Ask HN: Quitting Job to Launch a Startup

"how not to fail"

Don't do this to yourself. You cannot guarantee immediate success when starting out especially when you have no prior experience running a business. The first thing to keep in mind is that failures don't matter as most likely you will fail at a few things anyway. The important thing is to learn from failures and keep moving forward. This is not a motivational speech but the facts of business. So if you keep a defensive attitude, you will be disappointed.

Mindset is hard to change but you need to work on it. Don't think about failures but only look at how you can keep working towards your goal of a business. Not my quote but for every 3 pointer that Michael Jordan scored, he missed 100s others which no one will remember. So it is ok to fail but use the failure as another step towards success if you believe and work towards it.

Ok now some more practical advice :)

- Learn to Sell. If you cannot learn how to sell, you cannot run a business. Forget about everything else. To learn how to sell, learn how to listen to people's problems and issues and see if you have a solution for that. Start with anyone you know. Selling is not just making money but convincing someone.

- Do you really want to quit your job or can you start this on the side ? I personally would favor going all in but only when you are ready to an extent. Are you really ready for going cold turkey ? Perhaps not yet. Can you start on the side ?

- So you have a few ideas. Ok that is a start. But ideas need execution. And to execute, you need to identify your target market/customers. It may take a lot of trial and error to understand your specific target market. You need to start looking into validating the idea by starting small and executing the hell of out it.

- Start with a niche. Very focussed. If you try to sell to everyone, you will sell to no one (and no, amazon did not start that way. it took years before they become the amazon of today).

- Are you willing to risk it all at some point ? Are you scared of failing ? If yes, you may want to reconsider being in business.

I hope this helps you.

My advice to you is to keep your job. Work on your startup as a side project and gradually build it. If it takes off and starts to generate as much as your day job, then make the transition.

Survivorship bias will skew the success of startups. Success is far less common than what I originally thought.

Take a look at the $100 Startup book it has some good points to consider.

Don't quit your job. Work on your project in your spare time. First of all your idea will probably take minimum 3-4x longer to gain traction than your most pessimistic guess. If/once it gains traction it will probably take significantly longer to be profitable than your most pessimistic guess.

Work on your project in your spare time and only think about quitting your job once the idea is verified by actual customers. I spend 3-4 years burning through savings without getting any traction. I have since started another project which will be done in my spare time. Having to deal with both money and start-up related issues at the same time is not preferable.

Lots of good advice from a wide spectrum of HN. I am currently going through this as we speak. I am at the very early stages of Customer validation phase. I have mouths to feed and and hence need my job to keep me alive while I go through the whole startup phase. If you can get your hands on these two books, can’t recommend them enough; Ready Fire Aim- teaches you the mantra about selling first right from the get go. Also lays down actionable strategies to find your customer, how to sell them, how to price your product. Running Lean-Ash Maurya. Think of it as an amalgamation of Lean startup by Eric Ries and 4 steps to Epiphany by Steven Blank. Again the emphasis on customer development aka idea validation. You need to solve a problem that is worth solving. If you don’t have a problem that a customer wants solved, you don’t have anything to sell. Simple. The guy offers a lean canvas which you can use to develop your business model. Worth checking out.

Beyond these books, a few resources worth following are GetLatka, product habits by Hiten Shah and anything by Patio11 who was doing SAAS way before SAAS was even a term. One of the very early advice that Ash Maurya gives in his book is tat all the early stages of the startup phase can be done while being fully employed. ESP, the product/solution fit. Once you have validated the problem after countless customer interviews, you can start working on the actual solution to the Problem that you just validated and iterate on the build, measure learn loop. By the time you get to this stage, you are already a team of 2-3 early cofounders working out of an office space and ready to take in some external funding. When you get to this stage you can confidently quit! Good luck. EDIT MVE- minimum viable employment. Find a place that can employ you for your existing skills, pay market which provides you with the necessary resources(time) while you are involved with customer validation(problem/solution fit).

No 4 really annoys me. You should absolutely do it for the money. The main objective of starting a business is to make money. Other objectives like "making the world a better place" or "be your own boss" are just bonuses.