4 ms·
Some of my friends asked me whether they should start a company, I typically suggest them to answer these questions first: - Have you ever made over $10k on yo
by wenbin 6y ago
Some of my friends asked me whether they should start a company, I typically suggest them to answer these questions first:
- Have you ever made over $10k on your own?
Not from your day job salary. Not from public stock market. Making money needs practice. You start a company to make money. You’d better have some experience of making money first. Without working in an established company, are you able to make a meaningful amount of money and survive in this world?
- What’s your longest project?
Have you worked on anything for multiple years? Grit & patience need practice. Building a successful company takes multiple years, even decades. Be prepared.
- When was the last time you were insulted by others?
If you grew up in a very comfortable environment (rich family, great schools — because your parents went to those great schools too, great companies, …), probably you already get used to compliment for your entire life. Now you are going to face a very very diverse set of people who don’t know your family background or don’t recognize your family name. If you are the kind of people who are easy to be upset by very minor things (e.g., people don’t reply your email or people don’t compliment you), you’d better stay in the friendly corporate.
- What happened when you broke up with your ex or your friends?
People relationship is complex. You’ll experience a lot of bad people relationship if you start your own company — breaking up with cofounders, firing employees, fighting evil investors, fighting con man, fighting bad reporters, dealing with malicious users, dealing with competitors (sometimes in person)… All kinds of drama. You’d better practice this kind of things before starting your own company.
- null_deref 6y ago10K sounds like a lot of money, do you really set your own bar there? What examples did you encounter of people making 10K on their own while still working at corporate?
- eaenki 6y agoI mean $10K it’s like a website w content for US audiences and getting 1K readers a day for a year - depending on the niche you could make even more. It’s not that hard. Not easy. But not hard either. For example posting on relevant Facebook Groups every day a couple of hours a day would suffice. If you can do that you have a basic grasp of marketing, copy, product market fit, accounting and taxes, financing, maybe design, hiring and outsourcing. Definitely a head start.
- fuzzfactor 6y agoThis is true not only for software or engineers. 10K is still significant but you definitely need to set your own bar. Anyone in the 50K to 150K wage market needs to have a deep understanding of whatever it took to bring in 10K without your employer, it's going to take a lot more of that once you no longer have a paycheck from a job there. Even building success selling used cars on the side can be very worthwhile to engineers who are considering becoming entrepreneurs, when it could be regarded as a career distraction on many other engineering paths. And however long it took you to bring in the 10K, it's likely to require 5x to 15x as much time to match your employment income, when left to your own devices. A lot of times when you get far above 150K in wages, any windfall can be based less on productivity and more as temptation so you don't start your own company when you think about it. At that point you'd really need to independently be able to make a lot more than 10K a lot easier & quicker before it would make sense. Might have to sell something at a lot bigger scale than a few cars then.