The Startup Recipe

Okay, it’s a nice Sunday evening, not so cold with 70 degree F and what do I have for you for dinner tonight? I’ve a start-up. yes, that’s right, lets do a startup. Its not tough, if you manage well the ingredients for the recipe. Actual sequence and proportion of ingredients can change a bit, so feel free to experiment.

1. The most basic ingredient- get a co-founder(s). An intelligent, smart, high IQ acquaintance — Naa, that’s not what we need. A good friend — better, spouse- could do (but handle with care), sibling — great. Love the stripe team.

Surprised, we didn’t start with the idea as first step? I am sure you know how unimportant it is, don’t believe me…see how Itay Adam did it.

2. Now to make sure you and your newly found co-founder can really make it great, we are gonna put 2 of you (or 3 or more) in a small room for weeks, may be months. Talk about various things, do some free-lancing together, try to make some money. It should all gel in well…think thats enough? hmm, let our ingredient # 5— come in.

And if you’ve any doubts at this stage, whether the recipe is gonna come out well, refer this and you’ll never have confusion again….

3. Now that everything looks mishy-mashy, we have well-blended founders in right proportion, and we are ready to roll. But wait, we have put 2 great friends, buddies for life in the team but it is possible that our experiment might fail and we will need to refer to some wise men. So lets just get an advisor or create a master document to guide our recipe. This is called the legal document. Lets accept it even with all right intentions, we can still make bad decisions or might have differing views so need some guiding principles for us to keep moving.

4. Hola ! time to talk about the idea, We are now ready to shake the world, lets build something good for mankind. It is an important ingredient of our recipe and we can not start baking without it. So at this step, lets just nail the idea. The sub-steps will need you to do lot of market validation, talk to friends & family, look at competition. With strong founding team in place, you’ll soon identify a problem (they’re all over the place) & the solution.

5. We are getting there, all we need now is make this dish green, so lets put some money into it. How much? It depends, if you have done your business plan, cash burn, projections, team size, marketing strategy, and your personal needs for next 12–18 months, you will know how much can you put-in. But it is important. So spend some time figuring this out..we dont wanna run out of patience mid-way.

And finally, we will garnish this with just 5 things — lots of passion, commitment, work ethics, attitude and execution and we will let it bake for next 6–9 months and and see how it comes up. I have enjoyed baking mine for last 1 year- do it and tell me how was it for you?