Before hopping onto our entrepreneur journey; let’s broaden our vision on what are the key requirements to sustain through this hard journey of entrepreneurship.
Table of Contents
What Is A Startup?
An entrepreneur is the one who runs a startup. A startup is a venture or a company that is initiated in order to dispense solutions to certain problems that have never been addressed before or to provide better solutions to the ones that are already existing.
With the rise in startup culture in India, the most common doubt faced by the budding entrepreneur is- When to start?
Two Major Pillars For Entrepreneurs To Kick-Start Their Entrepreneurship Journey:
1. Financial Independence: Starting a company is never going to be easy. Most people do not succeed in their first company, they succeed with their second/third idea. There will be times when you’ll be struggling and things won’t go according to your plan and therefore financial security is extremely essential. If you are starting a company you need to have some resources.
How Can a College Student/Fresh Graduate Have a Huge Sum of Money in Hand?
You needn’t have a great sum of money but at least a basic amount that you need to survive for 12-18 months. It may be in the form of pocket money that you’ve collected in college or family support so that you are not constantly worried about your next step and your survival. Financial security helps you to stick through this difficult path of building a start-up and sustain through these difficult times before you get to the positives.
2. Basic skill-set in one part of the company: A company basically comprises two parts- building products and selling products. Hence, decide which part of the company are you willing to take in charge of. Are you confident enough in building products or marketing/selling products? Analyse your skills and decide which part of the company you wish to manage and maybe your cofounder can manage another part.
What kind of skill do I require; technical or managerial?
Startup automatically means you will have to learn tons and tons of things on the way. Even if you’re the one building the product, you’ll have to learn a little bit about selling the product as well. You might be really good in one part of technology, maybe backend, but you’ll have to learn the other part as well, maybe UX design or product management.
Become confident in what you do. This will give you the strength to survive and you’ll realise this is not the end. Even if the company doesn’t yield results as you had planned you can still do something amazing because you have the required skill set. You can achieve whatever you want to and even if it fails you can still get a well-paying job.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”—Lao Tzu
Once you have the above mentioned two basic requirements, you will not have to worry about your survival. Your thought process will change. You will do it because you are passionate about it. You are confident about yourself so even if the current idea fails you can get back up with a fresh idea.
You can’t make decisions when you’re scared and startup means you will have to take a lot of calculated risks. Hence building that confidence, skillset and financial resource is of utmost importance.
Now address the following questions-
- Do you have these two requirements at the end of 4th year, or you want a job first.
- Do you have resources or you wish to first earn and save?
- Do you have the skill or you wish to work in a corporation to attain that skill?
If the answer is Yes-
If you feel you are confident about the resources then start right away. Quit waiting for the right time.
If the answer is No-
Join a company to gain these two resources and learn the required tech stack.
What Kind of Job Role Will Prepare Me For My Startup?
Join a startup if you’re planning to build one. It will actually give you real-time exposure and you will learn about how things run. All the branches of a startup are interconnected. A person working in tech will have a fair share of knowledge about how things are working in sales. But if you are working in a well-established company you won’t have any idea about the branch other than yours.
A startup will help you see a 360-degree angle of the complete business. You will learn how to build products, and what are different parts of it, how decision making is happening, how sales or marketing is working and how the company is supposed to advertise the product. This will help you understand what it takes to build a startup.
Frequently Asked Questions
The right time to convert your idea into a product is when you attain financial independence and basic skills to create at least a running prototype of you product.
Start as soon as you feel confident about your product and have created a basic prototype. Make sure you have enough finance to run the business for the initial 1-1.5 years.
Industry experience is not required. You only need basic skills to create a prototype of your product and some basic managerial skills like how to communicate effectively with a potential client.
Start off with limited resources in hand. You don’t need finance to create the entire business. Start on a smaller scale but make sure you have enough money to sustain for the initial one year even if the company makes 0 profit.
Hope this answers your dilemma and you are able to start off as soon as possible and with the right resources and the right state of mind.
Meanwhile, you can visit the Coding Ninjas website to explore our platform.
By Jyotsna Tiwari
