James Wilding's Weblog

If you’re not a hacker or a technology pundit, you’ve probably not heard of Y Combinator. They’re a group of investors who do seed funding for startups: this mean they give money to groups of people who have an idea but don’t have a business — yet.

Y Combinator are good at what they do, and have a refreshing approach to funding new businesses. They don’t ask for massive control, don’t look to take a large share of the business, and are happy for startups to sell early if they want to. It’s a refreshingly relaxed and down-to-earth attitude, and about as far removed from Dragon’s Den as you could hope for.

When I was reading Y Combinator’s website this morning, this sentence on their about page really stood out:

Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

This is so true, and by extension most successful startups need to be prepared to change their idea substantially. In my mind, this flexibility and initiative is the most important thing about starting a business. All the other important things — financing your business, finding customers, creating new products — rely on the ability and willingness to create and adapt.

If this sounds obvious, consider starting your own business.

If you stubbornly hold on to your founding idea when you start a business, you’ll most likely fail. The reason for this is that as soon as you start to put your idea into practice, you’ll learn that something’s wrong with it. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way business works: as you work, you learn. You learn that your ideas needs to change, and if you don’t go with those changes your business will die.

Starting a business as a vanity project to promote your great idea is stupid, unless that idea is really well researched. What you really should be doing is going into business for business sake, with a broad set of boundaries around what you will and will not work on: that will give you the flexibility to change when you need to.

When I started working for myself, I was doing small business websites exclusively. Now I’m working with a graphic designer doing small and medium business websites, consulting on Rails development work, and developing a few web apps (for fun and profit) on the side. Things change, things grow. That’s what makes business fun!