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Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better

227 points by rmason 6y ago

ActsJuvenile 6y ago
Seems like the dataset behind this article is for founders who have built businesses with $5K MRR and above. $60K revenue (and $20K profit @ 33% margin) is a fairly low bar, so it is not surprising to see solo founders create 2.5X more businesses that clear this bar. My question after reading this article is, do these solo founders manage to grow their business as large as founding-teams? How many solo founder businesses cross the $50M revenue mark?
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  On what planet is $240k/yr net profit for a boot strapped business a "low bar."
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    The $20k profit number was already multiplied by 12, it's not the monthly number.
  - fouc 6y ago
    A developer working as a contractor and charging his clients a fairly reasonable rate of $120/hr could make that.
    - shiftpgdn 6y ago
      If you have ever contracted at any length you would know that $120/hr is hard earned and usually has not insignificant time on the back end in so far as negotiating the deal, keeping it going, etc.
      - jlokier 6y ago
        Here on HN I've occasionally seen people talk about $150/hr as a "low" contracting rate. And others talk about how they could not achieve that in their wildest dreams, and consider $80/hr "good". I was recently contacted about a contract proposal, in the USA, and they were offering $50/hr for some quite advanced cryptography work for a BigCorp end customer. I turned it down but it's good to get an idea of the market rate. Rate expectation seems to vary a great deal depending on which geography and network-bubble people are in.
    - bavell 6y ago
      > ...fairly reasonable rate of $120/hr Hahaha, I wish I could tell my clients that's a fairly reasonable rate! The only situation where that's fairly reasonable is when you're contracting with MegaCorp Inc...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- threeseed 6y ago
  It would be good to correlate that question with "what percentage of solo founders successfully raise". Because that would affect how many cross the $50M revenue mark as well. As a solo founder I've been told many times by VCs that they will invest in solo founders but then when you look at their portfolio it tells a misleading story. Most of their solo founders are previous founders or rockstars e.g. someone like Justin Kan.
  - noychery 6y ago
    Author of the article here. Agreed with your point. I personally advocate for getting a hands-on advisor (https://www.growthclub.online/post/advice-for-solo-founders https://www.growthclub.online/post/advice-for-solo-founders) and at least for us in GrowthClub it helped to raise funding from 2 angels. Not yet sure about VCs.
- jasonkester 6y ago
  Ah, but $50M/year isn't the goal of a single player business. It's more like $200k/year, from a few hours effort per week. That's a lot more achievable. 10X your revenues, then automate everything so that it ticks along in the background with hardly any input. It gets very good after a while.
convolvatron 6y ago
they didn't mention 'someone to call me back when i wander off into the swamp'
- maximzavadskiy 6y ago
  growthclub.online, the publisher of the article, does exactly that - one founder call a week to help you check for swamps. (I am the founder of GrowthClub)
tobyjsullivan 6y ago
From the referenced study: > A stratified sample of 65,326 Kickstarter project creators was surveyed via email. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898
- askafriend 6y ago
  Oh god, Kickstarter is....not a good sample to answer a question like this.
  - sojourners 6y ago
    Why? See I understand kickstarter has a history of unfinished products and founders running away with money, but i feel like you are just having a knee jerk reaction. Actually I look at this positively. Most kickstarters offer actual tangible products and not software, and I think going solo and actually making profit (though small) is a pretty insightful result.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Because kickstarter is very different from traditional bussinesses, making it difficult to know if the conclusions of the study translate to traditional founders.
      - chacham15 6y ago
        To be fair, Pebble (a YC company) started on Kickstarter...so its probably a mixed bag.
      - sojourners 6y ago
        I edited my comment as you replied, but basically I think this study is pretty useful and true for kickstarters, but maybe not so much for traditional startups.
    - askafriend 6y ago
      Because it's not representative. It's selecting for a particular type of company and particular type of person who starts it. And in general the quality of projects on Kickstarter in aggregate is....utter garbage. I'm sorry but there's no nice way to put it despite some quality projects/companies coming out of Kickstarter.
drchiu 6y ago
