The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.
April - 2011 - issue > Business
Entrepreneurial Lessons for Software Startups
Hemant Elhence
Your superb start-up “idea”, or your “IP”, is not enough.
The real crux of building a business is just that - building the business. In building a successful business, relentless execution is far more important than a great idea or superior intellectual property. Many people dream of great ideas all the time, few really do anything with their idea. Chances are many people have already had the great idea, perhaps an even greater idea than yours. While protectable intellectual property (IP) is helpful, it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for creating successful and valuable business. So don’t get obsessed with your idea or your IP itself, rather focus on starting and building the business.
You can’t make a start-up happen by working at it part-time.
Most entrepreneurs try to start their venture in a lower-risk manner by keeping their day job, or doing some consulting work on the side (which pays the bills), while they are building their new venture on the side. This usually doesn’t work. When the venture needs it most, your focus and your energy get divided. The real action and progress in building a start-up happens when you make that “yet another” cold call, looking for your first customer, on that dull Friday afternoon, when otherwise you would have been working on your day-job or your bills-paying-consulting-gig.
Don’t confuse product based and service based business models.
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