[ExI] Series of blog posts on this email list, origins of Bitcoin, problems with Yudkowki, effective altruism, and more

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 12:17 PM Gadersd via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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?
>

I could answer that, but I'd be doing you a disservice by limiting my
answer to just that topic.

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.

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.

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.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+start+a+business 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.

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.

---

That said, the Small Business Administration is literally all about small
businesses.  (It's like the SBA was named for them.)
https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/10-steps-start-your-business 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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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