Why building a startup is so risky?

"Everything popular is wrong" - this quote from Oscar Wilde permanently changed my life. Instead of saying: "hey, that's what everybody does, so it has to be a best method" I try to analyze everything a little bit more. I think you should rather try to search for a better solution, than always rely on the most popular one. Let's consider the standard process of building a startup. Everybody say's it's a risky business, because you have to spend a lot of time and money, however the outcomes are unknown. 

I decided to ask: "why is it so risky at all?". And you know what? What everybody does is just wrong!

Investment -> Validation

A standard startup lifecycle looks more or less like that:

1. The idea
2. Finding a team and co-founders
3. Legal issues, vesting contracts, business registration
4. Searching for seed funding or risking your own money
5. Couple of month spent on building a prototype
6. Fortunately the next round of funding
7. Beta launch
8. 90% chance of failure, 10% chance of success

Of course that's the perfect plan, which doesn't take random events as quorells between founders, running out of money before finishing a prototype, feature creep and finally launching a prototype after a year, not getting funding, etc. All of those events make it impossible to reach point 8., at which you can finally check if it was worth working on the project. That luckily happens after 6 months. It means risking at least 6 months with 10% chance of success. Hell yeah, it's risky! The question is: does it really have to work this way?

Validation -> Investment

Why wouldn't you check, if your idea makes sense before starting to work? "I need a MVP to do that", "I need a team", "I need founding"... blah, blah, blah. None of those is fundamental. Let's see how the idea validation change the rules of the game:

1. The idea
2. Appropriate validation

At this point you either start earning money from preorders, or fail so fast that it cost you only a couple of hours or days to find out it's not going to work. You don't have to search for a team, create MVP and you don't need any funding. That sounds a lot easier and far less risky, doesn't it? Working on the validated idea makes live easier also on the next steps:

• You earn your own money, so you need less funding, if any
• You don't have to share your company with co-founders, because you can simply hire people to do the job
• Investors will contact you at a certain point, and you won't have to pitch everybody in town

What do you think about such a strategy of building a startup? If you want to learn how to start earning money without creating a MVP sign up for free e-mail updates or check my online idea validation course.