Elizabeth Iorns at Female Founders Conference 2014

TL;DR

Elizabeth Iorns, founder of Science Exchange, presents nine lessons learned over three years building a marketplace for ordering experiments from the world’s best labs. The core takeaway is that founding a startup is hard but rewarding; the final lesson is "don't give up.

Key insights

• Solving your own problem (Paul Graham’s advice) provides deep understanding and passion, and creates a compelling founding story that helps raise money, get press, and build a team.
• It’s as difficult to build a company solving a small problem as a big one, so you should aim for a real, large problem (citing Aaron Patzer’s "real need" distinction).
• To verify a problem is real, talk to potential users early, do market research on size and competitive landscape, examine the status quo, and launch a minimal viable product for real-time feedback.