Nick-
It's an interesting question, but it's sort of like asking when the right time to start playing baseball, or learning piano, or trying your hand at pick up is. There's no real "right" time, and it's something you can always put off until later. However, starting early generally has long-term benefits for your success later on down the road in a given area.
Rob makes some good points here - comments on a few of them:
Mr.Rob said:
You don't need a college education to be an entrepreneur. It may help to better acquaint you with whatever field it is your interested in going into business in but there are a handful of people that don't have college degrees and are very successful. There is a very successful comedian turned life coach/speaker (spoke to 4 president's to get them thinking right though no telling if it worked or not) that dropped out of college in order to be a comedian... and he sucked at first. I'd say you could probably get more bang for your buck studying the intricacies and skillsets of the field you're talking about then you could with a college degree.
I'd view a college degree primarily as a backup at this point. I hear a lot of older guys saying, "You don't need college!" but many of these are guys who have college degrees and got good jobs straight out of school. I never hear anyone without a college degree saying this, perhaps because I don't know any of them who are business owners or Internet writers.
My personal opinion is, if you know what you're doing, you probably don't need college. If you don't know what you're doing, it's useful. In studies of the most successful men of the past millennia or so, an education equivalent to the level of a few years of college is the point at which people are most productive. More or less education with that, and their lifetime productivity goes down.
You can always do college a little later if you try something for a year or two and decide to go get an education after that. I worked for a year after high school selling tires, and everyone thought I was crazy. But when I got to school, the classes made a lot more sense to me than they did to most people because I had real world experience in the workplace I could tie them to, and most of the other students around me did not. That also enabled me to be a lot more impressive in job interviews later when I wanted to.
Mr.Rob said:
Idk how you're going to manage to live if you're not making any money though. Dave Ramsey, a top financial advisor in USA (has his own radio show where people call with financial questions), suggests getting a job to survive with and then building your business in the meantime when you're not working. Once you grow your business enough to survive and you know it will continue to grow then quit your job and go full time entrepreneur.
This is good advice in theory. However, when you're working a 9-to-5, it's
very hard to be motivated enough to start your own business... or find the energy to. Your best hours of the day go to your day job, and all you're left with is the end of the day, when you're tired, worn out, and just want to go do something mindless to unwind. It's no coincidence that most entrepreneurs are either young kids still in college, or older guys who've saved up a lot from a career and left their jobs to start a business tackling a problem they know of in the industry that no one else is doing a good job of tackling. Both the college kid and the older guy who's built up his savings account have the time to focus squarely on a business.
I launched Girls Chase in 2008, but didn't really do anything much with it from a business / monetization standpoint aside from some coaching here and there until 2011, because I had a full-time corporate job before that. When you're making enough to pay the bills and then some, the desire to build something is pretty faint and fleeting.
Mr.Rob said:
Though another thing you might want to consider is that building a business is hardcore time consuming (probably more than a 40 hr. a week job) and you might not get a lot of time to be meeting women and rapidly improving your seduction skills as you currently are.
Yes. Whatever your social skills / girl skills / anything else are before you start business-building, expect them to be in stasis for a few years while you try to hit high enough revenues that you can hire enough staff that you aren't doing absolutely everything yourself.
Mr.Rob said:
I want to work for myself too but I find it more important to get my dating/social life handled first. I plan on just getting a job of any sorts that I can live off of (once I get to my new city down the road) and meet tons of women when I'm not working until I get Jedi Lord status. Once I'm confident in this arena I'm going to shift my focus to building my empire.
I tend to think this is the best path too. I know lots of guys with money who have little hunger for improving with women. They get enough okay-ish girls just because they can afford to go to nice places and throw money around that the drive to learn to pick up just isn't there.
However, I know lots of guys who've learned to pick up, and quite a large number of them eventually transition into learning business after this. It's a pretty common trend you see: the guys who get good at girls turn their sights onto business-building after. Some of them do okay here, some of them fail, and some of them hit it out of the park; it's another skill set with some overlap but lots of new nuance, too.
On the specific business idea-
PrettyDecent said:
I'm toying with the idea of launching a business involving an ear-device that translates languages in real-time.
My main questions here would be:
- How feasible is this, and how accurate can you get it?
- How monetizeable is it - how many people want something like this, what's it cost to manufacture, and what's your margin?
- What are the competing products out there? If no one else is doing it, why not?
- Differentiation: this isn't an original idea (few ideas are), so what's different about your version that will make it a success?
- How long is it going to take to prototype this, and handle the software? It's probably going to be a reasonably large project. You're not just building the software that translates one language to another (and even Google Translate is just okay at that), but you're also doing something with devices, which means you've got to have something that's both functional and comfortable/unobtrusive enough that people will wear it. You might be better off just writing the software, then selling/licensing it to a device manufacturer like Apple/Samsung/Microsoft/Google/etc.
Main issues I see here is that this sounds like a very complicated project, unless you have a lot of experience with writing translation software. If you have money, you could probably outsource the prototyping of the device, although building the software is something of a Holy Grail of the translations industry if I've got my facts right and I'm guessing you
probably can't outsource that; you'll have to build it in-house. Which means you need to be very talented at writing translation software, or you need to find a programmer who is, and if you're going that route, the big question that any programmer with that kind of talent will have for you is, "What do you bring to the table?" and it'll have to be more than an idea. Every talented programmer is overflowing with great ideas to work on, and doesn't need more. Even if you handle prototyping and build great software, you've still got to worry about mass manufacture, which takes a lot more money, and distribution - getting it in front of buyers - which is where plenty of otherwise spectacular products fail out of the market when they fail to
find a market, or gain traction with that market.
Most likely, you'll need a large-ish team of talented developers to put together the language translation software, which means you'll need quite a bit of funding. Raising funding is no cakewalk though; investors get bombarded with wonderful-sounding ideas all day long, and aren't moved by something that will change the world; everything the get pitched is going to change the world. They just want to know how feasible the project is, and why you're going to be the one who will make it work when no one else has yet.
I'd
probably recommend finding something simpler and starting with that, then circling back to this when you have a bit more business experience, or more experience coding up translation apps (maybe you can work for someone who writes translation software, and learn the ins and outs, and also the current obstacles to better translations?). Of course, there's always the chance that if you DO know what you're doing, you might be jumping in at exactly the right time, and you'll be the guy who develops this. A good instant translation device would be a watershed moment for global
everything if you could pull it off, and if you have your patents in order you'd be poised to make a tremendous amount of coin (you'd probably end up selling or licensing it to Google or Apple or someone like that, who can really scale up the system and get it out there; or else they'd find a way around your patents and do their own devices anyway).
Not knowing your background, I don't want to scare you off a cool idea if you're a programming whiz / master finder and bringer-together of very talented people, but if you've yet to start building your business-building skills, I'd suggest focusing on learning skills before committing too much time or energy to something that's probably a lot to bite off. Every airplane has a Kitty Hawk, but the folks at Kitty Hawk had been building bicycles for many years before they turned their attention to airplanes.
I listed a few books I've found very useful on building businesses in my "recommended reading" article; if you haven't checked those out, I might point you there next, Nick:
Recommended Reading
Chase
... due to my large shovel uhuh" 
