7 Reasons Not To Start A Startup

If you are still trying to prove your abilities to yourself, or worse, to others, startup is not the best way to achieve that. It’s probably the surest way to induce self-doubt, not to alleviate it.

There are plenty of ways to prove yourself that are easier and quicker. Train for a half or a full marathon, get up early for a month, learn a new skill in 6 months and apply it to solve new problems. If you can do any of that, you have proved your great potential. QED.

If you are afraid of boredom or being mediocre, starting a startup will definitely help with that. However, the odds are against you because only two things can happen. If you succeed, you will lose interest immediately, because it didn’t live up to your expectation that it would be challenging, and you will feel bored again. If you fail, you will get the satisfaction of being challenged so you want to try again and fail again, because the failures keep your entertained.

In spite of my best effort to avoid falling into this fallacy, I still got it wrong until very recently. If raising millions of dollars from top VCs is the first thing that comes to your mind when you are imagining the successful moment of your startup, you should go back to the elementary:

A business = value <=> money <=> customers

Creating a business only requires delivering value to customers and earning money from customers. VCs and accelerators are great value-add to the startup ecosystem, but they are not as fundamental as internet to internet businesses.

I once saw raising money as a key milestone of a startup’s life, probably because I’ve read too many articles from VCs and Angels that are essentially marketing materials from them and didn’t think for myself. They are outstanding and extraordinary people and institutions but just not as essential as customers. To think “raising money is the goal of starting a startup” is like saying “getting Nike/Adidas endorsements is the goal of becoming an athlete”. It just doesn’t sound right.

Related posts:

Perhaps this is the reason why lawn care enthusiasts love to know every insight that helps them in shaping a healthy and aesthetically-satisfying yard. In our last blog 9 Inspiring Lawn Landscaping…

Prior to coming to Peru to work with a curandero (traditional healer) to cure my incurable autoimmune disease, I had no idea what a curandero, or shaman, really did. Four years ago I was living in…