Why you Should Begin Working on your Start-Up Idea Already

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Abstract

lar, successful, and paying product to be produced, in fact, a <a href="http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf">study done by Stanford</a> has shown that productivity per hour dramatically decreased after 50 hours, and after 55 hours the extra productivity may even be negative. Starting early and not waiting for the perfect moment will give you enough of a head start to make up for not working day and night.</p><h2 id="16c5">Just start working</h2><p id="beb8">The idea behind Barkr came about from a friend of a friend. There are so many different doors for a new opportunity to come from in your life making it so important to aggregate and take advantage of these sources of new ideas when they present themselves. Throughout your network whether its friends, family, or coworkers there will be some inspiration for the improvement of life.</p><p id="5f7b">My now business parter had done some decent research, and presented some basic sketches of the site. Being a college student, this was more effort than anyone else had put into showing me how committed they were about creating a start-up, and really was all it took for me to start working on it. I accepted the task without any knowledge other than the surface level information of: development stacks, web service technologies, microservices, etc… But I figured this was all something I could learn, or at the very least, pretend to learn and implement from existing open source solutions out there. This led me down the path of learning more about Web Development, Server Architecture, and the Cloud than I had in 4 years of college.</p><p id="7b45">Many of the hours spent were in trial and error, and debugging that seemingly had no end. Errors I had never seen before and didn’t know what they meant were popping up left and right, when the only goal was to create a Minimum Viable Product. “How can I even continue coding this knowing that I’m so inexperienced and won’t be able to handle bigger challenges if I can’t even get the simple stuff right?”. It was certainly not a straight forward process, but I started learning a few things.</p><ol><li>Just start working on something. It is easy to feel like you’ve accomplished something when all you have done is thought about what your plans are for that task. Until you start, you won’t realize which assumptions you were right or wrong about. You can spend all of your time worrying about how to create something so that you

Options

won’t have to refactor it in the future but most of us won’t get the code right until the second or third try.</li><li>Take each task day by day, and don’t worry about the big picture so much unless thats what you are currently supposed to be thinking about. As you make small progress, even if that means not breaking something that day, incremental changes will start compounding to create something larger than expected.</li><li>Don’t plan unnecessary features until you actually need them. It is likely that you will deviate and build off of your initial ideas once you begin talking to real customers. My parter really helped me with this one. It gets overwhelming at times trying to plan too far ahead. It was slowing my coding progress because I spent most of my time worrying about what would happen if “1 million people started using it tomorrow and our servers couldn’t balance the traffic correctly”, or “what if we start getting DDOS attacks or hackers started breaking into our servers”. Don’t be negligent about it, but know what your real task at hand is.</li></ol><h2 id="491c">Reflecting</h2><p id="f94b">The bumps in the road that make you want to quit and make the idea seem hopeless contribute an important learning experience and will start to shape your product. What started as an unoriginal idea transformed by its own creative process. I found that I had to take a step back at times, and to not worry about the things that aren’t there. I used to think that the small day to day tasks were just a means to an end. The priority should be focusing on whatever you are working on in the present, not about an imaginary situation that your mind comes up with.</p><p id="20d6">My experience creating and developing <a href="http://barkrgrooming.com">barkrgrooming.com</a> is still an ongoing process, and a journey that I wish to continue sharing with the intention of inspiring others that want to create their own start-up but haven’t yet, for whatever reason. I will continue to write more in depth about learning the coding process and setting up my production server on AWS, handling web traffic, DNS, caching, and scaling in future blog posts to come.</p><p id="a560"><i>Learn more about the fang journey and various other new things I’m trying in life <a href="https://nikitabuslov.substack.com/p/coming-soon?r=8rjjw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy">here</a>.</i></p></article></body>

and just stop worrying about it.

In this day and age just about anything you need to build a successful startup or business can be found online, and usually for free. Without any knowledge of the technologies or programming languages I used prior to starting, I was able to create a small web based start-up for dog grooming appointments. This is not to say that I am some sort of coding genius, but to show that anybody could do it too.

