Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

So I have been given the opportunity to speak at the university I graduated from (Portland State University) about my experience starting Mugasha while I was an undergrad.

I thought I would get some of your thoughts on starting a business.

Here are few questions I plan on talking about.

- Why start your own business? Why start early?

- How to be a domain expert?

- How do you know if you have the right Idea?

- Why it will be the hardest thing you will ever do?

- How do you bootstrap?

- How do you find investors?

I think customer development (from steve blank's book: the four steps to the epiphany) is a really important subject rarely touched upon in schools. Often times you can sell the product before you even create it. That needs to be communicated to students.

Why start early? Early is probably the best time in your life to do it.

First of all I think you're doing a great service to the student body. I have really had to reach out in order to gain advice and information as a college freshman doing a web dev business and a summer storage franchise. I think many think about time management a lot. Here at Emory there is a ton of pressure to do well and aim for a 4.0 for Grad School. The time commitment necessitated for venture is difficult to deal with. So please talk about time management. The most inspiring words I heard about the subject probably were along the lines of, take advantage of the free time you have now because later on you'll only have less and less. I think that came from HN.

I'd advise against taking on any debt in your own name- It's a very tempting offer, particularly if you have good credit coming out of school, but it will mean that if the business does go south for whatever reason, even if it is outside your control, you may be paying it off for decades.

Instead, build something that can raise profits immediately, and start building from there. That will help to keep you focused on what your revenue stream can support- Borrowed money allows you to have unrealistic ideas, and overspend too quickly.