It's almost a joke at this point among new entrants to the job market. Job postings list an entry-level position, then request 3-5 years of experience. How is someone who is actually entry-level supposed to qualify for that when some candidates applying genuinely will have 3-5 years of experience?
Build something, and make your own experience! It doesn’t seem like it should work, and yet my career is proof that it does. I started this process while working at a coffee shop. One year later, I was hired as a product manager for a Y Combinator-funded travel startup.
Win-Win Entrepreneurship:
This is an overview of my system to create win-win entrepreneurship scenarios.
If you start a new company and it supports you financially, congratulations! You don’t need that entry-level job anymore.
If the company doesn’t succeed, make sure you learned enough to have real-world experience when interviewing for new positions. If you build things, you’ll have more interesting interviews and likely more success than a person who spent the majority of their time applying for jobs without building experience. As another benefit, you’ll try all different facets of the business world at once and have a better idea of what types of work you enjoy.
What to build?
Find a problem that you genuinely want to solve, and you think you’re capable of solving on your own. If you already know every step of the process you will follow, pick a bigger problem to solve.
What if I’m limited on money?
You need a rough idea of the resources you have available to you. Starting a business can be incredibly inexpensive, especially if you’re willing to do the work yourself. The type of business you choose will help determine start-up costs:
Technology:
If you’re interested in technology but low on funds, consider learning how to build a digital product. With no-code tools available today, this might not even require coding knowledge.
Services:
If you have some service you know you can offer, it’s possible to build a low-cost business around this as well. A service-based business could be anything from neighborhood lawn care to managing a social media marketing agency. Get creative here if you have some strengths that you believe provide value to other people or businesses.
Physical Products:
Physical products can be inexpensive, however organizing a production run can carry a relatively high cost. Crowdfunding is an option - but it may not be the best fit for this process. If your crowdfunding campaign doesn’t succeed, then your business never gets off the ground.
Make sure you actually launch it.
Almost no one will care about your hard work or even believe you’re doing anything while you’re getting started. It’s a cliché, but you have to believe in yourself. Everyone else will only believe you were actually working on something after you launch it. This is why crowdfunding can be a risk. If your campaign fails and you never go live with the product, all that work you put in to get started will not be recognized.
It’s imperative to get to the point where you’re selling a product or service to customers. Until you get to that point, no one will take your business seriously. It’s dumb, but that’s how it works. No one sees your hard work, they just see the finished product.
How to learn anything: start with the end in mind.
What are you trying to accomplish?
Free resources for learning to code are abundant online, and having a product in mind that you want to create will help direct you to the right resources. If you know you want to build an app, you would start by Googling “how to build an app” rather than “how to start a company.”
In my case, I wanted to build a watch company but didn’t know anything about watches. I Googled “How to build a watch” and went from there. When one of my suppliers emailed asking if I wanted an “AR Coating” on my watch crystal, I searched “What is an AR coating watches” which led me to a post in a blog called “Everything you need to know about watch crystals”, including a section on anti-reflective(AR) coatings.
Identify the things you need to know, then known them. Any information you want is out there for free if you search for it.
Conclusion
If you’ve done this right, you’ve built enough experience to at least get some freelance work. In my case, launching my watch company was only marginally successful. I could cover my costs with sales but wasn’t seeing the success I hoped for. However, I did manage to use this experience to get some freelance work consulting for e-commerce clothing brands in Los Angeles. Since I had already run a Shopify store myself, I could confidently work with a brand to help them solve their technology problems. By the time I was in interviews for full-time positions, I had real experience that allowed me to succeed in a product management role at a startup.