Should You Launch a Tech Startup?

The companion to the Turbo Guide. Last month: HOW. This month: WHY.

A few weeks ago I wrote The Turbo Guide to Launching a Tech Startup — a fast, AI-powered playbook for getting from idea to first customer.

The response I loved most was from people who had never built anything before. People who weren't "tech founders" in any conventional sense. They read it, they built, they shipped. Some are selling to actual customers right now.

I wish there were more of them. The opportunities right now are genuinely tremendous, and there are far too many people on the sidelines who should be in the game.

This post is for those people — and for anyone who has ever quietly considered the idea of a startup in any form. It's especially for the people who see problems around them, big or small, and have the nagging suspicion that technology could be part of the solution. If that sounds like you, read on.

Because here's the thing — AI hasn't just made it cheaper to build software. It has rewired what's possible, who can do it, and how. If you decided five years ago that being a tech founder wasn't for you, the math has changed enough that the answer might be different now.

So before we talk about what to build, let's talk about you.

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Are you Startup-Led or Problem-Led?

In my experience, founders arrive at the question of "should I start a company" in one of two ways.

The first kind is startup-led. They've decided they want to be a founder, and now they're hunting for an idea. People land here for all sorts of reasons — we'll get to those in a minute — but the key thing is the startup is the goal; the idea is whatever fits.

The second kind is problem-led. They're so frustrated by a specific problem — something they encountered in their work, their life, their industry — that they can't stop thinking about it. A startup emerges as the way to make the problem go away.

Both kinds produce great companies. There's an old saying in startup land: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. The founders who last are the ones who can let go of their first ten product ideas without flinching, because what they actually care about is solving the underlying problem. Startup-led founders eventually have to fall in love with a problem too. Problem-led founders start with that box already checked.

Here's why this distinction matters for you specifically. Startup-led folks tend to find their way to incubators like Genesis on their own — they walk in the door already convinced they should be doing this. The problem-led folks are different. They're working away in their industry, seeing problems every day that could obviously be solved with the right product, and never seriously considering that they could be the ones to solve them. This post is especially for them.

If the thing you can't stop noticing is a real, specific problem in a world you understand — take that as a signal.

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What do you Actually Want?

This part is harder than it sounds. People don't always know what they want, and they're often wrong about it when they think they do. But being honest with yourself here is one of the most important things you can do before picking a path.

In my experience, founder motivation tends to cluster in a handful of places:

Wealth. You want a big payout — eventually selling the company for tens of millions or more. You're willing to swing for the fence and risk striking out.

Independence. You want control over your own future. You want to be the one making the decisions about what you work on, how you spend your time, and where you're headed — rather than having those calls made for you. You want to own your own direction.

Impact. You want the problem you're solving to actually get solved, broadly, for a lot of people. The financial outcome matters, but it's not what gets you out of bed.

The thrill. Some founders are honestly just chasing the experience of doing this — the adrenaline of building something from nothing, the high of shipping, the identity of being in the game. The outcome matters less than the chase. That's legit. Just know that's what you're after.

Most people have one or two of these as primary, with the others as nice-to-haves. The mismatches I see most often are people who say they want wealth but actually want independence, or who chase the thrill of being a founder when what they really want is to make an impact. Different motivations point at different paths, so this matters.

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One Thing Before we get to the Paths

Before we walk through the three options, you should know this: none of them are easy.

Being an entrepreneur is an all-in decision, whichever path you pick. You will work harder than you have ever worked. You will think about the business in the shower, at dinner, while you're trying to fall asleep. There will be months — sometimes years — where you make less money than you would in a salaried job, while carrying more risk and more stress. Customers will tell you they love what you're building and then forget to renew. Co-founders will drift. The market will move under your feet.

Path 2 is not "the easy path." Path 3 is not "the easy path." There is no easy path. The reason most people don't start companies isn't that they couldn't think of a good idea — it's that the work, sustained over years, is genuinely demanding in a way most jobs aren't.

