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Solo founder here. Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. The product may be in what appears to be a crowded field. Identify niche opport

Solo founder here. Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. The product may be in what appears to be a crowded field. Identify niche opportunities or cases where an established leader is doing a poor job. It's fine to do some consulting on the side to pay the bills. Of course it will take time away from the product you are building; just be able to recognize when it's too much and scale back consulting or turn off the spigot completely once product sales take off. It's fine to work according to your own schedule and needs, not some idealized '100 hours/week' VC fantasy schedule. Investors don't care about you, they care about their returns. As you don't fit the pattern of what they expect for a successful startup, they will either ignore you or make very unreasonable demands - find a co-founder, work twice as hard, follow this or that model. Ultimately, it's a waste of time at best, a loss of control and failure at worst. Once you have cashflow, offload certain business tasks to pros who can do it better and cheaper than attempting it yourself. Hire when you have sufficient cashflow + cushion. Take pride in what you are building, the customers you attract, and the skills you are learning.

pontus 6y ago
I think this is great advice. I remember when I was an undergraduate physics student, looking forward to grad school and idolizing all the famous physicists. My adviser, who was not the most soft and cuddly type of guy, always pushed this type of hyper-alpha stuff on me, even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It really does damage to you and your self image, and I don't think the advice he gave me was really meant to help me as much as it was meant to help him feel superior. Anyway, a bit later in life now I look back and realize that there are so many times when I've idolized a certain way of living / doing things that are actually not productive at all but rather just feed that same type of alpha-image. There's no reason why you can't be successful on your own terms, even if that means taking the weekend off, being a solo founder, or whatever. Sure, I get that startups are hard and draining, but (not to lean too heavily on cliches) there's a difference between working hard and working smart and more often than not I think these types of alpha-founders are glorifying busyness.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It's always fascinating to see people make claims like this, despite all evidence showing that it's impossible to maintain. Some extreme genetic outliers may be able to sustain performance with around 5 hours of sleep per night, but no one is going to last very long on 2-3 hours per sleep each night.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    How do you rule out if the professor is an extreme genetic outlier? Seems like the kind of place you’d expect to find such an outlier.
    - bjo590 6y ago
      Has there ever been a documented medical case of someone surviving on less than 3 hours of sleep a night indefinitely? I've read a lot of sleep studies, and besides some non-scientifically published variations on Buckminster Fuller's 30 minute nap every six hour sleep schedule I haven't read about someone getting such low amounts of sleep.
      - wolco 6y ago
        I've been on that little sleep for months. It takes away from any clear thought. Very unproductive. Not something anyone should do on purpose.
        biolurker1 6y ago
        Why are you on it? Covid insomnia?
        xwdv 6y ago
        Baby.
        6y ago
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. Great point. The long-term survival of a business distills down to being able to bring in more money than it costs you to produce a product. It's such a simple concept, but it's easy to forget when you're swept up in the excitement of coding and engineering an idea you're excited about. Ironically, it's the most ambitious engineers who tend to make the mistake of doing too much engineering work before trying to validate the product. I can't count how many times I've signed up to follow ambitious engineers' startup ventures that turn into years of highly-detailed marketing updates for products that never seem to get any closer to materializing. These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later with blog posts blaming the industry, the timing, the economy, or other external factors for their failure. In reality, most of them could have determined their market fit, or lack thereof, much faster by launching a smaller version early and iterating with customer feedback.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  It's hard to get out of an engineering mindset and into a product/customer focused mindset. We like building things, and making them fast and powerful and efficient. The customer doesn't care about any of that though. They just want something that helps them.
  - pritovido 6y ago
    Of course the customer cares about fast, powerful and efficient things they can use. What happens is that most of the time making something fast, powerful and efficient implies so much resources that the ambitious engineer can not complete the project in time. Customers prefer something that works today, even with limited functionality that something perfect that only works inside the mind of the engineer. That is the reason Steve Jobs said no so many times, because this way his company could ship products in time. That in engineers mindset problem: It is painful to say No, like the song says, we "want it all".
    - richard_g 6y ago
      Not only that -- a lot of people pursue "innovative" technologies and try to build something all new, when existing ideas have only reached 1% of the market that need them because it takes a lot of work to actually get people on board.
nscalf 6y ago
The toughest part of this is finding a product that people are willing to pay for. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and everyone doubles down on pushing the product and iterating until they finally have no choice but to admit failure. I think YC does a great job of getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea. Can you send texts instead of build an app? Can you do it all manually for the first 5 customers? Be quick to throw away things that aren't working, you don't have the bandwidth as a solo founder to make a perfect product, you NEED to see market acceptance to make it worth your time.
- lambdatronics 6y ago
  >getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea This is even a problem in the sciences! Everyone wants to kick the can (getting feedback on their pet hypothesis from reality) down the road & play with their shiny, awesome tech/math in the meantime. "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Thomas Huxley
- double0jimb0 6y ago
  100% disagree. People good at this “know it when they see it” on the “finding a product that people are willing to pay for”. They don’t find this part hard. What is hard is keeping mistakes/ignorance marginally less fatal than the ground you gain in your successes... forever.
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    Willing to pay for is a low bar. A prerequisite of many. People are willing to pay $1 for a decent coffee, for example.
aswanson 6y ago
Excellent advice.
tiffanyh 6y ago
Would you mind posting the link to your business. I’d love to check it out. I bet others here would as well.
compscistd 6y ago
I’m a full time software engineer for a small company. No amount of googling answers my question: what exactly is part time consulting? At least, in your context
- vinay_ys 6y ago
  Here's my understanding. YMMV. Moonlighting: working side job/s for other entities while you are employed full time by one entity. The full-time employment entity is your own company (if you are the founder) or your full-time employer and there could be other companies or individuals to whom you work for part-time (1 day a week, adhoc days/hours, weekends etc) and you are paid for that work. You have two things to consider: 1. Make sure it is legal (for example if you are on certain types of work-permit visa in some countries it might be illegal to work for anyone other than the work visa sponsor). 2. Make sure you don't have conflict in your employment contract clauses (many full-time employment contracts have clauses that prevent you from working for others even for part-time without explicit permission from the full-time employer). Usually if you ask your full-time employer, they may permit you to do one-off consultations to other companies (and get paid for it) if they think it would not take your focus away from your FTE work and if there is no conflict of interest or potential to reveal trade-secrets (example: if that other company is a competitor etc).
akulbe 6y ago
What is your product/service? You don't post anything in your profile. I'm interested to learn more!
DrNuke 6y ago
Yeah, it is a twofold task really: 1) devise & ship something that makes sense and actually adds some value somewhere for a good number of people; 2) put it in front of the target niche through the cheapest feasible means of any type, aka do not get into the social media marketing rat trap. In my very limited recent case, I produced a Kindle booklets series earlier this year (20 academic literature reviews) and started selling some through targeted ads on Amazon.com, at $0.03 per click, on top of a very few thousand visualizations per day. Ramen profitable, but a platform to start from for small incremental updates in the mid- to long- term, hopefully.
hinkley 6y ago
The trap I fall into is thinking about whether a solution 'ought to exist', disregarding the reasons why it doesn't already. There are lots of tools people on appreciate when they are gone, and getting people to pay for them takes a much better salesman than I'm used to having available.
taneq 6y ago
> Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. Exactly. In fact, it's not even about the product. You need to solve somebody's problem in a way that they are willing to pay for. The product is just how you choose to do that. The designs and code and engineering decisions and artwork etc. etc. aren't for the customer, they're for you. What the customer is paying you for is solving their problem.

