Advice to Entrepreneurs from Entrepreneurs

Tonight's panel that I moderated went really well. There were some great questions and the mix of Michael Jones from ChannelAdvisor, Michael Doernberg from DoubleClick (former CEO of SmartPath) and Ted Dintersmith with Charles River Ventures was fantastic.

Here are some general thoughts they shared in response to questions from me and the audience:

- There are a lot of good new ideas out there. What differentiates companies and makes them great is the execution.

- Entrepreneurs shouldn't debate whether or not this is the right time to start a business. That is almost like trying to time the stock market. The advice was to ignore market conditions.

- Also, entrepreneurs shouldn't read about a hot space and try to start a company trying to copy the model. Usually, when it is in print, it's probably too late. At that point, there could be tons of competition.

- Too much time is spent building and carefully refining a business plan for VCs.

- For the market research for start-ups, it was recommended that instead of studying tons of research reports, more entrepreneurs should pick up the phone and talk to potential customers. Call up twenty potential customers, share your idea and see if they would they be willing to be a beta customer. And if the first twenty say no, be peristant and call another twenty.

- VCs are attracted to entrepreneurs with a "spark" and a winning, take no prisioners attitute.

- Some entrepreneurs think they need to raise a ton of capital to sufficiently build their business, but when you look at many of the most successful companies on NASDAQ, many of them have either raised a small amount of capital (under $10 million) or in other cases, they didn't raise money at all.

Comments

[ideatango.com]

I got the idea for my startup website from reading "The World is Flat." Excellent read for those who haven't read it. But in any case, I hope that once I have a couple years of experience under my belt google & yahoo are still buying web 2.0 communities for $1.4B (by the way, I'll settle for $2M). I'm creating a website called IdeaTango.com. Ideatango.com is an online community that brings together people who have ideas for products or services, with persons or organizations that can help develop those ideas. We empower users to create change and profit from their ingenuity. Check it out, let me know what you think.
Bryan
www.IdeaTango.com
The Daigle Blog @ www.bryandaigle.com

[Michael Jones]

Steve,

We recommended that people work more from business outlines than complicated, time consuming business plans. When running a start-up you need to be flexible, and more importantly you need to get moving on your idea. Sometimes spending too much time on making the perfect business plan can lead to never starting the company :)

MJ

[Steve Shu]

"- Too much time is spent building and carefully refining a business plan for VCs. "

Interesting comment. Wonder what alternatives might have been discussed. Using Powerpoints instead to get some feedback?