The basic question haunting most startups is “are they building something people want?” Paul Graham said if you want to know why startups fail you should observe what those failed startups do. And it turns out the failure primarily results from making something nobody wants. If this question is so important as life and death of your startup, it is worth giving some thought. There are basically three approaches that successful startup founders have taken to make sure they build something people want.

Approach #1 : Build for yourself
This approach assumes that you are a typical user and what you are building is a product you will want to use. This reduces the problem of finding what to build to whether there are people like you out there or not. And chances are that there are. This approach has shown considerable successes (read Facebook and Google) and is pretty decent way to get started with an idea. All you need to do is ask : Would you love to use it if it weren’t your startup?
Downside : The above question assumes that you know how you would behave if it weren’t your startup. But fact of the matter is it is highly likely that you don’t. For two reasons : One, it is your idea and ideas have natural tendency to command inclination of the person who gets it. And two, it is fairly difficult for anyone to know how one would behave in a  purely hypothetical situation (in this case : if it were someone else’s idea).

Approach#2 : Go lean
This approach assumes that there is no way of knowing what people want without validating it with experiments. At least, in making decisions about what people want, you best bet is to run experiments as cheaply as possible to really learn how people would behave in the hypothetical situation you are are trying to create through execution of your idea. Luckily you don’t actually need to execute upon the idea to learn that. If you goal is merely to learn you can do that in whatever way you can to get the users close to the hypothetical situation you are proposing. This approach means you don’t even have to build product unless you have learnt well about your users through experiments.
Downside : This approach is useful in a scenario when there is extreme uncertainty. It deviates your attention from actually building your product to learning about users, which is good because building a product nobody wants is a form of waste. But if you have figured out what users want “trying to run experiments” is a form of waste as well.

Approach#3 : Build for existing market
This approach is fairly simple. (Disclosure: this is what we have been following in our startup : Meedo). This approach is somewhat less discussed in today’s scenario (but existed even before the time there were no lean startup or even tech startups). At its heart, the approach entails building something that users are already using. This is determined by the existence of products that people are using. Yes, it means you will have competitors but it also means that there is a market already and people want that kind of product. Ideally you would want to build a product in a space that has no market leader yet (More on that later). So the question of what to build is already figured. In this case to win among your competitors the one and only thing you need to do is ensure that the cost of switching to your product is less than the added perceived value that user thinks he will get out of your product. This means that users should be able to switch to your product without loosing anything in the process (and ideally, gaining something). This explains why you couldn’t possibly build a winning social network even though there is a market or for that matter, any other product category which has a market leader. Simply because the cost of switching for users is just too much to be compensated by the additional features you might be hosting in your service.

That leads to  the final question of how do you differentiate substantially that Added perceived Value > Cost of Swtiching . That can be done primarily by :

I am addicted to facebook. I admit that because that’s the first step to cure it. The one thing that I’d like to change in myself that will set me on track is not opening my facebook account every so often just for the sake of seeing what is in it. Basically for some very complex reasons I cannot let even an hour go without checking facebook and I realize how detrimental it is to my progress in any meaningful endeavor. And yet, this realization isn’t good enough to make me stop doing that. In fact, because of some weird reason I always find myself doing things that do not matter in the long run and are done only to make it easy to kill time. That includes checking TechCrunch or upvoting a post on Hacker News. The latter are certainly informative  and useful if only I did them 10% of the time I actually do it. I have struggled (to be honest I never gave it a serious thought to cure it yet) with this addiction for about 2 years now and I seemed to get nowhere with it. The one thing that really upsets me all the more is the giant waste of time that has happened because of the addiction that I can never ever get back. So how do I plan to cure it?

This will be an experiment but I will not stop untill I have eliminated the addiction of facebook for good from my life. The goal sounds really simple : Don’t open facebook. But thats not it.

Not only you have to not open facebook but you have to do it for a time period which is sufficiently large to allow you to focus on things that are more important and meaningful. That means either fighting your urges to open facebook or eliminating it altogether. In the first case, the problem is urges are not easy to fight, not so much because they are strong but because they are persistent. Your only hope to fight the urges is through a sustained amount of force at least equal and opposite of your urges. But it is rather tough which is evident by the fact that I almost always give up. So, the only long term solution that I can rely on is eliminating the urges altogether.  Now that’s a different problem altogether. This will require a solution that is fundamentally different from fighting the urges. So what could be that solution?