pontus 6y ago

I think this is great advice. I remember when I was an undergraduate physics student, looking forward to grad school and idolizing all the famous physicists. My adviser, who was not the most soft and cuddly type of guy, always pushed this type of hyper-alpha stuff on me, even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It really does damage to you and your self image, and I don't think the advice he gave me was really meant to help me as much as it was meant to help him feel superior. Anyway, a bit later in life now I look back and realize that there are so many times when I've idolized a certain way of living / doing things that are actually not productive at all but rather just feed that same type of alpha-image. There's no reason why you can't be successful on your own terms, even if that means taking the weekend off, being a solo founder, or whatever. Sure, I get that startups are hard and draining, but (not to lean too heavily on cliches) there's a difference between working hard and working smart and more often than not I think these types of alpha-founders are glorifying busyness.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It's always fascinating to see people make claims like this, despite all evidence showing that it's impossible to maintain. Some extreme genetic outliers may be able to sustain performance with around 5 hours of sleep per night, but no one is going to last very long on 2-3 hours per sleep each night.
- xwdv 6y ago
  How do you rule out if the professor is an extreme genetic outlier? Seems like the kind of place you’d expect to find such an outlier.
  - bjo590 6y ago
    Has there ever been a documented medical case of someone surviving on less than 3 hours of sleep a night indefinitely? I've read a lot of sleep studies, and besides some non-scientifically published variations on Buckminster Fuller's 30 minute nap every six hour sleep schedule I haven't read about someone getting such low amounts of sleep.
    - wolco 6y ago
      I've been on that little sleep for months. It takes away from any clear thought. Very unproductive. Not something anyone should do on purpose.
      - biolurker1 6y ago
        Why are you on it? Covid insomnia?
        xwdv 6y ago
        Baby.
        6y ago

