Hello and welcome back to Startup Curious, where we discuss things you should know if you’re thinking about working for or starting a startup.
Apologies for the late episode! I’ve been losing my voice, as you may be able to tell. As a result, this is going to be a pretty short one, but I wanted to pop in and address a question I hear a lot: “How do I know if I’m ready to start a company?”
The answer is simple: you will never be fully ready to start a company. There will always be some skill you should learn first, or some reason to wait a little longer. Things will pretty much never align perfectly - and that’s okay!
The key thing to do is look at your current life situation and your resources - time, money, all of them - to figure out how you can go about trying to start the company you want to start. If you’re strapped for resources, you may need to break things down into smaller steps than you would like in order to start making progress.
Maybe instead of quitting your job right away (which is honestly almost never a great idea), you can start doing some consulting to solve the problem you’re trying to solve, which will bring in some extra income and allow you to do user research at the same time. Maybe instead of building a product right away, you can figure out if you can do some of the work manually so you can start learning. It’s a little hard to speak about in general terms, but there’s almost always a way to break things down into smaller pieces so you can get started.
Honestly, this can be kind of difficult advice to take because it may feel lame compared to some of the founding stories you hear about… but here’s the secret about those stories: many of them are edited and curated to cut out the boring bits. Many, many companies had small starts that slowly snowballed into bigger and better things. You will be in good company (pun intended?) if you start off this way.
So… I guess to answer the original question of “How do I know if I’m ready to start a company?” the answer is: You almost certainly are. It just may look a little different than you expected.
Thank you for joining us today! If you found this episode useful, please remember to subscribe and share. Our goal is to make startups more approachable for everyone and the only way we can do that is to get the word out!
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If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, or you’re a founder who would like their story featured on this show, send me an email at v@thescrappyoperator.com.
How do I know if I'm ready to start a company?