Building apps is not enough you need a startup as well
Entrepreneurship and young students
I was invited to talk about entrepreneurship at Vegova — Upper Secondary School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Technical Gymnasium Ljubljana. Since we are a startup and I have been an entrepreneur for quite a while, I do have a few pointers I can give. Mostly I want to motivate more young people to go that extra mile, while chasing the stars and work for their dream. However, I do not want to mislead them and say it is easy, because it is not.
At the beginning it looked like nobody wanted to be an entrepreneur, however, at the end of the lecture, a few students came to me asking how to execute their idea and how to spread the word about their open source project. Well, this is all entrepreneurship, just not in a broader scope. So this is something I need to emphasise the next time. The recap was that quite a few would like to become entrepreneurs.
The talk
CodeBrainer, the story, vision and goals
I like explaining what inspired me to follow this path of building a full-blown online education system for teaching beginners how to start coding. My friend and I were at a party, and we were talking about him losing his job as a chemist. As I was leaving I said as a joke, why don’t you start coding, there are many jobs out there for a developer. I meant for it to be a joke, but a few months later he wanted to talk, about where to get useful resources. I thought that everything about coding is already written, but soon I started to discover, that there is a gap for people that are new to coding. I promised to mentor him. However, while I was mentoring him, I took notes and a system started to emerge, and this is the story how CodeBrainer was born. Have a look at how far CodeBrainer has come.
Our vision is quite simple. We want to teach everybody how to code. Our goal sounds optimistic, but we believe everybody will have to know at least a little bit of coding. Since a lot of informational systems already require a degree of coding. Take a look at digital marketing; programming is involved even if we do not perceive it as coding. Setting campaigns to show different ads for different countries or showing one banner for younger people and the other for older is kind of programming as well.
Our goal is to become the best site for beginners where they can learn how to code. It is not an easy goal, but it is something that inspires us.
Regular job vs being an entrepreneur, freelancer or funder
A job is a great option
So what are the main advantages of having a steady job in IT? Jobs in IT are well paid and with that a whole lot of stress is reduced. I see a steady income as the main advantage. For a worker, it looks like money just came from somewhere. If you are an entrepreneur, the story is different, since you are responsible for figuring the way to get the money and in most cases, you are not only responsible for yourself but also for your employees and co-founders.
People change plenty of jobs in their youth and this is just a perfect way for expanding your network of people. You never know when an acquaintance comes in handy later in your career.
While executing tasks at your job you get many assignments that challenge you. Having a job is a great way to “free” education. Why do I say “free”, because you still need the time to learn things and time is very precious.
The limit of being an employee is that there is always that last promotion and there is a limit how high you can climb up the corporate ladder. I am not saying it is terrible, but it is not limitless.
What about entrepreneurship
I am in love with chasing stars. Being able to change the world in the future, keeps getting me out of bed with a smile on my face. At the same time, I do not want to hide the fact that it is a hard thing to do. You need a lot of willpower and effort to execute all of your plans. The best thing about being a founder, freelancer or entrepreneur is that you are working for yourself, you have the steering wheel, and you can influence what is happening with the final product. Working for yourself is great and bad at the same time since you can burn midnight oil too many times. With flexible work hours, you can grab a long coffee in the mornings and if you need to do something you will do it because it is fun and not a necessity.
What do you need to start working on an idea
It is not that hard to start working on your idea. All you need in the beginning is time and an idea. I do have a suggestion for you. Research your idea a little bit before starting. Research the web first, it gives you insight into what has already been done, and usually, you are not the unicorn, so if there are no hits, you are probably searching for the wrong term :) When you find the competition, you can start searching for a twist that makes you different as well, and there is always a twist and a possibility to work on something. Don’t give up on the first competitor.
It is good to research markets as well (Total Available Market (TAM), Served (or Serviceable) Available Market, and Target Market). Researching the market shows how big your market is and how much opportunity is left for you.
The right way of researching your idea is to talk to as many people as you can. After that make some structure for your questions, like a small questionnaire and talk to your friends, family and most importantly “interview” strangers as well. Since people close to you are always biased.
