Let me begin be saying: I’m not a business executive. I’ve never started my own business (yet). But I have seen and read a few things that have lifted the scales from my eyes regarding business.
Business is about customers. Successful businesses have them;
unsuccessful ones don’t. If you want to succeed at business, you need
to understand this first. VC Ron Garret
says as much and from the very excellent education I’ve gotten from
working at Leostream, I believe him.
Start-ups don’t get funded for having great ideas, a superior product or even a competent management team (although I recommend having all of these, if you can swing it). People with money have money because they don’t throw it away unprofitably. If you look like a winner, you’ll get backed like one. To demonstrate you’re a winner, get a lot of customers.
I’d add a few more points. Most likely, you’re not a paragon of infinite ability. To build a company, you need to acquire talent that complements your own. You don’t need to do this from the absolute beginning, but eventually, you need to scale the organization from just being you. This is often a hard, expensive and painful transition.
Oddly enough, it seems that if you already recognize your own limitations, you’re probably not an entrepreneur.
If you think you’ve got what it takes to start your own business, just remember these points. The rest is left as an excerise to the reader.