If you are starting your own business, even a small business, I’ve compiled some advice for you. I read, watched, and listened to hours of entrepreneurs sharing their experiences, advice, tips, mistakes, and so on.

Among these entrepreneurs were big tech company founders, globally known CEOs, and others whom I’ve personally had the opportunity to talk to.

This is not by any means an exhaustive list, but I should say that much of the advice and mistakes to avoid were constantly repeated, maybe with different wording, but the core idea was the same. Let’s get into it.

Ideation

1. I’ll start with something I truly believe. Do what you love✨. 

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Steve Jobs

“Do something you are very passionate about.”

Jeff Bezos

2. Do it for fun. When you do it for fun, your mind just thinks and thinks and thinks until you make the product better. 

3. 🧐 Do the research, ask questions, dive deep into the information, and read.

4. Alex Hormozis’ tip on getting ideas 💡. What people ask you to do as a favor because you are good at it is something that you can charge for later.

5. You have to come up with ideas every day, or the idea muscle atrophies. 

• Try and come up with 10 ideas every day. After 6 months, you will become a machine.

6. 🆕 You don’t need to create anything new. Just think about the value equation. How can you add more value, do it differently, or do it better?

7. As Steve Jobs preached, you have to start with the Customer Experience (CX) and work backward with the technology.

• What are the benefits for the customer?
• You don’t start by sitting with the engineering team, figuring out what great technology we have, and then understanding how we can market that. 

Learning and Problem-Solving when Starting Your Business

8. Even before you start your business, you can start building the network you need 👥. You don’t need to wait to launch, and in many cases, you should NOT wait. This includes clients, mentors, teams, partners, and so on. 

9. Google it. If you can’t solve it with Google, then entrepreneurship might not be for you.

10. When starting your business, you will need to learn through practice. You can work for free; it’s also called learning 🖋️. 

On Success

11. There is no shortcut to success 🚀. 

12. Get trench knowledge and depth of experience. There is a sequence. You need to build a foundation; you can’t skip from step one to the top of the mountain. 

Structuring and Scaling

13. If you are thinking about starting your business, put yourself in a business that doesn’t have limits. You need to be able to visualize it scaling 🌎.

14. Start small. Make the experience great for one person, and then figure out how to scale that. Don’t scale something that isn’t great and try to fix it later; that is harder. This is super important if you are starting your business.

15. Write it down! ✏️ Create a Business Plan, so you and other stakeholders can understand your business. This will also help you set your own expectations and those of others around you.

16. Think about all the things you need when starting a business, and not necessarily from day one. For example:

• Name
• Logo
• Figure out what you are going to design
• How are you going to get it to the marketplace 

17. You need to find people who are insanely great at what they do 💥, not necessarily the most seasoned professionals.

• If you can find a group of 10 great people, you can do great things.

18. Your most important job will be recruiting 👩🏻‍💼. 

Visualize It

19. You need to believe it enough so you can see it 👀.

20. Metrics 🎯. In marketing, we say there are two things that don’t exist: what isn’t measured and what isn’t communicated. To avoid losing sight of where you need to go, you should be clear on the metric or metrics that you need to track.

Now, don’t over-obsess with the metric that you lose track of where you need to go. The metric should be there to help you be clear on where you’re going. 

• Ask yourself: What do I need to measure to make sure I’m on track?

Get Things Done

21. Set deadlines and hard stops 🚦. This can help with many of the fears surrounding launching your business. Promise yourself to stick to the launching deadline!

• Make a plan and follow through. You will be proud of yourself 😉.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you are probably wondering, among many other things, what to do when starting your business. So, besides the advice and tips, I also took note of mistakes and things to avoid when starting a business.

22. Oversharing 📢. Be careful who you share with. Don’t share everything with everyone before you execute. 

23. You don’t need to over-plan 📄. Take Action. Just get started. You’ll learn more by doing than by thinking about it.

• Something else, the longer your idea is in your mind, without you testing or validating it, the harder it will be, to be honest with yourself if you find that the market doesn’t need it or that your idea doesn’t really solve anything.

