These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from formacionamedida team by Miquel Garcia.
Tetuan Valley Startup School has shown us how marvelous is to to be an entrepreneur. You will be an adventurer, an innovator, a superhero. I’m eager to finish Tetuan to tell my boss I’m leaving my job and starting a successful career as entrepreneur and I will be the next Mark Zuckenberg in a couple of months. I only need a few hundred of thousand dollars any VC will give me when they listen to my pitch.
Get real.
Maybe this is an option for people that just have finished college and have a McJob or no job at all. Maybe if you are already unemployed and you don’t have to make that decision because society did for you. But if you have a loan and/or kids and a safe pay, you will not leave your job anytime soon, and less in the days we are living. Loans aren’t paid with noodles. But I think there are alternatives. I’m only saying that before jumping the pool, be sure there is water.
My boss says that to be an entrepreneur you can earn much money, but the downside is that you are never sure if you will be paid at the end of the month. Rule one: in a couple only one of the members can work for himself, the other must stay with his/her safe salary. My boss is a former entrepreneur who decided many years ago to start a career as a corporate man, and while he put as many hours as he says he earn less money for hour than us, he has a life after work. My former boss was the opposite, a former worker that started his own business, and he had the big money, money to buy us an office or a new house for himself with cash.
I have always though that if you want to start your own business, stay on what you know. In the book El libro negro del emprendedor, Fernando Trias de Bes says that to assure the success of the entrepreneur is essential that he knew well the sector. I someone tells me that tomatoes are the next big thing, I can start a tomato selling shop, but I don’t know anything about tomatoes, and I will lose all my money and probably my health. But the next big thing are not tomatoes, are internet-based business (sorry tomato experts), and I know a couple of things about internet . For us that work more or less doing “web applications”, it’s very easy to make the jump, because we have already have much of the knowledge. And if you can design AND develop, you have much gained.
In his famous book Rich dad poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki says “keep your day job but start minding your own business”. In their new book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson say: “You need less that you think: at first don’t buy anything not essential and don’t hire anyone. Don’t leave your job“. I find the story of Balsamiq particularly inspiring. He started the product as a second job. He has eventually started his own shop, and has a few employees now, but not before he had a successful product and earnings. He said in his blog:
So I started my “second job”: every night, after putting the baby to sleep, I would work for 4 hours in the kitchen (roughly 8pm to midnight). It’s amazing how much progress you can make, a little bit at the time, even when you are tired from a full day of work
If you work 20 hours a week you are investing on your business 1,3 * gross income / 2, that can be 25k – 30k a year depending on what you earn. Multiply this for each of the members. And you will not find a more motivated worker than yourself. And not only these hours count. When I read a news feed related to my business, learn a new design trick or witness a practice in my day job that “can be done better” but it’s not because of some organization / bureaucracy / asshole, and I think about how I would do it, I’m putting value in my business. In these first steps, my business is not an office, it’s a mindset. Also, one of the lessons I have learn on this school is that “don’t stay on your garage”. You have to show your work to the world, Is difficult to stay motivated if you cannot show your work to someone who can appreciate. Networking is crucial. I think people at Tetuan Valley do an amazing job for us wannabe-enterpreneurs in the path of seeing our dreams come true.
Before taking the red pill, I will prepare myself for the real world. My plan is leave my job only when my second-job earnings surpass my first-job ones. Meanwhile, I will stay with my Nescafé salary, and become a night coder.
