You Don’t Have To Ditch The Day Job

BusinessWeek:

In the beginning, it’s not always practical to dive into a Web startup full time, though eventually you will have to if you want it to succeed. Still, if you’re too poor or too unsure to do the right thing for your business and dive in full time, here are a few things that seemed to work for my partners and me when we did it part time.

1. You need a co-founder and some cheerleaders. If you can’t find two or three friends who are really excited to be beta testers for what you’re building, consider changing direction.

2. Pick a day or two per week when you always work, ideally in the same room as your co-founder(s). I repeat, always, no exceptions.

3. Have a boat-burning target. What will it take for everyone to dive in full time? Five thousand active users? 10,000 uniques a week? Funding? That should be a shared understanding.

4. Pick an idea that is tractable. Every business is a theory. If your theory is “We can build a better Web-based chat client,” that’s something you could test quickly. If you’re theory is “We can build a car that runs on lemonade,” that’s just not going to work as a part-time effort.

5. Understand that your first version is probably going to suck.

6. If you’re going to screw off at work (everyone does), spend it getting smarter about the stuff you don’t know. If you’re a coder, read a few design/usability blogs. Read up on what motivates angel investors. Research competitors and write down what they do well. Get brilliant at SEO, search engine optimization (it’s not hard).

7. Be sure you own your startup. I’ve had the fortune to work in places and companies where there was very clear ownership of “after hours” work. If ownership of your personal intellectual property is not clear, do not rely on the goodwill of your employer. Greed can do funny things to people, even if they were initially big supporters of your startup.

Photo by mjamesno.

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