It begins with the mind and origin of those urges. I have done a bit of research and found that the urge to do anything is part of our instinct to always seek pleasure which is carried upon by a part of brain called Amygdala. This part is what redirect our energy to save us when faced by a fearful object and this is the part that makes us want a delicious ice-cream, not so much because it is delicious but because over time it has realized what is delicious has fat and hence a storage of energy for crucial situations like when there is no food around. Now this seems counter-intuitive now but in thousands of years, man has faced several such calamities to evolve the part of brain that works this way. Amygdala is all good and does things for our best interest, except that it doesn’t think. Yes, it is not the rational part. It doesn’t judge or reason. IT JUST REACTS. BASED ON INSTINCTS. Much like animals. When you throw a stone at a animal, it is not logic that makes them run, but instincts. The trouble is as instincts are often not based on solid facts, even a gesture of throwing stone will make the animal run as much as actually throwing stone. It’s rather satisfying to think that I am giving in to my instinct when I really open the facebook because I can recognize it and eliminate it by logic just like I wouldn’t run when I realize the person throwing the stone at me doesn’t actually has a stone. I only wish if it was that simple.

Addictions are a different story than instincts. Remember I mentioned Amygdala also accounts for seeking pleasure. The reason one becomes addicted to anything is because the brain has come to accumulate an experience of pleasure via use of the object it becomes addicted to. And the more you use the object the greater will become the size of accumulation, thus leading to an even incremental desire to use the object. So it is kind of a vicious cycle that seems almost impossible to stop. Except that your brain basically forgets stuff too. Yes, you heard it right, your brain forget almost anything you give to it given sufficiently enough time and the forgetting will happen a lot faster than the accumulation has happened. (Fact: The brain as a whole doesn’t forget anything, but just transfers stuff from active memory to passive memory). Your job therefore is to give facebook up for a just enough time that the brain forgets the experience it has accumulated. But how? Didn’t I just redefined the problem to mean the same thing? i.e. Fight the urges for sufficiently long time. Nope. There is an addition. You must as well form an equal accumulation of experience of something more desirable than checking facebook. Let’s get it clear enough. The way I have acquired addiction is by having pleasurable experience for sufficiently long time. The only solution to cure it is by replacing it with another addiction but the one that is desirable. Oh, did that sound scary? Well, it is but is doable. Think of something you would rather do on a regular basis. In my case it is coding. I’d rather be addicted to coding than to facebook. I enjoy coding as much as I enjoy facebook, except I am not addicted to coding because I didn’t do it at the cost of another addiction. So, what I am saying is, everytime I have the urge to check facebook, instead of fighting the urge I just tell myself “Okay, so you want pleasure? Here you get pleasure through coding”. I don’t fight the urge I just morph it a bit and two things happen : One, the brain gets a good amount of time to forget the accumulated experience of pleasure it has got through facebook and second, a new experience gets accumulated in its place (that of pleasure through coding).

Over time, I should realize that I love coding as much as I loved facebook once. And I hope that way my addiction would be gone. Lets see how it works out for me. I will update exactly after 21 days.

In one of my previous posts, I said, I wouldn’t do a startup unless I already have a specific number of users loving what I have built. By specific I meant just a handful of users using the app almost naturally and finding it useful. Recently, I and Hrishikesh have built Sleep Optimal, which is an android app that is designed to help you have optimal amount of sleep both in holidays and workdays. The app is receiving some absolutely positive review and almost everyone who has used it seem to love the idea. Now I find it is time re-evaluate if this is something we would like to call a startup.

Just for a little background, we started building Sleep Optimal mostly because we wanted to apply our recently acquired android programming knowledge in an application solving a genuine problem. We came up with the idea from a problem that I faced myself. During my summer vacation I didn’t had a fixed time when I went to sleep. Sometimes it was too late and sometimes it was too early. As I didn’t have any college the day after (For those who are wondering, yes I am still doing prefinal year of my college), I had to turn the clock wheel time and time again to set the alarm (so that I didn’t oversleep myself) which was quite a bothersome experience. And since I just didn’t do that, I was over/undersleeping on most days. We tried to solve that problem by replacing the ritual of setting alarm every night with just a tap that would cancel the existing alarms and set just one to go off after the number of hours I have told the app in preferences and hence the idea for Sleep Optimal was born. It was just a genuine little need that I came across and decided to create something that will fill the gap. It wasn’t supposed to be a startup at all, just an experiment to see if we could build it.

