How to start a startup in 2024

I started Zeda.io in January 2021 (I covered that story here), and since then, I have been asked numerous times about how to start a startup. I hope that in 2024, many people will be starting their own startups, and these focused steps, without any unnecessary information, can help them get started.

These steps are based on my experience and learnings from building Zeda.io, a SaaS platform with teams in the US and India. Some steps may not be relevant to everyone, but overall, they provide a good direction.

Validate your “Why”:

1. Starting a startup is hard, and it’s even harder to sustain it. Therefore, your motivation for starting a startup should be compelling. Don’t have FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), trust me, the grass is greener on the other side. Statistically, a high-paying job career has higher odds of retiring successfully.
2. Are you passionate about the problem, the industry, and the users? Or are you simply bored with your current personal or professional life?
3. If you fall into the latter category, please reconsider starting a startup. Figure out what the real problem is. Startups don’t create wealth; they require hard work and take a toll on life. So, reassess your why and make sure you are ready for 5–10 years of commitment.
4. I would also encourage you to take a moment to align your why with other factors in life, such as your family, economic situation, risk appetite, and partner. All of these aspects will be impacted. So, please be sure why you are embarking on this long and challenging journey.
5. There is no tool or framework here, just a strong internal calling you would regret not listening to.

Validate your idea:

1. You might have an itch or hypothesis about something, but it will save you a lot of time, energy, and money if you can validate your idea with the right set of users.
2. Friends and family don’t count. Direct message people on LinkedIn, find out where your users hang out, and be active in those communities. Find those communities.
3. Talk to at least 100 potential users in your ICP and create a waitlist to get people to sign up. Launch a landing page on social media and ProductHunt, get people to pay upfront, run ads, and measure click-through rates (CTRs), and conduct surveys.
4. Talk to decision-makers about your ideal customer profiles. Trust me, we fall in love with our idea, but most people either don’t have the problem or don’t have a big enough problem to pay for it.
5. You should also use Intro.com, Clarity, or SuperDM to reach out to leaders in the space and get their opinions to validate your idea. Find users on UserTesting and ask them to provide feedback on the prototype.
6. Trust me, spending $1500–2000 here will save you a lot of opportunity costs and provide you with much-needed perspective.
7. Also, doing this will help you in your go-to-market (GTM) strategies. Try to understand how users will buy and discover your product and how much they will be willing to pay for it.

Find a co-founder:

1. I have been talking to my co-founder every day for the past 1000+ days. We bring different things to the table and trust each other, and I am confident that we couldn’t have done it without each other.
2. It is a challenging journey, so don’t do it alone. It only gets harder. Look for someone with complementary skills, ideally, someone you know and have a relationship with.
3. You can try YC co-founder, On Deck, or Antler to find a co-founder, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It just feels inorganic.
4. If you can’t convince someone to get excited about owning 40–50% of a future multimillion-dollar venture, you will have difficulty convincing investors, the early team, and customers.

Finance:

This is the most frequently asked question, and although we at Zeda.io have raised funds, my perspective has changed since then. We have incredibly supportive investors, but with more funding comes more distractions, and I admit that I have become susceptible to those distractions.

1. We raised funds, but I would highly recommend considering this. Do you truly need funds, or do you feel the need to raise simply because it is commonly done?
2. Is your idea suited for a small-scale business or a venture-scale business?
3. If you are a first-time founder building a global SaaS, I highly recommend joining an accelerator program like YC, 500 Startups, Techstars, etc. It provides early adopters and encourages swift action.
4. Money helps with experimentation, but the lack of it forces you to innovate. Without money, there are fewer constraints, and you are compelled to operate within those constraints. In my experience, this can be beneficial.
5. Both founders should have at least 9 months of savings to cover personal expenses.
6. You can use your personal savings to fund the company. Simply provide this money as a loan to the company so you can retrieve it when the company generates revenue.

Team:

1. You can’t do it alone, and the people you work with are key to determining your success. So choose wisely.
2. Build a team of 6 people for as long as possible. This includes 3 engineers, 1 designer, and 2 GTM (Go-To-Market) professionals. One founder should be responsible for engineering and another for GTM. Product development should be a shared responsibility.
3. Take the time to hire the right people. Look for individuals who are smarter than you, have valid reasons to leave their current jobs, and are willing to take risks with you.
4. Seek individuals who believe in you, believe in the problem you’re solving, and whom you can trust.
5. Look for people who can integrate well into your personal life, forming a close-knit tribe.
6. Ideally, hire mid to senior-level professionals who can grow with the company.
7. Start by searching within your network. LinkedIn or Wellfound should be sufficient for this.
8. Before committing to full-time work, spend at least 2 months working together.
9. These team members should end up owning approximately 5–10% of the company. You should be comfortable with this ownership structure.
10. Remember, making the overall opportunity bigger is more important than just focusing on a larger piece of the pie. Consider implementing a 1-year cliff for the initial 25% ownership, with the remaining shares vesting quarterly over the next 3 years.
11. Ensure that formal agreements are in place for employment and equity arrangements.

