How to start a startup: the map from zero to your first round

Almost everyone who wants to start a startup gets stuck on the same question, usually late at night with far too many tabs open. Where do I even begin? Idea first or company first? Do I need money? And who exactly are these angels everyone keeps mentioning?

This page is the answer we’d give a friend: how to start a startup, in the order things really happen. Five stages, give or take some overlap. Under each one you get the short version of what happens, the usual stumbles, the 2026 numbers we could actually verify, and a few guides for when you want the long version. Leave the tab open. The money questions tend to show up around stage four.

Stage	What you do	Typical time	Money involved	Read next
1. Understand the game	Learn what a startup is, how funding works and the jargon	A few evenings	None	What is a startup
2. The idea	Talk to customers, test demand, build a first version	One week for a first test, two for a no-code MVP (our plans)	Close to zero; an SRLS from about €630 in fixed fees once you need a company	Validate your idea
3. The team	Find co-founders, split the equity, agree on vesting	Until you’ve shipped something real together	Usually just advice on the written agreement	Find a co-founder
4. The first money	Work out your runway; use savings, friends and family, angels, grants	Depends on the milestone you’re funding	In Italy, pre-seed and seed rounds totalled €172 million in H1 2026	How much money you need
5. Mistakes and timing	Watch the warning signs, decide when to go full time	US median from seed to Series A: 1.9 years (Q4 2025)	Enough runway to reach the next milestone	Why startups fail

Stage 1: understand the game

Before you build anything, learn the rules. A startup isn’t simply a new company. Picture two friends opening a bakery on a corner in Turin: a good business, maybe a great one, but it will grow as fast as the oven allows. A startup bets on something else. It tries to grow very fast, before it has even proved which business model works. That difference decides how you fund the thing, who wants to invest and what they’ll expect back.

Next, money. It comes in rounds with names: pre-seed, then seed, then Series A, and so on. Each has a rough size and a usual type of investor. Plenty of founders skip most of them. Some never raise anything and grow on their customers’ money alone. That’s called bootstrapping.

The usual mistake here is borrowing the vocabulary without the meaning. A founder says “we’re pre-seed” or “our runway is fine” in a first meeting, then can’t put a number on either. One evening with a glossary fixes that.

Two guides first. Not sure your project even counts? What is a startup walks through the definition argument. Paul Graham says a startup is a company designed to grow fast. Steve Blank’s version: you’re a startup until you find a business model that repeats and scales. Which one fits you? Decide after reading both. The startup funding stages come next, with the order the money usually arrives in, from bootstrapping to Series A.

Someone will drop “runway”, “vesting” or “pre-seed” in your first meeting and keep talking, with no pause to explain. Leave the startup glossary: 50 words for your first year open in another tab and look terms up as they come. And if you’d like to see how real companies got going, Italian startups that started small has true stories of founders who began with savings, a university lab or a side project.

Stage 2: test the idea before you build the company

This is where most of your first months should go. The goal isn’t a polished product. It’s proof that a specific group of people has a problem painful enough to pay for, and you get that proof by talking to them: ten or twenty conversations about how they handle the problem today, not about your idea.

After the talking, build the smallest thing that can prove you wrong about your riskiest assumption. That’s your MVP. It might be a landing page with a waitlist. Or a service you run by hand behind a plain website. And yes, a prototype you’ve stitched together with AI and no-code tools over a couple of weeks counts too.

None of this needs a company. Sooner or later you will want one, to sign contracts, issue invoices or take investment. In Italy the bill is small but real: NotaiOnline’s September 2026 breakdown gives about €630 in fixed first-year costs for an SRLS, which has no notary fee, and about €903 for an SRL, plus €1,500 to €3,000 + VAT for the notary.

If you’re under 35 and out of work, inactive or underemployed, two schemes are worth a look. Resto al Sud 2.0 covers eight southern regions, and Autoimpiego Centro-Nord covers the other twelve. Applications are taken on a rolling basis, and both were open in October 2026.

Say Chiara spends five months in her flat in Bologna building an app and shows it to nobody. The day she does, three friends tell her it’s wonderful. Of course they do. Or say Luca registers an SRLS on day one because it feels serious, and starts running up about €630 in fixed first-year costs before a single customer has said a word. Both are invented, and both are the kind of stumble first-timers make.

Talk first, and give yourself a calendar. Our seven-day plan to validate a startup idea without spending money was written for exactly this, and it starts with about ten problem interviews run the way The Mom Test teaches. If your budget is zero, sell before you build: how to start a startup with no money shows how a pre-sale or a deposit can pay for the first version. And if you can’t code, build an MVP with AI and no-code tools gives you a two-week route to a prototype.

Under 35 and in Italy? Check grants for young founders under 35 in Italy before you spend your savings. It sets Resto al Sud 2.0, Autoimpiego Centro-Nord, ON and Smart&Start side by side. If your product is technical, read about Italy’s innovative startup status as well, and about how to patent an idea in Italy before you describe it to anyone outside your circle.

Stage 3: build the team

One person rarely has enough hours for a startup, and who you start with matters more than what you start with. Pick someone you’ve already seen at work: a classmate, a former colleague, whoever was still at the hackathon when the lights went off. Before anyone signs anything, make one small, real thing together.

Then write down who owns what. Equal splits are common, though nobody says you must, and what counts is that the split matches the work still ahead and comes with vesting. Without it, a founder who quits after three months walks off with a third of the company.