In just days after we released the first version we started getting some real feedback from our users on how the app is helping them and suggestions on what the app should do  in addition to what it already does. Though initially it was just a little experiment and we never thought we are going to build it any further, we felt a compelling need to build it further based on the feedback and give the users what they want. And we went right after it, launched v2.0 on 15th of August, just about 3 days before. Now it looks a full-fledged app doing a few things really well.

Coming to the point right along, Is it apt to be called a startup yet? Let’s examine a few fact. Even if the app is still in beta and we have done quite a little to promote it (deliberately so), statistics suggests it is something worthwhile we have built. about 70% of people who installed the app are still actively using it and 50% of total active installs, use it every single day. Paul Graham famously quotes

It’s easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it’s harder to lie to yourself. If you think you’re 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it’s not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it’s easy to know how many users you have.

Even Lean Startup Ambassador Eric Reies has same thing to say : The real metric isn’t how many people have installed your app, that’s vanity metric. The real metric is what percentage of total installs engage with it everyday.

And in our case, though with a really small number, we are seeing some great engagement. Which makes us think, are we a startup yet? And I believe, not yet. Why? Because we aren’t ready yet. We don’t feel compelled to leave everything else (by which I mean our education) and start focusing on it.  Even though we keep thinking about it most of the times, even though we spend 30 to 40 hours of coding every week and even though we are getting one download every hour. We aren’t ready to be called a startup because we are still in college doing our graduation, because we don’t know if we will make money from our current app. Because we still want to build a couple more apps before calling the exercise of building new things off. But most of all, because we love not being called a startup. We are just a couple of guys passionate about building things together.

I have seen a lot of Startups fail simply because they wanted to maximize profit and make more money.  It seems counter-intuitive but I am convinced that the desire to make money from a Startup should be minimized in favor of creating value for the users. The more you try to make money from your Startup, the more likely you are to fail.

Let me tell you small story. I was in my college when I started my first company. It was 2009 and Facebook didn’t yet debut in India. Orkut was all the craze and I knew it sucked. I have seen facebook grow outside India and my original idea was to build something closer in nature to facebook (i.e. coyping its simplicity and utilities) and launch it for Indian audience. My sole purpose was to make money from it and hence I planned a lot of Ad space in the design of the site. And when I launched the site, nobody except me and my friend signed up and they never used it. And fact of the matter was ( as we bought a social networking software), with so many ads on it, it looked worse than orkut and it wasn’t even close to facebook. We failed miserably. I lost about $1000 in that Startup (and that was a lot of money to loose when you were a Student, back then). I didn’t make a penny. Now I am not saying I failed because I put ads. There may be a lots of reasons behind my failure  but one of the more important reason was that I was doing it just for money. My motivation came from the potential amount of money I could make from the site and one thing I never focused on were my users.

It is just a small example from my life and might be dismissed as a childish story as I was too young to Start a company and take any decisions back then ( I was 17), but I have seen enough examples to convince me this simple philosophy:

You will make money in the same degree as you care about making your user’s life better. The more you think about making more money out of your users, the more you will loose.

There is something magical about not being selfish and believing in giving instead of taking. The more you give, the more you get. The more you take, the more you loose. May be it can explained. When you have a spirit of giving away, people like you. When you focus on making life of your users better, they like your product and when they like your product, they tell others about it, and therefore you get more users. When you have more users, you have more leverage. When you have more leverage, a small amount of money that you make from one user multiplies thousands of times simply because you have more users rendering you far more money you would have ever made by maximizing profits per users at the initial phase. But the most important thing is, your business becomes less vulnerable to outside threats because, your users don’t feel cheated to use your service and because you simply have more users to justify you are doing them a good service.

My previous post generated a lot of arguments and while I got some great feedback on the post like this and this and even emails from few people who thought this was the paradigm shift that was required to get back on track,  many people just didn’t seem to agree. Posts like this are doomed to generate flame-wars or disagreements, primarily because they are about departure from current way of doing things and entry into a new paradigm. And people who disagree are those who find it hard to switch possibly because the current way of doing things works just fine for them or because they think it works for them.

