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I've been an entrepreneur non-stop for about 20 years. 15 of those as a solo-founder, across a few different start-ups. I'll echo the common ones: some lonelin

I've been an entrepreneur non-stop for about 20 years. 15 of those as a solo-founder, across a few different start-ups. I'll echo the common ones: some loneliness (the sense of being in an exhausting fight against terrible odds by yourself); and not having a co-founder confidant to bounce ideas off of and to interrupt your bad ideas or occasional bouts of doubt & skepticism. You can certainly find people to bounce ideas off of, however, two serious issues will routinely impede that: the occasional need for various degrees of privacy on internal development matters, and deep contextual knowledge of exactly what you're doing. Very few people on the outside are going to understand what you're doing well enough to provide super valuable opinions. I've spent ~18 months working full-time on a new start-up alone. It was supposed to take half that time, of course. It's the most important work I've ever done by far and it's the last thing I intend to ever build as an entrepreneur. I would have enjoyed having a co-founder on this project, however, realistically few people would be able to go along with something this time consuming and risky (no salary for two years). Sometimes it's just going to be all on you and you have to want it badly enough to persevere. It's a fascinating situation in the non-VC start-up land these days (that is to say, I'm intentionally not raising VC, I need max control to see it through long-term; a VC would fuck it up by prioritizing profit as the prime motive and their get-big-too-fast mantra). For a good engineer to join me for two years to do this, they might have to forsake $300,000 to $400,000 or more in total compensation. Or you have to take a dilution & control smack to the face up front and go raise a million dollars in VC. In my opinion, having watched the industry closely since the mid 1990s, the huge financial trade-off for engineers in doing non-VC start-ups is an epic problem that dissuades a lot of people (for good, sane reason). It's a simple equation: you're an engineer in a top five tech city, are you going to sacrifice a million dollars (possibly a lot more in SV) in total compensation across three to five years to do a thing, if that's what it takes? That's a monster risk to take, particularly if you're still in prime earnings years. That equation also enables me and others to do things many other people won't or can't dare to try, they won't eat the shit necessary to do it, or can't rationally take on the risk. It weeds out some competition.

