Being a university student is a really weird point in time to be. People who will go on to lead very normal and responsible lives temporarily lose their minds. Experimentation is the thing to do and “being young” is the perfect fallback when things go wrong. Most amazingly it is OK to fail and try something else, a lesson that is quickly lost upon graduation.

This is the perfect opportunity to not only wake-up in someone else’s house with no recollection of last night, but also to start a business!

I’m a Student that Wants to Start a Business Eventually, but Why Start One Now?

The perceived barriers to starting a business are a lack of time, money, and experience. Given infinite time and someone else’s money to play with the people who complain about this stuff would suddenly all become master entrepreneurs. Too bad real life doesn’t work this way. Everyone needs to start somewhere with all the risks and work associated with it.

As a student you don’t have a hell of a lot of assets to risk, so your total investment and risk in a business might be a month’s beer budget. Your bills are minimal and you only have yourself to support. Student loans and parents are there to fall back on if things go poorly. Unless you win the lottery it’s only going to get tougher to get started as you get older and start supporting a whole family plus a mortgage payment.

There’s no obligation to start something big that will make you rich or which you will run for the rest of your life. It’s always nice if things go that way, but you have so much to gain even from starting a little thing that nets you $200 total. You’re real return on your efforts will be the amazing experience you’ve gained, a very valuable asset in entrepreneurship.

I’ve started businesses in high school and university, two of which are now looking to be serious long-term successes. However many failed before launching, and others launched to deaf ears. I’ve noticed some things time and time again in my own ventures and those of my friends. From this experience I’ve decided to bring you some success points that are important for anyone starting a business, but are particularly strong points of failure for students.

Start Something Sensible

One of the lessons you may end up learning is that the carefully thought-out idea you had turned out to not be so good. This is tough because it spells almost certain doom from the start. Many students forget to do the whole “is it actually viable” check before going ahead with a venture. This doesn’t have to be a complex report involving looking up meaningless demographic statistics and printing pie charts. Ask yourself basic questions like “who is going to buy this?”, “why would they buy it?”, “how will they know about it?”, and “how will I make money?”. Now answer these questions honestly rather than with what you want to hear. Better yet run your idea by that brutually honest friend who won’t hesitate to tear it apart.

Check out this list of 8 stupid fratboy ideas for cliche examples of what not do. Note that it’s not so much the products that are bad, it’s the lack of thought characteristic to each one.

Spend Very Wisely, but Don’t be Cheap

There is a fine line between the importance of minimizing business expenditures on a shoestring budget and just plain being cheap. I forget who said that you can’t cost-cut your way to greatness, but it’s certainly true. Some stuff just plain makes sense to spend a little extra on, like 500 color business cards, or your own domain and a web host that won’t go down every Friday.

On the same note don’t try to start your business for nothing. There are good reasons for doing so, but not wanting to risk any money is not one of them. Given the financial situations of most students, I would say that as much as $500 can be risked before you’re looking at any substancial amount of money. Here in Ontario that is the cost of a single one term university course; if the business goes under you will still have gotten at least a course’s worth of knowledge and experience under your belt.

I find that the larger obstacle to putting your money into a business isn’t the actual financial situation somebody is in, but the fear of the sense of loss if things don’t work out. Ask yourself how your life will look if you do lose that money. Will it matter at all in the long run? Will it have been a genuinely bone-headed move in retrospect if it fails? If your answer to the latter is yes then your idea needs more thought.

Don’t Partner with Anyone Less Passionate Than You

The students that start a business together, particularly one that requires no upfront investment, and then do absolutely nothing are a university cliche. The excuses are always a lack of time and money, with neither partner ever being free at the same time. Exams and wing nights get in the way you know. Yes the cruel reality of university life has crushed these poor entreprising souls.

The reality is that running a business is a lot of hard work, and inevitably the amount of said work put into the venture by each person becomes equivalent to that of the person least serious about the project. If you don’t both firmly commit to a certain amount of time to spend on this, trust each other, and put real money into the game, stuff just isn’t going to happen.

Don’t partner with someone for the sake of partnering, only do it because your partner brings something important to the table and both of you are absolutely set on making the business a reality.

Have a Plan to Advertise the Hell Out of It

Those feel good stories in the press about student entrepreneurs making it big represent a miniscule portion of student businesses. No matter how cool your business idea is, you’ll find yourself very short on customers if you’re marketing plan involves a media frenzy begging for your story. You must promote the good old fashioned hard way, and make this your priority. If you have only ten things that you will do, that’s not enough. In all the successful campus events I’ve been involved, the promotion for those exceeded that. Think how much more it takes for a product or service that costs money. Be a Shameless Self Promoter.

You’ll find that most methods you try don’t work, or don’t work well. Keep trying new things while putting more effort into the strategies that are working. Make sure you can measure where you are getting your customers from too, otherwise you are doomed to continue spending significant time and money on the tactics that have failed.

Don’t Give Up Too Easily

School and life tend to get in the way very quickly. You do need to put some time and effort into this, and it can be harder to do when the initial excitement has worn off and you’re profits are $2 after two weeks of hard work. When your sales are inevitably much lower than you first expected, you need to analyze why that’s the case. Don’t give up too quickly, but don’t keep pushing forward blindly. Fix the problems in your business model and understand how you will eventually make money through realistic way. Few people have gotten it right the first time.