If you haven’t read the post yet and don’t want the trouble to read it again, here’s the summary :

Being in “Startup Mode” before you have something worthwhile is a waste of time. The definition of “Startup Mode” is a set of behavior reflected as a guilt inducing urgency towards things like marketing, customer acquisition, prototyping, modelling, market validation, research,  competitive analysis and all such stuffs. The definition of “something worthwhile” is a product or service that either a) you use yourself everyday without having to push yourself for using it or b) other people to whom you just casually presented are using it without you asking for it to use.

Now unlike what I said, what most people exclaim when they get an idea for a product is “Let’s do a startup on it!”  And they get into “Startup Mode” far before they have any Startup, or to be accurate, any product at all. What this means is they have to take an extra load of pressure that they must unnecessarily handle everyday while what they should be doing is really focusing on programming the first version of the product. Instead of accelerating, they slow down with the unnecessary weight and what should take 5 days to build takes weeks, often years. To quote an example, Mark Zuckerberg was not in “Startup Mode” when he set out to build first version of facebook and hence it took him just two weeks to write that. On the Contrary , Winklovoss Twins were in “Startup Mode” and probably that is the reason they couldn’t come up with the first version in more than an year. Who won is history.

The reason “Startup mode” should be eliminated unless you have a worthwhile product has more to do with the way softwares are written than anything else. A first version of any software almost always sucks and the problem with the “Startup Mode” is since you have a lot of pre-product users waiting for your product release, it has to be perfect, good looking, well designed and well executed, which unless you have a lot of money to begin with, doesn’t happen. On the other hand, when you present something casually and informally and tell that it is just a small idea you have been working on over weekend, it has two key advantage :

1. People tend to look at your product for what it is and not for who you are and that often shows the real worth of product/idea.

2.  You don’t have to worry if first version doesn’t look great. You can always improve if it is something which people want.

Now though it may sound strange, I am not against “Startup Mode” at all. Actually all those things I mentioned in the definition are important and they probably must be done for your Startup to succeed. What I am saying is get into “Startup Mode” when it becomes a Startup. Facebook became a Startup when Zuckerberg realized a lot of people are using it daily without much push. Google became one when people at Stanford began actively using the search engine without any Marketing. Apple became a startup when Steve Jobs realized what Wozniak has built is surely something a lot of people will want. So, my point is, unless you get to that realization Stop. Just keep building stuffs for your own use. If something is good enough more people will want it and there, you have got a Startup!

Not too long ago,  Hrishikesh and I, were about to kickstart working on  a new startup. Just to add some context, Hrishikesh has followed a similar trajectory as myself (i.e has taught himself to code and now teaches here) and we have a history of working in a startup together when we both didn’t know coding. Now the time seemed to perfect for us to start. We both knew coding and we made really great team. We liked each other, trusted each other and had worked with each other in the past which essentially meant we knew ins and outs of each other really well. But just after we made up our minds for it, we came across this product which initially seemed to do the exact same thing as our idea and the sad thing was, it was growing by leaps and bounds. We were soon stuck in arguments whether we should do it or not and if not, what should we do? For one, the realization that a product which does the exact same thing that we imagined already exists was a great demotivator and the fact that we ran out of ideas at that particular moment added to the fuel and made us feel even more hopeless. Ultimately we broke our agreement to do a startup and got back to our previous routine (which by the way involved learning to code android apps).

Not wanting to give up so soon, after a bit of research, I found out that the product we discovered was fundamentally different from what we had imagined and I told this to Hrishikesh that we might still get back to the startup we had thought of. But he said something to me that made me think deeply about my paradigm for startup. He said

“Man, I don’t trust myself enough if I can do a startup anymore. When you do a startup, you almost always have to be in startup mode. When you sleep, eat, drink, code or even when you go to bathroom. This thing suck man. I am not sure if I am made to take so much pressure.”

Long story short, that conversation culminated in a realization which was absolutely crucial in defining all of our future decisions about choosing to do anything meaningful. We realized

“It is not working hard that we hate so much, in fact we can have sleepless nights while we are writing a new software or debugging our codes and we were completely okay with that. Its what we call “Startup mode” that we hated and often dreaded. Because in this mode, we always have to be moving, making progress, building customers, marketing, product research, networking and all those blah blah stuffs and in case we didn’t do that, we felt extremely guilty. We felt we are letting our partner down. We are even letting ourselves down.”

