Starting your own gig

Last two weeks have been interesting. Talking to lot of people and running my ideas around, I got good / interesting advice. Let me hash out a cookbook (cheat sheet) for anyone who is interested and jot down notes that I can come back to later.

1. VISION

Cliched but essential. Not going down to the grand description as taught in business schools. What is needed here is a definition of what you want to achieve. Right now I have an idea which is I would say is ummm..... half baked. It is in my mind constantly and I keep thinking about it day and night. However, what I need to do at this juncture is verbalize it. A good bit of advice given to me is put it down in a powerpoint. This achieves two goals - a. Helps verbalize ideas in your mind & b. this is the medium by which you can attract / recruit a team who would contribute their time.

2. BUSINESS PLAN

Again not a grand treatise here, but penning down series of progression on what need you are trying to resolve. Need, Solution, Competing solutions, Strengths of your solution, Adoption (sales) cycle, Possible monetiziation.

At this point, you have a basic set defined of what you are embarking on. Next is getting feedback. Talk to people and discuss. In general, you tend to have a bias and you need someone to challenge your thoughts.

3. TEAM

After this go about getting good people on board. Work with a team of 5-6 to contribute towards a mashup / prototype. This would be a new experience for me and I know the challenge would be managing engineers who are innovators and working on their own time with no assured returns.

My ideal team that I am looking for is

1. My Self in the role of a product manager (define vision), project manager(timelines/dependencies), designer (architect), code (developer), test (QA), SCM, IT, Janitor ... all in one.
2. Technologist - An architect who is focussed on simplicity and elegance.
3. Advisor - Thought leader necessary to expand the boundaries of current thinking.
4. Developer1 - Front end developer
5. UI designer - Images, flash, css, look and feel

4. PROTOTYPE & ADOPTION

Build a simple prototype (but i do want it jazzy to get the wow factor) with limited functionality.

Deploying your proto and getting some traction I feel is essential to get feedback on what you are doing. Start sowing seeds of this thought process right now. The points mentioned above are all under your control. This is the point of inflexion where you are ready to show your solution to your target. I believe much will depend on how this phase goes.

5. FUNDING

I am not clear on this aspect, but this would be taking the next step in your enterprise. There are variety of avenues that can be used depending on what you need. Angel / VC / equity / debt et al. But here I feel an understanding of what you need, how much you need and why you need needs to be hashed out. As a general principle what I feel is that this negotiation needs to be at a level playing field. As much as you need funds, I believe in this economy, people with money also would be looking out for ventures that they can invest in.

But I will think about this around the time I feel we are there.

I dont know how I am going to fare, but one thing came to my mind as I was talking to a friend of mine recently - "I dont want to be accused of thinking small and failing, but I want to think big and succeed."