The Getting Started Part of a Start-Up

I received an email yesterday from an old friend from my consulting days.  My old buddy Greg was uncharacteristically polite and solicitous (“how are you?  the IceMule site looks great…I’m so impressed” etc etc etc.).

Now this is a guy who is much more likely to ask me how I can even get around at my age without a walker while wondering aloud how a woman as beautiful as my wife could have possibly married a schmuck like me.  The last time I saw him was when a few of us met in DC for a day of golf and spent 5 hours on the course and probably 3 off the course thinking up creative ways to get the other guy riled enough to blow any chance at the huge 50 cents we had bet on each hole.

So, as you can imagine, when Greg sent me such a, well, nice note, I knew I was being set up.  And then he hit me with the punchline: he’s been working on an idea, an idea he thinks could be a business, and he wanted to pick my brain about how I got the IceMule off the ground.

What’s interesting to me is that he didn’t need to be so cautious – of course I’ll share my experience with him.  Heck, I will (I am) sharing it with anyone reading this post.  If only to keep you from making some of the seriously dumb mistakes I made, and maybe to help you navigate some potentially dicey areas I stumbled all over.

So – here goes.  I’ll periodically write a post (for the Entrepreneur Notes section of CoolerNotes) about one aspect of starting a business using my own experience as an example.  But – caution – if I didn’t do it you won’t find it here.  There are plenty of books out there about how to start a business and they range from step-by-step instructions (many of which have great practical advice) to more inspirational tomes (many of which I read because I constantly need to maintain a good mental pump).  But I haven’t seen that many that deliver the blow-by-blow – and that’s what I’ll write here, for whatever it’s worth.

Of course, the first place to start is with product – every business has to sell something – either a product or a service.  My story relates to developing a product but having spent years marketing bank services, I can tell you that what follows is relevant to service-oriented companies as well.

I’m going to give you the Reader’s Digest version of the 6+ months it took me to get my product  out of my head and into my hands.  I’ll give a bit of advice also but feel free to disregard it – if you are anything like me, you’ll do exactly what you want to anyway.

Installment 1 next: Start Up Notes – From a cold back to a cool idea