8 ms·

What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

293 points by thakobyan 8y ago

bszupnick 8y ago
> The communication cost of making decisions and shipping something is extremely low. I'm sure everyone is a little different in this regard, but for me, having someone to make a decision with is something I really cherish. I'm a very optimistic person who dreams big, so having a partner who can poke holes and challenge my decisions has always helped me along the way. > Do not invest too much time early on designing the perfect pricing model for your product. As someone on the cusp of launching a side-project/wanna funded startup, I really loved this. I've recently caught myself trying to attain perfection instead of 'ship and adapt', and this is a great manifestation of that to be aware of. Thanks for the great article!
todd3834 8y ago
Thanks for sharing! I have spent a lot of time as a solo founder and I’ve spent time as a co-founder. I thought it might be helpful to contrast my experiences. As a solo founder I found that the highs were muted and the lows were amplified. This likely won’t be true for everyone but this was very true for me. As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so many things that need to be done. Being able to divide and conquer is a great feeling. I’ve read that statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder. This idea can really get in your head if your having a rough week. As a co-founder you might sometimes feel like you are carrying all of the weight and others are benefiting more from your hard work. Don’t worry, the next time you get sick they will carry on for you. It goes both ways. Not everyone will put out the same effort every day but hopefully it averages out. Personally I’m a very social person even though I sometimes feel like an introvert. Just because you can live life alone doesn’t mean it is the best choice for everyone. Now that I’m married and have a daughter I can’t imagine how lonely I would be if I had to go back to experiencing life alone. Similarly, working with people who you care about to some degree can be a great reward and motivator. Everyone is different and solo founders can be successful. For me, having experienced both, I will find a friend to join me on my journies from now on.
- idlewords 8y ago
  "Statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder" is true in the sense that accelerators like YC have this as a selection criterion. I'd be curious to see if this is true without the selection effect.
  - whitepoplar 8y ago
    There's this, https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/2-founders-are-not-always-better-1 https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/2-founders-are..., which I intuitively agree with, but I'm not sure how strong MBA-style research can be.
    - sroussey 8y ago
      It’s difficult to know. Knowledge of such a study can get internalized into a founders psyche and become self fulfilling. And they are the type to do so (both seeking out this kind of report and being impacted by it).
- no1youknowz 8y ago
  > As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so many things that need to be done. As a solo founder myself. Here's how to solve that problem. If you pre-launch speak to potential customers. If you are post-launch, speak to your customers. Those who are in the weeds and touch your application/competitors application on a daily basis are the ones who will give the best and most important feedback and from there you will know what to work on.
  - todd3834 8y ago
    Great tip! This would be good for companies of any size.
- proy24 8y ago
  Solo founder is such a loaded term. Every freelancer, dropshipper, consultant is also a solo-founder. it's just not as glamorous as building a venture backed product.
jasonwen 8y ago
A lot of solid advice. I’m surprised you learned so much in just your first year. It took me way longer for certain things to realize. Thanks for sharing!
avip 8y ago
What does "net revenue" stand for? Is that profit?
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  Net revenue is usually top line (sales - COGS), while net profit is bottom line, and in-between are various adjustments like taxes
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    Net revenue is gross revenue minus certain costs (discounts & refunds), but does not subtract COGS. What parent comment describes is more akin to EBIDTA.
- Blackstone4 8y ago
  In marketplace e-commerce (I'm thinking Etsy or Amazon), gross revenue might include dollars received for goods sold which is passed on to the actual seller since the platform is a market place i.e. teddy bear is sold for $15 of which $14 goes to the seller so net revenue is $1. So if your costs/COGS were $0.50 your gross profit margin on the net revenue was 50% (much higher than the 3% on total revenue). Other companies do this when they pass through costs such as in outsourced manufacturing.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lpellis 8y ago
  He defined the way he uses it in one of his earlier posts: (actual total gross revenue minus any fees, refunds, disputes) https://tik.dev/how-i-acquired-my-first-10-customers-for-cronhub/ https://tik.dev/how-i-acquired-my-first-10-customers-for-cro...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
loriverkutya 8y ago
Since it is hugged to death, alternative link: https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-in-my-first-year-year-as-a-solo-founder-efeb845da1f9 https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-in-my-first-year-year...
- idlewords 8y ago
  Why is a text post on a marquee publishing site having trouble handling a modest spike in traffic?
api 8y ago