I don’t think there’s particularly a right or wrong here. I’m solo myself and have felt for a long time to be in an inferior position because I don’t fit into the ideal 2.3 founders statistic. It took more than a few years for me to move past this as a major disadvantage. There are positives and negatives, as with anything.
- noychery 6y ago
  Author of the article here. Supporting a solo founder in GrowthClub and having co-founders in Panda Training, my own startup - agreed, nothing is black and white.
gnopgnip 6y ago
Solo founders doing better doesn't necessarily mean you are better off going solo.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  That depends entirely on your skillset
badrabbit 6y ago
Opensource projects with a BDFL leadership also have a reputation of doing well.
holidayacct 6y ago
Is this a joke?
mNovak 6y ago
Just because you start solo doesn't mean you're going to be solo forever; you just start hiring marginally sooner. So I guess my question is, all else being the same, is the extra $500k-1M (my guess) that a team would be able to raise at Seed/pre-seed over a solopreneur just an outsized recruiting fee for having found a couple other key hires?
pyrrhotech 6y ago
IMO in the age of insanely high tech salaries, early stage funding is very overrated. I saved $2.2M in my 8 year Bay Area career as a regular engineer with no exits, and I didn't even work at FANG. I have friends who saved more than twice as much as me. And then YC gives out 150k? 150k is a joke to anyone with a decent job. Why not save 2 million and then start your company at age 29 instead of 21 begging people for tiny money for huge share of your company? The YC model made sense back when it was founded and engineers made 60-80k. Now after the second tech boom, you are much better off working for FANG for 5-10 years and then starting your own company owning 100% of the equity until a real money $10M+ series A
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  I really agree with this, though I suspect some young bright 20 year olds are desperate to work hard for the little cash VCs throw at them, especially if FAANG says no to them for arbitrary reasons. The thing that has always stopped me from starting a business is the fear of being sued, the fear of failure, and the fear of just breaking even compared to working for a normal company. I also am not very good at sales despite years of trying-- my personality is hardwired towards laying all my cards down on the table immediately. My question to you is, if you have 2 million, why not continue to work for FAANG or retire semi-frugally to do hobbyist work, when considering that starting a startup involves immense downside risk (getting sued）
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    > is the fear of being sued... I can't discount it entirely, but... for many situations, that's probably a somewhat overblown fear. It's why you get insurance, pay professionals to do legal/paperwork stuff, and get on with your business. Almost anyone can sue for anything, but it probably doesn't happen anywhere near the number of times you might think it does. When you start, you're going to be too small to get sued in the first place. And being sued probably means you have paying customers, so you're already doing something right.
    - ta1234567890 6y ago
EarthLaunch 6y ago
The reasons why will not be discussed here.
bfieidhbrjr 6y ago
Well... That's inconvenient, isn't it. I've long suspected the cofounder thing was really to be able to divide and conquer. To have a spare founder when one inevitably quits. To play them against each other. Call it experience.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  The main reasons investors like multiple founders (a team) are: 1) social proof that they're not investing in an unlikable solo founder (co-founders is a shit test that there's more than one true believer, and that they can sell each either on the idea.) 2) free labor for the first couple of years from multiple co-founders You mentioned games that investors play, but there's always games regardless of one founder or more.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  That sounds like hard-won bitter experience. I'm always warning founders that investors are not on your side. They're not your friends, they're not there to help you succeed. They're there to make money. If destroying your life will make them more money, they won't hesitate or even feel bad about it.
  - andrekandre 6y ago
    anecdotal, but i have seen this first-hand (more than once) and it is not pretty...
- noychery 6y ago
  Author of the article here. Your comment made my day lol :D
aussieguy1234 6y ago
For me I find the fact I can grow my startup at my own pace without pressure is a good thing. I still have my day job as a software engineer, so I won't be running out of money any time soon. My employer reduced my hours by 20% and I'm working from home because of covid, giving me more time to focus on side projects. My product (https://expose.sh https://expose.sh) is basically complete and unlikely to change in a massive way. For now I'm just starting to get good at social media ads. After work I set up some campaigns, then review the results the next day and tweak them.
