31 tips for starting a business from someone who never had one

The 31 tips for starting a business from someone who never started one

Can you give lessons on how to start a business without ever having started one? The answer, according to the list's own author, is yes: "what I'm saying is pure common sense, and for that you don't need experience." Thirty-one points, from the first to the last, to keep you from going broke with your own company. And an uncomfortable confession in the second line: "I don't have and have never had businesses, like everyone who writes books of the Get Rich in 10 Days with My Method type."

The text is circulating on the forum and keeps ruffling antiestéticathers. Not because of what it says, which is mostly obvious, but because of who is saying it. The list begins with choosing a sector you've worked in before, not going into debt to the point of being unable to pay if the business fails, and avoiding partners where possible. It ends with the most ambitious recipe: creating a system, a kind of list of commandments so the business can be copied and implemented elsewhere.

Common sense as the only credential

The author's defense is both overwhelmingly logical and sneaky at the same time. "If I tell you that jumping out of a plane without a parachute is bad for your health, I don't need to have jumped out of a plane without a parachute for you to believe me." True. But between jumping without a parachute and managing a workforce, negotiating with suppliers or putting up with a toxic partner lies a stretch that can't be covered with aviation analogies.

The most repeated criticism is not of the content but of the authority: "if you don't own businesses you have zero credibility." Others go further and dismiss the text as a string of platitudes, on the level of "earn more than you spend." There's a middle ground that's more interesting: several of the recommendations only make complete sense once you've been on the other side, and then you discover that what seemed like a botched job was the least bad way of doing something, because there was no good way.

The point that sparks the most discussion: employees

Tip number 22 says not to empathize with employees, because a business is a machine and you and the people who work there are parts of that machine. That's when everyone jumps in. The main objection is that a company with a good working environment minimizes problems, and that environment is created by the boss. There are known cases of people who turned down better-paid jobs because they felt valued at their company.

The reply comes with a nuance: it's not about being a despot, but about not confusing the job with friendship. "All you achieve with buddy-buddy behavior is losing people's respect." The barrier between the person who pays the wages and the person who collects them, they argue, is not a manual-driven whim but an operational necessity. The nuance matters because the original text, read coldly, sounds like a blank check for mistreatment.

Partners, pricing and the country to do it in

The recommendation to avoid partners gets applause without reservations: "halves are for legs only." Same with not hiring family members. Where there's more division is on the price war. The author clarifies he means not undercutting when you sell the same thing as the guy next door, because you end up creating an enemy who will force you to lower them even further. But some point out that being cheap sells, and that in the neighborhood there's someone who peine a bar without even knowing how to make a mixed drink and has been open for almost thirty years.

And hovering over it all is the tip that's not on the list but that several consider the only necessary one: don't start it in Spain. The warning is repeated without much elaboration, more as a generational lament than as analysis. What does appear in detail is the proposal to start off the books to check whether the business works before pouring money into registrations, permits and bureaucracy.

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Thirty-one commandments, zero businesses started, and one sentence that sums up the purpose of this kind of list: "the only experience I have has been given to me by my 46 years in the world and watching and analyzing thousands of situations." In other words, the same credential we all have. The difference is that hardly anyone writes it up as a decalogue.