I am grateful to be a part of an industry where ideas can come to life and become real things with a bit of elbow grease and persistence. It's easier to start a technology business than just about any other kind. However, keeping one running is another matter.

Startups appear and disaapear all the time. Some are never fully born, and exist as half-formed projects on a computer somewhere. (I know I have my share.) What distinguishes startups that succeed from those that fail is often the seriousness with which the business handles the things outside of the creation process.

When you cast your vision and put your stake in the ground by opening your editor, you are doing more than writing code. You're starting a business that will want to grow. It will want attention, care, and feeding. But hey, you're probably working a job already, or jumping out on your own with a few consulting dollars to tide you over. Here are some of the things to think about when evaluating whether you're treating your business like it deserves.

You Need Time

We get it, this business started as an idea, an experiement, a hobby. But it's growing, and now it needs time. You have to balance the demands of existing employers or clients, and that will take some scheduling.

The most important thing to do is to carve out time in your calendar. Make appointments with yourself to work on the business, and keep them. There are a thousand different time management strategies, but what you ultimately must do is treat your appointments with your business the same as you would those with your boss or most important client. You wouldn't blow your boss off and say "ehh, let's meet Saturday when I have more time." So don't do that to yourself either.

There's one more benefit to carving out the time. Most phases in a business's life shouldn't be all-consuming. Putting the business into a box on your calendar allows you to worry about it less during time you should be concentrating on your primary job, or on your clients, or your family and friends. This peace of mind will make the hours you do work that much more productive.

Businesses Cost Money

From servers to tools to workstations and office space, businesses take financial resources to run, even if bootstrapped. There are lots of ways to cut corners, such a using a hot desk at a coworking space instead of a full office, or renting a cloud server instead of buying and hosting hardware. 

Remember though, your most valuable resource is your time, so don't fall into the trap of using your time to save every penny. So you set up your own web site framework or installed your own revision control to save on the $20 a month hosting? Great, that's one more extra large pizza you can order this month. But if your time is worth even $50 an hour, what else could you have done with that time that would have been better for the business? Jason Cohen has some radical, but real thoughts on this issue, and he calculates that your time is worth a lot more than that, as much as $1000 an hour! 

When you have payroll and employees, this becomes even more true. A company with just 5 developers on staff in the US is spending at least $40,000 a month in payroll-related expenses and benefits. A $200/month solution that offers value isn't even 1% of your payroll cost. If you can afford people, you can afford tools and services that they can use as force multipliers.

By all means, do things that don't scale. Keep it ghetto and don't waste resources trying to scale for a train that hasn't come yet. But don't spend hours installing a solution that could be hosted for a few dollars a month just because you know how. Reserve your time for customer acquisition, setting the direction of the business, and building product per your customer's needs.

You Could Use Some Outside, Experienced Help

A lot of startup founders are at least somewhat proficient with their off-hand skills. Business-minded founders can sometimes code a bit. Technical founders can sometimes write copy. Both are good enough at math to do accounting, and many high-IQ people are good at making sense of things outside of their core skill, like reading a legal document or researching office space.

However, you want to outsource any non-core competency to others as soon as you can. For things like accounting, legal review, or even finding real estate if you need an office, rely on people who specialize in it so that a) you get it done right, and b) you don't lose hours down the road (or in the case of accounting and legal, lose everything) because you missed a zero or didn't understand the significance of a clause. You're already outsourcing if you're using cloud servers or pulling in talent from a place like eLance or oDesk, so think of these other parts of your business the same way.  

Marketing and sales are core to every business, so while it's great to get consultation and help, be prepared to learn how to do it. For a technology startup, the knowledge embedded in your code is proprietary, so hire your tech key partners if you aren't those people. For everything else, outsource as long as you can. 

Conclusion

Kicking a startup off is no mean feat. The relentless execution drives many out of the game. The false hope of the loudly trumpeted exit stories from the Valley can be demoralizing even if you're successful but don't see that sort of exit in your near future. Even in the midst of that, taking the time to work on your business, putting a little bit of cash down to help the rubber meet the road, and getting help with accounting, legal matters, and paperwork will make your process of growth much smoother, and the road to your startup being your main means of income shorter.

Image Credit: "The Beginning Is Nigh", Garry Knight 
Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License