- auggierose 6y ago
  Maybe it's a case of "If you have to ask what it does it's not for you", but from the expose webpage it is not clear to me at all what it does.
  - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
    Looks like a competitor to ngrok.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    I've used similar services for Web hooks - if you're developing eg. a slack bot you'd have to deploy to a public url constantly without a tool like this, which shows down development considerably.
  - aussieguy1234 6y ago
    It will give a server (website or api) you have running on your local machine a public url. Like @beaconstudio below mentioned it could be used to test webhooks. Other uses are testing local sites on mobile devices, like I just did to give the mobile experience of expose.sh a revamp. Its faster than running adb, rooting your phone or connecting a cable and doing mobile debugging. There are other tools, although expose.sh is focused purely on http/https and not other protocols, this makes the syntax a bit easier as you don't have to specify a protocol, just a port i.e. "expose 80" instead of "ngrok http 80" (using ngrok as an example).
- 6y ago
vishnumohandas 6y ago
> you just couldn't convince your friends to join and therefore can't be trusted As you grow older, the number of friends who can afford to take financial risks reduces because they will have components such as family and kids to factor in. It’s sad that such gospels exist to make lives more difficult than it already is for founders who are 35+.
- klaaz0r 6y ago
  This, it get's overlooked so much. It feels almost arrogant when a VC thinks like that. Yes I can get some friends working parttime on my startup but going fulltime? They also have rent to pay. But I also think lot of pitch decks witha team slide contain parttimers but just don't tell the VC.
  - noychery 6y ago
    Author of the article here. Exactly! Sad that Paul Graham is the one who said that specific thing. I wonder if his opinion changed over time
- logicslave 6y ago
  This is why older founders have higher success rates, people who are over 40 with the financial means to take a risk like starting a company are probably outliers already in their age group
not_a_moth 6y ago
Having gone through 3 business-oriented co-founders in 1 year for a b2b tech startup, in each of those inter cofounder periods where I'm the solo founder I find it extremely fruitful for product, vision, and strategy. The content, branding, business strategy, and product all much more sharply aligned. Have become of mind it's better to go as far as you can as a solo-founder and only bring in major stakeholders when you're desperate because there's too much work.
- noychery 6y ago
  Author of the article here. Like the philosophy! Proves true with our experience in GrowthClub. Reminds me the thinking with bootstrapping.
airocker 6y ago
There was a post on HN before saying something like this: non-profits do better with teams but for-profits do better with solo-founders.
- samvher 6y ago
  I would be interested in finding this post - I haven't seen it and using your description I'm failing to find it with Google as well. Do you remember more? Thanks!
adamsvystun 6y ago
I wonder if you normalise by the probability of starting a business the results will change. Meaning that if you are together with somebody - it is much easier to start something, but when you are alone - you have to have conviction. So many of these non-solo founders might have not started business by themselves. This creates lower barrier of entry, and might cause solo founded companies look better. The correct question to answer is: if you have already decided 100% than you want to make a company, is it better to do it yourself or with someone else?
- noychery 6y ago
  Author of the article here. I would doubt the assumption that it's easier to start with other people. Would be interesting to see the data on that. In GrowthClub's case it was easier for us to start with one founder.
jasonkester 6y ago
Another factor in favor of going solo is that the ratio of deadwood at your company is going to be either zero or one. That is, if you're genuinely good at building things, you're going to build your thing quickly. There's nobody to drag you down, no slow backend guy blocking you from implementing the frontend or vice versa. Or maybe you find out it was you doing the blocking all along, which is also handy to know.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  The project will go at the speed of the slowest skill the members have. So if you're faster than your co-founder, you'll feel that as slowing you down. But the real question is whether you'd be faster at that task than them. E.g. if you rock the backend, and are forever waiting for the frontend to catch up, you'll feel slowed down. But that's only true if you're also faster at the frontend work than your co-founder, and able to maintain that speed while doing both frontend and backend. There's a point at which having someone else do half the work makes the thing go faster even if they're not as fast as you.