If you are looking at starting an online business be sure to read my guide to creating a successful e-venture where I cover many of the important considerations and pitfalls involved. Best of luck!

“It was great to meet you. May I have your card?”

“Sure it’s here somewhere. One sec. Oh I seem to be out, let me jot it down on this napkin here…”

This picturesque networking scenario gone horribly wrong has a habit of happening at the worst possible time. The problem? You didn’t bring your cards with you because you weren’t planning on meeting anyone. Here is your chance to get a big sale or a foot in the door and you’re messing it up already.

A Simple Tip to Avoid This Mess

I could tell you to simply bring your cards everywhere you go, but that hassle hasn’t worked for me. You constantly have to have your business card holder on you and that’s just unreasonable to remember. The trick that has worked well for me is to put them everywhere instead!

Subtle difference, but the idea is that forgetting the business card holder does not mean you’re out of luck. I have cards stashed in my wallet, clipboards, bags, jackets, shirts, filing cabinets, and anywhere else reasonable to keep cards. I have a habit of strategically littering them into portable compartments whenever it occurs to me.

This little tip has saved me a number of times, and the best part is that as I pull the card out from a trusty jacket pocket no one ever knows that I didn’t think about bringing my card.

I read an interesting article on Life Dev suggesting that you should never check your e-mail first thing in the morning or before bed. The article makes some excellent points, but I’d like to disagree with the solution.

To summarize, the author describes the perils of checking your e-mail at night or first thing in the morning. The core argument is that mail can take a while to get through, with messages like funny videos making it very easy to become derailed for 2 hours just surfing the net. Instead of being productive by checking your mail regularly you are burning up the most precious working hours or staying up too late and not get enough sleep.

All of this rings very true for me. About two years ago I fell in the above trap and combined with online forums I wasted ridiculous amounts of productive time. The result was the feeling that I never had enough time to do what I needed to, constant tiredness from a lack of sleep, and gradually increasing procrastination. Yikes.

Nevertheless the entire time I read the article, rather than nodding my head profusely I found a voice in my head shouting “what if your e-mail is important to your work?”. Being an entrepreneur I don’t have the luxury of turning off work beyond the 9 to 5 timeslots and there is always the possibility of an e-mail in my inbox that either needs to be answered urgently or will drastically reshape my schedule for the day. Knowing what’s coming at me as soon as possible makes it much easier to make good use of my time.

If the idea of not checking your mailbox sounds unrealistic for your situation I’d like to propose an alternative that I’ve successfully used for the past year. I say go ahead and check your e-mail in the morning. Check it before bed. Have your mail client running all day while you work. Give your e-mail as much visibility as you feel you need to be comfortable! The trick is to use a highly underutilized feature of virtually every mail client out there.

The Follow-up E-mail Flag

Virtually all mail clients have this feature. In Outlook it is literally a flag beside each message that you can click. In Gmail it is a star. It provides a very simple way of marking an e-mail message for follow-up along with an easy way to find these messages later.

I actually have two very different e-mail modes. Checking e-mail and responding to e-mail. The first mode can occur at anytime, and since I have my mail client always on and a BlackBerry strapped to my belt, it’s best described as “all the time”. When I check my e-mail I scan over each message very briefly (not everything needs to be fully read right away) and either flag it, leave it, or delete it. If an e-mail is flagged I am comfortable in knowing that I will get back to it at my liesure. Something that is high priority may get an immediate response, but anything else is saved for an appropriate time. I make a mental note of any e-mails with attached actions, allowing me to be aware of what is coming up without necessarily needing to act on it right away.

Not responding to everything is tricky at first as it takes a little bit of discipline to not watch that funny video right away or respond to every single question that someone may have of you. The author of the LiveDev article is perfectly right that doing so will quickly waste the most valuable productivity hours that you have. You also need to get in the habit of checking what messages you have flagged. E-mail clients generally have a separate view, but I’ve gotten in the (possibly bad) habit of simply scrolling through my inbox and watching for flagged messages. I find that needing to flip to a flagged messages only view is a little unintuitive and is a lot more likely to get forgotten.

Bonus E-mail Tip

If you look at my inbox you may become disgusted at the mess that it’s seemingly in. Virtually every undeleted message remains in there, with no real organization. The reality is that I’ve given up on attempting to artificially file messages on arbitrary criteria like the person who sent it or its topic. I was lead to do this after a combination of filing cabinet advice from David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Gmail’s unique tagging model. It turns out that the more places you have to store things, the more places they aren’t when you need them!

I’m confident that the e-mail that I am looking for is in my inbox. If it comes from a certain person I can sort my inbox by name and usually find it that way. The same applies to subject and date, both of which also greatly narrow down the location of an e-mail to a scannable size. If I’m using GMail I tend to simply search for the e-mail as the engine works really well and returns results instantly. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Outlook’s search, which can take several minutes to find what you are looking for. I recommend searching in Outlook as a last resort, and using the sorting function as much as possible.

I should note that I do use folders for certain special messages, like order receipts and automated e-mails. These special cases only get checked in a certain way and in the case of automated e-mail can really clog up an inbox if not dealt with separately. At the time of this writing I only have six such folders.