The people I've seen succeed at any of these paths went in eyes open. The ones who washed out fastest were the ones who picked a path because it looked easier than the others. The three paths below are differently demanding, not differently easy. Pick the one that matches what you actually want — not the one that looks like less work.

I'll be blunt about one more thing. I meet a lot of people who love the idea of being a founder but don't have the dedication or work ethic to actually pull it off. That's fine. Not everyone is built for this, and not everyone should be. If you read the rest of this post and decide a startup isn't really for you, there's a great career to be built doing something else. Be an intrapreneur — someone who finds problems to solve from inside a larger company. Build a career you love. And keep your eyes open: someday you might come across a problem you genuinely can't stop thinking about, and at that point the dedication to pull it off will be there, because the problem itself will demand it.

Onward.

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The Three Paths

I see three broad shapes a tech company can take right now. These aren't formal industry terms — just how I think about it.

1. Venture-backed high-growth
2. Build to last
3. Consulting / services (which can stay as services, or become a product startup)

A quick note on Genesis's role here: our major focus is path 1. It's where the biggest economic outcomes have historically come from, and our programs are built around supporting that. We're increasingly looking at path 2 too, because there's genuine opportunity there worth paying attention to. Path 3 isn't something Genesis supports — but it's still part of this conversation, because it's a real path on its own and it often feeds back into path 1 or 2.

AI has changed all three. But not in the same way. 

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1. Venture-Backed Hight-Growth

This is the path everyone pictures when they hear "tech startup." TechCrunch headlines, big funding announcements, deal offers from name-brand venture capital firms.

When you take venture capital money, you're signing up for a specific deal. VC firms invest in dozens of companies knowing that most will fail. They need a small handful of their bets to grow so massively that those wins cover the losses on everything else and still make the firm's overall fund profitable. So when they back you, they're not actually expecting you to succeed — they know most of their bets, probably including yours, will fail. They're investing because they think you have a good enough chance of being one of the rare big wins to make the math of their fund work. There is no version of this path where you take VC money and quietly build something calm and profitable. The deal is to swing for the fence.

That's not a downside. Those are the terms of the deal. If your idea is venture-shaped and you actually want to swing for the fence, this is how you do it.

The Newfoundland & Labrador funding environment for this is genuinely strong right now. We've gone from being a place where founders thought they had to leave to raise money. Now we're one of the strongest small-market venture environments in the country. Pelorus just launched Venture NL III, their third fund. Killick Capital is still actively investing. And the recent wave of local successes has produced a new generation of angel investors who are putting their winnings back into the next generation of companies. If your idea is a real fit for VC, this is a great moment to be raising here.

The trade-offs are real, though, and worth understanding before you sign up. Do you want to share decision-making with a board? Give up large parts of your ownership stake to investors? Sign contracts that pay investors back first when the company is sold? Work in a job your investors can fire you from? Be OK with being "doing fine" — profitable, growing, employing people — and still considered a failure because you're not growing 3x year-over-year?

If yes to all of it: go. The capital is here.

How do you know if your idea fits? Honestly, the best way is to talk to a local VC. Pelorus and Killick are both friendly and approachable, and they'll tell you straight whether what you have is venture-shaped. If it is, great. If not, they'll tell you that too, and you can move on to the other paths with that question answered.

How AI has changed this path: the floor has moved. Building a first working version of a product used to take months or longer; now it can take weeks. Investors expect that, and they expect you to show real customers using your product with a tiny team almost immediately. "We're an AI company" is now table stakes, not positioning. And in any AI-touched category, the first big winner tends to dominate the space — which means the upside is bigger, but so is the pressure to be that winner before someone else is.

This path fits if your motivation is wealth or impact — and you actually want the swing-for-the-fence game.

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2. Build to Last

Of the three paths, this is the one where the math has shifted most dramatically in your favor over the last few years. What used to be very hard to pull off is now genuinely viable — and that's new.

The idea: find a real, specific, often boring problem in a market you understand. Build a product — small, fast, minimal complexity — that solves it well. Get to revenue as cheaply as you can. Stay in control of the direction and pace. Decide later whether you want to grow it, sell it, or just run it.

