What valuable start-up is there that no one is building at the moment?

This question is harder than it looks, because your new company could create a lot of value without capturing some of it. As a founder, you need to have expertise in few areas or find co-founders that will cover them. The tricky part is to find co-founders you really enjoy working with.

Why? Because start-ups are really hard. At the beginning, it seems like a great idea that will be good fun to execute against, but very soon you discover (a lot of) holes that are challenges. If you aren’t enjoying your partners to the road, it’s going to be very hard to work well at those crucial moments. At the beginning, like in relationships, everything is flowing and there are no arguments. But very quickly, in the rapid pace of the start-ups world, you will find conflicts. Make sure you can have a great communication channel with your partners, and you are able to move quickly in those cases that you don’t see eye to eye.

Minimum Viable Product

After we have our co-founders and we are set on the idea, we are likely to move forward and to shape it. The first thing is the Minimum Viable Product: It is that product which has just those features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money for, and start to give you feedback on. It should be in the highest quality you can reach. So good, that you will be able to capture your users into it, with the value it’s offering to them. It’s important to put it out there as fast as you can and start collecting feedback from real users.

How to test the water

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During my volunteering work at Campus TLV, I work with startups on entrepreneurship skills and technology. One of the popular topics is the subject of this post: “How to raise money”. It’s a challenging topic on many levels. You wish to raise enough money but not too much. Why? because at this point of the startup’s life you are giving a slice of your company (=equity) to the investors and you don’t want to sell too much or too low. Here are few guidelines:

• In order to raise money for your dream you need to convince investors that you are the ‘champion’ of this domain. If you are currently not the ‘best’ in the world – think how you become part of the top 1% of people in the world that do X (when X is your product/service). Savvy investors knows that it depends on the team (=you) and its ability to execute against their ideas.

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