Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs, Students, Recent Graduates

Being a young and ambitious entrepreneur, I am a strong believer that we should start a startup as early as possible. I have already written about the ASAP Implementation approach. I also mentioned the advantages of starting a startup at young age.

But I do face lot of challenges as well. So being a devil’s advocate, I am just trying to look at the same objective, i.e. to start a startup at early stage, from a different perspective.

What are the challenges that young entrepreneurs may have to face?

Not mature and experienced enough
When we are just graduated fresh out of school, and are not exposed to real world challenges, then while solving the problems, our approach to these problems is not based on industry standard. We still think small. We think that startup projects are next versions of school projects. But we need to understand that  its not just next version. Building a product is huge and complex task, but building a company is something which we never learn at school. Startup is not just about one remarkable product. It is about a growing company. And defining a vision to grow your startup is a challenge. Also, school projects are practice problems, but the startup problems are real. The intensity of these problems is very different. Work experience matters a lot because it gives you an understanding that how difficult and complex the real world problems are and what type of intricacy level you need work to solve that problem.

But the good news is that there are some ways, through which, we can overcome this lack of exposure to real world experiences. There are lot of experienced people out there who are happy to help us out, so leveraging from their experience can be a key to overcome our startup in early age issue.

Definitely, getting help and channelizing it an appropriate direction is a challenge, but its surely not a showstopper if we plan things well ahead of time and work on it consciously.

The Time management dilemma – School Vs Startup
When we are students, most of the time is spent in studying academic
courses. Similarly, when we are recent graduates, we are busy in
proving our excellence to our new boss. So we spend very little time in
building product prototype, understanding the market trends, learning
business aspects, knowing the financial terms, building the
relationships and networking. So we have less preparation time before
we enter into this entrepreneurial world.

Of course, having lot of preparation time is not a requisite step to
enter into an entrepreneurial world. Many entrepreneurs learn most of
these things on the fly on an incremental basis with the help of right
mentors. But it is always an added advantage if we at least know the
theory behind entrepreneurship. But if we plan some of the important
things well ahead of time, I think these failures can be mitigated.

Does Money matter? Of course Yes!
In today’s world, even if the cost involved in starting a startup has reduced dramatically, it is not free. Starting a part time activity is manageable, but if we want to start a real entity, then it involves the money game. We need to raise money to bootstrap our company, especially when we are just graduated from the school. When we are working for other company, we can save some money, which can be used at least to bootstrap our idea.

Again, there are ways to raise the money, but as we are kids in this entrepreneur world, we have very less credibility in the market. So it is little hard to raise the money even if investors are ready to invest in our idea. If someone is coming up with same idea but with experienced management team, I guess they will go for other team.

One thing we can do is, do some savings when we are young, such that, that money is enough to get the prototype of our idea running. Once we have running prototype, then we can focus on raising more money.

Having said all, I accept that there are lot of problems. But I also believe that there are solutions and more importantly, there are solution providers. For me, the bottom line still remains the same – start ASAP.