This post was written by entrepreneur and startup coach Rahul Varshneya.

You know that you want to quit your job and that you want to start a startup. You’ve had this desire for quite sometime now and you really must begin.

But you don’t.

You don’t because you’ve got responsibilities. You don’t because you’ve not got the perfect time. You don’t because you don’t have enough cash. You don’t because you procrastinate.

The bottom line is, you don’t because you’re afraid. The rest are all excuses.

The problem is that there is a gap between knowing it and doing it. This gap is what differentiates the entrepreneurs from the rest, though. You can remain an aspiring entrepreneur forever, or you can take the plunge today.

Sometimes, the gap just remains and you never start. My intention here it to bridge this gap for you by making you dig to the bottom of the gap, identify the issue, and help you nip it. Nip it so that you can take the first step towards a long journey of entrepreneurship.

The only reason why people do not take the plunge into entrepreneurship is fear. That is at the root of all excuses. So how do you overcome fear? Here’s a plan.

#1 – Just Do It

There’s nothing like squashing or overcoming fear by staring straight into its face. Take the plunge for whatever be your reason not to. What’s the worst that will happen to you? You’d fail? But that’s going to happen anyway!

If you’re going to do a startup, you are going to fail. But the best part is that if you embrace failure, you will succeed.

I’ve learnt through my experiences that the best way to do something is to simply get started. Do not worry about the outcome for that is not in your hands. What you control is your karma, the result is something you have no control over, so why worry about something you can’t even control?

#2 – What’s Your Fear?

Identifying what you’re afraid of is a crucial step. You can’t just be afraid of failure; it’s got to be far deeper and intrinsic. Failure is an integral part of life and is deep rooted in everything we do.

The smaller things we don’t notice sometimes. So the task is to identify what is it really deep down that is bothering you from starting up. Write down factual things. Like the fear of not making any money after ‘x’ months/year. Fear of survival for the next ‘x’ months/years. You’ve got to be precise and write these down.

Also pen down what’s the worst that could happen if you come across these situations.

What you’ve just done is remove the clutter and fear from your mind onto real issues that you have down on paper.

#3 – Identify Resources

Once you’ve identified your fears, now begin to identify what you would do in case you come across these problems. Who you would/could go to for help? What resources can you dig into if you face these challenges?

You need to do an exercise in contingency planning, detailing everything that you will do in case you fail or face your worst fears.

Now you have a plan. A well-defined plan on what you will do when you fail. Instead of these issues cluttering your mind, now you’ve got an action plan. But failure can come in many ways and at the most unlikely instances. That is where you need to break your moves into smaller bits.

#4 – Get Started

Now that you’re prepared to get started, there are two things that you need to take care of. Make sure that whatever you’ve chalked out in your contingency plan, you’ve taken care of that. By taken care of I mean that you know you will have access to those resources when you go down that route.

Having laid down your fears at rest, you are now totally prepared to take your first steps. Don’t aim for a record-breaking long jump in the first step that you take. Break down your tasks that are required to get you started into smaller bits; smaller bits of achievable tasks that you can complete in 2-3 days.

If the first step to starting your venture is to put out a website, start identifying vendors. Start speaking to people who can introduce you to them. Most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t even get started with this because of the overriding fear of failure.

You may keep telling yourself all this while that getting website designed and developed is expensive, or how will you ever find the right partner who can understand your perspective and get things done. And then you just don’t get started.

The trick is simple. Just do it. Start finding out vendors. Start speaking to everyone you know about it. You will be surprised with the results. And this will boost your confidence to get on to the next step.

Once you successfully complete the first step, move on to the second. And so on and so forth.

#5 – By All Means, Please Fail

You really must fail. Even superman fails, learns a lesson, and then strikes back. The point I’m trying to make is that no one is immune to failure. And when you take smaller steps and strides, your fall will also be less hurtful.

But fall you must. Fail you must. Because only then will you discover the better path or journey. Only when you tread on the path with thorns will you realize the other better path and understand the value of what it means to be on it.

Failure is great because it teaches you many things. It’s an opportunity because only by failing will you come to understand your true potential. Because if you fail, you will relentlessly pursue till you get it right. Now, it is far easier to relentlessly pursue something when that task is much smaller at hand.

You get the point of breaking them down into smaller bits now?

The bridge between knowing and doing is very very small. All you need is a little bit of focus, a lot of passion, and Nike’s popular slogan imprinted in your head – Just do it. For when you’ve got focus, passion and true love, the universe truly conspires to make it happen for you.

If this article inspired you to get started, please write to me. I’d be happy to hear from you.

Rahul Varshneya has spent his entire career either working for startups or starting businesses. He now spends time between coaching aspiring entrepreneurs in launching their ventures, apps and websites, and building Arkenea Technologies, a service partner for entrepreneurs helping them develop their mobile applications and websites.

Excitement

At the beginning of this year Bob, one of my ex-students was in entrepreneurial heaven. He had an idea for a new class of enterprise software insight-as-a-service based on big data web analytics as a Cloud and SaaS (Software As a Service) application.

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery, iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments.

