Recommended for people interested in start-ups

A Founder's Guide to Starting in 6 Weeks

By Adam Neary

I met another young man today who is en route to a world class MBA program to fill in the gaps in his knowledge prior to starting his life in a startup.

I gave him the same metaphor I have given droves of others. If you wanted to be a world-class cyclist and told me you were going to spend the next 2 years rock climbing in Nepal, I would advise that, sure, you would probably return in shape and with stronger lungs, but you would probably be a better cyclist if you spent the next 2 years cycling.

For some reason, many business guys have a Mr. Miyagi-style notion of doing something else full time for the sake of building skills prior to engaging in what you want to do directly. It worked in the Karate Kid, but it’s poor advice for entrepreneurs.

Today’s subject, who seemed quite smart, was at least interested in working at Profitably in an intern capacity for 6 weeks prior to school matriculation, but since he doesn’t write code and doesn’t sell, there wasn’t a lot we could put him on over given our stage in development (and so I told him, and I will be forwarding this post his way, so I am not trying to be rude).

Rather, I recommended he start his own company in 6 weeks instead. 

We talked through a concept he was batting around, which was actually quite sound, and I recommended setting specific milestones for no/no-go gate at the end of the 6 weeks. In that period of time, without writing a single line of code, he could:

1. Launch a splash site
2. Test out pen-and-paper mockups with real users from his target market
3. Confirm if they would use or pay for what he was considering launching
4. Get out in front of the other revenue streams and get letters of intent from key stakeholders in his ecosystem (his idea allowed for that, fortunately)
5. Use a modest test budget to see if people would click on ads around his key messages

I thought I saw the spark in his eye, so I hope he follows through on this, but I realized that I have emailed a set of resources to a couple dozen bright-eyed folks just like him, so I figured I would consolidate that list once and for all so that I can just send people here.

And here it is: The Ultimate 6 Week Startup Crash Course (including the resources you need to validate a business concept with ridiculously little time and money).

Please note: there are 3 steps, and they need to be followed IN PARALLEL, not in series. Start all 3 steps this afternoon. 

Step 1: Get educated 

Everyone’s got their favorite must-read list, but here’s mine:

- Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany (never leaves my bedside)
- David Cohen’s and Brad Feld’s Do More Faster
- Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates
- The Powerset Talent Essays
- Dave Cancel’s Data Driven Startups
- The Hubspot crew’s Inbound Marketing
- The 37Signals crew’s Getting Real & Rework
- David Skok’s SaaS Metrics
- Tony’s Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
- Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work 

Just as importantly, you need to go read the key articles within and subscribe to the following blogs:

- ANYTHING that’s big in your specific space (most importantly)
- Fred Wilson of USV: avc.com
- Chris Dixon: cdixon.org
- Mark Suster: Both sides of the table
- Eric Ries: Startup lessons learned
- Paul Graham’s essays: paulgraham.com
- Nivi and Naval at venturehacks
- Jason Purtorti (designer from mint)
- TechCrunch and VentureBeat (just to keep track of deals and launches)

Don’t just subscribe. Read through the “best of” lists and peruse archives as appropriate. You’ve got a lot to catch up on, so while we’re at it, follow these folks on twitter (and find out who they are talking to), get an iPad, and load up all this content onto the iPad.

The collective knowledge all these folks are sharing is crazy. Follow their links serendipitously and soak it all up like a sponge. Build your list to share with others (and let me know what I missed!).

Step 2: Learn to write code 

I have anecdotally heard business people objecting to the idea of learning to write code, as it’s supposedly a waste of their talent. Cute. If you’re going to start a software company, learn to write code. You’ll have a CTO who will write all the real code, but you need to know what models, views, and controllers are in the first place. You need to know the difference between a relational database, an OLAP cube, a document-oriented database, and a key-value store. More awesome than all that, you definitely need to know how open source software works and how source control works, technically, culturally, and from an etiquette standpoint.

The good news is that engineers are better than bankers, consultants, scientists, or any other adults when it comes to sharing and structuring knowledge in a distributed environment, all for free.

Visit http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ and over the next six weeks, go at least through all the “Digging Deeper” sections. Just follow the instructions.

If you blow through the guides (a clear sign you’re an entrepreneur in reality!), you’ll have plenty of time to build an actual, working prototype of your idea.   

