The Best Advice For Startups From The Web.

I am a software engineer. In my field there are many startups and would-be entrepreneurs. I worked with start up founders, started my own ventures (AyeDeals.com) and am always returning to the same fundamental question: What makes a startup successful? Here is what the internet says.

Having a good idea.

The #1 factor in having the motivation to go through with building a company and that company succeeding or not, rests on having a good idea. Every successful tech start up has had one specific goal in mind. Most of the time it is one of the founders hobbies that becomes the initial business idea. Steve Wozniak made computers for fun. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his dorm room, after creating other college focused (for-fun) sites. Most start-up bloggers I have read agree on this point. One prominent blogger and venture capitalist went as far as “Most people will never have a successful start up, the numbers are against them. Therefore, do it as a hobby first and see how it works out.”

Testing your idea.

The second most common tip I have read is testing. Great you have an awesome idea! How do you know its awesome and not just the more common entrepreneurial “high” or the subjective inclination to like what you yourself think? The answer is testing. Ask friends and family, build a prototype, have user testing periods that last months. The likelihood of your original idea, “the way it was”, making it through these tests is around 3%. The importance of testing is to be able to get feedback and make your great idea even better. Review AyeDeals Do you remember what Twitter initially looked like, what about Google or Amazon? These sites were terrible at the beginning but have had years of testing to make them what they are today.

Dedication

This sounds very cliche, but than again this is a list of the most prominent advise I found online and offline. I remember one incident where an associate of mine (angel investor) who was a co-founder in the Facebook of Japan (Mixi), was talking to a founder about figuring out what was wrong with the business. Why is this not working? DEDICATION. Most people do not see the months of dedication and labor that is behind building a business. They do not think about building a business as being easy or hard; they probably don’t think about it at all until their venture is heavily underway or failing. The reason being that most people are/were employees and not founders. They have a role and that role only, and in the end of the day the big picture of making it work, is not their problem. “Get your head out of your a** and start thinking like a founder not an employee!”