alixanderwang 7y ago
If you’re open to sharing, what are you building?
- adventured 7y ago
  Sure. It's a new type of knowledge service (broadly in the Wikipedia, Quora, Britannica, Answers.com, wikiHow, Genius, et al. segment). Like most people I strongly dislike what has happened to the Web. I love the Web, I grew up on the Web, I'll never stop being in love with it (particularly what it once was, and still can be - it's a choice that we get to make in how we build). This service is Web only. It's built to be super fast, so it uses no bloated frameworks. It uses no trackers. It uses no traditional analytics services. It doesn't require piles of personal info and I don't want to know who you are. It has no social media (no social login or buttons or trackers or accounts). The typical large content page weighs in at around 20-40kb in size and loads in 150-200ms with 8 requests, no cookies, 7kb of script, 4kb of css (I can push that further, but it's tight enough for now). There will be no images on the entire service (SEO punishment inbound) other than a small text logo. No ads. No pop-ups. No dark patterns like hiding content. It doesn't require users / readers to use JavaScript. All content is Creative Commons licensed. The reason traditional VC can't be involved, is because they ultimately destroy all knowledge services they touch. I've been watching VCs (or private equity in the case of Answers.com; or giant corporations in the case of eg Verizon or IAC (eg about.com)) burn them to the ground for two decades now. To do it properly you have to prioritize what I call the knowledge motive, and absolutely minimize the profit motive. If you invert that value order, you'll destroy the service and you must inherently eventually betray the community that builds it up (this will happen to Stack Exchange; it has already happened to Quora). So this service is anti-commercialism; there is no business model going in; there will be no IPO; there is no exit plan; bare threads on expenses; it has to be run hyper thin, hyper optimized against cost and bloat. Doing that properly also helps keeps me independent. I have a ten year time frame allocated (including nearly two years into it so far), during which I'll push it forward and work on it no matter what happens, assuming I don't get hit by a bus or the equivalent. The ideal may or may not be to convert it to a charitable non-profit for long-lived purposes, assuming it works of course (I'm not assuming, I'm just doing it anyway because I want this thing to exist). I've messed with building various knowledge services going back a decade. This hit me like a bolt of lightning back in April of 2018 and I began to flesh it out. It required a few revisions in concept before full build phase began. I had to take about three months in there to teach myself some new things I had to know to be able to build this to operate very inexpensively from day one and forward (I'm assuming it will never be flush via operations). I'm probably going to do a Show HN this month or next for it and I'm going to begin showing it to some long-term Wikipedia editors that I know. Only a few people have seen it thus far, which breaks a good common rule - in this case I don't care, I'm not trying to find traditional product market fit, I don't have to desperately obey such concerns (it's solely my dime and my time), I built it because I wanted to, it will exist and persist because I want it to. There's a glorious freedom in that, and it might entirely fall flat initially or long-term - that's ok, I'm going in assuming the worst in terms of response; I'll see what kind of response it gets and decide on any adjustments. I'm in this for the very long-term and plotted that way from the beginning. It's another reason typical VCs can't be involved, their horizon is short-term oriented. They'll destroy you trying to force you to get big fast, and it won't matter to them if they do it, even if the thing could have succeeded by growing slower. It's just one of many reasons why knowledge services are the anti-VC segment. If you ever see a knowledge service take on big VC, you already know the guaranteed outcome ahead of time: burned to the ground, forced liquidation for pennies on the dollar, or an exit sale before the VC runs out to continue funding the bloat taken on during the get-big-too-fast phase (and then the buyer runs it into the ground or shuts it down, hello Freebase). So how will it stay afloat financially if it gains traction? Well, first, it's static cached text in the front, so it's dirt cheap to run at a very large scale. Beyond that I have some approaches that I think will work that I'll experiment with over time - it won't require much financially.
boris 7y ago
> being in an exhausting fight against terrible odds by yourself [...] eat the shit necessary to do it I think (from experience) that's a pretty accurate way to describe a software startup. And so as you find yourself on the floor (continuing with the fight analogy) time after time, the question starts to creep in: "What's the purpose? Am I just wasting my life?" The usual answer is to enjoy the journey, the experience (maybe getting some flow), what you learn in the process (and you do learn a ton, no question there). But the thing is, the further along you are, the less it is about learning or flow and the more it is about eating shit -- figuring out how to fix issue after issue after issue, often because of other people's poor decisions. In a sense, you become a lean and mean shit eating machine. And so the question starts to creep in again.
kayoone 7y ago
You have all my respect for embarking on a journey that difficult and seeing it through. However, I am not sure it really weeds out the competition. Solo-self-financing founder competition for sure, but if somebody else with some money backing is pursuing a similar idea and can hire people, two years will get him pretty far ahead of what you can possibly do in the same time.
newman8r 7y ago
I'm in the same boat, but doing it for 10 years not 20. I'm trying to put together a few small, tightly knit groups of solo bootstrappers like us to help support each other in our various endeavors over the coming years - feel free to email me.

alixanderwang 7y ago

If you’re open to sharing, what are you building?