This path is sometimes called bootstrapping — building the company on your own money plus revenue from your first customers. It can also involve modest outside investment from angels, friends and family, or grants. What it doesn't involve is the venture-capital deal we covered in path 1, where you commit upfront to chasing a billion-dollar outcome. The point isn't that you can't take any outside money — the point is that the money you do take doesn't lock you into a specific trajectory. You stay in control of where the company is going.

The path is wide. You could end up:

• A solo founder who, several years in, has built a profitable business that pays you $200,000 a year and lets you work three days a week.
• A small team that, over the better part of a decade, has built a profitable business doing $5 to $10 million a year in revenue, and plans to run it indefinitely.
• A bootstrapped company that grows over a decade or two into hundreds of employees and eventually sells for billions.

All three are real outcomes. The path doesn't lock you into any particular size or timeline.

How AI has changed this path: dramatically and unambiguously for the better. AI has collapsed the cost of building software to the point where one or two people can build and operate what used to require a team of eight or more. The economics now work for narrow, specific problems that were too small to bother with five years ago. People keep saying we'll see the first one-person billion-dollar company any year now. Maybe we already have. Either way, the math has shifted, and it shifted in your favor.

Two things you'll need.

First, a real problem to solve. Not "wouldn't it be cool if there was an app for X." A specific, painful problem that someone is already paying to make go away — or would happily pay to make go away. The more specific, the better. Booking software for mini-golf course operators in North America beats trying to build the next big general-purpose scheduling app every time.

Important to notice: you can — and should — figure out the problem long before you have to figure out the technology. The first weeks or months of any new venture are about validating: is this problem real? Are people actually willing to pay for a solution? Do they care enough to change what they do today? You can do most of that with conversations, a landing page, maybe a Google Form. No code required.

Second, someone technical on the team — eventually. AI has made building dramatically easier, but you still need someone who can ship, fix, and operate a real product once real customers start using it. That someone can be you, if you're willing to learn enough to be dangerous. Or it can be a co-founder. But it has to be someone, eventually. Throwing code together with AI assistance is fine for early prototypes. It falls apart fast once real customers start hitting it. The good news is you don't need to figure out the technical side on day one — you need to figure it out before you have paying customers depending on the product working.

Some real examples, anchoring different ends of this path.

Mailchimp started in 2001 as a side project of a small Atlanta web design agency. The founders bootstrapped it for twenty years, took zero outside investment, and sold to Intuit in 2021 for $12 billion. Each of the two main founders walked away with around $5 billion. That's the upper end of what this path can produce.

Less Annoying CRM is the example most readers should pay attention to. Brothers Tyler and Bracken King started it in 2009 to fix what they hated about Salesforce. Tyler kept consulting part-time for the first three and a half years to pay the bills while they built the business. Sixteen years in, they're still bootstrapped, still profitable, still family-owned. Around $5 million a year in revenue, 24,000 paying customers, 17 employees in St. Louis. They explicitly turned down the venture capital path. They explicitly aren't trying to sell. They are running a business they love, that pays them well, that they plan to operate for decades.

Those examples are great, but they took years and years. Here are two from the last couple of years that show how this is playing out right now, with AI tools in the mix.

PhotoAI is a one-person business run by Dutch developer Pieter Levels. He launched it in February 2023 as an AI tool that generates professional-looking photos of a person from a few uploaded selfies. Less than three years later, it's doing roughly $1.6 million a year in revenue — solo, no employees, built with AI-assisted code. His broader portfolio of small bootstrapped products is now over $3 million a year in revenue, still solo, still bootstrapped.

Base44 is the dramatic version. An Israeli founder named Maor Shlomo built it alone — an AI-powered tool for building apps — and sold it to Wix in 2025 for $80 million cash. The whole thing took about six months from launch to sale. One person. AI tools. Six months.

These aren't lottery wins. They're proof of what's genuinely possible now in a way it wasn't five years ago.