Students have an advantage they often ignore. Universities offer incubators, competitions and labs, with hundreds of possible co-founders in the same building. Check your university’s rules on intellectual property before you build on its equipment, though.

The usual mistakes: a 50/50 split with no way to break a deadlock, no written agreement “because we’re friends”, and picking a co-founder because they’re available rather than because they’re good.

Where do you look? Where people already meet. How to find a co-founder lists university incubators such as PoliHub at the Politecnico di Milano, Start Cup competitions, hackathons and Y Combinator’s free matching tool, plus ten questions to answer in writing before you commit. For the split itself, how to split equity between co-founders follows one worked example through a seed round. And if you’re still a student, starting a startup at university covers what your campus offers and who owns an invention made in a university lab.

Stage 4: the first money

Begin with a number, not a list of investors. How much do you need to reach the next milestone that proves something? That’s your runway question. Take your monthly costs, multiply by the months to the milestone, then add a buffer for whatever goes wrong.

The first money usually comes from the founders themselves, then from friends and family, then from business angels, private individuals who invest their own money in early companies. Satispay, the Italian payments app, raised its first €400,000 from sixty people who believed in its three founders.

Grants and equity crowdfunding can fill gaps. Venture capital funds tend to arrive later, once there’s traction to show.

Some Italian figures give a sense of scale. Startups in Italy raised €1.735 billion across 436 rounds in 2025, with 354 active investors, according to Growth Capital and Italian Tech Alliance. In the first half of 2026, pre-seed and seed rounds made up 59% of all deals but only €172 million of the €813 million invested. Most rounds are small and early. That’s where you’ll be, too.

Two mistakes come up again and again. People ask for money before they can say what it’s for, and they take a relative’s cash with nothing on paper. Then there’s a third: selling a big slice of the company for a small cheque at the very start.

Three guides cover the numbers. What will the first year cost? How much money you need to start a startup puts figures on it for Italy and includes a runway sum you can copy. Banks and grant agencies will want a plan. How to write a business plan goes through the nine sections most plans share, from executive summary to funding need. Investors, by the way, usually begin with a short deck. Last, your startup in one sentence: elevator pitch examples offers a formula, roughly “Name helps who solve what by doing what”, so you can say what you do before anyone stops listening.

When it’s time for the first cheques, your first €50,000 from friends, family and angels covers the paperwork and the dilution, Italian route first, and what investors look for in a first-time founder explains what to show when you have no track record.

Stage 5: mistakes and timing

Startups rarely die in one dramatic moment. CB Insights reviewed 431 venture-backed companies that had shut down since 2023, and its March 2026 report says 70% ran out of capital. Running out of cash is how it ends, though, not why. The reasons underneath were poor product-market fit (43%), bad timing (29%) and unit economics that never worked (19%). Many companies gave more than one.

The other big decision is when to go all in. Satispay’s three founders had the idea in 2012 while still working other jobs, then quit to work on it full time. Marta, an invented example from our guide on quitting, has €16,000 saved: that lasts 9.5 months with no income and about 18 months if the project brings in €800 a month. Quit too early and you burn your runway before you’ve learned anything new.

In Italy, NASpI, the unemployment benefit, is meant for people who lose a job involuntarily, so resigning usually means you can’t claim it. Check that, the notice period and any non-compete clause in your contract before you hand in your letter.

The early warning signs for each reason are in why startups fail, along with a pre-mortem checklist. And when to quit your job for a startup gives the three conditions we’d want met before you resign.

After this map: where to go next

A quick checkpoint first. If you’ve worked through the five stages, you should be able to answer what investors ask in a first meeting. Not sure you can? Take the free 12-question investor readiness test and wait for the diagnosis by email: it tells you what to fix first.

Preparing a round? Start from our guide to raising capital for a startup in Italy, the hub for everything below. It shows who invests at each stage and how the process runs. Then go deeper:

We’d read them in this order. The deck comes first: 10 to 14 slides, with the one-liner and the problem at the front and the team and the ask at the back. Pitch deck structure, slide by slide goes through each one. Next, the term sheet explained. Read it before anyone sends you an offer. It separates the few clauses that bind early from the many that don’t. SAFE vs convertible note covers the two instruments behind most early rounds.

Then comes the awkward question: what is the company worth? How to value a pre-revenue startup shows why that number gets negotiated, not calculated. Who writes the cheques? Begin with business angels in Italy, and save venture capital in Italy for a little later.

If public money fits your project better, start with our Smart&Start Italia guide, the zero-interest loan for innovative startups, and our guide to the EIC Accelerator, the European Innovation Council’s funding programme for startups and SMEs. And if your market is bigger than Italy, read our market entry strategy guide and the steps to enter the US market from Italy.

How to start a startup: your checklist before the first round

1. You can say what you do in one sentence, and a stranger could repeat it back.
2. You’ve spoken to at least ten potential customers, and the topic was their problem, not your idea.
3. Demand has met something real: a landing page, a pre-order or a paid pilot.
4. Your monthly costs are on one page, and so is your runway in months.
5. Roles, equity split and vesting are written down and signed by every co-founder.
6. You know which money fits your stage, and you’ve checked whether a grant fits you.
7. You’ve listed the three most likely ways the company could die, and what you’d do about each.

This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. Rules and calls change: check the official pages or ask a professional before you incorporate or apply.