24. Not making time for thinking 💭.

• Here’s a challenge: try to spend at least one hour a week on thinking and journaling.

25. ☑️ Not having a Goal or not having a big-picture idea of where you want to go or where your idea can take you. You need to be able to give direction to your team. And I would say, even if the team is just you and yourself.

You can start with a rough vision and redefine and change your mind later, but at least you have a starting point. It’s much easier to stir the direction of a moving ship than to start one that isn’t moving. 

Guiding Questions

• What are you going for?
• Do you have a revenue goal for the year?
• Think of your idea or the business you are starting and ask yourself, what does the future look like? 
• Have a vision and a reason why. Something that will keep you going when things aren’t going as smoothly as you’d like them to.

26. Having too many goals 🚫. You should have one main goal that you focus on. Then, that goal can have subgoals or milestones. Things that you can work towards.

Here is How YOU Can Do It: 

1) First off, grab pen and paper.

2) Now ask yourself, in a specific number of months or years, what do you want to be celebrating? What results? Milestones?

3) Write those down, all of them.

4) Then you choose one. If you could only achieve one of those goals, which one would it be?

5) Now, you have your ONE goal, and you can get going.

This is my personal example, with everything blurred.

• I used different color post-its to write and categorize goals from different areas: professional, personal, and so on.
• I decided to work on a list of things I would like to accomplish in 10 months. You could do 3, 6 months, or 12, whichever is best for you. Some people do it by years.

Depending on how much time you want to spend on it and how much time you’ve previously spent thinking about it, this can take from 15 minutes to an hour. I’d recommend you try and come up with at least 50 goals. After writing some goals, you may start getting more ideas and being more specific, which is better.

27. Not recognizing there are multiple paths to get to your goal 🧗🏻‍♀️. There are paths you know, and there are also many others you don’t. 

• Read more books on how to get to your goal.
• Speak to people who have achieved that; just ask people you have access to. They don’t have to have done the ultra-specific thing you want to do. Still, they probably know a thing or two about how to start and scale a business. You can run your idea and strategy past them, and they can help you identify things you are missing or haven’t considered. 
• Think about who could help you along the way.

28. Not Focusing. ➡️ Don’t split your focus on too many areas. You have a limited amount of time and energy; use it wisely!! Choose the ONE thing in each area of your life.

“We try to focus and do very few things well… we decide not to do a lot of things so we can focus on a few handfuls of things and do them well.”

Steve Jobs

29. Working in Parallel: you don’t have to do all things at once, you can work in sequences or series.

• My personal take: I like working in sprints 🏎️ or batches, which allow you to focus completely on the one thing you have to do and get it done instead of spreading your energy and attention all over the place. Usually, even if I plan on doing things in parallel, I end up working in a specific task or project because I obsess over it, and all of my focus goes into this one thing.
• Ultimately, it’s like time blocking – much more productive than trying to get some minutes from here and there.

My Personal Bonus ✨

30. NOT asking for help. We all need help with something because we are not “know-it-alls” and we don’t have experience with everything.

I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make, and one of the easiest ways to hinder your progress, is not asking for help, whether that is an opinion, advice, consultation, a once-and-done or a week-on-week coaching session.

Whatever you need to keep up your progress, figure it out and reach out to people who can help 📧. Many will say no. Maybe they’re too busy but keep going until you find a few who can. And be grateful ✔️. 

“If you know exactly what you want to be, you need to spend as much time with people who are actually that already.”

Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ll end with this because I love it.

Everyone has ideas; the challenge is not coming up with ideas. Its validating the idea and executing on it.

TL; DR. To summarize, here are a few things you need to know when starting a business.

There is so much advice and knowledge that people, especially entrepreneurs themselves, are very kind to share. As I mentioned in the beginning, this is not an exhaustive list, and of course, there will be many nuances and aspects to consider depending on your project, idea, industry, and so on.

As I keep learning and listening to entrepreneurs, I’ll keep sharing 😉.