Starting a Startup in College

My Story

When I was a junior/senior in high school, I started to think about college. I realized that I’m going to be in college for a long time, and that it’ll have a big impact on my life. The fact that it’s such a big decision means that I should put a correspondingly large amount of thought into it.

Similarly, I also thought a lot about the career I end up choosing. I realized that it’ll be something I spend a huge chunk of my life doing, and thus it deserves a correspondingly huge amount of thought.

During my senior year in high school, and my freshman year in college, I spent a lot of time exploring my interests. I read books, read things on the internet, watched documentaries, took classes etc. At this point, doing research was plan A, and entrepreneurship was plan B. I spent a lot of time exploring different academic fields to see what type of research I’d like to pursue, and not enough time learning about entrepreneurship.

After taking a bunch of classes and reading a bunch of stuff for the past 2 years, I declared as a neuroscience major during my sophomore year of college. Neuroscience seemed to address the most important questions. How are we conscious? How do we think? How do we learn? How do our brains evoke emotions? I also was intrigued by physics. However, I didn’t like how tedious my intro to physics classes were, and was in general just put off by all the calculations.

So I volunteered in a neuroscience lab throughout my sophomore year of college. While I still had an open mind and continued to explore my interests, I figured that I’d end up getting a Ph.D and doing neuroscience research.

About midway through my sophomore year, I took a sharp turn. It turns out that research wasn’t what I thought it would be. I had an incorrect and romantic idea that I’d get to spend all my time thinking about and answering the big questions that I was interested in. Instead, progress is slow and incremental, and very few people get to even think about big questions. Most research is just about figuring out the boring details of how things work, not the major conceptual foundations.

So this stuff all pushed me away from research, but I was also being pulled towards something else. About midway through sophomore year, I read Paul Graham’s How to Start a Startup. Before reading it I had a strong intuition that I could put myself inside the minds of consumers and make something that they want. And that I could make smart business/strategic decisions. I was pretty confident that I could have a lot of success as an entrepreneur, but I didn’t really know too much about it. How to Start a Startup lit the fire under me because it spelled out the path out pretty clearly.

From there, I decided that startups would be my career. I reasoned that I had a high likelihood of success, and that success would mean 1) power, and 2) solving the money problem: two very appealing things. Power is appealing because it’d let me implement ideas I have to make the world a better place. Solving the money problem (the fact that having to work leaves you with little time throughout your life to do other things) is very appealing because I have lots of “other things” I want to do.

With it established that startups are my thing, I got to work. Throughout the second half of my sophomore year, I read the rest of Paul Grahams essays, read books on the stories of different startups, watched all the khanacademy finance videos, and took an intro to marketing class.

Heading into that summer, I decided on the startup idea I’d go with: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/. I decided on this idea because 1) I felt very confident that it’s something that people want, and 2) because from a technical standpoint, it’s something that I could build.

So that summer heading into my junior year of college, I started teaching myself to code, and eventually got started on an awful first version of the website. I learned HTML, CSS, and some Javascript/jQuery and PHP (along with taking 12 credits). I also read a lot about design. Aside from class, homework, playing basketball, watching the Heat win a championship, and watching TV shows while I ate meals, all I did was work. I took 3 full days off at one point for the sake of my productivity, but that was pretty much it.

Once the summer was over and junior year started, I slowed down. It was a conscious decision. I reasoned that in the grand scheme of things, pushing my startup career back a year or so isn’t too big a deal. On the other hand, I was living with all my friends in a dorm, and I knew that senior year I would be committed to my startup, so this was sort of a last opportunity I had to really “be a college kid”.

But this isn’t to say I didn’t work. I just didn’t go all out and actually launch and stuff. I uploaded all the information (about 100 different statistics for 200 schools), continued to refine my list of questions I’d ask on the website, read more about design, more books, stuff on the internet, and started reading HN.

There is a tangential event that was also very important my junior year: I came across http://lesswrong.com/. I saw a post from HN, loved it, explored the rest of the site, realized how important the content was, and basically stopped everything else I was doing to read all the sequences. I learned a lot. It was one of — if not the — most important things that happened in my life.

Once the summer arrived, it was time for all out work again. I started the summer heading into my senior year by teaching myself Rails. Once I was comfortable enough with Rails, I built my website. Even though it was this past summer, I don’t really remember how long everything took. I think learning Rails took a few weeks, then it took a few weeks to build the website, and then a few more weeks to upload all the statistics for each of the 300 colleges. Throughout this time, I also wrote a bunch of essays to make me a better thinker, and to hopefully attract traffic to my site.

In late July, I “launched” my website. I tried for a while to get people to answer the questions for free. I asked everyone I knew on Facebook, texted people, posted on Reddit, HN, Quora (amongst other things). I managed to get a decent amount of answers for Pitt (the school I go to), but not for any other schools.

Throughout the remainder of the summer, I continued to read about design and improved the design of my website, I continued to try to get people to answer questions for free, and I read books about marketing and stuff to give me ideas.

Once the school year started, I basically continued this stuff, but just had less time because of classes. Eventually, I realized that people weren’t going to answer them for free. So I decided to offer $5 to answer 50 questions + a $100 bonus to the best answerer.

I’m in the process of trying to get this to work right now. To spread the word, I have friends at 4 other schools who spread the news of the offer, and I’m waiting to see if it works. Which brings me to where I am right now: about to graduate (3 more weeks), and waiting to see if this method of getting people to answer questions works.

Advice

You know how they say that you have to choose 2 options between work, sleep and social life in college? Imagine adding a startup to the mix. Starting a startup in college is hard.

My biggest piece of advice is to be very aware of how big a time commitment you’re making by starting a startup. Realize that if you want to start a startup, you’ll have to sacrifice other areas of your life (hanging out with friends, schoolwork, exercise etc.).

• You might not be able to workout at the gym for 2 hours, 3 days a week.
• You might not be able to hang out with your friends every weekend.
• You might have to accept getting some B’s and C’s in your classes.
• You might have to accept that there’s no downtime anymore. You can’t watch that TV show, or read that book, or see that game.

I get the sense that when people decide to undertake a challenge, they disregard the fact that it’ll eat away at other aspects of their lives. Don’t disregard this. Allocation a time is simply a matter of prioritizing. So prioritize, and accept the costs of cutting down on other things as necessary for the greater goal.

My second biggest pieces of advice is to not just dive into it. Being successful in a startup is sorta like chess. To start with, you have to be smart. But you also have to know the rules of the game, and to be familiar with strategy and stuff. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, you have to know the rules and the strategies.

I recommend the following as a minimum:

• Read all of Paul Graham’s essays.
• Read through Venture Hacks.
• Educate yourself on the basics of business (marketing, finance, accounting, strategy, economics etc.). Doesn’t need to be comprehensive, but you should know the basics.
• Learn design. You could start here.
• Read a bunch of startup stories as case studies.
• Learn to program (or whatever the corresponding skill for your startup requires to build it). This is something I didn’t do a thorough enough job with. I just sorta learned enough to get started, and figured I’d pick the rest up along the way. But this often leads me to work slower and limits what I could do. It would have been more efficient for me to spend the time building up my skill set before diving in.

My third piece of advice is to consider the big picture, and to consider playing the long game. Starting a startup isn’t necessarily an all or nothing thing. You don’t have to commit yourself fully, and you don’t have to risk your career for it. You could spend some time accumulating skills and testing out some side projects.

This article highlights what I mean: http://www.almostpolished.com/blog/2013/7/2/a-less-riskier-path-to-entrepreneurship-in-software-development.

My final piece of advice, is that although it’s difficult… it’s still a great option. Give it careful and serious consideration.