- maximzavadskiy 6y ago
  > Or maybe you find out it was you doing the blocking all along, which is also handy to know. What would be the point of reference to know that you are 'blocking' when you are alone?
  - jasonkester 6y ago
    Two things. First, it signals that maybe solo founding isn't going to be your thing. Second, it cautions a career path that involves working for big companies with good job security and benefits, ideally in a department where you can be forgotten about and not ever required to produce any results. If you remove all blockers from your path and still remain blocked, it's a good indication that you shouldn't ever place yourself in a position where people are going to notice.
simonswords82 6y ago
Being a solo founder with autonomy has advantages and allows you to take decisions faster but it is not without its downsides. As the proverb says (paraphrasing) - if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far take people with you. That does not necessarily mean get a cofounder - but even solo founders will need a mentor, chairman or some form of outlet for their thoughts and problems. Otherwise it's a lonely existence and when times are hard it very quickly becomes overwhelming for most people.
browsergap 6y ago
This can't be true. YC clearly prefers multiple founders, and YC is the leading early stage investor.
- glangdale 6y ago
  From what I understand "solo founder == bad" is a pretty common view held by both YC and a number of other accelerators. If they all believe this then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and smart people will rapidly find another founder before they go through YC whether they needed one or not.
- maximzavadskiy 6y ago
  According to Paul Graham the key reason why YC thinks teams are better is phycological support. But you can get that support by joining a proper peer support system instead, e.g. https://growthclub.online https://growthclub.online. Disclaimer: I am the founder of GrowthClub.
yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
I run three companies. - A solo, bootstrapped B2B SaaS - A bootstrapped B2B2C SaaS with one co-founder - A VC-funded B2B SaaS with two co-founders My solo project is the one I work on least. This is likely because nobody is holding me accountable for it, other than when I get the occasional email from someone who wants to use the product and they need x feature (which I haven't yet bothered to implement). In my experience, I've done far better owning a fraction of something than 100% of nothing.
- glangdale 6y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that someone who runs three companies might not be an entirely typical case or all that predictive of how things work for someone who runs one company. Not doubting your word, but it seems like if you've got 3 cofounders distributed across 2 companies that's going to create a lot more "fires" for you or at least generalized urgency.
  - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
    Right, but that's kind of my point. In fact, I think the specifics of my situation go beyond just how many companies I'm running. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think people should base their actions on what this research supposedly shows. To be honest, I also think this "research" is pretty thin. Not that the authors haven't worked hard on it, but there's a pretty obvious effect of Survivorship Bias in this study. The authors allude to this in their outline of the method used in the paper. > Data on founding teams and longitudinal data on nascent firm performance is notoriously difficult to collect … In many cases, team data are gathered based public records, which creates a left censoring problem as operational status implies a degree of success in itself …. We address this problem by using data from a unique survey of formal companies that raised money via Kickstarter projects, allowing us to observe the founding conditions and performance of firms. --- > might not be an entirely typical case I don't think there are many "typical" cases. I'm not even sure what a typical case would be. Company founders are usually atypical people. I think that's what usually leads them to finding gaps in markets. The best course of action — in my opinion — is learn to introspect as objectively and as honestly as you can, or otherwise try to solicit unbiased external critical feedback (which is harder than it sounds!) and then take a course of action based on your own individual situation.
zupa-hu 6y ago
# Reason 3: Lower costs They lost me here. Founders take a significantly lower salary, anything else is typically a rounding error. That just flies against (my) common sense.
- noychery 6y ago
  Author of the article here. At least for myself I see a big difference in payroll in GrowthClub (with a solo founder) and my own startup with 3 co-founders and 2 more shareholders-partners.
agustif 6y ago
Well that's the same than saying design by-comittee sucks.
fuzzfactor 6y ago
I say solo founders perform research better.

