Head Scratching Startup

 When looking for startup advice, you are usually given standard advice, like "Focus on your strengths", or "Start in a field you currently work in". These are both solid pieces of advice, given that you actually have these strengths and you are able to notice what's inefficient in your line of work. However, I took the initiative to decide to completely disregard that advice and go into a field that I had no experience and limited knowledge of. That's when I decided to try a hardware startup.  For those of you who have any sort of experience in hardware, you'll know that it's not something you can just pick up along the way. Starting a hardware startup is hard enough if you have a background in electrical engineering, but throw in an overconfident business major like myself, and you have a recipe for disaster. I have had some experience with programming, but in a different language than what's required to start working with hardware. I was think...

 Now you may be wondering why the weird title for the post and for the website. Why would anyone want to be head scratching their way through the startup process? The truth is that the head scratching process isn't desirable at all, but it is the reality of looking back on some of the decisions you decided to make as a founder.  When deciding to start a company, or at least the start of an idea, it seems very easy to get in the mindset of "There's no way I would make that mistake", and then inevitably, you realize you either made that mistake or something very similar to it. For me, when working on my first idea, I thought it would be a great idea to work in secrecy and to try and get a patent on the product before I took it to market. This ended up being a very stupid decision, especially since when I presented it to others for the first time, there seemed to be a very visible discomfort at the mere sight of what I had created. Here I was, thinking that I was on to s...