I Want to Start a Business but I Never Actually Start: Preparing Is Not Progress

How long have you been going to start this business? Not the months. The years.

Now the second question, the one this book is actually about: in all that time, how many strangers have had the chance to say no to you? For most people who pick up this book, the answer is exactly zero.

Preparing feels almost exactly like progress. It produces work, decisions and a folder that gets bigger every month, and it never exposes you to the one thing that could go wrong: a person outside your head looking at what you made and saying no. That is not a character flaw. It is a very good trap.

In 2023 three researchers pooled seventy-five studies covering 150,703 people and found that how strongly someone intends to start a business accounts for about 17 percent of the differences in what people actually go on to do. Desire was never your problem. This book is about the other eighty-three.

Eleven chapters. Each one carries a single idea and the research behind it, and each one ends with an exercise that takes one sitting.

Inside:

- 1,673 start-up attempts in four countries, in which the ones that became a business took a median of seven months and the ones that were abandoned took twelve. The attempts that died were the long, careful ones

- The number you are waiting to reach before you start, and why it moves as soon as you get near it

- Harvard and MIT's open online courses: 12.67 million registrations, and 52 percent of the people who registered never opened the course material

- A three-week business training programme for 4,402 young people in Uganda that really worked, and what the untrained group had done by year nine

- The licence you think you need, checked against the 102 occupations a US report actually measured

- Students transcribing meaningless Greek for seven weeks, who planned their work patiently and pushed it away once it was in front of them, and why 59 percent of them chose to tie their own hands when it cost nothing

- Why so many people who finally start never chose the day, and what Sweden's records of every plant that closed in 1987 and 1988 show about it

- What an unfinished business idea really does inside your head, which is not what the famous Zeigarnik effect claims

Every number has been chased back to the paper it came from. Where a paper would not open or a figure could not be checked, the chapter says so instead of printing the headline.

Diego Segura is an industrial engineer who has spent his career working out how systems fail and how to fix them. He holds an MBA and a master's in Digital Technology from Boston University, and has worked with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Boston University. He runs businesses whose software has shipped with teams in Germany, India and Japan, and his work has been published in nineteen languages. He has also finished a product and never sent it to the 120 buyers waiting in another tab, carried one idea since 2018 without selling a single unit, and taken three days to send a four-sentence email. Those stories are in here too.

The book does not ask you for a plan, a course or a morning routine. It ends by asking you to send one question to one person who could pay you, inside fourteen days, and to put the answer where somebody else can see it.

The reply does not have to be a yes. It only has to arrive.