learningAssuming I have an idea but know nothing about startups and entrepreneurship, how much time should I spend on learning? What books/courses/… do you recommend for learning?
By working I mean working on the idea and trying to make it happen. By learning I mean like reading a book. (not learning that comes from research on customers, that’s work!)
Here are some good sources for learning about entrepreneurship:
Paul Graham's essays. Graham is the founder of the most successful startup incubator, Y Combinator, and one of the best writers and thinkers in the startup ecosystem. I also recommend his book, Founders at Work.
Ben Horowitz's blog. Horowitz is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, one of the newest and most successful VC firms. His new book, The Hard Thing about Hard Things, is also good.
How to Build a Startup, a free online course by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank (I couldn't add a third link to this answer but you can Google for the class). Blank helped pioneer the concept of customer development - of "getting outside the building" to talk to customers and identify needs before plunging into developing product.
I recommend spending 1-3 months on learning about entrepreneurship and whether it's for you before starting to execute an idea. Entrepreneurship is a very challenging (and very rewarding) career choice. It's seen as glamorous but many people do not have the personality, skills, or dedication to be successful entrepreneurs. If you are mainly looking to make a lot of money, strongly reconsider since entrepreneurship requires more work with less guaranteed returns than most other careers.
If you decide entrepreneurship is a good fit, start exploring industries and problems that align with your passions and skills. Talk with people in those fields about problems they want solved. Don't suggest solutions at first, just ask questions and listen. Interesting solutions will come to you as you learn more about the problems.
You'll also want to network in the startup community to meet potential co-founders, mentors, and eventually investors. What events to attend will depend on your area but many cities now have startup meetups and events. You can also try contacting founders of startups in your area to meet for advice. I've found many experienced entrepreneurs will meet with aspiring founders who ask thoughtfully for help (ask specific questions, listen well, offer to help if you can).
Hope this helps!
If you are thinking of entering the startup scene, before even doing a thing about your idea I recommend spending 3 months on just learning on entrepreneurship in general, so you have an idea of what you are getting into.
Then about 3 months of validating your idea with customers and researching other companies, competitors so you get a sense of the market. Researching their founders, their products, their timeline, the problems they had, how they solved those etc.. I think this should be about 50-50.
After that I advise 70% executing and 30% learning. Our company culture is based on this. If you work for 5 years but do the same thing as you did on the 2nd week, you only have 2 weeks of experience of that job. But if you are constantly learning and improving than you get real experience which is very valuable.
That being said this is a subjective matter and these are all my personal opinions. This should only give you a perspective. I am also curious about the answers of other people.
Additional resources for learning:
Watch every YouTube video from Y Combinator's start-up school 2012/2013/2014.
Ash Maurya's books and videos. e.g. Running Lean.
Utilise the LeanStack tools and guidance from Spark59 to help you get into the start-up mindset at the same time as turning your idea into business canvases, models and experiments that can be validated.
I can only tackle the learning part, as I don’t know what kind of business you want to start to give you an estimation as to how much time you will spend working.
For learning you’ll need to know a few basic fundamentals:
Basic Marketing: You’ll need to understand the market you’re getting into and how to be competitive in that market. (1 months)
Basic Accounting: You’ll need be able to read financial statements at a minimum. (1 month - 3 months)
Basic Business Management: You’ll need to learn different business structures (sole proprietorship, partnership, and incorporation), certain ethics, and so on. (1 - 2 months)
How to put your own website up: There are many services like Wix, Wordpress, or shopify (ecommerce) This can range from a week and beyond.
Depending on where you’re from there might be services to help you learn. In Canada there is Canadian Youth Business Foundation. Which helps youths with startups. The best way to know if these exist is to check with your town hall, they might have a business development center that you can talk too.
For books on learning these things, my best advice is to snap up old used college books, on each subject. Basically, introduction to management, or accounting, and so on. Use books you think will help you best in learning. With using text books you know you’re getting data on how to do something, not books that are basically people giving you a motivational talk of how to do well in business, or internet click bait.
Learning will never stop in a business though, so get ready to constantly updating your knowledge.
I think learning is a pretty important part of the process. Maybe you could do what google does: 70% of your time for work, 20% of your time to improve your work (learning and improving productivity) and 10% of your time for whatever you want.
Whatever you choose, it’s important that you at least leave some time for learning. I speak about this in this blog post: https://medium.com/keep-learning-keep-growing/how-to-enjoy-reading-books-2d10d13905c7
Good Luck
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