How I quit my day job and started a business

22Apr09

I decided to share my process of launching a start-up company. Maybe it will be interesting and helpful for someone, let me know in the comments!

HOW I QUIT MY DAY JOB AND STARTED A BUSINESS

I always knew I wanted to run my own business, but was waiting until a great idea comes up. But as ideas were coming, I couldn’t recognize, which one is a great one. Then I left my day job at Ernst & Young and wanted to find a better one, but I was completely pigeonholed – I got great offers of tax adviser jobs, but no chance to get anything else. Quite disturbing.

So I decided to go freelance and started doing web design. It got me a nice stream of income quite quickly so now I have some backup if my other ventures fail. I am developing it into a small marketing agency actually, which I may describe some day as well.

THE BUSINESS IDEA I PICKED

I am quite a proficient computer user. Plenty of people ask me for advice with their computers. At the same time, the technology has evolved; fast internet is widespread and there are several new pieces of software which let you connect to someone’s computer (if they allow you) and remotely work on it to solve the problem. So I decided to start an IT hotline.

Not a breakthrough idea at all. But I bet on my ability to do it in a better way than others and on my marketing skills. Also in my last job I got a pretty clear idea how an IT hotline should NOT work: “Did you try to restart the computer? No??? Do it and call back then!”, “So you restarted and the problem prevails? Try restarting once more and call back…”, “So it still prevails?? [transl. "you still bear up??"], Interesting/Strange/Impossible! I take a note and someone will call you back”