<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Thanks for that Adrian. I’ll remember your advice.<br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Mar 16, 2023, at 4:04 AM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" class="">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 12:17 PM Gadersd via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" class="">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br class=""></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="overflow-wrap: break-word;" class=""><div class="">I have been wanting to form a software startup for a while now but have no idea regarding the process. What are some resources that I can use to learn about the funding, hiring, and management processes that a founder would need to go through?</div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I could answer that, but I'd be doing you a disservice by limiting my answer to just that topic.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If you don't already know how to go about finding resources for questions of this sort, the very first thing you need to do is to learn how to find them. Not just this specific question about what a founder goes through, but any future question you will have.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If you are eventually successful, on the road to that success you will have many more questions like this - and not always the time or connections to ask relevant people. You must learn to find the answers on your own.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Granted, in quite a few cases there are no good answers online, but the general process of business formation and what to look out for has been thoroughly documented. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+start+a+business" class="">https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+start+a+business</a> may seem like a short and trite answer but doing a quick Web search before even asking should become instinct. It doesn't have to be Google if you prefer another search engine - it is entirely possible that ChatGPT et al can do much of the searching for you even today, let alone what they will evolve into in the near future - but the key thing is to use the tools that are available. So many would-be startup founders simply fail at that step, even the ones who grew up with this technology.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Do not take the rest of this email as gospel. Look things up for yourself; to see if I'm just blowing smoke on any part of this (or at least, to see if your understanding of my words conflicts with your understanding of what most other people say). If you take nothing else from this email, please take this advice: learn how to learn.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">---</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">That said, the Small Business Administration is literally all about small businesses. (It's like the SBA was named for them.) <a href="https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/10-steps-start-your-business" class="">https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/10-steps-start-your-business</a> and the pages it links to are among the many good starting guides, though the steps it lists aren't in chronological order (e.g., what they list as step 3 - fund your business - is often the last of the 10 steps to perform, though it is good to know how businesses get funded while doing the other steps). You might also look up "lean startup business plan" and "minimum viable product".</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">For hiring, consider what all the tasks are to make what you intend to make, and which of those you can do. For those that you can't (or at least, can't well or efficiently), learn the basic lingo - as used by those who will be doing the task - to describe what you want. This will not only help with hiring once you get that far along, but will give you a more realistic idea of the team size you will need - and thus of the labor budget, which is most of the expenses for a software startup. This helps with funding: the first major step toward getting funded is to get a credible idea, preferably with evidence and documentation, of how much you'll need.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I would also recommend, especially for a startup, starting by researching how people currently solve or get around the problem you intend to solve. Even if you have some revolutionary new idea, there is always a nearest equivalent to your solution - maybe far distant, but it exists. Find this and find a simple way to explain, in terms your potential customers will understand, why your solution is better. (The first transatlantic airplane flights were extraordinary achievements, but people had been crossing the seas by ship. It was quite possible to quantify how much faster an airplane crossing was than a ship crossing.) Prepare to discover that your initial idea has been tried and perhaps is still being done - but by examining how, and the problems and limitations they have run into, you may learn from their failures (because there's nothing like other people spending millions of their dollars to give a free-for-you demonstration of what does not work) and come up with a better way to do it.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Not seriously doing this market research, or at least not before putting in serious money or time, has been the most common error I have seen startups make.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Assuming you intend to solve a problem people have, rather than just market a product or service. If you intend to primarily sell something and only consider why people would want it as a secondary concern, your business is already a failure: drop that idea and restart by first considering what problems people have that they would pay money to have solved, that you can help address.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Also assuming your intention is to develop something new, rather than just be another consultancy offering the same services a bunch of others already offer. If your intention is the latter - you're an Extropian (presumably), so you can do better by yourself and the world. You've seen the ideas that have passed through this list. Take one of the good ones that hasn't been commercialized yet and make it happen.</div></div></div>
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