Founding a Startup: Technology Prerequisites

A wish to launch a startup is a common trend among most of the IT guys.
But they have some common yet rather simple doubts like:

Before starting your own startup, how much technically good you must be?

Some doubts extend to the product level like,

Should I have the product ready before approaching the investors?

While some are even more simple yet important like,

“Whether I should be good in implementation first or first come up with an idea and then think about the technologies?”

In this post I try to speculate what all we actually need to answer these questions.

The first and foremost thing one need is a good idea/concept for one’s startup.
One should never be willing to start a business just because everyone else is doing so!

If you already have a game changing idea that you are ready to die for.. then I would say that you just overcame a huge hurdle.

Now if it is an IT product, then I would say that having an MVP(minimum viable product) is always preferred before going in front of investors.

Investment is like a give and take relationship, they are going to invest some amount say X and take Y% of stake/equity/ownership based on one’s product and on their interest.

Its basically a conditional algorithm and it goes like:

1. if you only have an idea and no product:
   • they invest an amount A and take M% equity
2. else if you only have an idea and an MVP only:
   • they invest an amount B and take N% equity
3. else if you only have an idea and a product ready to be launched in market:
   • they invest an amount C and take O% equity
4. else if you only have an idea and your product is already in the market:
   • they invest an amount D and take P% equity

Here the relationships between different amounts goes on like: D>C>B>A
and the relationships between different equity goes like: M>N>O>P

Coming towards the implementation part:

The technologies one is going to choose, will always depend on the type of the product one plans on to make.

If someone is making an Ad Network then they may like to have big data tools like Redis and RabbitMQ, and Java/Scala based server end.
If someone plans on to give some Data Analytic Dashboard based product then they may need to consider R and Python. And so on..

What I am trying to say is technologies do not matter.

There will always be a technology suitable to your idea and the product that you want to develop.

And someone certainly do not need to be a technology genius,

you should simply be a problem solver who knows basics of all what is happening under your roof.

What matters is how clear the idea is.
One should have a clear picture of what they want to make and the type of challenges they may face.

And after that one needs a good mentor(someone with experience in that field) who will be a kind of guiding hand from time to time.

Everyone has mentors and there is nothing wrong if you have few.

And most important of all one needs to know the type of members they want in their team.
Because at the end of the day it is the team members who are going to help you build your startup!

I can go on and on giving more and more points but I guess that I have already made my point..

I wish luck to all the people planning to start your own venture in near future.