I've been a solo founder for some time. By far the toughest thing for me has been the cognitive load. I don't mean raw time. I generally have enough time to get done what I need to get done. I'm talking about the sheer number of different things I have to think about and pay attention to. It's more about mental clutter and management of it than time management, at least for my own case. Burnout can be an issue too and can come from cognitive load and also not having as many peers to give support and energy. It's easy to get down and lose motivation. Overall I'd say: multiple founders with good chemistry > solo founder > multiple founders with bad chemistry or conflict. I always put being a solo founder on a list of weaknesses, but the thing is that everyone and every team/venture has a list of weaknesses and part of succeeding is recognizing yours and trying to work around them. Strategies I've found include maintaining time/energy boundaries (e.g. not working weekends unless something is on fire), delegating where possible, managing scope creep (I've had problems with this one!), and looking at it as a marathon rather than a sprint and thinking in terms of endurance. Getting exercise, eating healthy, and trying to get enough sleep help too as with anything requiring one to be fit.
- PerfectElement 8y ago
  I'm a solo-founder too and I agree that cognitive load is the biggest problem, even working less than 40 hours/week. I've been on this for 4 years and I feel like my personality has changed due to the fact that my brain can't dedicate reasonable resources to anything other than running the business. I used to have several interests (musical instruments, travel, film, photography) and now I can only afford to care about business and family. The only things I can talk about are related to business or child-rearing. What keeps me going is that I should be able to retire at least 20 years sooner than I would by working a regular 9 to 5 job, so I'll have plenty of time to dedicate to other interests.
idlewords 8y ago
After running a thing by myself for nearly ten years, I would say the most important factor is anxiety management. People experience anxiety very differently, so it's hard to give advice, but without some way of dealing with and reducing this stress it is not possible to run a solo business for a sustained period of time. Some examples of what can make you anxious working solo: * A "lumpy" income stream that is hard to model or predict * The feeling of being on call 24/7 * Having to make a large capital outlay or hire an expensive professional like a lawyer * Seeing a well-funded competitor appear and start hiring Anxiety is an odd meta-problem in that if you worry about it, you just make it worse, but some strategy for long-term coping is necessary.
- ohaideredevs 8y ago
  How did it go with the competitor? Look on the bright side, at least a partner didn't steal your IP and go on to compete. I have seen that happen to at least 3 people I know fairly well irl.
  - idlewords 8y ago
    I bought them
    - dannas 8y ago
      Do not try to compete with pinboard!
      - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        Uh, or do and get an exit? :)
        juliusmusseau 8y ago
        For $35K.
    - joshmn 8y ago
therealwardo 8y ago
I've been working on a project with a couple people that I don't get a lot of value from as co-founders right now because they aren't designers or engineers. They are trying to help us define the set of requirements given their relationships in the industry, but they have not really done product work before. I keep telling myself how valuable they will be once we launch because they will bring customers. Echoed by the author here: "When you start a project, you always think that finishing and launching your project is the hardest part. However, after the launch you realize that the most difficult part is just ahead." Any recommendations for how to handle this kind of co-founder situation? I'm thinking about working with them to define equity incentives on both sides, but I'm short on other ideas for how to make things feel well balanced in the short term given our unbalanced skill sets.
- aj24 8y ago
  one thing they could and should be doing is enabling those conversations with potential customers right now so you can validate the product/features you're building as well as have them be ready/aware to use your product when you do launch.
  - benjaminwootton 8y ago
    Agree with this. Your domain experts should already be inputting into the product and bringing early adopters to the table to help you build the right product. You development for X months whilst they wait for the product to be fully baked is the wrong way to go about it.
- psgibbs 8y ago
  Without much more detail than this, they don't sound like cofounders. If they're waiting until you launch to go 100%, then you're assuming all the risk right now. Again take with a grain of salt, bc I have no context, but , if there's one you think is clearly the best, that you like working with them, get them to be a cofounder and make them go all in. They can do lots of manual work to validate the idea/product (ie manually do things you'd like your product to do). If there's noone you could see doing this, then their role is probably not going to grow that much when there is a 'product'. Also: the product will never be done, and framing launch as a binary event doesn't help you (or your potential cofounders). It's all just a continuous spectrum of trying to cover as much scope/utility as possible for your users, and using a product to try to automate that. After 7 years, you'd be shocked how much stuff my sales cofounder does manually that we had framed as a 'required feature for launch'.
Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
I ran my company successfully as a single founder for 5 years, till one day I was told I would become a quadriplegic & I had to close my company as there's no other executive to take care of it. I had Facebook Fb Start accelerated product with 2,50,000 customers , any company expressing interest in acquiring my product wanted me to work for them; which wasn't possible as I was recovering from surgery. Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company. I used to despise YCombinator's co-founder requirement, now I advice everyone to get a co-founder before they start their operations.
- 420codebro 8y ago
