Start your company now

Want to create a company? Thinking you need a ton of capital? You don’t.

Don’t listen to the nonsense or the noise. Right now is the best time in the history of capitalism to start a company. Is there a recession/hangover/impending economic doom? Probably. Housing craziness? Yep. Layoffs and industry turmoil. Mmhmm. Inflation? Lots of it.

In early 2023 I left my high paying and quite wonderful job at Pure Storage (shoutout to those guys for having me, and being so supportive when I left) to start DeepWhale AI, since rebranded as North (north.inc).

The first 6-7 months were crazy, stressful and amazing. Did we raise capital? No. Did we sign tons of customers in the first 90 days? No. To be honest, we didn't even write a line of code for the first 100 or so days of the company.

We did talk to tons of customers, investors, advisors and started building the framework of what the market was telling us to make. Nobody took a salary, and I lived off my savings.

I wouldn't recommend this path to many people, however I see more and more people taking the plunge each week, which is great. The world needs more people building amazing companies to replace and disrupt the lazy, the greedy, and the stubborn. And to house and create opportunities for the tons of people out there without a job or looking for their next adventure. Right now is the greatest time to make the jump and go build.

If you’re thinking about it, and you’re not alone by the way, here’s a little blueprint on how you can basically build almost any type of company(venture scale, small, services based, software, resale, b2c/b2b etc) for less than $1,000. You don’t need a ton of capital to get going.

Test First Build Second.

Simply put, most companies fail because of one of two reasons. Either someone builds something no one cares about, or someone builds something and sucks at finding and selling to the people that care about it. Almost every startup failure comes down to one of those two buckets. No it's not because of the economy or because investors don’t like you or because you didn't know the right people.

The best way to tackle the first couple of months, is to show potential buyers a product that doesn't exist to test if it should. How? Make it look like it does exist.

1. Create a slick brand on Figma. Cost: $0
2. Create a great website at duda (duda.co). Cost: $30-50/Month.
3. Add in some cool art and illustrations via iconscout. Cost: $10-30/Month.
4. Run google ads against your product to drive traffic to your site, and see if you get sign ups for a beta/test/waitlist. You can make your site one page with a subscribe link or make it multiple pages. Cost: as much or as little as you want. I recommend starting $50-100/Month for initial testing.

Total cost for this phase: $90-180.

Great, you designed the framework of something cool. Now find customers or testers. Try not to make these people your friends. Huge mistake. Your buddy buying your software because he/she genuinely loves you, isn't a confirmation that you’ve figured out a great business, it's a sign you have great friends.

You might be onto something? Great time to start going deeper. Find 10-40 people that might buy your product and go talk to them. Make this all you do for 60-90 days. 12 hours a day you are working on beg, borrowing, hacking, stealing your way into 50 conversations with people that might be your first paying customer. A few channels that need to be your bread and butter at this stage:

1. Apollo.io is the tool to use for email sequencing (automated personal emails that take no work to send). Also you can grab direct dials with an enterprise plan. 100+ calls/emails per day minimum. Don't listen to your marketing friend that tells you it's all about HVCOs(if you know you know) and “capturing the audience early” because it's trash advice. You don’t have time for a 14 month sales cycle. You need feedback from real buyers tomorrow. Go talk to them. Cost: $100-300/Mo
2. Linkedin is the single best tool to network, inbox and chat. Use it. It's free. Create simple and short copy & paste messages that probe if a contact might be into your service or product. Hint >> simple really means a sentence or two. Cost: free.
3. Networking: spend no more than 10% of your time here. I see way too many entrepreneurs spending half their day at events and luncheons. You get almost nothing done at these. They are usually hail mary events, meaning 95% of the time it's a wasted, but once in a while you meet someone there and it clicks into something big.
4. Optional Investor conversations. If you’re building a venture scale business(and you should seriously consider not going this route for most business types) then repeat steps 1-3 but with investors also. 200+ touches (100 customer, 100 investor). How do you find investors? Tons of tools out there that are free. VCsheet is great, so is openVC. Follow folks in the vc community on LI and see what they post. A lot of folks post helpful articles and tools for anyone to use for free. Use apollo. Search by titles (investor, associate investor, venture, principle, GP/investor, angel investor, you get the idea) You’ll find tons of contacts & companies this way. Ask friends. Chances are you have met or are friends with someone that has raised capital before. If you know me, ask me. Ask for help.

Total cost for this phase: $100-300.

Once phases 1 & 2 are cooking, start building. Find a cofounder or a team, offer equity. You’ll find amazing people.

My Co-founder and I met on angel list. I created a job post for a CTO for a company that at that time was in concept mode. We had great conversations, created an equity heavy package that allowed me to have him create an MVP and start earning a salary later, once the company was funded and doing well. If you’re technical, find a seller. If you’re a seller, find someone that can write code. If you’re not building a business with software, bring on someone that makes the company wildly better immediately. Triple down on your superpower and bring in people to round you out.

A few more nuggets to those about to launch.

>> Right now is a golden time to recruit, play the cards you have been dealt. Fill your team with some of the amazing talent on the unemployment line, it's never been easier (or cheaper) to acquire amazing talent.

>> Work a lot. But not 18 hours a day. Take breaks, workout, spend time with your family or kids. But schedule your days where you maximize your time. Anything operational that can be done at 9pm push it to the night time, make a coffee and open your laptop after dinner. Netflix will be there in a year but your business might not be.

>> Ask for help and be honest. What do you need help with? Chances are you’re a first time founder, and a lot of building a business will be new and uncomfortable to you. Ask others who have done it. This is a great time to reach out to people you look up to and ask for mentorship and feedback.

>> The business is not about you. You are a servant there to help people you bring into the business maximize their own ability. You need to focus on helping your people do the best work of their career at your company and keeping them motivated and thrilled to stay. Your customer's experience and your employee’s experience is the only thing that matters. Everything else will fall into place over time. Are you making a product or service people love? Do your people love making it? Find those answers.

>> In the first year, say no to anything in your life that doesn't serve your business needs or your family needs. Everything else takes a back seat. Go on that golf trip in a year. This rule reverses after the company is off the ground as time away from the business is great for you. Time away will give your brain time to dream, think, analyze and get inspired. Travel will make you a more well rounded and interested person which will help you relate and ultimately lead others.

>> If you work like crazy you will be floored at what you can accomplish in one week. Start thinking about where the business needs to be in 3 days, 5 days, 2 weeks, not in terms of months/quarters/years.

>> Every single company or product that you love(Airbnb, Tesla, Apple, etc) probably had tons of pivots or changes in the early years. They also all had to “fake it until you make it”. You will too and it’s fine.

>> Get good at things you can't hire someone for. There are always limitations to who you can bring on at what times. Want a better brand or website? Learn to build one yourself. Hate accounting? Oh well, do it yourself. Eventually you can hire and scale but you might not be able to up front. This rule shouldnt come at a sacrifice of you tripling down on your superpower.

>> Kill long meetings. I've been building North for almost a year and have never once scheduled a 60 minute meeting in the history of the company. 99% of my customer calls are scheduled as 15 minute calls, yes even pitch calls. Stop spending 15 minutes talking to a customer about your weekend, they don’t care. They do care about if your product can solve a problem they have.

>> MOST IMPORTANT >> Don't do business with assholes. Customers, employees, and investors apply to this rule. You don’t have to love everyone all the time, but say no to working with jerks 100% of the time. Don’t ever break this rule.

Happy building!!!