adventured 7y ago
Sure. It's a new type of knowledge service (broadly in the Wikipedia, Quora, Britannica, Answers.com, wikiHow, Genius, et al. segment). Like most people I strongly dislike what has happened to the Web. I love the Web, I grew up on the Web, I'll never stop being in love with it (particularly what it once was, and still can be - it's a choice that we get to make in how we build). This service is Web only. It's built to be super fast, so it uses no bloated frameworks. It uses no trackers. It uses no traditional analytics services. It doesn't require piles of personal info and I don't want to know who you are. It has no social media (no social login or buttons or trackers or accounts). The typical large content page weighs in at around 20-40kb in size and loads in 150-200ms with 8 requests, no cookies, 7kb of script, 4kb of css (I can push that further, but it's tight enough for now). There will be no images on the entire service (SEO punishment inbound) other than a small text logo. No ads. No pop-ups. No dark patterns like hiding content. It doesn't require users / readers to use JavaScript. All content is Creative Commons licensed. The reason traditional VC can't be involved, is because they ultimately destroy all knowledge services they touch. I've been watching VCs (or private equity in the case of Answers.com; or giant corporations in the case of eg Verizon or IAC (eg about.com)) burn them to the ground for two decades now. To do it properly you have to prioritize what I call the knowledge motive, and absolutely minimize the profit motive. If you invert that value order, you'll destroy the service and you must inherently eventually betray the community that builds it up (this will happen to Stack Exchange; it has already happened to Quora). So this service is anti-commercialism; there is no business model going in; there will be no IPO; there is no exit plan; bare threads on expenses; it has to be run hyper thin, hyper optimized against cost and bloat. Doing that properly also helps keeps me independent. I have a ten year time frame allocated (including nearly two years into it so far), during which I'll push it forward and work on it no matter what happens, assuming I don't get hit by a bus or the equivalent. The ideal may or may not be to convert it to a charitable non-profit for long-lived purposes, assuming it works of course (I'm not assuming, I'm just doing it anyway because I want this thing to exist). I've messed with building various knowledge services going back a decade. This hit me like a bolt of lightning back in April of 2018 and I began to flesh it out. It required a few revisions in concept before full build phase began. I had to take about three months in there to teach myself some new things I had to know to be able to build this to operate very inexpensively from day one and forward (I'm assuming it will never be flush via operations). I'm probably going to do a Show HN this month or next for it and I'm going to begin showing it to some long-term Wikipedia editors that I know. Only a few people have seen it thus far, which breaks a good common rule - in this case I don't care, I'm not trying to find traditional product market fit, I don't have to desperately obey such concerns (it's solely my dime and my time), I built it because I wanted to, it will exist and persist because I want it to. There's a glorious freedom in that, and it might entirely fall flat initially or long-term - that's ok, I'm going in assuming the worst in terms of response; I'll see what kind of response it gets and decide on any adjustments. I'm in this for the very long-term and plotted that way from the beginning. It's another reason typical VCs can't be involved, their horizon is short-term oriented. They'll destroy you trying to force you to get big fast, and it won't matter to them if they do it, even if the thing could have succeeded by growing slower. It's just one of many reasons why knowledge services are the anti-VC segment. If you ever see a knowledge service take on big VC, you already know the guaranteed outcome ahead of time: burned to the ground, forced liquidation for pennies on the dollar, or an exit sale before the VC runs out to continue funding the bloat taken on during the get-big-too-fast phase (and then the buyer runs it into the ground or shuts it down, hello Freebase). So how will it stay afloat financially if it gains traction? Well, first, it's static cached text in the front, so it's dirt cheap to run at a very large scale. Beyond that I have some approaches that I think will work that I'll experiment with over time - it won't require much financially.

boris 7y ago

> being in an exhausting fight against terrible odds by yourself [...] eat the shit necessary to do it I think (from experience) that's a pretty accurate way to describe a software startup. And so as you find yourself on the floor (continuing with the fight analogy) time after time, the question starts to creep in: "What's the purpose? Am I just wasting my life?" The usual answer is to enjoy the journey, the experience (maybe getting some flow), what you learn in the process (and you do learn a ton, no question there). But the thing is, the further along you are, the less it is about learning or flow and the more it is about eating shit -- figuring out how to fix issue after issue after issue, often because of other people's poor decisions. In a sense, you become a lean and mean shit eating machine. And so the question starts to creep in again.

kayoone 7y ago

You have all my respect for embarking on a journey that difficult and seeing it through. However, I am not sure it really weeds out the competition. Solo-self-financing founder competition for sure, but if somebody else with some money backing is pursuing a similar idea and can hire people, two years will get him pretty far ahead of what you can possibly do in the same time.

newman8r 7y ago

I'm in the same boat, but doing it for 10 years not 20. I'm trying to put together a few small, tightly knit groups of solo bootstrappers like us to help support each other in our various endeavors over the coming years - feel free to email me.