How To Quit Your Job And Start Your Own Business – Part 2

In my previous article on How To Quit Your Job And Start Your Own Business – Part 1, we touched up on identifying the reasons for starting up. Once you’ve identified the right reasons for starting your business, you’re all set to take the first steps into entrepreneurship.

But before you take those first steps, you must know the landscape where you will land your feet on.

Solve a Problem

Whatever you decide to do as a business, always start with a problem that a specific category of people have or one that you have experienced. Do not start up because market research states great potential for your industry or because you feel you can do a better job at what others are doing. Go the extra mile in finding out what is troubling people, and then build your product or service to address that. Nearly every successful company built to last solved a problem for a defined group of people.

Procrastination is a Startup Killer

The first step of starting a venture is to start one. If you want to start your business, shut up and start up. If you don’t act on your idea today, someone else is bound to stumble up on it and take it to market before you can. Trust me, no idea is unique until it is executed. The day you decide to startup, is the day you should take the plunge. There is no right time or moment to startup and you will never be able to imagine all the possible things that can go wrong even before taking your first step. Cross that bridge when you get to it.

Rainy Days turn into Months and Years

One of the most common excuses I hear from people waiting to startup is to fill their coffers with enough rainy-day money. The truth is that you will never be able to save enough for your startup journey. Let’s say you decide to save enough for six months, what if once you’re on your own, you’re not able to get traction for the first six months? What if it takes one year? What happens then? Are you only ready to work until the rainy-day money lasts you? If that is the case, you will never be able to succeed. The thing is that only when you’re faced with a dire situation is when you will find a way out.

Failure is Imminent

If you are going to start up, you are bound to fail. For in failure are life’s little secrets. For in failure is where you will discover a pivot that can make your product or service successful. Angry Birds was the 52nd attempt that finally made it for Rovio. PayPal was Max Levchin’s fifth attempt at entrepreneurship that finally won him the things he deserved. So embrace failure. You cannot learn to ride a bike by reading how to ride one. You’ve got to hop onto one, fall a few times, but then you get up and hop on again. And only then will you gain the confidence and the balance to ride free.

Here’s a fantastic graphic (from Funders and Founders) that explains failure just right.

Capital is a Bane

This holds true for mainly tech ventures. The more money you have, the more mistakes you will make and head down the road to failure pretty quickly. So it’s a good thing that you do not have capital to startup. I don’t know a single successful entrepreneur today who started with a million bucks.

If you want to start a product company, bootstrap. Pool in your resources from savings or borrow from friends or family. There are many more ways of raising money to build your product. But importantly, get a proof of concept done (outsource if you must) and get some traction before you take it to investors. If you plan to start a services business, then get your first client, and then hire a team to work on it or simply outsource. Deliver a fantastic service and then work your way into setting up your own team.

So here we are having established the ground for taking your first steps as an entrepreneur. This was the easy part. Now comes the hard part and the moment of truth, the day you put in your papers. As much as you convince yourself to be fearless, it sure stays with you throughout the notice you will serve, but the excitement of starting up overshadows it. And the day you break free, that is the day your fears will be laid to rest. Because, that’s the day you’ve learnt to take your first step and there’s no stopping henceforth.

Step 1

Before you quit your job to launch your startup, you need to first validate your idea. You need to know whether people actually want what you’re building. Quitting your job to build something that people don’t want would be a foolish thing to do. So secure yourself while you still have a job.

If you’re launching a product in the consumer space, launch a basic prototype or a minimum viable product and use employees of your company as potential customers. What this means is that do not look for perfection, rather get a working product that offers the core value or feature. The idea is to quickly get feedback at the least amount of investment put in to build the product. Once you start to get feedback and traction from users, you can then make changes or enhancements to the product.

If you’re in the B2B space, go sell the concept to another company and ask whether they’d be interested in buying the first instance of the core product of which they will get all the upgrades for free.

The moment you find your first few set of customers who are willing to pay for your product or service, you’ve got your idea validated and that there truly is a demand.

Step 2

This is the defining moment. To do or not to do. If you really want to startup, then this is the stage that you’re idea is validated, you have a working prototype and you need to start building traction among users and simultaneously enhance the product to suit the needs of your customers. You need to put in your papers now. Just do it. Necessity is the mother of invention and each problem has a solution. So when the problem comes, you will find a solution. Do not worry at this stage of a problem you do not have. Put your product into production and at the same time put your papers in.

Step 3

Keep trying to acquire customers. Manually. And focus on delighting each and every one of your customers. Because, by the time you come out of your job, you would have established a customer base who has now had enough experience with your product and is delighted (assuming you put your efforts into this) enough to share it with their network.

The compounded effect of referrals and recruiting customers will help your startup to grow and reach a sizeable amount of customers within a very short period of time.

Paul Graham of Y Combinator put this brilliantly in one of his recent essays, “The mistake they (entrepreneurs) make is to underestimate the power of compound growth. If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week. And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you’ll be surprised how big the numbers get. After a year you’ll have 14,000 users, and after 2 years you’ll have 2 million.”

Remember, entrepreneurship is all about innovation and marketing, which will determine the success of your business [click to tweet]. Innovation refers to creating a compelling/unique product or service and marketing means just that, how to effectively reach out to your customers with the right messaging to exhibit the value of your product or service.

So, now the day you’re set free is the moment of truth. Now you’ve got a real business, with real customers and if you’ve done well this far, you’ve also probably got your first set of employees. Whatever it takes, you have to walk, take bigger steps and eventually run. Keep your focus on how you can delight every single customer and there’s no reason why you cant change the world in your own way.

photo credit: AlicePopkorn via photopin cc