Incorporation and other operational works.

You need a registered entity for many reasons, like collecting payments, preserving IP, payrolls, investments, etc.

Many things can affect where you should incorporate headquarters, so please research more. But if you are building a global SaaS company, the US is good enough, and you can flip later. But feel free to choose others based on financial and personal situations. We have a parent entity in Delaware, USA, as HQ and a subsidiary in India, fully owned by a US entity.

1. First thing, get a C corp.
2. Use Doola, Stripe Atlas, and Clerk to register the company.
3. Get a lawyer to review things.
4. Use Usestable for getting a mailing address.

Tools for daily use:

Here is a list of tools that should cover 90% of the work for the first 6 months. You can try finding and trying others, but this stack is what we use, and I have seen it in almost all startups.

Company-wide tools:

1. Google Workspace for email, calendar, and storage.
2. Slack for communication.
3. Brex or Mercury for your startup banking.
4. Gusto or Razorpay Payroll (India) for payroll compliance.
5. Loom and Grammarly are what I personally use very often.
6. Notion/Coda/Slite to maintain company documentation, PRDs, How tos, and a CRM for sales or hiring backlog.
7. Equity management- Cake Equity or Pulley.
8. Perplexity or GPT4 for making life easier and faster. It will help you get answers and get better at copying and coding. Get one pro license and share the password.
9. For legal documents, use — Legalzoom or Avodoc to get templates and get reviewed by AI.
10. Otter — Record sales and user interviews to revisit later.

Product tools:

1. Linear — It has replaced Jira for dev tickets in most startups.
2. AWS or Microsoft for cloud infra. You’ll get startup credits, use it for now.
3. Standuply — If you do async updates, ideally set up a policy to do in-person standup and make sure people don’t miss it.
4. GitHub — You can get the enterprise version free for a year and get your dev the AI copilot.
5. Figma — For designs, getting design to code, and Figjam for brainstorming.
6. Zeda — Collect customer feedback, build and share the roadmap with customers/investors, and publish regular release notes to keep the team motivated and send external signals of your progress.
7. Stripe — Stripe billing can handle your payments, plans, and taxes. Free up to $50k.
8. Dopt — Recently discovered, and if your GTM is PLG, this can be a game changer.
9. June.so or Fullstory — These have become the go-to tools for SaaS analytics. For the website, use Microsoft Clarity and Plausible.

My biggest advice is to buy tools and don’t build them. There are options for almost every use case, and yes, it can get expensive over time, but for 6 months, when you want to validate things and need momentum, build the core product and not features that you can find a solution in the market. For account management Clerk.dev or Auth0 exist, For search, Algolia is available, Notification- Courier, Integrations — Merge, you get the idea.

GTM tools:

1. Apollo.io or Reply.io- While I have given up on outbound campaigns, you can give it a try.
2. Customer.io — Free to manage Product marketing emails, campaigns, newsletters, and sequences; you get free for 6–12 months.
3. Intercom — Run customer support, manage onboarding, and email campaigns from here. We got free for 12 months via Brex.
4. Canva — Get a license and help your marketing team create social media posts and emails without a graphic designer.
5. Framer or Weblfow for a website is perfect. Just take a template or hire an expert if needed. Fiverr is full of freelancers for this.
6. You don’t need CRM at this stage and can manage on documentation tool, but Attio is a good option for now if needed.
7. I also use LinkedIn Sales Navigator along with Dripify to run some LinkedIn sequences. I do very targeted outreach through this.

Tips:

1. The tool can be changed later, and you should not spend too much time optimizing tools.
2. Anything with a free plan is okay till it doesn’t break things.
3. Leverage startup plans as much as you can.
4. Pay through a single credit card across all tools and review your expenses every month.

Product & GTM (The actual work):

1. How to do Product and GTM This is the most important thing or the only thing that matters. Everything else so far has been an enablement for this step to happen and succeed. You will need to spend almost 80–90% of your time here.
2. Solving the problem you set out to solve and telling people the value you are creating by solving it. Ideally, you should also tell them how you are solving it differently/better than their current ways.
3. Remember, you have to build something great, and the world should know about it. There are enough ways to build a product and GTM motions to play with. I’ll suggest picking the simplest one that you can execute most effectively.

Product:

1. I would suggest just having a Kanban board and a one-week sprint.
2. Don’t cover every case early on. Just build a minimum valuable product.
3. Don’t complicate your product and process. Don’t try to solve every problem, start by focusing on one thing and solve it the best.
4. Try to do a retrospective every 2 weeks and see what is working.
5. Collect as much feedback as you can.
6. Define one user journey and measure it. Just one and see the starting-to-end conversion rates and optimize it.
7. Build→Ship→Hear→Optimize→Build→Ship→Announce and repeat.
8. Check out Lenny’s podcast to see how other companies built products in the early stages. I recommend subscribing to Acquired and How I Built This podcast.