  Wow I am sorry to hear that. Best of luck man.
- graeme 8y ago
  Good point. I think any single founder should bear this in mind. Note that depending on scale and industry, you can design around this to an extent. My company largely runs automatically. I mostly work on growing it. I have a contract programmer and support rep who handle stuff. Requires very little day to day input from me. Don't get me wrong. If I became quadrapeligic, things would gradually break. But depending on time required away, I could have someone come and take input from me on some decisions, stop some functions, etc I got this from the 4 hour workweek, which is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to make a solo business based on systems. I do know the system works incidentally: there have been periods where for 1-2 months I did almost nothing. Just coming out of one due to a concussion that knocked me out of work. The business grew nonetheless, though I have a backlog of some things to take care of. So, if you are starting a solo business, you have a bus factor of 1. You should consider the design of it, and what happens if you become unable to work on it. Of course, this bars you from some industries or business models.
  - Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
    > of course, this bars you from some industries or business models. Not just that, there are numerous other variables. e.g. The environment,I started my company in India when there was no definition for a startup, so my startup was no different than a Billion dollar corporation from the eyes of the government. So, as a single founder I spent much of my initial years trying to learn all compliances & adhering to them(there are dozen new ones every month); while the product development went un-interrupted through the developers (whom I personally trained) & via automated systems. Startups in a better environment had a competitive advantage of having to focus only on their company's growth even when being a single founder.
nyrulez 8y ago
This resonated well with me - thank you for the article! I jumped into the fray late last year full time and it's been the most exciting (and nerve-racking) few months of my life. As the author says, I feel like I am learning new things, growing personally (and making mistakes) at 10x the speed! (and I live in Jersey City too) I would say the hardest part for me is balancing time between building and outreach. It's always concerning to build stuff mindlessly without having a tight user loop, but in the beginning it's really hard to wear multiple hats and figure out how to do both. I wish I had a great co-founder who could handle the outreach and audience part, but that's probably like wishing for a genie. If anyone invests in crypto or stocks at all, feel free to check them out [0][1] - I am always looking for feedback (I haven't publicly "launched" yet but am close). Fun fact: everything here is in Python, both frontend and backend. [0]: https://coinquanta.com https://coinquanta.com [1]: https://stockquanta.com https://stockquanta.com (only landing page)
- ru999gol 8y ago
  frontend in python?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - thedragonline 8y ago
    I'm guessing the tkinter tooling that comes with Python.
    - nyrulez 8y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong but tkinter is only for Desktop GUI I think. I am talking about the new search engine we are creating at coinquanta.com. That's indeed in Python - it's a bold experiment for us but drastically cuts down our development time. We'll write a blog post about our experience and tech stack soon enough.
  - nyrulez 8y ago
    See my reply below :)
mamitas 8y ago
On the flip side (to most of the comments here) I've done 2 failed startups as a cofounder and feel that things might have gone better if I just did it solo. Both of these were with people I knew for a while and initially had good chemistry with - but it ended up going sour over ultimately product/idea differences (both over 3 year stretches). I feel I did most of the work anyway (development work in a deep tech startup) and the sales/business partner basically just walked away with the biggest clients (since they were the face of the company as far as the client was concerned). The next startup I do, I'll just pay for sales/consulting with cash, rather than cofounder equity.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  The other person might feel the same way: “in the end I did most of the work of getting actual paying customers, the other cofounder just wrote some code...next time I’ll just hire someone to do the coding” Not saying you should do things any differently than planned next time, but we coders have an outsized view of our value sometimes. You can pretty easily hire someone to write code if you have the cash. But being able to bring in actual cash for a brand new product (especially one that doesn’t exist yet) is actually pretty rare. I’m a coder myself, but if I could wave a magic wand and make myself an awesome sales person instead, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’d sit and contemplate that wand for a long time.
  - mamitas 8y ago
    Moot point - well obviously the other person would feel differently - who wouldn't? Although that argument only works if you stereotype things completely. On one side we have a savvy outspoken salesman and on the other a shy introvert coder. And each thinks the other is completely replaceable. Kind of black/white don't you think? Thats sort of the VC mental model i.e. the mantra that more people in the team makes it more likely that the startup has the entire skillset needed to create a successful business. On the other hand - one of the top reasons for startups failing is cofounder disputes. So difficult to say - are more founders less or more risky? :) Most serial founders I know are actually pretty good at multiple things - experience and endless pitches will often do that to you.
unwind 8y ago
Meta: the word "Year" is duplicated in the title, that would be great to have the mods edit. Thanks.