Later that night, I rethought how all these companies, the ones who are most successful were founded and I realized that most of them haven’t been started by founders in “Startup mode”. Facebook was started as a casual side project which Mark built because he just loved building things not because he set out to do a startup. It came to him organically rather than in a startup mode. Ditto with Google. It was a college project, nothing like a startup. Wozniak Built his first computer out of his own interest and necessity rather than because he wanted to do a startup. This pattern is repeated in nearly all the significant companies we see today. They were all initially casual, informal projects started by people who didn’t set out to do a startup. And when I dug a little deeper into this pattern deeper I experienced a paradigm shift. In simple sentence my realization was-

What I say is a startup is NOT a startup unless I have a precise number of users loving what I have built. And therefore, this whole “Startup Mode” is an invalid argument against the situation.

This makes sense right? Unless you are doing a startup, it is stupid to put yourself in a “Startup Mode”. And you are not doing a startup untill the point you have a precise number of customers loving what you have built. And therefore, we decided to release ourselves from this “Startup Mode”. What followed after that was a sense of relief. We pledged that we will NOT do a startup unless we have built something with a precise number of users loving our product and untill then we will just keep building stuffs. And interestingly enough, right after that pledge, we set out to build this android application working days and nights (as we would normally expect to work in a typical startup) and in five days of non-stop hackathon came up with the first version of our product (which due to some technical difficulties have not been uploaded to Google Play yet, but will be soon. ) It was exciting, fun and most of all didn’t seem to intimidate us and hence we built in 5 days what would have taken may be 5 weeks had we been in the “Startup Mode” (as we had to do customer validation, market research , keep an eye on competitor and all such craps which simply wasted our time).

We don’t know if this product will succeed or not but it doesn’t make a difference as we are already set to build our next app. If enough number of people show interest (or love) in any of our current (which happens to be just 1) or future products, we are ready to leave whatever it is we are doing and push it forward. We are light headed and are doing what we love doing- pushing our limits to build new things. It’s challenging but not intimidating. It’s fun.

And one more thing, since we don’t want to get involved in all those market research and craps, we are just going to build things which we would want to use ourselves. Before building anything we ask this simple question Paul Graham told us

What do you wish someone would make for you?

Honestly speaking, having a bad co-founder is worse than having no co-founder at all. Alone  (Without a co-founder) the worst thing that can happen to you is a riddle of unsolved problems which are so intimidating that you want to run away. With a bad co-founder, its more than that. Its frustration, distrust, misunderstanding, misalignment of works and a multitude of misbehavior. Paul Graham stresses upon the importance of co-founder a way too much. He argues for the patterns of most successful technology enterprises about being co-founded rather than being founded by a single founder. And his argument is, with no co-founders not only you have no emotional buffer, someone to motivate you or to rely upon, but more than that you have no one to account to, really no one who will speak a dime if you give up and hence when things go wrong- it becomes really easy to give up.

While I agree giving up is the most likely cause for startup’s termination and all the consequences which arise from having no co-founders facilitate the process of giving up, it is still a choice that you consciously make. And like any other choice, you are fully accountable. There was something I was reading lately – a book by Stephen R. Covey called ” 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.  It contained a quote that is as true as it is self-evident and is one of the finest inspiration that one can have when things go wrong which mostly do when you are doing a startup-

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
-Viktor E. Frankl

So you always have the freedom to give up or not give up. It doesn’t matter whether you have a co-founder or not. And chances are if you don’t give up for sufficiently long time someone with right caliber and with right character will join you. But if you give up, you permanently ruin that chance.

Eric Ries, who is entrusted with the title of being the founder of the Lean Startup movement, says-

If You Don’t Have a Discrete Hypothesis You Are Incapable of Failing.

What he means by that is that startups are experiments. And For any experiement to fail or succeed you need to have a hypothesis that you can test against certain conditions. But what if you don’t have a hypothesis? You cannot fail. All you can do is give up. So, why failing is good? Because it helps you learn that there is something wrong with your hypothesis which in turn,  tells you that you need to test a different approach to solve the problem you are solving.

