These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Spring edition. This post is from the Workab team, formed by Jaime de la Cal, Alberto Fernandez, and Alejandro Segura.

First, you start the car and put it into first gear. This is equivalent to coming up with an idea and being ready to make it happen. In order to do that, you figure out how many people you need for your team and what type of profiles you require and start looking for them.

During this initial stage, you start working with your new co-founders, polishing up the idea, making a small business plan and identifying the best way to accomplish the project objectives.

If at some point the project is not progressing as expected, i.e. the team as a whole is not working very hard enough, someone within the team must enforce a change in the work rhythm in order to achieve the goals. Here, the team changes to second gear.

At this phase, everyone in the team accepts a new working schedule in which all the founders involved put in as many hours as they can. At this stage, which carries on for a long time, the team accomplishes several tasks: creation of a prototype, creation of the company, and long nights working together. It is the time called “I have no life, I work 24X7”.

This phase could also be compared to driving in a big city full of cars, knowing you could crash at any time. But the next phase is even crazier. Now, the new company changes to third gear. It is driving much faster but  is still  in the same hectic city environment.

It is at this time that you launch your product to the market! You could have done everything perfectly until this point, but now it is time to find out if the idea from the first step was a good idea which the market indeed does demand. Your car is now going very fast; the engine is running at full power. Marketing plan, sales plan, finance plan, SEO plan, operating plan, HR plan… and above all, the product. The product has to work perfectly.

When the company passes the break-even point, congratulations!  Change to fourth gear. The company incorporates itself to the highway and starts enjoying the trip. The whole team surely deserves it.

After travelling lots of miles, and only if the car is well driven, you have the opportunity to launch into fifth gear. On the other hand, you could change your car into a boat. And you could either sell the company, or live speeding along in your new boat that you built from a car.