This path fits if your motivation is independence or impact in a focused way. Most readers of this post should be looking hard at it.

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3. Consulting / Services

This is the path most people overlook. It deserves more attention.

You start a business that helps other companies solve a problem you understand. The hottest version of this right now is helping organizations adopt AI well — most are flailing, most have no idea where to start, and the demand for capable help is enormous. But this category is much bigger than just AI. Marketing strategy, regulatory compliance, operations consulting, manufacturing process design, healthcare administration, specialized accounting — anywhere companies are struggling with a problem you can solve, there's a services business waiting to be built.

And here's a related angle that doesn't get talked about enough. In any of those domains — not just AI consulting itself — a solo or small-team consultancy that uses AI to make itself dramatically more efficient has a real edge right now. One person with the right tools can do work that used to require a team of five. The big incumbent agencies will be slow to figure this out — they have too much structure and too much existing business to disrupt. That gap is a real opportunity for anyone willing to move quickly.

This is a real path, not a placeholder for "couldn't build a real startup." Some problems just lend themselves better to services than to products. The problem might be too varied across customers to standardize into software. The customer might need a human in the room. The work might depend on judgment in ways software can't replicate yet. Recognizing that and building a great services business around it is a perfectly legitimate way to build a real company.

One more thing worth knowing about this path: you don't need to build anything first to start earning revenue. Your first signed contract is your first revenue — you're being paid for expertise you already have, not for a product you've had to build and hope finds a market. For people who don't want to gamble months of unpaid building on whether an idea is going to land, that's a real practical advantage worth weighing.

This path has two possible finish lines, and you get to decide along the way which one you're going for.

Finish line one: the services business is the business. You build expertise, charge well for it, hire as the work grows, and end up with a stable, profitable services firm. That's a real outcome with real wealth. It is not a tech startup in the venture-capital sense — but it is a real company, with employees, ownership, and durable revenue. For founders who want independence and a stable business they can run on their own terms, this can be the entire game.

Finish line two: services was the discovery engine. You take on client work, and somewhere in that work you find a problem so common, so specific, and so painful that you decide to build software to solve it. The client work pays your bills while you build. The clients become your first customers and testers. The problem you found is one you understand viscerally — because you've been hired to solve it five times this year. And now you've moved over to path 2 with a head start most path-2 founders never get.

A lot of the best path-2 founders didn't come up with their product in a vacuum. They lived inside a problem first. Mailchimp itself is a perfect example — it was originally built as an internal tool to help its founders' web design clients send newsletters. The web design business funded everything for years; eventually the side tool ate the parent business. Less Annoying CRM was the same shape — Tyler King got the idea while consulting at an insurance company that was drowning in Salesforce. He kept consulting on the side to fund the early years of the product.

How AI has changed this path: the services half got hotter, and the discovery half got cheaper. The market need for AI-implementation services exploded, but plenty of other services categories are benefiting indirectly too — AI is making operational work cheaper, which means firms have more budget to spend on outside help with the things AI doesn't yet solve. At the same time, the cost of turning your accumulated services knowledge into a product has fallen through the floor. You can do both at once now in a way that was practically impossible five years ago.

If you have real expertise in some specific field but no specific product idea yet, this is probably the best place to start.

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Get Building

Pick the path. Build the smallest version that proves something. Get it in front of real people who might pay for it.

If you need the playbook for that part, that's what The Turbo Guide was for — from idea, through testing the idea, through getting a working version built and launched, to finding your first users, all in a hyper-compressed format using the AI tools that made this whole thing possible in the first place.

You don't need to fit a mental image of a "founder" to be one. That image was always wrong, and AI has made it more wrong.

The opportunities right now are real, and they aren't going to wait. Take the swing.

Ed Martin is the President & CEO of Genesis, a tech startup incubator in St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador. He previously co-founded Clockwork Fox Studios (Zorbit's Math Adventure), a venture-backed edtech company that was acquired in 2021. Build48 is a Genesis program — learn more about what we do.