227 points by rmason 6y ago

Seems like the dataset behind this article is for founders who have built businesses with $5K MRR and above. $60K revenue (and $20K profit @ 33% margin) is a fairly low bar, so it is not surprising to see solo founders create 2.5X more businesses that clear this bar. My question after reading this article is, do these solo founders manage to grow their business as large as founding-teams? How many solo founder businesses cross the $50M revenue mark?

shiftpgdn 6y ago
On what planet is $240k/yr net profit for a boot strapped business a "low bar."
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  The $20k profit number was already multiplied by 12, it's not the monthly number.
- fouc 6y ago
  A developer working as a contractor and charging his clients a fairly reasonable rate of $120/hr could make that.
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    If you have ever contracted at any length you would know that $120/hr is hard earned and usually has not insignificant time on the back end in so far as negotiating the deal, keeping it going, etc.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      Here on HN I've occasionally seen people talk about $150/hr as a "low" contracting rate. And others talk about how they could not achieve that in their wildest dreams, and consider $80/hr "good". I was recently contacted about a contract proposal, in the USA, and they were offering $50/hr for some quite advanced cryptography work for a BigCorp end customer. I turned it down but it's good to get an idea of the market rate. Rate expectation seems to vary a great deal depending on which geography and network-bubble people are in.
  - bavell 6y ago
    > ...fairly reasonable rate of $120/hr Hahaha, I wish I could tell my clients that's a fairly reasonable rate! The only situation where that's fairly reasonable is when you're contracting with MegaCorp Inc...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 6y ago
It would be good to correlate that question with "what percentage of solo founders successfully raise". Because that would affect how many cross the $50M revenue mark as well. As a solo founder I've been told many times by VCs that they will invest in solo founders but then when you look at their portfolio it tells a misleading story. Most of their solo founders are previous founders or rockstars e.g. someone like Justin Kan.
- noychery 6y ago
  Author of the article here. Agreed with your point. I personally advocate for getting a hands-on advisor (https://www.growthclub.online/post/advice-for-solo-founders https://www.growthclub.online/post/advice-for-solo-founders) and at least for us in GrowthClub it helped to raise funding from 2 angels. Not yet sure about VCs.
jasonkester 6y ago
Ah, but $50M/year isn't the goal of a single player business. It's more like $200k/year, from a few hours effort per week. That's a lot more achievable. 10X your revenues, then automate everything so that it ticks along in the background with hardly any input. It gets very good after a while.

convolvatron 6y ago

they didn't mention 'someone to call me back when i wander off into the swamp'

maximzavadskiy 6y ago
growthclub.online, the publisher of the article, does exactly that - one founder call a week to help you check for swamps. (I am the founder of GrowthClub)

tobyjsullivan 6y ago

From the referenced study: > A stratified sample of 65,326 Kickstarter project creators was surveyed via email. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898

askafriend 6y ago
Oh god, Kickstarter is....not a good sample to answer a question like this.
- sojourners 6y ago
  Why? See I understand kickstarter has a history of unfinished products and founders running away with money, but i feel like you are just having a knee jerk reaction. Actually I look at this positively. Most kickstarters offer actual tangible products and not software, and I think going solo and actually making profit (though small) is a pretty insightful result.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Because kickstarter is very different from traditional bussinesses, making it difficult to know if the conclusions of the study translate to traditional founders.
    - chacham15 6y ago
      To be fair, Pebble (a YC company) started on Kickstarter...so its probably a mixed bag.
    - sojourners 6y ago
      I edited my comment as you replied, but basically I think this study is pretty useful and true for kickstarters, but maybe not so much for traditional startups.
  - askafriend 6y ago
    Because it's not representative. It's selecting for a particular type of company and particular type of person who starts it. And in general the quality of projects on Kickstarter in aggregate is....utter garbage. I'm sorry but there's no nice way to put it despite some quality projects/companies coming out of Kickstarter.

