How to Start a Startup

Great startups solve real, painful problems that people or businesses desperately want solved. The best problems are ones you've experienced personally—this gives you deep insight into the solution and the motivation to persist through challenges. Look for pain points in your own life, inefficiencies in industries you know, or underserved customer segments.

• Talk to at least 50-100 potential customers about their problems before committing
• Look for problems that are frequent (happens often), urgent (needs solving now), and painful (causes real harm or loss)
• Validate that people are already spending significant money, time, or effort trying to solve this problem
• Focus on problems where you have unique insight or unfair advantages
• Be wary of problems only you have—they need to be widespread to build a business

Before building anything substantial, test your core assumptions. Can you get people to sign up for a waitlist? Will they pay for a rough prototype or even just a promise? Would they recommend your solution to others? The goal is to gather concrete evidence that your solution is something people actually want and will pay for—not just something that sounds interesting.

• Create a simple landing page explaining your solution and measure signup rates
• Conduct deep customer interviews to understand needs, workflows, and buying processes
• Look for signs of desperation—people who need your solution badly enough to use an imperfect version
• Try to pre-sell your product before building it—if people won't commit money, that's a signal
• Distinguish between 'that sounds cool' (polite interest) and 'I need this now' (real demand)

A Minimum Viable Product is the simplest version of your product that delivers real value to early customers. It's not about building something perfect or complete—it's about learning as quickly as possible what works and what doesn't. Your MVP should test your riskiest assumptions with the least amount of work.

• Focus only on the core value proposition—strip away everything else
• Aim to launch in weeks, not months—speed of learning is everything
• Use no-code tools, existing platforms, or even manual processes if you're not technical
• It's okay if the MVP is embarrassingly basic—if people love the core value, they'll forgive rough edges
• Define success metrics before launching so you know what you're learning

Your first 10-100 customers are the most important you'll ever have. They'll provide critical feedback, help you iterate toward product-market fit, become references and case studies, and generate word-of-mouth referrals. Don't wait for them to find you—go find them wherever they already spend time.

• Reach out personally to potential customers—founders should do sales early on
• Provide exceptional, white-glove service to early adopters—do things that don't scale
• Ask for honest feedback constantly and actually incorporate it into your product
• Focus on customers who have the problem most acutely, not the easiest to reach
• Build genuine relationships—early customers often become evangelists and advisors

As a solo founder, you can only do so much, and the journey is lonely. Finding the right co-founders and early employees can accelerate your progress dramatically. Look for people who complement your skills, share your values, and bring different perspectives to the table.

• Co-founders should have complementary skills—two engineers is often worse than an engineer and a business person
• Work with potential co-founders on a trial project before committing—marriage analogies are apt
• Have explicit conversations about equity, roles, commitment level, and what happens if someone leaves
• Hire for attitude, learning ability, and culture fit—not just experience on paper
• Your first hires will define your culture, so choose carefully

Product-market fit is when you've built something people want so badly that growth becomes organic and retention is strong. Getting there requires relentless iteration based on customer feedback, metrics, and experimentation. Most startups need multiple significant pivots before finding it.

• Track key metrics religiously—retention, engagement, NPS, referral rates
• Talk to customers weekly, even after you've launched and have data
• Be willing to make major changes (pivot) if data shows your current approach isn't working
• Don't scale until you have clear product-market fit signals—premature scaling is a top startup killer
• Signs of product-market fit: organic growth, high retention, customers upset when the product is down

Once you've found product-market fit, shift focus from searching to scaling. This means systematizing what works, building processes, hiring to expand capacity, and potentially raising funding to accelerate growth.

• Focus on one growth channel at a time until you master it before diversifying
• Document processes and build systems that don't depend on you personally
• Hire specialists as you scale—generalists are great early, specialists are better for scaling
• Consider fundraising if capital is the constraint on growth, but not before product-market fit
• Maintain direct customer contact even as you scale—don't lose touch with the ground truth