293 points by thakobyan 8y ago

> The communication cost of making decisions and shipping something is extremely low. I'm sure everyone is a little different in this regard, but for me, having someone to make a decision with is something I really cherish. I'm a very optimistic person who dreams big, so having a partner who can poke holes and challenge my decisions has always helped me along the way. > Do not invest too much time early on designing the perfect pricing model for your product. As someone on the cusp of launching a side-project/wanna funded startup, I really loved this. I've recently caught myself trying to attain perfection instead of 'ship and adapt', and this is a great manifestation of that to be aware of. Thanks for the great article!

todd3834 8y ago

Thanks for sharing! I have spent a lot of time as a solo founder and I’ve spent time as a co-founder. I thought it might be helpful to contrast my experiences. As a solo founder I found that the highs were muted and the lows were amplified. This likely won’t be true for everyone but this was very true for me. As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so many things that need to be done. Being able to divide and conquer is a great feeling. I’ve read that statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder. This idea can really get in your head if your having a rough week. As a co-founder you might sometimes feel like you are carrying all of the weight and others are benefiting more from your hard work. Don’t worry, the next time you get sick they will carry on for you. It goes both ways. Not everyone will put out the same effort every day but hopefully it averages out. Personally I’m a very social person even though I sometimes feel like an introvert. Just because you can live life alone doesn’t mean it is the best choice for everyone. Now that I’m married and have a daughter I can’t imagine how lonely I would be if I had to go back to experiencing life alone. Similarly, working with people who you care about to some degree can be a great reward and motivator. Everyone is different and solo founders can be successful. For me, having experienced both, I will find a friend to join me on my journies from now on.