I had made one of the introductions to a Fortune 100 CIOs so I got to hear his progress from both him and the CIO.

Takeoff

After 90 days, things seemed to be moving at startup speed. Bob had a backlog of users wanting to try his application, and the corporate IT people who were trying his early prototype said, “It’s crude, we hate the user interface, it’s missing lots of features — but we’ll kill you if you try to take it away from us.”

I pointed a VC who followed the space to the CIO who was testing the prototype. The VC told me the CIO wouldn’t get off the phone. He kept telling him he couldn’t remember when he had seen an enterprise software product with so much promise. The VC checked with other IT users and heard the same reaction. It was a “gotta use it, don’t take it away, we’ll have to buy it” product. After a demo and lunch, the VC (who normally did later-stage deals) wrote my ex-student a check for a seed round.

Life couldn’t be better.

I followed Bob progress in bits and pieces from updates from the CIO, the VC and his emails and blogs. He seemed to be on the fast track to startup success. But pretty soon a few worrying warning signs appeared.

The first thing that I noticed was that Bob couldn’t seem to find a co-founder. I wasn’t close enough to know if he wasn’t really looking for one, but given the early success he was having, it seemed a bit odd. But the next thing really got me concerned. Bob started hiring second rate developers. At best they were B- players.

Stall

A month went by, and the product stopped getting better. The user interface still sucked and new features had stopped appearing. The next month, the same thing. I got a call from my CIO friend asking, “what was going on?” He said, “It was a great prototype, we would have loved to deploy it company-wide, and I hate to let it go, but it looks like Bob company just lost interest in developing it. I’m going to dump it and look for a substitute.” So I called Bob and suggested we grab a coffee.

I asked him how things were going and got the update on how the early evangelists were using the product. As I had heard, they were ecstatic. But Bob said he was worried he hadn’t found the right customer segment yet. “I’m not sure I can get all of these guys to pay me big bucks,” he said. “That’s why I stopped coding, and I’m spending all my time out in the field still talking to more customers.”

“What does your VC’s say you ought to be doing?” I asked.  “Oh, he hasn’t had much time for me, his firm almost never does seed deals. It turns out I was an exception.”  Oh, oh.

The conversation was starting to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Bob had gotten to a place most founders never do — his product was a “gotta have it for people with big budgets.” He should have been back rapidly coding, iterating and finding out what feature set would get him to paying customers.

Instead he had produced barely three weeks of progress in the last five months. His prototype was rapidly wearing out its welcome.

A lack of nerve

When I pressed Bob on this he admitted, “No I guess my engineers aren’t very good. But I hired guys who were cheap because I wasn’t sure if my hypotheses were right. Didn’t you tell us to test our hypotheses first?” Now it was my time to be surprised. “Bob, you’ve validated your hypotheses better than any startup I’ve ever seen. You found that out in the first month. You got customers begging you to finish the product so they could buy it. You should have been hiring world-class talent and building something these CIO’s will pay for. It’s not too late. It’s time to grab them by the throat and go for it.”

I wasn’t ready for the answer, “Steve, I’ve been reading all about premature scaling and making sure everything is right before I go for it. I want to be sure I get all of this right. I’m afraid I’ll run out of money.”

I thought I’d make one more run at it. “Bob,” I said, “few entrepreneurs get the first time response you have from an early product. At your rate you’re going to burn through your cash trying to get it perfect. It’s a startup. You’ll never have perfect information. You’re sitting on a gold mine. Grab the opportunity!”

I got a blank stare.

We made some more small talk and shook hands as he left.

Bob was in the wrong business, not the wrong market. He wanted certainty, comfort and security.

I stared at my coffee for a long time.

Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This story originally appeared on his blog.

Happy Cloud serves downloadable games to users but makes them seem like streamed games because it allows gamers to start playing within a few minutes of starting a download. It sends the packets you need to begin a game first, then finishes the download in the background.

This method has been tried before by such players as Instant Action, which folded with the shutdown of IAC’s InstantAction division. Other rivals that do pure server-based game streaming include OnLive, Gaikai, Otoy, Spoon, GameTap, Exent and Playcast. So the field will be very crowded for Happy Cloud.

But Happy Cloud is targeting the pure download business with its “progressive download” technology. Rivals such as Steam offer a whole catalog of downloadable games, which often consist of gigabytes of data and take an hour or two to download. Happy Cloud says you can start playing a typical DVD-sized game within about 2 minutes on a connection that can move data at 20 megabits a second (cable modem speed).

The catalog so far includes Amnesia, Cities in Motion, FEAR, FEAR 2, Lego Batman, Lego Harry Potter, Majesty 2 and the Mount & Blade series. The company says it will add more games soon.

“Gamers don’t want to wait overnight for a download that might get interrupted,” said Eric Gastfriend, in a statement. He is vice president and general manager of Happy Cloud, based in Cambridge, Mass. The service is available to customers in the U.S.

The company was founded in 2009 and has 10 employees. Happy Cloud has raised $1 million from Jesselson Capital and Miles Gilburne. The founders are two brothers, Jacob and David Guedalia, who are on their sixth company now. Their previous company, iSkoot, was sold to Qualcomm in October.