This piece is derived from Vitaly Golomb's talk at Startup Istanbul 2014.
So why start-up? What's a good start up? A lot of people don't know what a good startup is. So a startup is an experiment in search of a business model. It is not a little version of a big company.It’s an experiments, most experiments fail.That's okay because when they work, it's a breakthrough. So you need to be ready to fail. A lot of cultures around the world have a real stigma with failure.But it's not the same type of failure when you're doing something really risky because the reward is much bigger. This is what you should start with. Who is the customer and what is the problem ? The biggest mistake I see from entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley and in general is you come up with some technology and you look for a problem to solve. Technology looking for problems to solve. That's usually very painful to turn into a business. You need to flip it upside down. You need to identify a problem and start testing it. You don’t have to start coding. You can create a Facebook group and see if there's demand for what you're trying to do. Start testing as early as possible, create experiments as early as possible. Identify a customer with a painful problem and it has to be a painful problem. It cannot be something that improves somebody's life just a little bit . That's not enough to motivate them. That's will not be enough two make your startup grow fast. It needs to be a pain killer. A very obvious difference between how was it before and how it is now. Make it obvious, that means that somebody who doesn't know your industry initially make it obvious for them that what you're solving is very valuable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8gdHYknRhI ]]>