Paul Dornier - MeetingBird Co-Founder (purchased by Front)
If you are a student, turning your student project into a startup is one of the most important steps in your founding career. When done right, this transition will give you the determination you need to overcome the startup hurdles that lie ahead and ahead of you. If not done correctly, the transition can be frustrating for you and your other obligations.
My co-founder (twin brother) Henry and I learned about the importance of this transition when we started Meetingbird as a side project at the university. In the jump from side project to startup, we focused on three major changes that we felt were right, including for other student startups.
1) avoiding side project euphoria
Side projects are always enjoyable because the work is done in a vacuum, with no negative feedback or responsibilities. Nevertheless, the transition from a third-party project to a startup implies a transition from realizing one's interests to realizing the interests of users.
The best way to make a project like this is to talk to real users about it. It sounds painful (and can actually hurt), but student founders have a unique advantage in doing so. You are already surrounded by a large number of first users, these are classmates and graduates.
There are several ways you can use this advantage more effectively:
- Send messages to relevant groups (engineers or entrepreneurs club) with an offer to talk about 15 minutes about the project. It is also a good way to find partners.
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Your side project probably started out as something you found interesting or fun, not something that could change the world. But turning your project into a startup means you have an understanding of why it really matters, and thinking broadly is a key part of that. I found 2 questions particularly useful for this:
Think carefully about the problem that caused you to start the project in the first place. How different will the world be if your startup solves this problem?
About a year ago, Henry and I thought we were just building a tool to improve conversations. But one day while at YC, Kevin Hale concluded that our chat fixing discussion issues could literally raise global GDP. Thinking more broadly about the problem your startup is solving can give you an inspiring and motivating product vision.
If you already have first users, find out what they think of your product. And build your thinking around that. Airbnb is a great example of this. When you meet an Airbnb host and stay overnight, it makes you feel right at home, even though home is so far away. The company's slogan in helping users "Belongs anywhere" captures their senses.
I also found the following sources interesting:
- Jessica Livingston 's book "Founder at Work" (in Russian: "How It All Began"), look at the chapter on Max Levchin. Who did a great job of transforming the project (cryptographic libraries) into a company that changed the world (PayPal).
- Paul Graham 's essay "A Student's Guide to Startups," note the "Learning Project Syndrome."
- Dustin Moskowitz's Discourse on “The Best Reason” to start a startup
# 3 take enough time
The last stage is the most difficult, but also very important. Like many students, you probably spend about 90% of your time on university, sports, educational or social activities, with only 10% of your time left on your project. But to give at least a chance to the project to become a startup, you need to change this distribution of time and spend almost all of your time on the company.
The best way is to set yourself ambitious deadlines. Last year, Henry and I, after talking with Kevin, decided that we would launch the beta in 3 weeks instead of 5 months. One canceled trip and many sleepless nights and the beta version of Meetingbird was released. Yes, there were a lot of bugs and few features, but now we realized that we were doing something more than a side project.
Conclusion
I focused on “how” to make this transition instead of “when”, and so the answer to that is easier than it could be. The best time to turn a project into a startup is when the difficulties of those 3 steps described above can no longer hold you back from the described leap. In How to Start a Startup Lecture Paul Graham explains that you "should be a student, not a startup, or a startup, not a student anymore." The choice to make the leap or not is binary, you cannot become a startup startup a little bit, and your intuition is probably already telling you the answer.
Regardless of your answer now, I am always available to paul@meetingbird.com and @PaulDornier_ if I can help the founding students get started on their journey.
Thanks to Valery Gerasimov for the translation.
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