Sex Ed. for Startups pt. 1 - What is a Startup?

Not very often, but every once in a blue-moon, one of our customers turns out to be, what we call, a "baby", meaning not only a first-timer in the pay-for-service respect, but a complete first-timer. In the old days we would have used the term virgin.
Although quite stereotypical, it has happened that a father would make it a present to his son upon his 18th birthday. In another case it was a group of college frat boys that were out upon the town. Personally I doubt the fraternity yarn. I was more reminded of "Revenge of the Nerds".

I already can see you scratch your head and asking yourself - what's she yammering about again ...

There's a first time for everything, be it a male-female relation or the forming of a startup and just like the former needs some practice and preparation and maybe some guidance from an experienced entity, the latter might desperately need it.

Of course, there's always those that say: "Stick goes into hole. That enough. Yehaaw. Know it all." That might be enough for personal satisfaction, but with this approach the highest peeks will never be reached and I guarantee that a caveman never built a successful startup either.

While I now leave you to do your own juvenile explorations and may only intercede with those upon special request, I will give you an introduction into startups.
Let's lube up and explore what a startup actually is.

So according to Steve Blank a startup is "a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model".  Isn't he sexy, btw?
Another definition comes from Eric Ries -

"A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

You will notice that both definitions do not include words like money, company, firm, tech, IT, garage or programming and that is a very important observation.

According to our friend wikipedia a business then "is an organization involved in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers."

Now according to Steve's definition a startup then has nothing to do with being a business. Being a little presumptive, once the startup has found the repeatable and scalable business model he talks about, it might cease being a startup and become a business ... 

Eric, on the other hand, doesn't go that far and his definition is probably easier to grab by most people.

Generally, when doing a startup, one has to deal with many many unknowns - be they 

• market (Is there one?)
• customers (Are there any? And who are they?)
• product (will people want it/like it/pay for it?)
• budget (will my money suffice till I get those items above straight?)
• team (are my co-founders the right people?)
• despair (is it really worth it or am I wasting my time/life?)

or many more and that is probably, what defines a startup the best. But the good news is, that there are methods to cope with all this uncertainty and we will explore them in a later part of this sex ed series.

If you only take one thing from this - let it be this -

If you open a t-shirt business, a bakery, a used-car business or a lawn-moving thing - it is NOT a startup - oh, and just putting the plug into the socket doesn't constitute good sex.