To give you a great browsing experience free of charge, this site uses cookies. Cookies help us personalize content and ads, provide social media features, track your preferences, and analyze traffic. Forbes may share this information with its advertising, analytics, and social media partners, who may use it with information you have provided to them in connection with their services. What are my motives? Startups require passion and persistence, which flows from purpose. How comfortable am I with failure? Startups are hard, and failure is guaranteed. The fear of failure is paralyzing and will lead you to make poor, shortsighted decisions. Even if the startup succeeds, there will be plenty of broken promises, unfulfilled expectations, and disappointment. Can you handle it with determination and grace? Which of my responsibilities will be disrupted by starting this? You have responsibilities to your family, your friends, your community, and perhaps your current employer. What will be disrupted by this endeavor? Is it worth it? All startups begin with this question. Facebook saw a lack of opportunity to easily communicate with classmates. Instagram thought photos taken with a mobile phone looked boring. Do I have the problem? Having the problem personally allows instant insight into virtually every area of the business and an intuition about what potential customers want. Is it already in the market? No amount of innovation is likely to disrupt the existing product. Business is about balancing risk and reward. If the opportunity is not significant, you either need to make sure your risk is low or abandon ship. What is my risk to test? A startup is nothing more than a hypothesis, and the first phase of every startup is testing that hypothesis. How difficult costly, labor intensive, time intensive will the test be to conduct? How many hypothesis adjustments pivots should we reasonably make based on the opportunity? Who is going to buy and why? What methods are you going to use to acquire customers, and what is the acquisition cost to do so? Can the concept be easily described and easily understood? Nothing complicated goes anywhere. How many gatekeepers are there to my success? Corporate hierarchy, middlemen, and single-source suppliers all pose significant roadblocks to long-term success. Try to have the least reliance on multi-layer sales situations, re-seller arrangements, or a single data source Twitter. Am I offering a vitamin or a painkiller? While valuable, no one wakes up in the morning craving a vitamin. Conversely, painkillers address an immediate and important need. Selling vitamins requires establishing the need first. Selling painkillers merely requires the presentation of a solution. What resources will you need to purchase to be successful? Whatever you just estimated, triple it. How long will it take to start bringing in significant revenue? Whatever you just said, quadruple it. Burn rate is the amount of cash you consume every month to keep the doors open. Runway is the amount of cash on hand divided by your burn rate, which is usually stated in months. A frequent mistake is underestimating cash needs and overestimating sales opportunities. This deadly combination spells an end to more than its fair share of startups. Where can I turn for mentorship and advice? They have the scars and stories to prove it. Learning from their mistakes and getting sound outside counsel will be a critical component to your success. Where are those people, and can you access them? Do you have the two most important skills? All startups require some combination of technical expertise and marketing. Who is going to handle accounting, taxation, finance, and operations? This is the most often overlooked aspect of entrepreneurship and creates massive headaches in short order. Note: Your answers are just for you. Remember to be honest with yourself, and while you might paint a rosy picture publicly, never buy your own B. These are tough but necessary questions. Brent Beshore is the founder and CEO of 28 on 2011 Inc. He is also a venture partner at Gen Y Capital, a regular contributor to Forbes, Huffington Post, and Washington Post, and a runner-up in the 2011 VH1 Do Something Awards lost to Lady Gaga for his work in helping his hometown of Joplin, MO recover from the devastating tornado. Connect with Brent on , and.