Common misconceptions

It is under my impression that many successful startups are believed to have started as a revolutionary idea that somebody had while experiencing a life-changing thought that was a message from the above telling this was their calling in life. From personal experience, this is a glorified story-telling device that the person tells themselves with the intention of making a shot in the dark seem like it was made with careful consideration. With all the glory that these famous ideas get in interviews, why wouldn’t the person want to add a little spotlight to it. It’ll make it seem that they weren’t totally making a wild guess to pursue this idea with no real thought or expectation of the outcome.

When given some additional thought, maybe this one idea is worth a shot. Nobody knows what road your efforts will bring you down, but the best you can do is know that it is time to try something new and hope for the best. At the very least, it’s another personal project that could added to a resumé and some experience and knowledge to gain.

Another impression I get comes from the Silicon Valley tech startup culture. There are expectations of working ridiculous 12–16 hour days to push a product out the door as soon as possible. The stereotypical lights off, white screen glare, hacker with a hoodie comes to mind. However, this is not the only way for a popular, successful, and paying product to be produced, in fact, a study done by Stanford has shown that productivity per hour dramatically decreased after 50 hours, and after 55 hours the extra productivity may even be negative. Starting early and not waiting for the perfect moment will give you enough of a head start to make up for not working day and night.

Just start working

The idea behind Barkr came about from a friend of a friend. There are so many different doors for a new opportunity to come from in your life making it so important to aggregate and take advantage of these sources of new ideas when they present themselves. Throughout your network whether its friends, family, or coworkers there will be some inspiration for the improvement of life.

My now business parter had done some decent research, and presented some basic sketches of the site. Being a college student, this was more effort than anyone else had put into showing me how committed they were about creating a start-up, and really was all it took for me to start working on it. I accepted the task without any knowledge other than the surface level information of: development stacks, web service technologies, microservices, etc… But I figured this was all something I could learn, or at the very least, pretend to learn and implement from existing open source solutions out there. This led me down the path of learning more about Web Development, Server Architecture, and the Cloud than I had in 4 years of college.

Many of the hours spent were in trial and error, and debugging that seemingly had no end. Errors I had never seen before and didn’t know what they meant were popping up left and right, when the only goal was to create a Minimum Viable Product. “How can I even continue coding this knowing that I’m so inexperienced and won’t be able to handle bigger challenges if I can’t even get the simple stuff right?”. It was certainly not a straight forward process, but I started learning a few things.

Just start working on something. It is easy to feel like you’ve accomplished something when all you have done is thought about what your plans are for that task. Until you start, you won’t realize which assumptions you were right or wrong about. You can spend all of your time worrying about how to create something so that you won’t have to refactor it in the future but most of us won’t get the code right until the second or third try.

Take each task day by day, and don’t worry about the big picture so much unless thats what you are currently supposed to be thinking about. As you make small progress, even if that means not breaking something that day, incremental changes will start compounding to create something larger than expected.

Don’t plan unnecessary features until you actually need them. It is likely that you will deviate and build off of your initial ideas once you begin talking to real customers. My parter really helped me with this one. It gets overwhelming at times trying to plan too far ahead. It was slowing my coding progress because I spent most of my time worrying about what would happen if “1 million people started using it tomorrow and our servers couldn’t balance the traffic correctly”, or “what if we start getting DDOS attacks or hackers started breaking into our servers”. Don’t be negligent about it, but know what your real task at hand is.

Reflecting

The bumps in the road that make you want to quit and make the idea seem hopeless contribute an important learning experience and will start to shape your product. What started as an unoriginal idea transformed by its own creative process. I found that I had to take a step back at times, and to not worry about the things that aren’t there. I used to think that the small day to day tasks were just a means to an end. The priority should be focusing on whatever you are working on in the present, not about an imaginary situation that your mind comes up with.

My experience creating and developing barkrgrooming.com is still an ongoing process, and a journey that I wish to continue sharing with the intention of inspiring others that want to create their own start-up but haven’t yet, for whatever reason. I will continue to write more in depth about learning the coding process and setting up my production server on AWS, handling web traffic, DNS, caching, and scaling in future blog posts to come.

Learn more about the fang journey and various other new things I’m trying in life here.