GTM:

Various strategies should be considered depending on your price point, product, industry, and startup. Read these blogs: Growth Unhinged and Developer-Focused GTM Playbook for more insights.

1. What worked for us:

• High-quality content
• SEO
• Ads
• Social Media
• Personal Network
• ProductHunt

2. What didn’t work for us:

• Event sponsorships
• Leadgen agencies
• Outbound campaigns
• Newsletters
• Community
• Podcasts
• Gated content like ebooks

3. What I’ll invest in:

• Brand
• Content
• Audience
• Product Marketing

From day 1, ensure your brand appears bigger than it is. Make it desirable and visible. Perception is everything. Start marketing from day 1. Don’t wait for the product to be ready before beginning marketing efforts.

Subscribe to the following resources: MKT1, SaaS Weekly, Growth Unhinged

More thoughts to share:

1. Get a founder agreement in place- a basic one, something you both agree on and can refer to in the future.
2. Use freelancers wherever you can. Optimize for speed, not quality and money. Get people to do SEO, Website-ops work from Fiverr, Toptal, Upwork.
3. Never pay full price for any tools mentioned. You can get free access via the startup program for each, just search.
4. Initial team will determine a lot of things. Hire carefully, and if things don’t work out, end fast.
5. Retrospect everything frequently- how’s company, product, marketing, investors, market, team, processes.
6. Don’t worry about small things; they look big, but growth can take care of 90% of a startup’s problems.
7. Never compromise. Never do or tolerate something unethical, disrespectful, fraudulent, harassment, or gossips.
8. Write regularly. Decisions, thoughts, mistakes, achievements, processes, and what doesn’t work.
9. Share your thoughts and writings. Promote transparency and feedback culture.
10. Read Great CEO within and also — https://www.unusual.vc/field-guide
11. Avoid meetups or conferences. Waste of time and money. Try getting 1–1 if you want to network. I reach out on Linkedin and get a 30–40% reply rate.
12. Get a mentor who is a few steps ahead of you. Not someone who is way ahead, their context will be different.
13. Where you spend time will determine the outcome. Spend wisely.

Personal Productivity:

My approach is simple, for me, consistency matters, and I can do simple things rather than complicated workflows.

1. Get a good noise-cancelling headphones. I use Sony XM5.
2. Listen to brain.fm, Ghibli, or Lofi music. Music with lyrics is a distraction.
3. Use Headspace 3 times a week or so. Walking or Cooking is also a great escape and helps me with my time.
4. Gym, again, I don’t overdo it, just 3–4 times a week is good to keep you in shape.
5. Sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time. For me, 11:30 PM-7:30 AM.
6. Read something every day before bed- Newsletter, Book, Blog.
7. I chat with myself on WhatsApp, I keep dropping my thoughts there and review them every day. Helps me with note-taking, To-dos, and reminders.
8. I put urgent things on my calendar for the same day or the next to make sure I address them.
9. Don’t spend time at networking events. Hardly anything meaningful comes out.
10. Coffee works. Just don’t overdo it.
11. Introspect my time spent every 2 weeks and optimize.

Personal note:

If you have reached so far, your motivation is high, and I want to share a realistic portrait of how it feels. Most people portray a fancy picture, and we hear success stories online, but here are some real moments that will happen and how I felt -

1. You will register a company under your name and feel something magical. You own a company. I still remember Jan 21, 2021.
2. You will have first resignation in the company and feel betrayed, but trust me, you will let go of more people. You won’t have perfect hiring.
3. You will get investor interest and they want to talk to you. You will give your best show, and they will say you are early for them.
4. You will get your first office (it can be your home, too), so remember you need to capture that moment.
5. You will have to always put a brave face in front of the team, investors, and social network. Even though your imposter syndrome will be off the roof.
6. You may have to make compromises to your existing lifestyle and be more humble. I had to cut my salary by 90%, and then my co-founder pushed his plan to buy a house.
7. You can’t be an asshole, your personality and company’s image are now connected. Don’t f*ck it up. Always pick higher ground and always do the right thing.
8. People look up to you for answers, and you may not have them, but give them reassurance that you will get back and fulfill your words.
9. Most importantly, your product will suck; customers might not love it or even understand it. You don’t want to hear it. That’s okay, hear them out, work on the feedback, and repeat.

All the best for your company, and I hope it is successful. If you need any help, DM me or email me at prashant@zeda.io.

I am planning to write more about my journey of building Zeda.io, like moving to the USA, how we raised money without a product, and the art of storytelling as a founder to convince investors, customers, and people to join you. If you think this will be helpful, please comment or message me. I would like to have some validation.