In many startups, the early work can be heavily tilted towards the business side. You have to figure out what you’re building before you want to actually start building. This means talking to customers, building a landing page, ad campaign, etc. Some companies may need more early technical development, but you’ve got problems if the business-side cofounder isn’t doing this.
Do you want to be an entrepreneur with that ten grand?
Find a problem. Talk to the people around you: What are their pain points in life? At college, there will be many people around you, unfortunately most of them are students or faculty, and education is a very slow business to grow. So you may want to get in touch with more diverse folks ;)
Figure out how to solve said problem. Not all problems are easily solved even with today’s tech. There are some great Y Combinator videos on ‘what startup ideas work’.
Check with folks if that solution actually solves their problem. Prepare to be surprised, pivot, and ask again… many times.
Create a landing page, small ad campaign, and get market validation. Then you can recruit a couple friends or freelancers to build it. Ah, make sure you have contracts. Don’t be like the Winkelvoss twins.
But really, make sure you’re enjoying your college years. Good luck!
Hi rem4ik4ever :)
First comment: Unclear value statement at readers’ first glance. You don’t say it til the very end, “Unlock Efficient Booking!”. E.g. check this out: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/17tjr3i/i\_analyzed\_100\_hero\_sections\_of\_mostly\_saas/
Have you looked at other businesses doing this? How do they do it?
This could be useful for booths at amusement parks, where they already have the physical hardware (“shoot the bullseye”). How would you get physical wheels to the businesses? If it’s virtual, how would customers trust that it’s not rigged?
Thinking as a customer, I probably wouldn’t be interested in something that’s pure luck. I’d be more interested in something that’s skills-based. Like, if I were buying something that was $34, I might pay an extra $1 for a shot at the prize. So this could be a ‘guess the president’ trivia game or ‘shoot the bullseye’ instead of ‘spin the wheel’. Actually, I’d probably pay an extra $1 for a shot at even a $50 prize as long as the challenge sounds fun. The prize also sounds more attainable at $50 than at $50k.
But I’m not a gambler :) Maybe this is more interesting to folks who buy lotto tickets?
If you do the paperwork yourself, LLCs can be ~$100 to form - not sure about Florida. But that depends on whether you’re willing to be your own registered agent and expose your mailing address. If you need to pay someone as your registered agent, write your operating agreement, etc, that can be $500-$900 not including the insurance. You may also have minimum required taxes each year. BTW: don’t trust those review sites that say agencies will form LLCs for you for $150ish, they’re totally off.
LLCs are a great way to protect your personal assets, but they can be expensive to form *unless* you handle it all yourself.
Are you fully confident this business will work out? How much do you expect to make, and what’s your risk tolerance with your initial clientele while you’re just starting out? These are all important considerations.
You absolutely shouldn’t have to brainstorm how to fix your programmer’s bugs.
It sounds like you two weren’t a good fit. Maybe he was unethical, or maybe there were other issues. You wrote that you were eventually telling him “how” to do things; that’s not a level of interaction you should have to take or that most programmers I know would be comfortable with. A non-technical boss should just be telling developers the requirements and ideally the “why”, not the “how”.
You might want a technical cofounder, or an engineer who’d be willing to walk you through best practices in working with them. This will help you learn and set expectations for leading programming teams in the future.