Before anything, let me define Hypothesis- Hypothesis is a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation. In context of startups, it is simply your approach you would have taken to solve the problem your startup is solving. Let me explain it with an example. Take Dating problem as an example. Dating is an important need and everyone agrees on that. So it’s a well-defined problem. But so far, no company has built a really successful company around dating. The most primitive versions of dating companies took the approach of database matching, while the recent breeds are leveraging the social networks we already have to create a list of potential dates for us. Many other took the approach of telling the system they want to date someone in their network and when the person they want to date says the same thing- it is revealed. So each companies solving this problem had a different approach to the problem. This approach is what really a hypothesis is.  If I say If I can set up a website and sell shoes with profit through a bit of advertising, I am essentially proposing a hypothesis- an approach to a defined problem (Going out to buy shoes you want sucks). The thing is you can be wrong in your hypothesis and with few metrics you can measure if you are wrong, but what if you don’t have an hypothesis? You can never be wrong. And since you can never be wrong, you can never know if you are failing or making progress. And since you don’t know that, you won’t know if it worth continuing, which will then translate into giving up. Failing isn’t bad. Failing doesn’t kill a startup. Giving up Does.

Looking at the failure rate of startups, it is easy to judge how many startup founders are operating without a hypothesis. Why is it so? It is because most startup founders are busy executing an idea instead of solving a problem. You can’t have a hypothesis if you have an idea. That idea may be a hypothesis to an existing problem but if doesn’t work, you have no other options except to assume that you have failed which often translates into giving up. Hypothesis is a well defined approach to solve a well defined problem, but if you don’t know the problem you are solving, if all you have is just an idea that you are trying to execute, it is more than likely that if something goes wrong, if it doesn’t work out, you will give up.

What if you had started with a problem instead of an idea. Ever solved a Maths problem? What do you do when the first approach you take doesn’t solve the problem? Do you give up saying that I have failed. OR DO YOU TRY TO TAKE A DIFFERENT APPROACH? What you do is recheck your previous approach-> identify what went wrong in that approach and try to arrive at the correct solution with validated learning from you previous approach. Your failure in the previous approach sets as a ground for you to arrive at validated learning that eventually helps you solve the problem. Another thing to note is though you failed in your first approach but that’s no reason for you to give up because you know you always have the option to change the approach (in lean startups it is called iterating). There might also be a situation where the problem you are trying to solve isn’t a problem people actually have or care about. The mathematical equivalent of this situation is when you are trying to solve a problem that you don’t fully understand.  In that case you redefine the problem. (In lean startup terminology that is called a pivot).  So why all these startups who succeed, succeed? Because to start with, they start with a problem that people have,  fail and then take a different approach based on validated learning. And why does startups who fail , fail? Because they give up.

I have tried really hard to come up with a single sentence that will include all the components of startup success. After lots of trials and errors following is the best that I came up with :

The only thing that is required for reasonably smart people to succeed in a startup is that they don’t give up on an important problem for a sufficiently long time.

Here’s the Analysis:

Breakdown of the previous statement gives you following recipe for startup success-

1. Be reasonably smart
2. Choose an important problem to solve.
3. Do not give up for a sufficiently long time.

All the above points are mutually exclusive and required ingredients for startup success. One is not more important than other, because in absence of any one of them, you will score zero. (Startups are binary-either you score 0 or 1. Either you fail or succeed. There is no such thing as moderate success in startups).

Let’s get started with the first component-

So how do you know you are smart enough? I don’t know a better way to test that than asking this simple question-

Do you think you can code the prototype of any product you imagine?

I know the non-tech co-founders might find it a little hard to digest but this question applies to them too. The reason I am saying that is because if they (non-tech founders) can’t code it now, they might be able to learn to code and code it sometime in future. If you think it is impossible for you to learn coding then you aren’t qualified. I am not saying it is a requirement that you learn to code but asking if you believe you can learn it- the idea of coding might intimidate you, just it like it did to me 6 months ago, and that’s fine but if you think you aren’t qualified to learn, you have failed this test. And if you did, sorry to disappoint you but startup isn’t the best thing you can do with your life. Deep down, I knew I could learn coding if it were only thing I dedicate myself to for a sufficiently long time (originally I thought it would be one year). I was intimidated by the amount of work that was needed to learn coding not by the thought that I wasn’t qualified to learn. To my surprise, I learnt enough coding to be able to build just about any prototype I imagine in just four months.

One characteristic  (that is crucial for startup success) of  “reasonably smart” people is that they tend to learn from new things faster than ordinary people.  Learning is the life blood of startup. Your chances of success in your startup will increase with your ability to learn faster. This is because you will commit a tons of mistakes, and if you can quickly learn form those mistakes and change your direction accordingly, you will find your way.