idlewords 8y ago
"Statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder" is true in the sense that accelerators like YC have this as a selection criterion. I'd be curious to see if this is true without the selection effect.
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  There's this, https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/2-founders-are-not-always-better-1 https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/2-founders-are..., which I intuitively agree with, but I'm not sure how strong MBA-style research can be.
  - sroussey 8y ago
    It’s difficult to know. Knowledge of such a study can get internalized into a founders psyche and become self fulfilling. And they are the type to do so (both seeking out this kind of report and being impacted by it).
no1youknowz 8y ago
> As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so many things that need to be done. As a solo founder myself. Here's how to solve that problem. If you pre-launch speak to potential customers. If you are post-launch, speak to your customers. Those who are in the weeds and touch your application/competitors application on a daily basis are the ones who will give the best and most important feedback and from there you will know what to work on.
- todd3834 8y ago
  Great tip! This would be good for companies of any size.
proy24 8y ago
Solo founder is such a loaded term. Every freelancer, dropshipper, consultant is also a solo-founder. it's just not as glamorous as building a venture backed product.

jasonwen 8y ago

A lot of solid advice. I’m surprised you learned so much in just your first year. It took me way longer for certain things to realize. Thanks for sharing!

avip 8y ago

What does "net revenue" stand for? Is that profit?

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
Net revenue is usually top line (sales - COGS), while net profit is bottom line, and in-between are various adjustments like taxes
- sokoloff 8y ago
  Net revenue is gross revenue minus certain costs (discounts & refunds), but does not subtract COGS. What parent comment describes is more akin to EBIDTA.
Blackstone4 8y ago
In marketplace e-commerce (I'm thinking Etsy or Amazon), gross revenue might include dollars received for goods sold which is passed on to the actual seller since the platform is a market place i.e. teddy bear is sold for $15 of which $14 goes to the seller so net revenue is $1. So if your costs/COGS were $0.50 your gross profit margin on the net revenue was 50% (much higher than the 3% on total revenue). Other companies do this when they pass through costs such as in outsourced manufacturing.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lpellis 8y ago
He defined the way he uses it in one of his earlier posts: (actual total gross revenue minus any fees, refunds, disputes) https://tik.dev/how-i-acquired-my-first-10-customers-for-cronhub/ https://tik.dev/how-i-acquired-my-first-10-customers-for-cro...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

loriverkutya 8y ago

Since it is hugged to death, alternative link: https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-in-my-first-year-year-as-a-solo-founder-efeb845da1f9 https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-in-my-first-year-year...

idlewords 8y ago
Why is a text post on a marquee publishing site having trouble handling a modest spike in traffic?

api 8y ago

I've been a solo founder for some time. By far the toughest thing for me has been the cognitive load. I don't mean raw time. I generally have enough time to get done what I need to get done. I'm talking about the sheer number of different things I have to think about and pay attention to. It's more about mental clutter and management of it than time management, at least for my own case. Burnout can be an issue too and can come from cognitive load and also not having as many peers to give support and energy. It's easy to get down and lose motivation. Overall I'd say: multiple founders with good chemistry > solo founder > multiple founders with bad chemistry or conflict. I always put being a solo founder on a list of weaknesses, but the thing is that everyone and every team/venture has a list of weaknesses and part of succeeding is recognizing yours and trying to work around them. Strategies I've found include maintaining time/energy boundaries (e.g. not working weekends unless something is on fire), delegating where possible, managing scope creep (I've had problems with this one!), and looking at it as a marathon rather than a sprint and thinking in terms of endurance. Getting exercise, eating healthy, and trying to get enough sleep help too as with anything requiring one to be fit.

