Ask HN: To Startup or not to Start-up?
First of all, now is probably the worst time to buy a house if you plan to start a startup, it&#x27;s an illiquid asset that has a whole bunch of associated closing costs and you don&#x27;t know what your monetary situation will be in the near future, you&#x27;re just setting yourself up for a pile of stress.<p>It&#x27;s always hard to step back from your idea when you&#x27;re convinced it&#x27;s a good one, but the most common advice is not to start with an idea, but to start with potential customers and find out what their pain points really are. If they&#x27;re not spending a lot of money outsourcing this, it will probably be really hard to convince them they should pay you for your software. I thought this advice didn&#x27;t apply to me and spent months of late nights and weekends working on a product, but it does. If businesses are not crying for your product, selling it to them will be hard. It can be done, but it will be hard.<p>As a technical founder, the things that are likely to kill your startup are not going to be technical implementation issues, and as much as the temptation will be to spend a lot of time at your computer working on your product, that is probably the least useful thing you can do.<p>Figure out if people want to pay for the product you have in mind. Don&#x27;t just assume that they should. Talk to them.<p>I would not advise quitting your day job before getting started. You should start talking to people who may want your product and finding out if they really do, way before you have it built.<p>If you just start writing code you will likely spend months on a pile of software that no-one wants to even bother integrating, let alone paying money for and the only thanks you will get is a hole in your finances, and then after that you&#x27;ll be stuck in job search that&#x27;s even harder than it would be now because you have nothing to fall back on.<p>I don&#x27;t want to get you down, but you need realistic expectations, not about the fact that it will be hard, but that you will most almost certainly fail; the best thing you can do is find the sources of risk for your fledgling startup and figure out if you can address them, which is all easier to do with the safety net of a job.