How to Start (And Run) Your Own Business

hello my goblins and ghouls my name is steven if you're new here i started an open source project for a pick and place machine which very precisely puts electronic components onto circuit boards and over the past couple years i started a company selling them if you want to start from the very beginning you can click here to catch up i have gotten so many comments from people asking about the process i've gone through to start this company and what are some tips or things that i learned along the way so today i'm gonna give you a walkthrough of how i've gone about creating an open source hardware company up until this point now a huge mega asterisk this is just how i did it you might feel differently about this so pick and choose things from this that you feel are useful and important and ring true to you there's also a ton of videos that i've linked to in the description talking about starting a hardware company starting a company in general things to think about through this process that i found helpful so all of those are in the description i highly recommend you go click through them i made a whole template about doing this for yourself so at the end of the video go click that link and go through this process yourself this video is broken into five parts but let's just get into them the first three go together why what and how then steps four and five are decisions and handoff the first step is why and this is arguably the absolute most important thing that you need to decide before you get anywhere else with starting a company this is so critically important like this is one of the most foundationally important things to how i make daily decisions at opulow so why this why comes in two different ways the first why is why do you want to do this and the second is why is this organization important to exist in your mind why do you think it's something that you want to bring to the world in 2018 i sat down and i wrote a first principles document about what do i want to do with my life i broke it down to the things that i know i'm passionate about the things that i know that i'm good at and the things that i know that i would have fun with and i effectively derived the fact that starting an organization and running it would be something i would love to do think about what you like and not only what you like but what your tendencies are including negative ones the second half of why is why do you want this organization to exist what is the point of making it for me it was very clear i wanted to make it easier to manufacture products at a mid scale i ran into this with a glow tie kickstarter where it was very frustrating to me and talking to other people i realized that this was a significant problem and it's one that i wanted to fix i decided that the why of the company why i wanted the organization to exist was very explicitly to help make mid-scale manufacturing easier that is the point of the company once you have this fleshed out this is going to inform every single future decision that you make the second step is what what do you want to build there are really two chunks to this in my mind the first is that what you build needs to be specifically suited towards you and where you have a competitive advantage this also includes something that you love to do and something that you can sustain working on for an incredible amount of time for example i had skills at building electromechanical systems so making a pick and place was very in line with that i had a lot of familiarity with fdm 3d printers and resin 3d printers so i know how motion control of systems works generally and i could at least prototype every aspect of the machine myself plus i love doing it the second part is product market fit this is a very well defined term in business which i will leave you to look up the specifics of but effectively it just means is the thing that you're making something that people actually want a user named domi commented how do you start a new company without any guarantee that your product will sold that's risky af i don't think i could do it mentally dami i feel that until we actually launched kits we didn't really know exactly how many we're going to sell but we did as much as we possibly could to figure that out ahead of time determining if you have product market fit is a very long process of interviewing people asking people how their current solutions work you yourself being the target market and knowing what you need being very egoless about your product and choosing to form it and craft it to what the market that you're trying to satisfy actually wants and we had a lot of data from youtube and from our email sign up list that gave us a pretty good idea of what we were going to see but yeah there's still a risk it's always taken a jump the more that you focus on trying to define your product market fit early on the less trouble you're going to have actually selling your thing once you've made it if you're making something that nobody wants that's pretty tough to run a business off of okay so now you know why you're doing this and why your organization exists what's the point of doing it you know what you're going to make and you're ideally pretty well suited to do it you have your competitive advantage because of who you are in the skills you built and you know that the thing that you're making is something that people want next is your how the how is the methodology with which you actually create your company and it's all informed by your why the how of opulo is all completely defined by that sentence i said earlier every single how every single way that we try and accomplish that goal needs to keep that y in mind every single one there's a lot of different subsections to the how