The Right Time to Start is "Right Now"

There is only one perfect time to start a company, and that’s right now.

Yep, right this minute. In fact, by the time you’re done reading this, you’ll have already waited too long.

“But wait, Wil, I need to just get a few more things in order first. Then I’ll be in a much better position to launch this startup!”

Nope. Wrong. You already missed out. You already waited too long.

The key to right now being the perfect time to start is understanding why any other time is a total waste of time.

Waiting = Stalling

We all want to believe that if we just wait a bit longer, to plan a bit more, to save a bit more, to get a bit more experience, then our chances of being successful with our startup will be much better.

But we’re not waiting — we’re stalling.

I’ve never been a planner myself; I’m more of a “Take action first, figure it out later” kind of guy. And frankly, it gets me into some trouble from time to time. But you know what it mostly does? It forces me to respond.

So let’s say I launch a new product and it goes horribly wrong. Great! Now I have no choice but to respond quickly to customers and ship new features even faster. If I had never launched the product, I would have lost my compulsion to respond, which creates action, which creates progress.

The Cost of Waiting

We also tend to overlook the insane cost of waiting, especially in a formative startup.

Every day we spend “not launching” is a day we spend “not learning.” We will learn 100x more about our customers when we put an early, awful product in their hands than we will ever learn from endless “customer interviews” in hopes of finding some magic formula for success.

It’s not just learning about our customers, it’s learning about ourselves. One of the greatest lessons Founders learn early is just how extensible they are as humans. It’s easy to think that we can’t lead, or build, or sell, when we never actually try.

But when we stop waiting and simply walk into a sales presentation with our new idea, we may bomb horribly, but we learn and adapt at a geometric rate. Every time I flubbed a big sales presentation as a young Founder, I learned 100x more about my ability and my pitch than I could have possibly learned practicing in my head.

The cost of every day spent not learning at that rate is unimaginable.

We Need to Start Failing Immediately

The sooner we can get started, the sooner we can start failing.

That’s right — failing.

Failing is what we do for a living as Founders. We fail over and over and over until we find what works. Then what do we do? We look for as many new things to try and fail at as possible so that we can discover the valuable stuff no one else is willing to uncover.

You know how we fail? By actually starting.

We make the mistake of thinking that more planning or delaying will lead to less failing, but we’re thinking about it the wrong way. More planning will prevent us from learning at all, and those failures are the teaching moments that guide us to where we need to be.

By removing failure, we remove learning. So we can’t wait around to fail.

Later is for the Losers

You know who else isn’t waiting? Our competition.

In fact, I hope my competition is waiting right now. I hope they are spending all of their hours in frenzied whiteboard sessions and deep strategy dives. I hope they are waiting to just save a little bit more money or finally get that diploma.

Because while they are doing that, I’m going to be finding customers, cornering markets, building brand awareness, and iterating on my products. While they are thinking about buliding a startup, I’m going to be building one.

Building later is for the losers. It’s for those who could have taken action, but instead had to watch the winners actually take the ball and score points.

Now let’s suit up and win this. This is what we were made for!

In Case You Missed It

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How Do I Design My Startup Around My Life? There’s very little preventing us from designing our startups around our life goals. It starts with us being very clear about what we want to achieve and then taking clear, small steps toward those outcomes.