Many people think that ideas are worth money and I think all these people are wrong, you can come up with the coolest ideas in the world and you are never able to implement them into real applications because you just don’t have the time or the business knowledge to know how these applications would be useful and addictive for the users.

You can also make the most appealing applications and yet you are not able to attract the critical mass and have the suitable business model to generate revenue streams for your apps.

Here are 7 things you should know before you quit your job and decide to bootstrap your startup:

1. How many cofounders? A startup business should not have more than 2 cofounders, 3 at most otherwise your shares in the new starup becomes so little. Selling your business for 1 million pounds means you get in your pocket 200K if you are five partners. Can’t buy you a flat!

2. Who are the cofounders? If your answer is 2 college friends who will be software developers working with me on the app. Hmmm… What about 2 years later when the application is popular and generating revenue, do you still need 2 partners that share the revenue? Or you would rather get rid of them and hire 2 fresh software developers? Think further down the road, one year later what is the value that my partners add to my startup?

3. Generating the critical mass. Don’t just think build it and people will come. Think why they would come and how. Think how to make them stay and grow the user base.

4. Your business model. Basically how will you make money from the application? What are you gonna sell? The application itself, or you will provide it for free and make out money from advertising? Or make the money from a service within the app? What’s your monetization model?

5. Sales sales sales. Who will make the sales? You need to hire experienced sales agents for your app, if you are an engineer with no sales experience, don’t try to sell it yourself.

6. Go mainstream and add a niche. We are always trying to be innovative which is good and important to have a healthy project. However, many people fall into the mistake of thinking about the niche and forgetting about the mainstream. A niche is an addition to your app but think about the mainstream audience. Think about Amr Diab, Mohamed Mounier and Justin Bieber, before thinking about Hamza Namira and Cairokee, although they have a good fan base, they are not main stream (yet).

7. Direct your users to do what you want them to do. Make them feel that they have control but target them to do what you want by providing the right default options and working on a very well studied UI/UX.. for example let them choose between 2 or 3 options instead of providing them with free textbox and asking them to type in what they want.