the first how is size and speed how do you want to grow how quickly do you want to grow and how important is that to you a lot of startups want to raise a tremendous amount of money and grow as fast as they possibly can that is an awesome approach and a super cool way to do a company some people just want to start an llc and make enough money to put some food on the table and enjoy their work that's also awesome knowing that is super important and that's informed by your why i knew opula was never going to be a small llc because my why for the company was make mid-scale manufacturing easier for as many people as possible i can't do that by just putting a couple kits out i need people to know about this i need to get it out there and make it accessible to people to accomplish my why so my why is deciding how i go about my speed and my scale i want to grow fast i want to grow quickly and i want to get the thing out there to more people to help solve this problem to address my why similarly is the actual organization that you form are you going to be an llc do you want to be a c corp do you want to be a delaware c corp do you want to be a 501c3 now these are all american organizations you can see what the general equivalent of these organizations is in your country and form something similar llcs are fantastic huge huge companies can be llc's c-corps or like a proper corporation have a little bit different of a structure and require maybe a little bit more formality to it importantly if you're looking to raise money having a c corp is very very helpful for managing the equity in the company especially in delaware delaware law is very very well known to investors it's been understood and thoroughly tested through a lot of different cases so people know what to expect when they come across a delaware c corp opulo happens to be a delaware corp and that made it a tremendous amount easier to handle taking an investment so if that's something that you're thinking about doing at any point it's a really good idea to consider doing that it can be a little bit more expensive to set up a c-corp especially in delaware but if you're thinking about raising money it's not a bad idea to do it another how is money how are you going to fund this thing raising money is a decision that has a lot of different factors that play in the first one is what are you actually building if you're doing a software startup this can be a little bit easier especially if you know how to code already you can rent an aws instance or a digital ocean droplet and put your website up online for a handful of bucks a month if it's hardware it can be a lot more expensive to get going it's a matter of physically buying parts testing them doing r d and prototyping putting them together shipping a physical object all over the planet huge thing to consider about raising money the other big part is how important is it to you to keep equity in the company and keep control over how it's run across the board a lot of venture capitalists trust you to start the thing if they've chosen to invest in you they're betting on you and less about the company but it is still important to consider that if you give up board seats and you give up voting control it is possible for someone to vote you out and you are beholden to other people this is no longer just a thing that you're running by yourself if you do not want to include this in your process of running your company raising money might not be right for you you should only take money from investors that are perfectly aligned with how you're thinking about running the thing if not it is asking for clashing but this is something that you really need to bash against your why and really consider whether or not raising money and who you're raising money from and what their ethos is lines up with why your company exists to begin with it can be a fantastic tool and really really help step on the gas but it needs to be the right fit for you and only you can make that decision another big part of this for opulo is being open source if someone has a design for a product and they have some sales but they don't quite have enough money to buy our kit i want them to still be able to build the thing that is still in line with the company's ethos it's still making it easier to make things at a mid scale not keeping the source open is antithetical to that why also keeping the source open means that other people can contribute and add on and make it better which also aligns with the why the more people that are able to contribute to the design the better and easier that mid-scale manufacturing is going to be for more people every single decision every single one of these house that i've listed so far comes back to the why every single one okay that was a lot now it's execution the first three are incredibly important on setting you on the right trajectory but these last two kind of take over after you've launched off they kind of help a guide and direct and course correct as you go through the process the first one is decisions you will make an unbelievable amount of decisions about the dumbest crap you thought you'd never have to decide for example we buy toilet paper for the bathrooms here at hopule hq what brand do we buy we have five employees what kind of toilet paper do they like how much can we afford to budget for toilet paper ideally someone else is making that decision at a later point but right now it's me that's a decision this is a silly example but it's one of thousands that crop up for the process of making decisions i have one very significant note that i think has served me unbelievably well so far it is drop your ego this is hard to do humans are ego driven machines but whenever someone disagrees with you and there will definitely be