Startups Stack Exchange Archive

What is the best time to start an IT business?

• posted by: Oussama GHOUAGH on 2015-01-18
• tagged: lean-startup
• score: 0

What is the best time to start an IT business, when you are young, ambitious and just graduated with no family and no responsibility or it’s indispensable to work for years as a good employee in an IT consulting to get experience ?

Answer 3055

• posted by: Mark on 2015-01-18
• score: 1

The best time to start is when:

• You are passionate about a specific problem and understand it well
• You can build or offer a good solution (whether it’s a product or a service business)
• You are ready to dedicate a ton of energy and time to the solution
• You have passionate, smart co-founders who you can work well with

It’s very important to understand the problem you want to solve but you don’t necessarily need experience in that industry. Many successful founders did not have experience in their industry but understood the problem (e.g. founders of eBay, Uber, AirBnB).

If you do not have all of the above, I recommend working toward gaining them. You can talk to potential customers to learn about a problem and potential solutions, work at a large company to earn enough savings to start your own, or build your network to meet potential co-founders.

If you’re concerned about age, I think the majority of successful IT companies are started by younger founders (under 40 years old). There are always exceptions but I suspect this is because younger people have the time, energy, and fresh perspective.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3082

• posted by: DcK on 2015-01-20
• score: 0

Maybe it is important for you to understand how wide is the question you have asked! The term IT business may be used by Microsoft, Apple but also by the small service shop who sells cartridges at the corner of my street. To make a small analogy, it is as if you would ask: when is the right time to do sports? Do you mean an individual sport, a team sport, a motor sport, as an amateur, professional, recreational and so on. Therefore a general answer could work for now:

1. The right time to think about starting a business is when you have identified a specific need in the market.
2. As long as you have identified the need then you should look to see if you have the resources to solve the need (can be money, time, knowledge or a brilliant original idea). You should know that most successful businesses are not built around an original idea.
3. If you have completed steps 1&2 you should have an idea on how are you going to proceed (a basic business plan with at least an idea of a business model).

You do not need to have extensive experience with the specific domain, nor a lot of time spent as an employee in a company who has done that before. But it can help you learn a lot about the future business. Actually you can read that many entrepreneurs have some sort of blind courage to start in spite of the unknown ahead. But be prepared to take some risks, learn from mistakes, to pick yourself up and start again. For encouragement here is a list of people who failed during their careers.

Note on the IT concept

You should consider this dilemma: is the technology in the core of your business or is it merely the tool needed to solve a problem. For instance an online shop is still a retail business, and it uses the technology as an instrument to get faster to the customers. On the other hand a company who makes plugins for software development tools has the technology as a core, and it would have a very different business model. Good luck!

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