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. Great point. The long-term survival of a business distills down to being able to bring in more money than it costs you to produce a product. It's such a simple concept, but it's easy to forget when you're swept up in the excitement of coding and engineering an idea you're excited about. Ironically, it's the most ambitious engineers who tend to make the mistake of doing too much engineering work before trying to validate the product. I can't count how many times I've signed up to follow ambitious engineers' startup ventures that turn into years of highly-detailed marketing updates for products that never seem to get any closer to materializing. These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later with blog posts blaming the industry, the timing, the economy, or other external factors for their failure. In reality, most of them could have determined their market fit, or lack thereof, much faster by launching a smaller version early and iterating with customer feedback.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
It's hard to get out of an engineering mindset and into a product/customer focused mindset. We like building things, and making them fast and powerful and efficient. The customer doesn't care about any of that though. They just want something that helps them.
- pritovido 6y ago
  Of course the customer cares about fast, powerful and efficient things they can use. What happens is that most of the time making something fast, powerful and efficient implies so much resources that the ambitious engineer can not complete the project in time. Customers prefer something that works today, even with limited functionality that something perfect that only works inside the mind of the engineer. That is the reason Steve Jobs said no so many times, because this way his company could ship products in time. That in engineers mindset problem: It is painful to say No, like the song says, we "want it all".
  - richard_g 6y ago
    Not only that -- a lot of people pursue "innovative" technologies and try to build something all new, when existing ideas have only reached 1% of the market that need them because it takes a lot of work to actually get people on board.

nscalf 6y ago

The toughest part of this is finding a product that people are willing to pay for. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and everyone doubles down on pushing the product and iterating until they finally have no choice but to admit failure. I think YC does a great job of getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea. Can you send texts instead of build an app? Can you do it all manually for the first 5 customers? Be quick to throw away things that aren't working, you don't have the bandwidth as a solo founder to make a perfect product, you NEED to see market acceptance to make it worth your time.

lambdatronics 6y ago
>getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea This is even a problem in the sciences! Everyone wants to kick the can (getting feedback on their pet hypothesis from reality) down the road & play with their shiny, awesome tech/math in the meantime. "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Thomas Huxley
double0jimb0 6y ago
100% disagree. People good at this “know it when they see it” on the “finding a product that people are willing to pay for”. They don’t find this part hard. What is hard is keeping mistakes/ignorance marginally less fatal than the ground you gain in your successes... forever.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Willing to pay for is a low bar. A prerequisite of many. People are willing to pay $1 for a decent coffee, for example.

aswanson 6y ago

Excellent advice.

tiffanyh 6y ago

Would you mind posting the link to your business. I’d love to check it out. I bet others here would as well.

compscistd 6y ago

I’m a full time software engineer for a small company. No amount of googling answers my question: what exactly is part time consulting? At least, in your context

vinay_ys 6y ago
Here's my understanding. YMMV. Moonlighting: working side job/s for other entities while you are employed full time by one entity. The full-time employment entity is your own company (if you are the founder) or your full-time employer and there could be other companies or individuals to whom you work for part-time (1 day a week, adhoc days/hours, weekends etc) and you are paid for that work. You have two things to consider: 1. Make sure it is legal (for example if you are on certain types of work-permit visa in some countries it might be illegal to work for anyone other than the work visa sponsor). 2. Make sure you don't have conflict in your employment contract clauses (many full-time employment contracts have clauses that prevent you from working for others even for part-time without explicit permission from the full-time employer). Usually if you ask your full-time employer, they may permit you to do one-off consultations to other companies (and get paid for it) if they think it would not take your focus away from your FTE work and if there is no conflict of interest or potential to reveal trade-secrets (example: if that other company is a competitor etc).

akulbe 6y ago

What is your product/service? You don't post anything in your profile. I'm interested to learn more!

DrNuke 6y ago

Yeah, it is a twofold task really: 1) devise & ship something that makes sense and actually adds some value somewhere for a good number of people; 2) put it in front of the target niche through the cheapest feasible means of any type, aka do not get into the social media marketing rat trap. In my very limited recent case, I produced a Kindle booklets series earlier this year (20 academic literature reviews) and started selling some through targeted ads on Amazon.com, at $0.03 per click, on top of a very few thousand visualizations per day. Ramen profitable, but a platform to start from for small incremental updates in the mid- to long- term, hopefully.

hinkley 6y ago

The trap I fall into is thinking about whether a solution 'ought to exist', disregarding the reasons why it doesn't already. There are lots of tools people on appreciate when they are gone, and getting people to pay for them takes a much better salesman than I'm used to having available.

taneq 6y ago

> Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. Exactly. In fact, it's not even about the product. You need to solve somebody's problem in a way that they are willing to pay for. The product is just how you choose to do that. The designs and code and engineering decisions and artwork etc. etc. aren't for the customer, they're for you. What the customer is paying you for is solving their problem.