The second ingredient is choosing an important problem to solve. So many (smart) people are wasting their time in solving problems that doesn’t matter. Pursuing broken threads is good and there’s a good chance you will end up with something good if you follow these threads but when you are doing so, it is just stupid to assume you are doing a startup. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom mentioned :

Building the solution is often easier. Finding the right problem to solve is hard.

There are so many people either working on unimportant problems or are trying to execute an idea that they happened to find at some moment of brilliance. No wonder why they find themselves stuck when the idea doesn’t work out as expected.

I recommend following path to find the right problem to solve-

1. Identify a niche market which you understand.

2. Write down top 3 or 4 problems that people in that market face.

3. Order these problems based on amount of pain they cause.

4. Pick top one or two related problems.

Note : Niche market shouldn’t be too small or too large.

The third ingredient is not giving up for sufficiently long time.  By that I mean two things- a) Not loosing determination (Find more  on determination) and b) Not running out of money. You might have control over the former  but the latter can’t happen forever- only thing you can do (if you are reasonably smart) is increase your run-time by spending less money.

Finally, Resilience accompanied with your ability to learn quickly from your mistakes and your users makes you  unstoppable. You iterate fast and move fast.  The only question that remains is ” Are you working on the right problem?” And if you get this question right, even if your first version of product doesn’t get traction, or is rapidly discarded you know there is something wrong in the approach you took to solve the problem and therefore you need to take a different approach. Most people (generally those who are working on an idea that flashed on them) will give up at this point assuming that they have failed but you will not because you are smart enough to realize that something was wrong in the approach you took to solve the problem and are resilient enough to try a new  approach based on validated learning from your past experience.

This excellent post by Mike reminds me of how much of crying and gruntling happen when someone less than qualified starts it.  Doesn’t matter who you are- Startup is a journey that will change you forever. Regardless of failure or success, it is one of those things which shall have deepest impact on every aspect of your life ranging from your wealth to your health, from your family to your friendships. Nothing will remain the same. One of the things most people have come to have a consensus on- startups are ridiculously hard. And it’s true. Having been through three different startups, 2 tech and one non-tech, I have seen how hard it can be. Imagine being in a situation when you were so thirsty that you cannot walk and yet have to move because that’s the only way you could save yourself from dying? That’s exactly how startups are. The only difference is,  in a startup there is no way to know beforehand if you will ever get water in the direction you are moving.  But one thing you can do is increase the chances of getting water. And it is because of this that I have prepared a checklist that you must check off before kick-starting your startup journey to save yourself from unnecessary frustrations and stupidity.

Check#1 : Can you code the first version of your product or find a tech co-founder?

Comments: The latter is harder.Don’t think of outsourcing or hiring. You will fall flat.

Check#2: Are you solving a real problem or trying to implement an idea that came to you at some moment of brilliance?

Comments:Don’t do latter. Look for real pain points (preferrably in a niche market).  Your startup should be a pain killer , not a vitamin. Preferably build a product that you might naturally use yourself without having to push yourself for using it.

Check#3: Can you forget about making money for next 2 or 3 years?

Comments: The original checklist was “Are you young?”  That’s coz most startups won’t show results (even after you raise funds) too soon. And therefore you should be able to live without earning a penny a from your startup. It is particularly easy if you are young and don’t have a family to support.

Check#4: Are you resilient?

Comments: Resilient is a sort of person who never gives up on anything that he determines to do. Steve Jobs said :

You need a lot of passion for what you’re doing because its so hard. Without passion, any rational person would give up. So if you’re not having fun doing it, if you don’t absolutely love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you look at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society, often times its the ones who love what they do, so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it, quit. Because they’re sane, right?  Who would put up with this stuff if you don’t love it? So its a lot of hard work and its a lot of worrying constantly. If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.

And it’s so freaking true. This is number one reason why most startups fail. Paul Graham in his famous post 18 mistakes that kills startup says :

The most common type [of failure] is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn’t do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.

Check#5: Watch these videos.

It’s a must watch for anyone who never heard about lean startups.

Walks you through the popular myths of startups and clears them.

At last I’d like to rephrase Michael Arrington from the post that I mentioned above :

If you work at a startup and you think you’re working too hard and sacrificing too much, find a job somewhere else that will cater to your needs. But if deep down you know that you’re part of history, that the things you are building will be written about and thought about forever, then maybe after that good cry after a short sleep under your desk you’ll pull yourself together and remember. That you are a person in the Arena. A Pirate. That you are here to make a dent in the universe.