drchiu 6y ago

I don’t think there’s particularly a right or wrong here. I’m solo myself and have felt for a long time to be in an inferior position because I don’t fit into the ideal 2.3 founders statistic. It took more than a few years for me to move past this as a major disadvantage. There are positives and negatives, as with anything.

noychery 6y ago
Author of the article here. Supporting a solo founder in GrowthClub and having co-founders in Panda Training, my own startup - agreed, nothing is black and white.

gnopgnip 6y ago

Solo founders doing better doesn't necessarily mean you are better off going solo.

rorykoehler 6y ago
That depends entirely on your skillset

badrabbit 6y ago

Opensource projects with a BDFL leadership also have a reputation of doing well.

holidayacct 6y ago

Is this a joke?

mNovak 6y ago

Just because you start solo doesn't mean you're going to be solo forever; you just start hiring marginally sooner. So I guess my question is, all else being the same, is the extra $500k-1M (my guess) that a team would be able to raise at Seed/pre-seed over a solopreneur just an outsized recruiting fee for having found a couple other key hires?

pyrrhotech 6y ago

IMO in the age of insanely high tech salaries, early stage funding is very overrated. I saved $2.2M in my 8 year Bay Area career as a regular engineer with no exits, and I didn't even work at FANG. I have friends who saved more than twice as much as me. And then YC gives out 150k? 150k is a joke to anyone with a decent job. Why not save 2 million and then start your company at age 29 instead of 21 begging people for tiny money for huge share of your company? The YC model made sense back when it was founded and engineers made 60-80k. Now after the second tech boom, you are much better off working for FANG for 5-10 years and then starting your own company owning 100% of the equity until a real money $10M+ series A

sushshshsh 6y ago
I really agree with this, though I suspect some young bright 20 year olds are desperate to work hard for the little cash VCs throw at them, especially if FAANG says no to them for arbitrary reasons. The thing that has always stopped me from starting a business is the fear of being sued, the fear of failure, and the fear of just breaking even compared to working for a normal company. I also am not very good at sales despite years of trying-- my personality is hardwired towards laying all my cards down on the table immediately. My question to you is, if you have 2 million, why not continue to work for FAANG or retire semi-frugally to do hobbyist work, when considering that starting a startup involves immense downside risk (getting sued）
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  > is the fear of being sued... I can't discount it entirely, but... for many situations, that's probably a somewhat overblown fear. It's why you get insurance, pay professionals to do legal/paperwork stuff, and get on with your business. Almost anyone can sue for anything, but it probably doesn't happen anywhere near the number of times you might think it does. When you start, you're going to be too small to get sued in the first place. And being sued probably means you have paying customers, so you're already doing something right.
  - ta1234567890 6y ago

EarthLaunch 6y ago

The reasons why will not be discussed here.

bfieidhbrjr 6y ago

Well... That's inconvenient, isn't it. I've long suspected the cofounder thing was really to be able to divide and conquer. To have a spare founder when one inevitably quits. To play them against each other. Call it experience.

redis_mlc 6y ago
The main reasons investors like multiple founders (a team) are: 1) social proof that they're not investing in an unlikable solo founder (co-founders is a shit test that there's more than one true believer, and that they can sell each either on the idea.) 2) free labor for the first couple of years from multiple co-founders You mentioned games that investors play, but there's always games regardless of one founder or more.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
That sounds like hard-won bitter experience. I'm always warning founders that investors are not on your side. They're not your friends, they're not there to help you succeed. They're there to make money. If destroying your life will make them more money, they won't hesitate or even feel bad about it.
- andrekandre 6y ago
  anecdotal, but i have seen this first-hand (more than once) and it is not pretty...
noychery 6y ago
Author of the article here. Your comment made my day lol :D

aussieguy1234 6y ago

For me I find the fact I can grow my startup at my own pace without pressure is a good thing. I still have my day job as a software engineer, so I won't be running out of money any time soon. My employer reduced my hours by 20% and I'm working from home because of covid, giving me more time to focus on side projects. My product (https://expose.sh https://expose.sh) is basically complete and unlikely to change in a massive way. For now I'm just starting to get good at social media ads. After work I set up some campaigns, then review the results the next day and tweak them.

