

Lessons Learned After Teaching 88 Struggling Entrepreneurs For 6 Months - uladzislau
http://under30ceo.com/10-sobering-lessons-learned-after-teaching-88-struggling-entrepreneurs-for-6-months/

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Lasher
I loved this article. This paragraph in particular really struck home for me:

"Entrepreneurs get stuck trying to find something they are passionate about.
Picking a business you are passionate about is not as important as being
passionate about the process of building a business. I’m not passionate about
any particular business industry, but I am passionate about finding problems
and solving them. Make your passion solving problems and adding value – then
you can go almost anywhere and do anything. And most importantly, you can get
started. Once you get started, you start to see dozens of new opportunities
open up that never existed when you stood still."

Waited far too long for 'just the right idea' to present itself...

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charlieflowers
>> "You can start a business without an idea. Just go into a market like
“Veterinarians” for example and Find The Pain. In that pain, you will come up
with a product idea."

Is that really true?

It is very hopeful, and I'd like it to be true. Is it?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Of course it's true. Here's a simple proof.

1) You can start a business with a bad idea, and through customer engagement,
find the right idea.

2) Since #1 is empirically true, then it must also be true that you can start
with no product idea at all, and get to a good one. You simply start with no
product, make a bad (or just random) product, and we're back to #1.

Starting with no idea is the same (or maybe better) than starting with a bad
idea. Picking an industry is good enough.

I'm not even sure why people are wedded to the idea of picking a product at
all - picking an activity, or industry, or group of people is a fine seed for
a business. My business has very little to do with where we started 4 years
ago, though we sort of started with an idea. Sort of.

~~~
charlieflowers
Well, yes, that makes sense.

But -- it seems so scary (even crazy) to start a business without a concrete
"idea". Like getting onto a boat and launching into the ocean to "see what
happens."

All the "startup" articles scream the accepted wisdom that you will have to
change your original idea many times (pivot, pivot pivot), so I believe it is
true.

I suppose it needs to evolve, just like a kid growing up needs to go through
wanting to be a firefighter and then an astronaut and so on until he/she finds
what she really wants to do.

But that means the "original idea" that helps you hire the core team and raise
funding is really just a "cover story", and the founder is either (a) fooling
himself with his own cover story, or (b) fully aware that it is just a cover
story that he uses to bring in others.

Is it really that way? I suppose it is, and I suppose the VC's know it better
than the entrepreneurs do. But wow, it is a paradigm change for me.

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taroth
>"Entrepreneurs are lonely, but they thrive in a community with others. With a
private chat room always on and 15 to 20 members sharing their setbacks,
failures, and successes, a thriving connection was created. Live chat was
wonderful for creating connections."

Truth, and chat is a interesting idea. Is there a HN IRC that I am not aware
of?

~~~
carbocation
Unofficially, #startups on freenode

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WiseWeasel
These suggestions seem very tailored to the B2B software sector, rather than
consumer web startups. Getting paying customers before building a product is
not always a viable strategy, depending on what you're trying to build.

~~~
dreawf
I think the main point of this article is that to be a good entrepreneur we
have to solve real world's problem with our product so people will use it. Our
type of business doesn't really matter here. We can build a successful web
startup if our web actually solving real world's problem. E.g. people use
google and wikipedia because it solve their problem.

