How to Become a Prosperous Entrepreneur

The digital age makes it possible to create something, market it and sell it entirely on your own, which means it’s a lot easier to be an entrepreneur than ever before.

My parents are finally able to talk fondly of the first phone call I made home during freshman orientation in college.  Three days into my time at Duke, I didn’t call to talk about my new classes or teachers or even the new friends I had made.  I was crazy excited to tell them about these things called lofts.  They were these 6-foot structures that everyone was paying $200 a piece for, and I felt like I could build them myself for a quarter of that price and then sell them to all my new friends.

Half the battle of a start-up is simply getting started, but once you have an idea and a team, there comes another hurdle: finding the right product-market fit. The quest to product-market fit or ‘PMF’ is often filled with false positives, failed features, and trying to figure out the fastest possible way to generate revenue.

Many thanks to the Kauffman foundation for crunching the numbers on a key part of Jerry Moran’s clumsily-named Startup Act 3.0 — the new visa for immigrant entrepreneurs.

Whether you’re launching a new product or service from within an existing enterprise, or you’re an entrepreneur noodling a new startup idea, I find that that same fundamental set of screening questions can help you shape your idea.  I’ve assembled these questions into a 12-point framework I call the Launch Lens. 

No entrepreneur ever wants to admit failure. But there is a worse fate: running a startup that's become a zombie.