The May 2012 Edition of Wired Magazine had a multi-page spread on entrepreneurship, and provides interviews with some of the biggest and most influential investors in both London and the USA.
With media sources, such as the Guardian predicting that the next 12 months could be the new dot.com bubble, and new crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter allowing armchair investors to fund tech startups, entreprenuism seems to be the new rock and roll.
If you are thinking of starting your own business, then Wired has provided a checklist to help new businesses build effective launches. It is loosely based on the (excellent) Eric Ries book, The Lean Startup, which is widely considered to be the new start-up’s Bible.
Here’s Wired’s checklist:
1. Find the people you believe you could build something amazing with. These are your co-founders
2. Find something you love deeply that could be so much better. Thats your market.
3. If you spent your lifetime on that thing, what would it become? This is your vision.
4. What is the smallest possible thing you could build that would test whether others agree? This is your minimal viable product.
5.Recruit the smallest team you need to build it. These are your seed investors and first hires. Be utterly ruthless about choosing people who share values, vision and ambition level.
6. Build it and launch it. This is your first test.
7. Celebrate. It’s really important to do this. That was some intense stuff.
8. Tell some people that you think will care. These are the most important people in the world now, the first ever users of your product.
9. Is there anything about your product that your new users couldn’t live without. If not, return to step 4, it’s okay. If so, onward!
10. Improve that specific thing that they can’t live without. See if they start to tell friends about how great it is.
11. Go back to Step 3. Maybe it’s even bigger than you thought. If so, tell everyone in your team how so
12. Figure out how to make money that is aligned with what your users can’t live without.
13. Use that money to move faster towards your vision. This means making more users happier, faster.
14. Go back to step 3. Making something better is addictive. Doing it with the best people in the world, for something you love, is worth the heartache.
Let us know if you’ve tried any of these.