auggierose 6y ago
Maybe it's a case of "If you have to ask what it does it's not for you", but from the expose webpage it is not clear to me at all what it does.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  Looks like a competitor to ngrok.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  I've used similar services for Web hooks - if you're developing eg. a slack bot you'd have to deploy to a public url constantly without a tool like this, which shows down development considerably.
- aussieguy1234 6y ago
  It will give a server (website or api) you have running on your local machine a public url. Like @beaconstudio below mentioned it could be used to test webhooks. Other uses are testing local sites on mobile devices, like I just did to give the mobile experience of expose.sh a revamp. Its faster than running adb, rooting your phone or connecting a cable and doing mobile debugging. There are other tools, although expose.sh is focused purely on http/https and not other protocols, this makes the syntax a bit easier as you don't have to specify a protocol, just a port i.e. "expose 80" instead of "ngrok http 80" (using ngrok as an example).
6y ago

vishnumohandas 6y ago

> you just couldn't convince your friends to join and therefore can't be trusted As you grow older, the number of friends who can afford to take financial risks reduces because they will have components such as family and kids to factor in. It’s sad that such gospels exist to make lives more difficult than it already is for founders who are 35+.

klaaz0r 6y ago
This, it get's overlooked so much. It feels almost arrogant when a VC thinks like that. Yes I can get some friends working parttime on my startup but going fulltime? They also have rent to pay. But I also think lot of pitch decks witha team slide contain parttimers but just don't tell the VC.
- noychery 6y ago
  Author of the article here. Exactly! Sad that Paul Graham is the one who said that specific thing. I wonder if his opinion changed over time
logicslave 6y ago
This is why older founders have higher success rates, people who are over 40 with the financial means to take a risk like starting a company are probably outliers already in their age group

not_a_moth 6y ago

Having gone through 3 business-oriented co-founders in 1 year for a b2b tech startup, in each of those inter cofounder periods where I'm the solo founder I find it extremely fruitful for product, vision, and strategy. The content, branding, business strategy, and product all much more sharply aligned. Have become of mind it's better to go as far as you can as a solo-founder and only bring in major stakeholders when you're desperate because there's too much work.

noychery 6y ago
Author of the article here. Like the philosophy! Proves true with our experience in GrowthClub. Reminds me the thinking with bootstrapping.

airocker 6y ago

There was a post on HN before saying something like this: non-profits do better with teams but for-profits do better with solo-founders.

samvher 6y ago
I would be interested in finding this post - I haven't seen it and using your description I'm failing to find it with Google as well. Do you remember more? Thanks!

adamsvystun 6y ago

I wonder if you normalise by the probability of starting a business the results will change. Meaning that if you are together with somebody - it is much easier to start something, but when you are alone - you have to have conviction. So many of these non-solo founders might have not started business by themselves. This creates lower barrier of entry, and might cause solo founded companies look better. The correct question to answer is: if you have already decided 100% than you want to make a company, is it better to do it yourself or with someone else?

noychery 6y ago
Author of the article here. I would doubt the assumption that it's easier to start with other people. Would be interesting to see the data on that. In GrowthClub's case it was easier for us to start with one founder.

