What if you're close? OK, what if you aren't quite there. You can't pass tests 1, 2 and 3 above, but you are close. Then take a pause – don't say no yet. Instead, go do some more homework. Do 20 customer interviews. Find a great co­founder who can pass the 3 tests, commit to 7­10 years and the overall 24+ months to Initial Traction. You almost certainly can’t do it alone; do that and then see how it feels. Even great founders that can see The Future sometimes need help. I did in both my startups. 20 interviews and an amazing co­founder can be the missing pieces that really show you how to do your own SaaS startup. A Double Check: Are You Really Sure? There's been one huge change in “entrepreneurship” over the past 10 years. No, it’s not that it’s cheaper than ever to do an Internet startup. That's not even true. When software came on a disk or a CD­ROM in the old days, it was even cheaper. You didn't even need a single server to start Microsoft, or Intuit, or Borland, or Lotus. Although distribution today is far broader, if not cheaper. It's not that the web and tech are so much bigger, creating so many more opportunities. That’s true, but even when tech was smaller you could scale very quickly. Inflation­adjusted, Lotus 1­2­3 did over $100M its first year and IPO’d in its second year. What SaaS company ever did that? What's changed is the culture of entrepreneurism. Ten years ago, to be a founder you were a bit of a nut – a mad scientist, a crazy kook, someone who didn't realize the odds of success were 0.00001%. Someone so smart, so gifted, so bonkers, that they did something wild. Founders were a breed apart. You might have met some of them, but you could never imagine being one of them. Ten years ago, if you joined a startup post­traction, you were still taking a big risk. You were stepping out of an accepted career path and potentially taking a big hit; and you were definitely taking a big salary cut. By contrast, today even a pre­traction entrepreneur is super­cool. Even being just a wannapreneur can make you feel cool. The risk is low, failure is fine, and you can always go join Facebook/Google/Zynga/Square if it doesn't work out. Joining a post­traction startup? No salary cuts necessary. And your resume? Enhanced by that cool, hyper­scaling startup, i.e., zero risk. That's OK by me, but I think the disservice is that TechCrunch, Y Combinator, The Social Network and all that has over­glamorized entrepreneurship. My one piece of advice: you absolutely should not start a tech startup and try to raise money unless it's 100.0000% clear to you that this is the best thing in the world to do. Why not? First, your startup will almost certainly fail, and while that's OK, you won't really get any credit for it. No one cares about your failed startup that got no traction and that no one ever heard of. They won't judge you, but they won't care.