What do you need to start a startup?
Let’s start with a straight answer: drive and willingness to take action without having certainty.
With that out of the way, let me explain the difference between resources, attitude, and product (a product or service).
Usually, if you go to any traditional media outlet, you will read that the essential resources you need for starting a business are: A business plan, a sales pitch, an elevator pitch, a product, or at least a prototype and a couple of early believers than join you. I have seen many times people working miracles to fulfill these resources, taking up to 3–5 years, and because of that, they will lose drive. If you wait until you have a 100% certainty of your actions, you will never be ready.
If you are thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, first be sure your nature is ok with this:
1.-Be able to manage stress and uncertainty every day.
2.-Be ready to ignore perfection, focus on planning for failure and building for success.
3.- Understand that success will be the sum of at least 3 of this: better product, better price, better quality, better executive team, biggest funding, better-proven strategy.
Now that you understand the personal requirements, you can move on, and proceed to be completely honest and answer these questions:
What drives you? (Money, purpose, impact, fame, etc…)
What makes you better to execute your idea than anyone else?
What is the personal metric in which you will measure your success?
What is the business metric in which you will measure your business success?
Data show us hundreds of entrepreneurs which enter a completely new area to found a business they did not have any previous experience, nor knowledge, and they were able to build highly successful businesses, but data show zero entrepreneurs who make it without drive.
So, if you are spending a ton of time building a business plan to perfection or thinking of endless brainstorm sessions before moving forward you could be doomed. Focus on researching your market, building a basic business plan to show potential and identify your cash flow needs, and immediately move forward to an action plan to set dates for:
-Creating the legal entity
-Creating the value proposition (answering why is your business much better than other existing players? -focus on the much)
Last, but not least, building a company is a really hard endeavor, you will need to be ready to ask and receive a lot, I repeat, a lot of help. If you think “you what to do it on your own”, you will be disappointed, there is not a single successful company that was built by a single person. Embrace help, and help others yourself, that’s the way you even things out, we are not islands, if you are blessed enough to get help from others, that does not mean you are not doing it on your own, it means people believe in you, and people believe in helping others.
Now, 90% of the entrepreneurs I had interviewed at Startup Grind, have the same answer to the question, what was the first action that drove you to develop your startup? A=Creating the legal entity
So, there you go. Every journey starts with one step.
Originally published at https://www.huffpost.com on August 7, 2017.
