This book is meant to serve alongside your starting journey into entrepreneurship. The pace of the book is meant to be very fast pace, at the speed of engineering, and because of this, it’s really important to list out some common pitfalls that amateur plague amateur entrepreneur. Most of these tips can be found any your typical productivity book. If there is anything I know about running a startup company, it’s how to NOT run a startup company. For years I was plagued by the exact same debilitating problems that most failing business where. Mainly, it stems from not having the resources to mitigate these hazards from the start, whether that be funding or experience.
Quote unquote buying stuff for your business when it is really for your own secret wants is a recipe for failure. When you’re starting a startup company, it is extremely important that all of your purchases be extremely targeted. The two most valuable resources that you have are time and money. You need to be an essentialist when it comes to your startup budget. List out what tools and toys you actually need to start generating revenue as soon as possible. Once your generating income, you can buy those toys on your own time with your own money, instead of wasting precious company time and money on stuff that isn’t essential to the success of your business.
I will concede that some people, including myself, can be nocturnal, and this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to most. If you are serious about your business, you have to make that your life. You can’t wake up and turn on the news and spend hours making breakfast, then dick around on the internet for a few hours before maybe getting in a half hour of spotty work. That is how you fail, hard. That’s personal experience talking. When I wake up, what I do in the first two hours is what sets the tone for my entire day. A good start in the morning can get multiple days of work done in one. Don’t waste this precious time.
If you’re nocturnal, this does actually still apply to you, one in reverse. The thing about the morning that makes people productive is that it is the time when they are most awake, fresh, and not distracted. For nocturnal people, the times when they’re in the flow are often in the middle of the night before then go to bed. Whatever your body’s schedule is, you need to start making note of when you are most alert and focused and make a routine of working every work day at that time. Set a schedule and don’t deviate even once.
It is extremely important for you to get to work right away. One thing that dooms both startups and engineers is not having something to work with soon enough and then not having to opportunity to have that learning experience and first development iteration cycle. It is extremely important that you get your hands on, instead of wasting that time daydreaming about how it works while looking at your wish list. You need to do anything you can to get physical progress on something… anything. This is not to say waste a bunch of precious man-hours on a useless prototype, but you can’t let long periods of time go by when you could have don’t some of the heavy lifting required to get a company off the ground.
Copyright 2014-22 © Cale McCollough; most rights reserved, Third-party commercialization prohibited, mandatory improvement donations, licensed under the Kabuki Strong Source-available License that YOU MUST CONSENT TO at https://github.com/CookingWithCale/AStartupCookbook.