Loic Le Meur Blog: How You Can Start A Business With Passion: "Each edition of LeWeb inspires more participants to start a business and it is one of its main purposes. I am always getting many questions about how to start a business after LeWeb, years ago I had written a series of posts, 'create a company' that I should have continued, but instead of doing that I started other businesses. To help the few friends who are dying to start their businesses in 2009, here are some very quick thoughts that could help them get started. This is NOT a comprehensive post, just sharing a few top of mind ideas that I would tell you if you asked me how you should get started.
-just throw yourself in the water and swim, stop thinking. Most people I know hesitate too much to start, they think too much, just do it and learn as you go
-it is not where you start that matters, it is where you take it that matters, as Jason Calacanis says, not where you start
-stop waiting for the idea of your life, just focus on something easy to explain and that delivers a service people will like
-identify 'empty space' that is a service or product that does not exist or badly delivered by your future competitors
-remain in your area of expertise, it is generally what you have the most passion about and where you are the best
-do not spend months on the business plan, do something simple and start selling it as soon as possible, your business plan will be wrong anyway
-do not spend time on market research, it is useless. Just search the web for who is doing it or not, read blogs about it, search on twitter, etc
-got your idea? good, just start. Do not spend months writing it in details or doing the best powerpoint ever, it is pointless. Just write it in bullet point format.
-share it as much as you can to friends and other entrepreneurs, on your blog (start blogging if you don't) and get advice. They will only care about the bullet point, short executive summary.
-do not be afraid that anybody 'steals' your idea, there are hundreds of people who have the same idea right now and probably some already working on the same. If you do not do it, you will only have to complain when someone else has done it, and it will be useless as they will always say they had the idea before (and it will probably be true, maybe not, who cares).
-repeat after me 'ideas have no value, only execution matters'. When you are done repeat that again. -try to start without resources or if you can, raise some money with friends and family, do not go and spend time see VCs at start, especially in difficult times
-start building as soon as possible, don't wait. Ship anything you can, a simple website, even with bugs, call it alpha :)
-you are not a developer? go find one, you can either give him enough shares for him to be cofounder, or just go to elance find resources generally for not much. You can have an entire site done there very cheap
-once shipped, get friends and family using it and giving you feedback. Blog it, tweet it, share on Facebook, any means to get the initial community going is the best
-don't do marketing, do a better product first
-use a feedback tool such as uservoice or getsatisfaction and ask your community to give you feedback and vote on the most important features they want
-just deliver the most popular features your active users want and deliver often, don't try to make the perfect product, it will not happen.
-run as fast as you can as being transparent implies that competitors will also read your community feedback and often copy cool ideas, sometimes deliver them faster than you do
-once your product is ready enough, start selling something, find real customers. This does not mean it should become entirely paying, the community would not like that, rather ship a 'pro' more feature packed product, or start adding some non intrusive advertising but in recession times, do not count too much on advertising revenues...
-write a weekly or monthly newsletter, email marketing is far from being dead, use one of the tens of free tools around, make sure you let people unsusbcribe easily if they like, avoid spam.
-keep in touch with the community as much as you can with events (can be virtual events such as questions, challenges) every week or even every day
-keep improving the product regularly, do not let too much time in between two versions
-if you have some friends and family or better seed or VC money, 'hire slowly and fire fast' as you will read very often, it is always good advice. As tough as it can be, it is a question of survival, always make sure you 'have enough runway' ahead of you. If you don't, your team is too big.
-success takes time, give it the time it needs. LeWeb, my conference, took 5 years to gather nearly 2000 participants and establish its brand (that can even survive some logistical issues, or at least I think!) and I did not even think about it as a business when I started it
-don't think you will never be able to execute your idea with almost no means, there are solutions most of the times and great 'bootstrapped' companies are the living proof
-in the current tough market conditions when it is extremely tough to raise money with crappy valuations, the best is obviously to work on ideas that generate revenue as soon as possible.
-have passion about your business. Do not sleep much and focus only on your business. Do not do anything else, except taking some good two hours lunches from now and then.
-work like hell. Be always on. Know your space and focus focus focus.
Obvious? Yes. All the above is obvious. But you cannot imagine how many friends I know who never start because they do not follow the obvious. I forgot things? Of course, this is why there are thousands of books about entrepreneurship. I did not talk about human resource for example. I just tried to gather a few quick thoughts. I wish you all to start a business in 2009 and will be happy to help as much as I can, just keep in mind that I am very busy trying to make mine, Seesmic, a great success. Fortunately I have some runway ahead of me as the most 'new' and 'innovative' a product is, the longer it will take to find its use, but the more exciting it is! If you have any motivation issue, just watch Gary Vaynerchuk at LeWeb and you will 'just crush it'.
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