Launching Your Startup…From Afghanistan

I realize the lessons learned captured in the blog post have a limited audience. There isn’t exactly a thriving startup scene in Afghanistan to begin with. It’s also worth mentioning it’s a pretty terrible place to decide to launch your startup. However, for the sake of anyone considering it, I’ve outlined the following 8 points that are worthy of consideration.

1. Nobody wants to hear about your startup here. You can try and corner some of the locals to get feedback on your site, but given that “Landing Page” has no direct translation in Pashto, you may have issues.
2. The “Hitting the Streets” method of obtaining user feedback is impractical as the streets will sometimes explode here.
3. The Internet sucks: deal with it.
4. Ramen is not commercially available. Amazon will ship to Afghanistan.
5. Save your work in the cloud before heading to the bunker during rocket attacks. It only takes a few seconds and you never know where those things are going to land. Make sure you are backing up regularly during fighting season.
6. Startup Weekend: Afghanistan isn’t happening anytime soon.
7. Telling someone you’re in “Stealth Mode” has a different connotation here.
8. No Beer: means less good ideas, but cleaner code.

Hope these tips prove useful next time you find yourself in the middle of a war and just HAVE to ship. If, on the off chance you are in Afghanistan and love startups, please shoot me a line…figuratively.

• Matt

Founder: Valid8