Do you want to start a business? Ask yourself these three important questions

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Steve (820.html ">steve Blank"), Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, scholar, Founder's Handbook co-author (originally published in LinkedIn)

As our training program unfolds, 26 of teams are trying to find an answer to whether they should turn their course projects into a company.

Since we've all been emphasizing "evidence-based entrepreneurship" and "Investment readiness level" (investment readiness levels), I guess someone would ask me this: "After we figure out all this data, Should it be based on this data to seek to achieve our ideas? "

I would like to point out that the "data" (the results of a dialogue with more than 100 customers, partners, and payers) that you have collected in 10 weeks is not the first thing to focus on. Before that, you should first care about three things that are more important.

1. Are you willing to spend the next three or four years of your life doing this?

Now that you've come to understand the potential business channels and potential customers, one question to ask yourself is: Are you willing to work with these customers for the next three or four years and enjoy the entrepreneurial fun no matter how much money you make?

One of the biggest mistakes in my career was the wrong thing. I've been in startups, working with engineers to design microprocessors, or selling supercomputers to research scientists to help them solve some very interesting technical problems. But in the penultimate company I took office, I did video game business. In this company, I am facing the client is 14 years old little boys, I hate them, the only hope is that they hurried away. The converse is the same: they don't buy anything from me.

So the first thing you and your team need to consider is whether doing business with these clients will make you feel uncomfortable.

2. Are you going to be engaged in a business that can be expanded? If not, then would you be willing to always be small instead of bigger?

Are you going to be engaged in a business that's just fun and you have other jobs? Do you want to engage in a small business, four years after the revenue can reach 4 million U.S. dollars, ten years later to reach 8 million dollars? Or is it a large enough scale to attract buyers or liquidity injections?

Before you start doing the business you want to do, you first need to decide your personal goals and think about whether the business you want to do can achieve that goal through future development.

You need to negotiate with the other co-founders to make sure all the founders are interested and then make any decisions about starting a company. If one of you is content to pay 500,000 dollars a year and the other is dreaming of selling the company to Roche in the future at a price of $1 billion, the difference is Roche. One or both of you will be very unhappy if the goals of the two are not clearly agreed upon in the future.

3. If you still can't make money after 4 years, will you enjoy it?

If you start a company that eventually ends in bankruptcy, do you still feel like you've had a great trip? The founders started their own company not because they wanted a huge windfall, but because it was the greatest invention they could think of. The chances of a startup failure are very high, so if you and your team can't enjoy learning and building something and are excited about what you're going to do, don't do it as well. (Snow is compiled)