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

Tell them that they need to weigh the upside and downside of risks they are taking (financial, time, value) before they take the leap. More often than not starting young has a lot of upsides. No golden handcuffs, More agile/lean , No family to support, Ramen profitability is OK and the delta in learning is huge. Tell them that the upside to failure(which is the worst outcome not considering going into debt) in their first venture is way better than their downside.

Also tell them that the hardest part no one talks about is how starting a company means you are the boss and how you need to plan stuff everyday and get it done. Also, its not the amount of work they get done but the results they get and how driven they are to get those results that matter in the end.

I'm going to write this as a high-school drop-out that did very well:

Finish that college and forget about that startup, assuming you're in a halfway decent college and a somewhat useful discipline.

I know you've been asked to speak about your experience, but keep in mind you've been asked because of your success, and the road behind you is littered by the corpses of those that didn't make it.

Starting a business, while in college, or out of it, is in large part luck if it is successful. By talking to people about what you've achieved you may give them the impression that this is easier than it looks, so stress the amount of luck that went in to it, to make sure they can weigh the odds accordingly.

Starting early or late isn't really much of a decision, the longer you wait the more knowledge you have, so the bigger the chance that you will succeed the first time, but by then the people that started earlier will have failed once already and will have learned from that as well. It works out about even.

Being a 'domain expert' is limiting your business to something very small right away, better to be general and to know how to procure the services of domain experts!

You know you have a 'right idea' when it starts moving under its own power, instead of you having to push it.

Finding investors is for a very lucky few, better concentrate on realistic scenarios for bootstrapping.

Possible additions to your list:

- the value of networking

- keep your fixed costs DOWN! (even today I still do this)

- make a nest egg as soon as you can afford it

- live healthy, running a startup is like top sport

>> What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

You are not as experienced as you think you are.

I wish someone I respected had told me this when I was a college student. In college, I thought I was super-awesome. I thought I was already a leader. I thought I was qualified to manage a 100-person company. I thought I didn't have much else to learn; I just wanted to start a company so I could grow it and sell it and make a ton of money like everyone else.

Now I know that I am merely above-average and lucky. I know that for every problem I face, there is someone more experienced than I who has already solved that problem, thrice-over, and wants to help me. If I had known this 10 years ago, I think I would have sought out a lot more advice, been much more receptive to criticism, and been a better entrepreneur.

Note: obviously this is 100% personal and anecdotal. I may have been the only a-hole in college who needed to hear that message, so YMMV.

I'm a college student who wants to start a business, these are the questions that I'd like answered:

- do it full-time or on the side?

- what kind of advice should I not listen to?

- My skills are programming and designing, what kind of stuff should I learn?

- do I really need to move to a technology-rich country? (For the effects of your talk, maybe you should change country for city.)

- how do you get customers and do sales if you are an introvert geek?

- what to look for in a cofounder?

I actually just had a discussion with a group of students and advisors from the UofM center for entrepreneurship Friday. I think the 3 take-away points from my speech were:

1. You know you want to be an entrepreneur when you don't feel right doing anything else. This life is too short to spend it doing something you hate.

2. Be Flexible. Be passionate. But don't let your passion get in the way of your flexibility. We're all attached to our ideas. But sometimes you have to be open to the possibility that no one wants what you want them to want.

3. (this is the single most important piece of advise I could give anyone, no matter what they decide they want to do with their life) Learn how to tell a story. If you can become a great storyteller, you can succeed in whatever it is you decide to do with your life.