And you should.

Step 3: Validate your idea

We all agree that an idea and $3 buys you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. You don’t want to be ridiculed as a Winklevoss, so make peace straight away that your idea means nothing, but execution means everything.

You don’t need startup capital, and you don’t need a coder. You need to find out if anyone cares about what you’re thinking about offering the world. Hopefully all the reading I recommended above will give you a much more informed idea about how to do that, but since you’re starting each step at the same time (right?) you haven’t read all those books yet. So here’s a first week worth of to-dos:

- Buy a domain and launch a splash site using Wordpress
You can find cheap hosting with 1-click non-technical install. Follow the instructions, and then search for a sexy theme that you dig out of the box (e.g. http://www.press75.com). Write some copy. Don’t know where to start? That feeling isn’t going away—it gets profoundly worse.

- Begin blogging. Don’t know where to start? That feeling isn’t going away—it gets profoundly worse.

- Begin collecting email addresses on a landing page from people who want to use your service

- Go to Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and create test budgets for ads that point to your landing page. See if people click on the ads and if they give you their email addresses. This is your first “conversion” data—enjoy the sweet delicious nectar of feedback! 

- Draw out full paper mockups of everything you have in your head, and put those drawings in front of people who will use your product. Ask if they would pay for the product. How often could they see themselves using it? Why WOULDN’T they use it? What would it have to do to get their attention? Don’t ask your friends. Ask your enemies. Presume they are being nice to you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. Of course they want what you’re offering, but no, they don’t want to sign up for your mailing list or alpha?! Bullshit. They hate your idea. Go to a meetup related to your space and practice trying to convince a stranger to sign up for your email list with a couple mockups and a smile.

Note: If you feel like getting cute, use Balsamiq. Or don’t.

- If someone ELSE is going to pay you other than your users—and this is key—go talk to them. If you can’t get meetings with them in the next 6 weeks, what does that say? If you can, show them the mockups. Best case scenario, get letters of intent around pricing for whatever you’re planning to do. There’s nothing better when you need to explain to your mom and your girlfriend and your priest and your butcher that you’re not going to business school.

- Once you know (on a preliminary basis) what people will pay, do some honest market sizing. If you’ve got something people will pay for, how many of them are there? If you multiply those two numbers and you’re north of $1B, you’ve got a fundable startup. Find other ways to qualify that number and calibrate it. Use Census Bureau data. Find other MBAs who have access to Hoovers, Capital IQ, Forrester, and Gartner, etc. You might even find a future intern. ;-)

- Two weeks in, sign up for 4-week trials to a dozen some-odd tools that help you kick ass all over the place. Steve Blank has a pretty good list, but definitely include KissMetrics and KissInsights, Google Analytics (free) and Apps (not as free), Tout and/or Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, Dropbox, and whatever else applies to your space. (But don’t waste time on project management, planning, budgeting software or anything related to “scale.” Please refer to “I’m Going to Scale My Foot Up Your Ass” for more details. You’re validating your idea, not building a business yet.)

- Learn by doing. I’m serious. Learn by doing. Then repeat.

Bottom line 

At the end of the 6 weeks, if you have read until your eyes crossed, learned to write code, and validated that there is in fact a business there…and you still want to go to business school, you’re not an entrepreneur. At least you found out quickly and can spend your two years gearing up for a role at Amex, Bain, or JP Morgan rather than tilting at windmills.
And this is ok, by the way. My wife is a Harvard MBA and a successful consultant, and she’s amazing. The guy who introduced us is a Harvard MBA and a banker, and he’s ok anyway (wink). Amex, Bain, and JP Morgan are awesome. They just aren’t for entrepreneurs.

It’s possible, though, at the end of the 6 weeks you’re going to feel the way most entrepreneurs feel, that there isn’t anywhere near enough time in the week to get done everything you need to get done, and you can’t imagine wasting another minute screwing around. You’ve got 25 meetings already set up for next week, 10 meetups to check out, a dozen revisions to mockups you need to test out, Google Reader with a 1000+ article backlog, and an enormous market full of customers who are dying for what you’re going to bring them, god damn it.

Once you’re hooked, it’s over.

And once you’re there, let’s meet for coffee again, and we can talk about who I can introduce you to so that you’re spending the following six weeks even better.