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"Editor\u2019s note:\u00A0This is a guest post by Christian Reber, CEO and co-founder of Berlin-based\u00A06Wunderkinder. It\u2019s part three of a series, cross-posted from\u00A0his own blog, in which he draws on his experience to offer advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in Europe and beyond. You can follow him on Twitter, where he is\u00A0@ChristianReber.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThis is the final part of a guide to launching your own startup. Don't miss part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.\r\n13. Find advisors and mentors to build your business\r\nThroughout this series I\u2019ve mentioned a couple of times that I\u2019m lucky to have mentors and advisors on my side, helping me to define a strategy for building 6Wunderkinder and Wunderlist. In retrospect, after working on it for nearly 3 years, and going through some intensive ups and downs, I can truly say: having these people around me is one of the biggest reasons it all still exists. To be even more clear, without these people, I\u2019m convinced it would have never started in the first place.\r\n\r\nBack when I was thinking about starting a new company, I was running an agency business. Together with my co-founders, we started by building a simple web app based task manager on PHP called Lunchbox. We planned to launch it as a Web app you could use for a monthly fee with no plans for a mobile app, nor a desktop app \u2013 it was a really old school concept for building a Software-as-a-Service task management web app.\r\n\r\nWe had no money to start the business on our own, so I posted a simple status message on Xing (the German equivalent of LinkedIn): \u201CWho\u2019s with me to build the next-generation project management app?\u201D Minutes later a guy I met months earlier at a tech event reached out to me \u2013 Frank Thelen. An entrepreneur himself who was running his own photo-print business in Cologne, and had also invested in a few German tech companies. We had a call, and I explained the idea to him.\r\n\r\nA few days later, he and his partner Marc visited us here in Berlin. We demonstrated the prototype, and presented a few design concepts. We met for a few hours, went out for lunch, and they decided to invest in our idea.\r\n\r\nTogether, we took our prototype, defined a product roadmap and started building it. Because those guys made investments in other tech companies, they had a lot of experience in critical success factors of software businesses. Together, we turned Lunchbox, which again was a simple web-based SaaS app, into a cross-platform productivity app named Wunderlist.\r\n\r\nWith their initial investment we were able to focus on developing Wunderlist for Mac and Windows, and launched version 1.0 in November 2010 (just a few months after we registered the new business). With the launch being a great success, we then decided to raise capital from a German government fund called Hightech Founders Fund.\r\n\r\nWithout posting this one message, and without the experience of Frank and Marc, Wunderlist would not exist. We would have never started the business, we would never have built mobile and desktop apps, and we just wouldn\u2019t have executed it the way we did. Not only because both guys invested in the company, but because they worked with us on business strategy, product, design, marketing and technology. Together, they allowed us to start this company in a big way \u2013 they were investors and mentors.\r\n\r\nNow that the company is three years old, we\u2019ve added many more, including Atomico, Earlybird, T-Venture, and even a few individuals who are helping us to define the right strategy for a specific segment of the company, whether it\u2019s product, technology or anything else. Mentors became crucial for me. They help us reflect and decide. Every time we\u2019re not quite sure about the next step we should take, we ask for advice. Every time we need a partner to ping-pong some new ideas, we ask for their feedback.\r\n\r\nMentors are a great way of widening your horizon when you start a business, and I believe every founder should have one or more. Actually, most successful tech entrepreneurs have incredible, experienced and strong mentors \u2013 Meet Behind-The-Scenes Mentors Of 15 Top Tech Executives.\r\n\r\nI\u2019m incredibly grateful for the support of our mentors who most definitely saved us years of learning everything on our own. I\u2019ve become a strong believer of mentoring. And while connecting with our first mentors was luck, nowadays when we decide to get an advisor for building or growing a specific part of the business, we create a list of people who would be super helpful, and we connect with them.\r\n\r\nWhen people talk about mentors, they often use the term \u201Cadvisors\u201D as well. There is no official explanation for it, but I would clearly define 3 different types of supporters you can add to your company:\r\n\r\n\tInvestors\r\n\r\n\tPeople or organizations who invest in your business, with the clear goal to have a great financial return. At the early-stage, investors are also often your mentors, but it can be hard to connect with investors as much as you can connect with individuals who respect you and are simply interested in your personal success. Investors are usually more interested in building and scaling up the business and less in your personal development.