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Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

Should you start a startup?

More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That's the main reason I wrote this. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that would probably be a good thing.
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So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.
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My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing-- though in that case it probably won't take four years.
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I don't think the amount of bullshit you have to deal with in a startup is more than you'd endure in an ordinary working life. It's probably less, in fact; it just seems like a lot because it's compressed into a short period. So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That's the way to think about it if you're trying to decide whether to start one. If you're the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.

Source: Paul Graham's essay  "How to Start a Startup".

What customers want

In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product.
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Get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that's implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
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In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

Source: Paul Graham's essay  "How to Start a Startup".

The idea to start a startup

In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
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Look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.

Source: Paul Graham's essay  "How to Start a Startup".

Are you an animal?

Excerpt from Paul Graham's article "How to Start a Startup":

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.

Definitely a must read for anyone interested in the subject. I will post more excerpts from his essay soon.

Brief Note On Startups.

Reading through TechCrunch I came across one of Sarah Lacey's posts where I found this brief paragraph to be especially important:

Here’s why this matters: Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.

You can read the full article here.