jasonkester 6y ago

Another factor in favor of going solo is that the ratio of deadwood at your company is going to be either zero or one. That is, if you're genuinely good at building things, you're going to build your thing quickly. There's nobody to drag you down, no slow backend guy blocking you from implementing the frontend or vice versa. Or maybe you find out it was you doing the blocking all along, which is also handy to know.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
The project will go at the speed of the slowest skill the members have. So if you're faster than your co-founder, you'll feel that as slowing you down. But the real question is whether you'd be faster at that task than them. E.g. if you rock the backend, and are forever waiting for the frontend to catch up, you'll feel slowed down. But that's only true if you're also faster at the frontend work than your co-founder, and able to maintain that speed while doing both frontend and backend. There's a point at which having someone else do half the work makes the thing go faster even if they're not as fast as you.
maximzavadskiy 6y ago
> Or maybe you find out it was you doing the blocking all along, which is also handy to know. What would be the point of reference to know that you are 'blocking' when you are alone?
- jasonkester 6y ago
  Two things. First, it signals that maybe solo founding isn't going to be your thing. Second, it cautions a career path that involves working for big companies with good job security and benefits, ideally in a department where you can be forgotten about and not ever required to produce any results. If you remove all blockers from your path and still remain blocked, it's a good indication that you shouldn't ever place yourself in a position where people are going to notice.

simonswords82 6y ago

Being a solo founder with autonomy has advantages and allows you to take decisions faster but it is not without its downsides. As the proverb says (paraphrasing) - if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far take people with you. That does not necessarily mean get a cofounder - but even solo founders will need a mentor, chairman or some form of outlet for their thoughts and problems. Otherwise it's a lonely existence and when times are hard it very quickly becomes overwhelming for most people.

browsergap 6y ago

This can't be true. YC clearly prefers multiple founders, and YC is the leading early stage investor.

glangdale 6y ago
From what I understand "solo founder == bad" is a pretty common view held by both YC and a number of other accelerators. If they all believe this then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and smart people will rapidly find another founder before they go through YC whether they needed one or not.
maximzavadskiy 6y ago
According to Paul Graham the key reason why YC thinks teams are better is phycological support. But you can get that support by joining a proper peer support system instead, e.g. https://growthclub.online https://growthclub.online. Disclaimer: I am the founder of GrowthClub.

yakshaving_jgt 6y ago

I run three companies. - A solo, bootstrapped B2B SaaS - A bootstrapped B2B2C SaaS with one co-founder - A VC-funded B2B SaaS with two co-founders My solo project is the one I work on least. This is likely because nobody is holding me accountable for it, other than when I get the occasional email from someone who wants to use the product and they need x feature (which I haven't yet bothered to implement). In my experience, I've done far better owning a fraction of something than 100% of nothing.

glangdale 6y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that someone who runs three companies might not be an entirely typical case or all that predictive of how things work for someone who runs one company. Not doubting your word, but it seems like if you've got 3 cofounders distributed across 2 companies that's going to create a lot more "fires" for you or at least generalized urgency.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  Right, but that's kind of my point. In fact, I think the specifics of my situation go beyond just how many companies I'm running. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think people should base their actions on what this research supposedly shows. To be honest, I also think this "research" is pretty thin. Not that the authors haven't worked hard on it, but there's a pretty obvious effect of Survivorship Bias in this study. The authors allude to this in their outline of the method used in the paper. > Data on founding teams and longitudinal data on nascent firm performance is notoriously difficult to collect … In many cases, team data are gathered based public records, which creates a left censoring problem as operational status implies a degree of success in itself …. We address this problem by using data from a unique survey of formal companies that raised money via Kickstarter projects, allowing us to observe the founding conditions and performance of firms. --- > might not be an entirely typical case I don't think there are many "typical" cases. I'm not even sure what a typical case would be. Company founders are usually atypical people. I think that's what usually leads them to finding gaps in markets. The best course of action — in my opinion — is learn to introspect as objectively and as honestly as you can, or otherwise try to solicit unbiased external critical feedback (which is harder than it sounds!) and then take a course of action based on your own individual situation.

zupa-hu 6y ago

# Reason 3: Lower costs They lost me here. Founders take a significantly lower salary, anything else is typically a rounding error. That just flies against (my) common sense.

noychery 6y ago
Author of the article here. At least for myself I see a big difference in payroll in GrowthClub (with a solo founder) and my own startup with 3 co-founders and 2 more shareholders-partners.

agustif 6y ago

Well that's the same than saying design by-comittee sucks.

fuzzfactor 6y ago

I say solo founders perform research better.