\r\n\r\n\r\n\tMentors\r\n\r\n\tPeople who help you grow not only as an individual, but as a leader. Mentors invest in your business and more importantly, in you. Especially as a young or first time founder it\u2019s incredibly helpful to get mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs.\r\n\r\n\r\n\tAdvisors\r\n\r\n\tPeople who can add strategic value to your business (e.g. if you want to enter new markets or work with big corporations)\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nYou can offer both advisors and mentors equity in exchange for support, but be careful not to create artificial interest. They should be interested in you and less in your company. They are not employees, but first and foremost they help you to succeed as an individual. At an early stage, be sure, he or she commits to at least spending some hours each week working with you.\r\n\r\nAdvisors can be very helpful, but sometimes can also be the opposite. Choose them very carefully. Make sure they deeply care about your success.\r\n14. Be ready for constant change\r\nI learned many painful but great lessons over the past few years. One was how to deal with constant change. When you decide to build a technology company, you are faced with one of the fastest moving industries on the planet. Technology changes so quickly, and along with it, markets and people.\r\n\r\nWhen we started, Facebook and Twitter were exploding, transforming the way companies handle marketing. Apple had just created a gigantic app market, making the development for mobile incredibly important. There was almost no Android, no Mac App Store, and no iPad. The market was moving so quickly, we had to constantly adapt our product strategy.\r\n\r\nBeing in a constantly changing environment like the tech industry makes it really difficult to forecast trends and developments, and requires a massive focus on flexibility. When you are building a product, be ready to change essential parts of it within weeks, if not days. Be ready to expand and to tackle new opportunities quickly. And more so, make sure your team is ready, too.\r\n\r\nConstant changes in startups happens everywhere. You are constantly adjusting and optimizing internal processes, adapting your development strategy due to changing markets, modifying a fundraising strategy because of a financial crisis, replacing managers because of bad performances \u2013 this list just goes on and on and on.\r\n\r\nFrom a pure software perspective, within the last 10 years there has been an incredible change. 10 years ago, building software was fundamentally different. Software was very business focused (e.g., Office), complex, and feature-driven. Building such products was complicated, and required years of development.\r\n\r\nThen suddenly, software went mobile and got simplified. Within a few years, the requirements of building a great software product completely changed. Today, software is winning by design, intuitiveness and availability \u2013 not just by features. Mobile devices and apps made software a mass market phenomenon and changed the way software is built entirely.\r\n\r\nIdentifying changes in a market, and knowing when the time has come for a strategy shift becomes critical for any kind of tech business. Many startups fail because the technology stack doesn\u2019t fit the requirements of the market, or because the key platform changed completely.\r\n\r\nMake sure to not only build your product in the most flexible and scalable way, but also invest time in creating a company culture that embraces change in order to use the full potential of your team, no matter what the new challenge is going to be. The more flexible you run your product and company, the more likely you will have a chance to win.\r\n15. Work hard and be nice to people\r\nBeing mindful while maintaining just the right sense of urgency is incredibly hard. It requires a lot of experience to give people the freedom to learn and more importantly, to fail.\r\n\r\nOur industry is full of young millionaires, and that\u2019s not necessarily a good thing. It\u2019s very easy to meet people with bad intentions, people who don\u2019t care about anyone but themselves. Define your personal values, think carefully how you want to be successful, and how you want to celebrate it.\r\n\r\nBecoming successful will change your personality, either in a positive, or in a negative way \u2013 it\u2019s your decision. When Steve Jobs got asked what his biggest weakness was, he answered: \u201CI think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance, which knocks on your door whenever your are successful.\u201D For myself I found that through by honest and sharing my knowledge I am getting a lot back every single day. Follow this simple rule: Work hard, take risks \u2013 and always be nice to people.\r\n\r\nDon't miss\u00A0part 1,\u00A0part 2,\u00A0part 3\u00A0and\u00A0part 4\u00A0of this guide.\r\n\r\nImage credit: Jupiterimages / Thinkstock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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