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, but who read, built, and shipped. Some are selling to actual customers right now.

I wish there were more of them. The opportunities right now are genuinely tremendous.

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.

To start, let's talk about you.

Are You Startup-Led or Problem-Led?

Founders arrive at "should I start a company" in one of two ways.

The first is startup-led. They want to be a founder, and they're hunting for an idea. People land here for all sorts of reasons, but the key thing is the startup is the goal; the idea is whatever fits.

The second is problem-led. People 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 to make the problem go away.

Both kinds produce great companies, but: 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. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. 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. Startup-led folks tend to find their way to incubators like Genesis on their own. The problem-led folks, on the other hand, are working away, 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… that’s a powerful signal. 

What Do You Actually Want?

Being honest with yourself here is one of the most important things you can do.

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.

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.

Impact. You want the problem you're solving to actually get solved, broadly, for a lot of people.

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. 

Most people want more than one of the above. It’s important to figure out, because different motivations point at different startup paths. 

One Thing Before We Get to Those Paths

None of them are easy.

Being an entrepreneur is an all-in decision. 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.

The people I've seen succeed went in eyes open. The ones who washed picked a path because it looked easier. Pick the one that matches what you actually want.

Onward.

Three Paths

These aren't formal industry terms — just how I think about it.

1. Venture-backed high-growth
2. Profitable and independent
3. Consulting / services

Genesis' major focus is path 1. It's where the biggest economic outcomes have historically come from, and our programs are built around that. We're increasingly looking at path 2, because there's genuine opportunity there. Path 3 isn't something Genesis supports — but it's still part of this conversation, because it's valid and it often feeds back into path 1 or 2.

1. Venture-Backed High-Growth

“Venture-backed” = “taking venture capital” = signing up for a specific deal. 

VC firms invest in dozens of companies knowing most will fail, betting that a small handful will grow so massively that those wins cover the losses. Backing does not mean they expect you to succeed. It means they think you have a good enough chance of being one of the rare big wins. 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. If your idea is venture-shaped and you actually want to swing for the fence, this is how you do it.

The NL funding environment for this is genuinely strong right now: founders no longer have to leave to raise money. We're one of the strongest small-market venture environments in the country. Pelorus just launched Venture NL III. 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. It’s a great moment to be raising here.

There are trade-offs, though: 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 "doing fine,” 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.

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, you can move to the other paths.

2. Profitable and Independent

This is the one where the math has shifted most dramatically in your favor. What used to be very hard is now genuinely viable.

You 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. Get profitable. Stay in control. Decide later whether you want to grow it, sell it, or just run it.

This path is sometimes called bootstrapping: building on your own money plus revenue from your first customers. It can also involve modest outside investment from angels, friends and family, or grants. 

You could end up:

• A solo founder who has built a profitable business that pays $200,000 a year and lets you work three days a week;
• With a small team that has built a profitable business doing $5 to $10 million a year in revenue;
• A bootstrapped company that grows into hundreds of employees and sells big.

This path requires:

A real problem to solve. Not "wouldn't it be cool if..." A specific, painful problem that someone will pay to make go away. You 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? 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.

Someone technical on the team. AI has made building dramatically easier, but you still need someone who can ship, fix, and operate a real product once customers start using it. That someone can be you, if you're willing to learn enough. Throwing code together with AI assistance is fine for early prototypes. It falls apart fast once real customers start hitting it.

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

3. Consulting / Services

This is the path most people overlook.

Help other companies solve a problem you understand. The hottest version right now is helping organizations adopt AI well — most are flailing, 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.

In any of those domains, a solo or small-team consultancy that uses AI to make itself dramatically more efficient has a real edge. 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.

You don't need to build anything to start earning revenue. Your first signed contract is your first revenue — you're paid for your expertise, not for a product seeking a market. That's a real practical advantage worth weighing.

This path has two possible finish lines:

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. For founders who want independence and a stable business they can run on their own terms, this can be it.

‍Services as the discovery engine. You take on client work, and somewhere in that work you find a problem so common, specific, and painful that you build software to solve it. The clients pay your bills while you build. The clients become your first customers and testers. You move over to path 2 with a head start.

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

Get Building

Pick a path. Build a small version that proves something. Get it in front of real people who might pay for it. More on that here.

Lastly: you don't need to fit a mental image of a "founder" to be one. That image was always wrong, and the current context has made it even more wrong.

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

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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. Learn more about what we do.