PerfectElement 8y ago
I'm a solo-founder too and I agree that cognitive load is the biggest problem, even working less than 40 hours/week. I've been on this for 4 years and I feel like my personality has changed due to the fact that my brain can't dedicate reasonable resources to anything other than running the business. I used to have several interests (musical instruments, travel, film, photography) and now I can only afford to care about business and family. The only things I can talk about are related to business or child-rearing. What keeps me going is that I should be able to retire at least 20 years sooner than I would by working a regular 9 to 5 job, so I'll have plenty of time to dedicate to other interests.

idlewords 8y ago

After running a thing by myself for nearly ten years, I would say the most important factor is anxiety management. People experience anxiety very differently, so it's hard to give advice, but without some way of dealing with and reducing this stress it is not possible to run a solo business for a sustained period of time. Some examples of what can make you anxious working solo: * A "lumpy" income stream that is hard to model or predict * The feeling of being on call 24/7 * Having to make a large capital outlay or hire an expensive professional like a lawyer * Seeing a well-funded competitor appear and start hiring Anxiety is an odd meta-problem in that if you worry about it, you just make it worse, but some strategy for long-term coping is necessary.

ohaideredevs 8y ago
How did it go with the competitor? Look on the bright side, at least a partner didn't steal your IP and go on to compete. I have seen that happen to at least 3 people I know fairly well irl.
- idlewords 8y ago
  I bought them
  - dannas 8y ago
    Do not try to compete with pinboard!
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      Uh, or do and get an exit? :)
      - juliusmusseau 8y ago
        For $35K.
  - joshmn 8y ago

therealwardo 8y ago

I've been working on a project with a couple people that I don't get a lot of value from as co-founders right now because they aren't designers or engineers. They are trying to help us define the set of requirements given their relationships in the industry, but they have not really done product work before. I keep telling myself how valuable they will be once we launch because they will bring customers. Echoed by the author here: "When you start a project, you always think that finishing and launching your project is the hardest part. However, after the launch you realize that the most difficult part is just ahead." Any recommendations for how to handle this kind of co-founder situation? I'm thinking about working with them to define equity incentives on both sides, but I'm short on other ideas for how to make things feel well balanced in the short term given our unbalanced skill sets.

aj24 8y ago
one thing they could and should be doing is enabling those conversations with potential customers right now so you can validate the product/features you're building as well as have them be ready/aware to use your product when you do launch.
- benjaminwootton 8y ago
  Agree with this. Your domain experts should already be inputting into the product and bringing early adopters to the table to help you build the right product. You development for X months whilst they wait for the product to be fully baked is the wrong way to go about it.
psgibbs 8y ago
Without much more detail than this, they don't sound like cofounders. If they're waiting until you launch to go 100%, then you're assuming all the risk right now. Again take with a grain of salt, bc I have no context, but , if there's one you think is clearly the best, that you like working with them, get them to be a cofounder and make them go all in. They can do lots of manual work to validate the idea/product (ie manually do things you'd like your product to do). If there's noone you could see doing this, then their role is probably not going to grow that much when there is a 'product'. Also: the product will never be done, and framing launch as a binary event doesn't help you (or your potential cofounders). It's all just a continuous spectrum of trying to cover as much scope/utility as possible for your users, and using a product to try to automate that. After 7 years, you'd be shocked how much stuff my sales cofounder does manually that we had framed as a 'required feature for launch'.

Abishek_Muthian 8y ago

I ran my company successfully as a single founder for 5 years, till one day I was told I would become a quadriplegic & I had to close my company as there's no other executive to take care of it. I had Facebook Fb Start accelerated product with 2,50,000 customers , any company expressing interest in acquiring my product wanted me to work for them; which wasn't possible as I was recovering from surgery. Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company. I used to despise YCombinator's co-founder requirement, now I advice everyone to get a co-founder before they start their operations.