Remember, you need passion to work on your idea. The first year is a lot of fun, but it gets more stressful over time. There are many challenges waiting for you to conquer. In some cases, there is quick success at the beginning, but in most cases success is the result of quite a few years of hard work.
Don’t give up, set goals you can reach. I suggest having long-term and short-term goals. Long-term goals are there to motivate you for the future and to challenge you the whole way. Short-term goals are there to keep you sane.
Lean startup
There are a lot of resources that explain the lean startup approach in great detail. You can look at the books section for few more ideas. However, I want to talk about my experiences and suggestions I have for you.
The first suggestion and my personal experience is about MVP. MVP is a minimum viable product, and it is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future product development (wiki). I like to challenge all my friends to create a paper version of an MVP. I think that most of the ideas can work on paper. What I mean by the paper version is that this is a version with limited resources. With little resources we limit over engineering. CodeBrainer had an excellent paper version, it was me taking notes about how I conducted my mentoring. I wrote down questions, what I explained, how I explained and with that we had an excellent base to work on for an online version of the MVP. Even the first implementation of the online version was without a server and just content for a user to go through, which significantly cut down development. If there is a paper version for an online course, there can be a paper version for almost anything.
Next important thing about lean is measuring; this is having a number for every action you take. Measuring everything is a hard aspect to grasp on. You know you have to measure it, but it takes a lot of experience to get this flowing through your veins. You have to start step by step. The first implementation is never perfect, but don’t worry the next version is a whole lot better. The main point is that you have to do the first one to start off. For example, a startup can start by counting monthly meetings, track the number of new insights, how many new questions you have, how many suggestions you got on meetings. Measuring how good features are is a number of how many people used it. Once you get the feeling, you can measure anything. Measuring can help you when you do not see progress, because numbers are growing even though you are not noticing it. Do not be sad if numbers are falling, as this is an insight as well, act on it and find a way to improve.
While we at CodeBrainer were learning how to measure everything I also wanted to have a procedure for everything. It is as important as the measuring. Once again, the first procedure you write is not perfect, but correcting it and making the next version is pretty straightforward. The great thing is, you can use the procedure to instruct others to make something for you. If you do not have a procedure, you are on your own.
A lot of new startups will build an application for their startup and if you are like us and want to build MVP yourself, taking a beginners course in Android development can be a good start.
Startup Accelerator
We decided to enter an accelerator even though we already went through the process with another startup. Accelerators are great because many teams are doing the same as you and there is a lot of knowledge exchange. You can share experiences about marketing, getting customers, execution. Within an accelerator, there is also an education program where you can enhance your knowledge about startups and the way to do things smart. Most accelerators emphasise the importance to present your idea well. They show you how to present it on different levels, to investors, to the public and to your customers. This is great since you can never get too much experience in this department.
For us, it was a kind of kick in the butt and getting things done. While in an accelerator you have to be very quick in implementing strategies and your product so that they can help you with it. If you have nothing to show they can not help you. I think that this made a significant impact on us and shortened this period of researching for quite a bit.
Books
Disclosure: Links to the books in this post are “affiliate links.” This means we may garner a small commission at no cost to you if you choose to make a purchase. I only included books that I actually think are worthwhile, useful and that I have personally read.
These are a few books that inspired me through my startup years.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries
This one has a special place in my heart with Eric so enthusiastically explaining all the things. I also suggest watching some of the earlier Lean conferences. The conference gives excellent insight, gives you high motivation with real cases from real life.
The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, Steve Blank
One of the fathers of the Lean movement has a little more entrepreneurial way of explaining how not to waste time on developing your product and startup.
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, Gabriel Weinberg
What inspired me the most is that it presents the way of measuring what your next marketing channel should be. It is called bullseye and worth discovering what it is all about.
Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses, Joe Pulizzi
A long search for a book has been successful with this one. I wanted an excellent book on content marketing. Moreover, this one offers a framework as well. This book is almost all about content. The fact that made me think a lot is: “How can you write content, that when you remove branding reader will still know you wrote it.” This means, you must know the text is yours without images, without brands, without company colours.
