"Platitudes are meaningless." - Benjamin Franklin

These sorts of articles start to annoy me after a while. It's a lot of noise and very little signal. Everyone has 15 bullet-pointed list articles for 10 ways you can start your startup, but they're all just platitudes that don't suggest any real, actionable information.

The best one in this particular bunch is the "I can't quit my job" one. There are many ways in which a person could quit their job and still get by to be able to work their project, but nobody ever bothers to say what that is. And actually, the point is meaningless if you never ship. You can have all the runway in the world and you'll still go nowhere if you don't know how to release a product.

And releasing is not easy. It's not as simple as just saying "put something out there." That's another platitude that these sorts of articles talk about. You don't just go from A to B without obstacles in the middle. The whole idea of the weekend hackathon release of a minimal viable product first rests on knowing exactly what you're building and the tools with which you're building it. If it were as easy as opening a kit labeled "startup snax", then everyone would do it.

My advice: don't start a startup, not yet. If you don't know how to make it happen, then you're not ready. Do start a project, though. Do whatever you can in a particular field.

If you're not technical, find an open source project to try to advertise, market, grow mindshare. Get involved with your local independent arts scene and work on film projects that want to Kickstarter their projects. You have to find ways to prove to YOURself that you can do what needs to be done, in ways that aren't going to destroy you like quitting your job. You'll meet people who are capable of making things from raw materials this way. Make those people your friends (real friends, not acquaintances you hope to exploit one day). Pay attention to what they are working on, and apply your skills to maximize their reach. Converse with them about your ideas, and maybe one of them has had a similar idea and you can be off to the races together. If you don't know how to make things, you cannot just hope they will show up. You have to actively find these people.

If you're technical, the necessary skill that you will need to learn that will be hardest for you is giving up. Giving up if the project is too hard to go focus on something easier so you don't stagnate. Giving up on enhancing the current project so you can release it. Giving up on trying to be the be-all, end-all of your project and letting other people in. Yes, you can market your project on your own, but it's a lot of fucking work and you have other work to do. Go meet people in the world and find a guy who gets as jazzed about social media as you get about code. If you don't know how to market things, you cannot just hope people will find it. It just doesn't happen. The secret is that you have to steal other people's traffic for your own. Or share, whatever you want to call it, point is that everyone's internet attention is currently saturated, so you need to find a way to make them more efficient about absorbing data to be able to include YOU in their stream, or you need to replace something else in their stream. There are socially acceptable ways to do this and there are ways that are not socially acceptable. The easiest way to ensure that your project is not tarnished by bush-league tactics is to find someone who knows the game already that you can trust to keep everything above the board.

Keep everything you've ever worked on. Keep a diary of your work on your projects. I have a private GitHub repo that is specifically for storing all of my project ideas that aren't developed in any way yet, it's just for note taking and it's only private because they just aren't fleshed out for human consumption yet. Any project that I've ever worked on that is in some semblance of working I have as a public GitHub repo. The importance is more the backup than it is the sharing, but there is a certain charity to it as well: if I'm not going to get value out of it, maybe, just maybe someone else will. I would switch to GitHub pages to publish things but I do a lot of art, too, and I have a growing followership on Tumblr right now. But publish, publish, publish, and keep, keep, keep. Because in a year I want you to go back over everything and see how far you've come. I look over my projects and I think about what I could do better now that I have a year of experience under my belt.

I have one particular project that I have been working on for 7 years. It's small, it's simple, and I've probably only put a total of 3 months of work into it over the last 7 years. It doesn't even solve a unique problem, there is tons of work in this space already. But it is actually extremely useful for me and because I know it intimately, it makes me extremely productive. It is a culmination of my knowledge of programming, and I have a rule that only 20% of my time on it is for adding features, the other 80% of the time is to refine it, simplify it. If I had known it would take 7 years to get it to where it is, I probably would have never started on it. But I never had a preconception of where it was going to go, and the latest features were only possible because I had laid the ground work so many years ago. Because I've just kept at it, reviewed, refined, and let it be what it was going to be. In another 3 years, it might actually be a viable product. Who knows, the only way I will find out is if I don't give up on it.

Then, at some point you'll wake up and realize you have a lot of skills on your hands, you have a lot of people who are very skillful at your disposal, you're NOT deeply in debt because you didn't quit your job, and you have the startings of 3 or 4 products on your hands that you would have never imagined you'd even want to work on 5 years ago. That is when you get your friends together, quit your job, and put out your own shingle.

Because otherwise, this talk of "you don't need a whatever-you're-not cofounder right away, you'll just find them," that is all get-rich-quick scheming.