420codebro 8y ago
Wow I am sorry to hear that. Best of luck man.
graeme 8y ago
Good point. I think any single founder should bear this in mind. Note that depending on scale and industry, you can design around this to an extent. My company largely runs automatically. I mostly work on growing it. I have a contract programmer and support rep who handle stuff. Requires very little day to day input from me. Don't get me wrong. If I became quadrapeligic, things would gradually break. But depending on time required away, I could have someone come and take input from me on some decisions, stop some functions, etc I got this from the 4 hour workweek, which is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to make a solo business based on systems. I do know the system works incidentally: there have been periods where for 1-2 months I did almost nothing. Just coming out of one due to a concussion that knocked me out of work. The business grew nonetheless, though I have a backlog of some things to take care of. So, if you are starting a solo business, you have a bus factor of 1. You should consider the design of it, and what happens if you become unable to work on it. Of course, this bars you from some industries or business models.
- Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
  > of course, this bars you from some industries or business models. Not just that, there are numerous other variables. e.g. The environment,I started my company in India when there was no definition for a startup, so my startup was no different than a Billion dollar corporation from the eyes of the government. So, as a single founder I spent much of my initial years trying to learn all compliances & adhering to them(there are dozen new ones every month); while the product development went un-interrupted through the developers (whom I personally trained) & via automated systems. Startups in a better environment had a competitive advantage of having to focus only on their company's growth even when being a single founder.

nyrulez 8y ago

This resonated well with me - thank you for the article! I jumped into the fray late last year full time and it's been the most exciting (and nerve-racking) few months of my life. As the author says, I feel like I am learning new things, growing personally (and making mistakes) at 10x the speed! (and I live in Jersey City too) I would say the hardest part for me is balancing time between building and outreach. It's always concerning to build stuff mindlessly without having a tight user loop, but in the beginning it's really hard to wear multiple hats and figure out how to do both. I wish I had a great co-founder who could handle the outreach and audience part, but that's probably like wishing for a genie. If anyone invests in crypto or stocks at all, feel free to check them out [0][1] - I am always looking for feedback (I haven't publicly "launched" yet but am close). Fun fact: everything here is in Python, both frontend and backend. [0]: https://coinquanta.com https://coinquanta.com [1]: https://stockquanta.com https://stockquanta.com (only landing page)

ru999gol 8y ago
frontend in python?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- thedragonline 8y ago
  I'm guessing the tkinter tooling that comes with Python.
  - nyrulez 8y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but tkinter is only for Desktop GUI I think. I am talking about the new search engine we are creating at coinquanta.com. That's indeed in Python - it's a bold experiment for us but drastically cuts down our development time. We'll write a blog post about our experience and tech stack soon enough.
- nyrulez 8y ago
  See my reply below :)

mamitas 8y ago

On the flip side (to most of the comments here) I've done 2 failed startups as a cofounder and feel that things might have gone better if I just did it solo. Both of these were with people I knew for a while and initially had good chemistry with - but it ended up going sour over ultimately product/idea differences (both over 3 year stretches). I feel I did most of the work anyway (development work in a deep tech startup) and the sales/business partner basically just walked away with the biggest clients (since they were the face of the company as far as the client was concerned). The next startup I do, I'll just pay for sales/consulting with cash, rather than cofounder equity.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
The other person might feel the same way: “in the end I did most of the work of getting actual paying customers, the other cofounder just wrote some code...next time I’ll just hire someone to do the coding” Not saying you should do things any differently than planned next time, but we coders have an outsized view of our value sometimes. You can pretty easily hire someone to write code if you have the cash. But being able to bring in actual cash for a brand new product (especially one that doesn’t exist yet) is actually pretty rare. I’m a coder myself, but if I could wave a magic wand and make myself an awesome sales person instead, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’d sit and contemplate that wand for a long time.
- mamitas 8y ago
  Moot point - well obviously the other person would feel differently - who wouldn't? Although that argument only works if you stereotype things completely. On one side we have a savvy outspoken salesman and on the other a shy introvert coder. And each thinks the other is completely replaceable. Kind of black/white don't you think? Thats sort of the VC mental model i.e. the mantra that more people in the team makes it more likely that the startup has the entire skillset needed to create a successful business. On the other hand - one of the top reasons for startups failing is cofounder disputes. So difficult to say - are more founders less or more risky? :) Most serial founders I know are actually pretty good at multiple things - experience and endless pitches will often do that to you.

unwind 8y ago

Meta: the word "Year" is duplicated in the title, that would be great to have the mods edit. Thanks.