people that do that try to remove your ego from the decision you made and reconsider it after you thought through it as objectively as possible and not holding yourself to your original decision out of ego if you still think it's the right choice stick to it and do it even if other people disagree with you and if it's better adopt it thank them and move on happy to have improved your process a challenge is a gift every time someone challenges me it is an opportunity for me to think is this actually what i want to do let me reconsider if this is truly the way i want to do this it is self-defeating for me to stick to my guns just because it was the decision i came up with if someone has a better idea than me which people do very often it is in everyone's best interest for us to adopt it consider challenges as a gift this is really hard to do it is exhausting constantly forcing yourself to remove your ego from decision making but it is so worth it the fifth and final chapter is handoff i have been working on this youtube channel and subsequently this company since 2018. for two and a half years i was doing that alone i was doing all of the video production all of the cad all of the design all of it was on me that is not sustainable handoff is about finding ways to take things that you've been doing this whole time and give them to other people if your thing is growing to be bigger than you at some point you will have to abstract parts of it away from you it is just unsustainable to expect that you can do everything and it's probably pretty bad for your mental health and work-life balance as well after lucian came on board i haven't thought about ordering parts in over a year lucian just owns that that is huge for allowing me to work on things that i am uniquely good at the things that i have a competitive advantage on this is the way you are able to grow past just one person but it is a hard process finding small scopes of things or big scopes that you uniquely have been doing so far and hand them off to someone else it is hard to do and they at first will not be as efficient or as good at it as you might be but it is still worth it to invest the time in getting them ramped up and working on it there are also systems in place that do the same kind of hand-off i have this huge thing about the dichotomy between what i call a tool and a project a tool is something that just works you just get it and it solves a problem it's a black box you don't understand how it works but you give it an input and you get an output and it solves your problem project is something that you get into the details on but you have complete and total control over it as you grow the more you move things from projects into tools the more that you can abstract those bits of thought into some other system that you don't have to think about to free you up to do other things that you are uniquely good at for example we use a piece of software called gusto here at opulo gusto handles all of our hr stuff all of payroll running all of managing all kinds of hr tasks and sending offer letters and all that stuff it's just all handled in this thing now it's not free we have to pay money for it but it means that i don't have to manually find ways to write checks for all the employees and do all the math myself and send all the letters manually it does all that for me and it frees me up a ton to be working on other things now figuring out when to do this is tricky especially if you're a struggling business or starting business and you don't have a lot of money deciding to spend money on a tool like this can be a really difficult decision this is a constant battle we face all the time of is this a tool or a project do we spend money on it and just solve it and don't think about it or do we spend the time to deal with it ourselves some of these tools are free i'll put a link in the description to some of them that i think have been fantastic for automating certain things but this is a constant challenge of do we do this ourselves or do we just pay someone to solve it for us this comment very astutely points this out about specific manufacturing processes so those are the five sections in my mind that are super super important for starting your own company but like i said at the beginning of video there's a whole template for going through this process step by step for yourself and your own process of starting a company it's actually a github repository so you can fork it and fill it in in your fork or if you think maybe i missed some things or something should be different file a pr i'd love to make it collaborative and a whole bunch of other people that know things that i don't about this should be able to contribute to it and make it a great resource for figuring out the most important things when it comes to starting an organization also if you have any questions about anything i said please leave them in the comments i'd love to see what you're thinking and respond there's a lot going on here and there's a whole bunch of different perspectives on how to do this and i'd love to hear yours all right that's it for this one thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time hey

Channel: Stephen Hawes

Views: 14,890

Keywords: entrepreneurship, how to start a business, starting your own business, stephen hawes, steven hawes, stephen hawes pick and place, pick and place machine, stephen the robot, hardware startup, open source startup, opulo, opulo index, lumenpnp, lumen pick and place, lumen pnp, mid scale machines, mid scale manufacturing, how to start your own business, how to start a business with no money, how to start a startup, startup company, open hardware company, open source company

Id: nLUw4CKdanY

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022