All business advices are myth
All business advices are myth including this one . As there are loads of talk about what to do or what not to do . Either you should get funded or you should do bootstrap . Do i need to start something as there are already established players exist . Do i really need to be in silicon valley to be a global company ? There are loads of such questions exist . Well there will be many answer of any question . I will try to explain which i think also what i said in start “All business advices are myth” including this one .
What i think is first of all find the problem , many times you dont know actually this is kind of a problem. But for god sake dont create problem in your mind and then create a solution on top of it . There can be a big and small problem but ultimate your product or services should solve the problem even in smallest vertical industry e.g. you are building some kind of software tools which will be used by software developers only ( Like atlassian — https://www.atlassian.com/ ) . Its not like that you should have a kind of thought from day one that you are going to create something like iPhone or Mac or MSoffice or something like that .
atlassian is a perfect model for solving a problem in their ecosystem like in this case solving the problem for software developers . You will find a lot & lot of meaningful companies which are really solving problems . Many times they dont have multi billion dollar “so called valuation” which actually doesnt matter but they are problem solver companies , meaningful & generating profit “which is kind of missing now a days from so called unicorn companies” .
Little bit of self promotion — as we are doing for Mobile( http://mobikul.com/ ) , Helpdesk ( http://uvdesk.com/ ), Hotel Softwares ( http://qloapps.com/ ) and many more Ecommerce tools ( https://store.webkul.com )
What i really think is “every company or product” must have a story if you dont have it create it , make it . This is vital “copying is easy , scaling is hard” . You will see in the market there will be loads and loads of copycat exist for the same idea or services but very less of them actually scale .
You shouldn’t build a company for 5–10 years and if you have any exit plan like in next 2 years i will sell the company and personally all the board member will be millionaire or billionaire thats not a good idea at all . You should build company for 1000 years may be more than that .
As Peter Thiel says “ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”
Why everyone is in a rush to get funded ? Well the reason is simple — open any tech news site and you will see news are bombarded by funding news . Example this company got the funding from this VC , another company got the funding from another VC and so on . VC funding is one way to scale business but not the only way to do it . End of the day all the businesses in this world need to generate profit why not from the day one ? why rushing towards to VC ?
A great talk on bootstrapping your business — Also many times people do want to validate their business ideas from VC’s or Mentors or from existing serial entrepreneurs . Well i do believe that no one actually knows as Guy kawasaki says “experts are clueless” which is totally true .
Will discuss more on such ideas & again which i am trying to explain is all what i have written is absolutely my version of the story it may not work at your version . So instead of validating , it i would say “try and create more and more mistakes and learn from them ”