectures on entrepreneurship, and the ins and outs of starting a company. Each lecture will be 2 hours, and will be given to a group of people that have just started, or are thinking about starting a company.<p>The idea is to be very hands-on, and talk about what's important, what the traps are, what to spend your time on, etc. The goal is that the group will go out and start their companies, and hopefully have a higher chance of success because of these lectures.<p>So the question is: What should I talk about? What do you think is important? What do you wish someone had told you when you started out?<p>The audience isn't particularly technical, and many of the companies are in sales, services and other non-tech industries.

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The mistake most people lecturing about entrepreneurship make is to talk about the mechanics of starting a company. And in fact a big mistake inexperienced founders make is to focus too much on the mechanics of it.

In practice the most important questions are things like how to maintain morale, how to find and get along with cofounders, how to push investors' buttons, and so on.

And make sure to demphasize the importance of the "idea." Sure it's important, but not nearly as much as newbie entrepreneurs think.

Or more precisely, the initial idea is usually not that important, because it's usually wrong. It's best to see an initial idea as a question rather than an answer.

You say you want 6 topics...

1. The Problem Statement

(who needs a solution, why do they need a solution, what do they do now: breakdown the value by time-cost and money-cost, what is the TAM, what subset of that TAM do you focus on first (does a subset of that TAM pay more or at all?))

2. The Solution

(what options for solutions do you have, what is the cost of each of those, what is the value of each of those to an end-user (is that value able to be reflected in revenue), how do you implement these, which do you choose)

3. The team

(what roles are needed, what are good qualities for these roles, what should YOU focus on, how do you focus, what is the motivation, other (morale etc...))

4. Business Strategy

(how do you market your product, how do you make customers screaming happy, do you develop a partner network, how to utilize big players, when to change gears, how to change gears)

5. Money

(what do you need and for how long, how do you obtain it, what are appropriate milestones for your industry...(there's a lot on this topic))

6. Getting started

(how to vet ideas, when to incorporate, when to patent if applicable, resources (marketing tools (software and services), financial tools, seeking advice), how to hire, what to outsource, how to outsource)

From my experience, the best way to start planning is to give your lecture its structure first. For a start, I'd divide it into 2 parts:

(1) Internal perspective [The bright idea, people, motivation, skills, legal aspects, gtd]

(2) External perspective [Market analysis, funding, communications]

Additionally, I think the key to success is mixing "theoretical frameworks" with real world examples in each session, to keep people motivated.

Agree - I was thinking about having 6 main points and do 2 lectures on each. This, as you point out, makes it more structured and people know what's coming.

What I'm trying to do right now, and with this post, is to find out what the 6 main points should be. I'm thinking about the following: The idea, you as a person, partners and employees, financials, sales and marketing, and legal.

Is there something missing?

I'm trying hard finding something missing, but I think your points are very good already. I'd also choose this sequence.

Just brainstorming on the things I wish someone had told me before:

(1) Be careful when picking friends as business partners: Having good friends as business partners can be tough, especially when things don't go as expected. I think this is a personal thing, as some people can argue on a business level and still stay friends. Thing is, you have to be sensitized to that fact.

(2) Endurance It takes longer than you plan. Period.

(3) Set quantitative, measurable goals. When I started a project with some friends :) two years ago, we had a great product (e-commerce), but never implemented any "controlling" into our application. Of course, we could track units sold, but the whole idea would have given us much more data points that could be used for analysis and further development - only had the scripts to read them out never been implemented. Use numbers whereever possible to make your decisions.

I have your second point in my notes already :-)

Your first and last points are great, and I'll definitely think about how to get them into the lectures.

please post video of the lectures online. thanks.

They'll be in Danish, so you probably won't get much out of them. If they were in English I would gladly have done so.

you may translate your slides (if at all you're using it) and share with us ...

1) find a problem 2) solve a problem 3) optimize the solution

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