Business Coaching

WePay cofounders went after their dreams of starting a start-up.

If you’re a recent college grad with

Rich Aberman and Bill Clerico faced a tough decision as they approached the end of their senior year at Boston College. Start an innovative online-payment processing company, or start a new job and grad school?

They decided to take the latter option –Aberman set out for law school at New York University and Clerico took a job as an investment banker at Jefferies — and they promised themselves that, one day, they’d start their business. But they soon saw themselves getting sucked into their day jobs, with little time left to “really start on” their entrepreneurial ambitions.

“It only gets harder to start a company as time goes on,” Aberman, 25, told Entrepreneur.com. “As you get used to a salary, you start getting comfortable with a certain lifestyle, which becomes hard to leave for the uncertainty of being an entrepreneur.”

WePay launched March 30, which allows individuals and groups all over the world to establish an account and collect money in a variety of ways–from paper checks to credit cards–and then use a debit card to spend the money in the account. They already have several thousand users, ranging from sports teams to fraternities to groups of roommates managing rent and utilities. WePay collects transaction fees ranging from 50 cents for bank account payments to 3.5 percent of credit-card payments for each payment received; outgoing transactions are free.

Aberman and Clerico were able to get their college business idea back on track after a minor detour, but they strongly recommend starting right out of college.

“You have the degree under your belt, and you haven’t tied yourself into a particular lifestyle or career path,” Aberman says. “If you take a risk, and it fails, the worst that happens is that you have a unique experience that you can use as an impressive factor to get you into graduate school or to rock a job interview.”

Adds Clerico, “If you wait until you work for a few years or go to graduate school, you are just piling on reasons not to take the risk, and you reduce the chances that you ever will.”

What do you experienced entrepreneurs out there think…is it better to get started with a start-up sooner rather than later?

The team behind the start-up Secret London. Founder Tiffany is in the front row.

This isn’t an uncommon story anymore: a 21-year-old has a successful start-up.

What’s unusual, however, is the start-up was originally a Facebook group.

Tiffany Philippou started a group called Secret London in response to a competition for a summer internship with Saatchi & Saatchi. The Facebook group started as a page where Londoners could share secrets and their favorite things about the city, things only locals know about. There are also forums on the site where people can ask where to find something like live music, African drumming classes or a quirky wedding venue, and locals can respond with their opinions.

Just two weeks after starting the group, it had 182,010 fans. While the competition eventually had 800 different groups competing for the internship, Philippou now has a start-up. Internship? Old news.

With the URL bought (www.secretcities.com) and a Twitter account with 5,300 followers and blog that have both been live since early February, Secret London is blossoming. The most amazing thing about this start-up – besides the fact that it spawned from a Facebook group – was it only 2,963 pounds.

“What’s amazing is how much you can do cheaply if you are working on a project that inspires people.,” Philippou wrote in a guest blog post on TechCrunch.com. “As well as the incredible talent we got on board, we also got a printer from Freecycle.org, brought some equipment from home, and borrowed the rest. The folks at the Finsbury Centre in particular were really generous with their time and help.”

So how about that? A business can start from just about anything…including a Facebook group.

Start-up or not, every company has issues to overcome…does yours? Take our Business Health Check to find out.