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Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?
- atdrummond 4y agoThis was a great post that actually is undersold by the title. Any aspiring solo founder should read this, as ToolJet’s founder has provided a great roadmap to getting to product market fit - and understanding the trade offs and concessions a solo founder must make. It absolutely matches my own experiences and expertly lays out the growth plan for a software firm that’s bootstrapping and dogfooding off of a single person. Well done Navaneeth. Will absolutely keep this in my personal list of articles for friends and acquaintances looking to start their own firms.
- navaneethpk 4y agoGlad that you found the article helpful :)
- intelVISA 4y ago#1 is too true, it's a nightmare to try find someone suitable & non-technical to augment any dev tooling (or similar) venture IME How did you handle the VC raise or were you entirely bootstrapped?
- navaneethpk 4y agoI've written another article that explains how we raised seed round here: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-project/ https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-...
- intelVISA 4y agoThanks :) grats on the succesful launch
- xwowsersx 4y agoGood post, very helpful. So it sounds a good approach, or at least one, if you can't just quit your job and go full-time without some funding is to launch the project/product and go straight for a seed round which then gives you the resources you need to go full-time. Great to hear this is a plan that can work, assuming the project gets enough love.
- moralestapia 4y ago>do not nitpick - every fight is not worth picking This is quite valuable. Great article Navaneeth, thanks for sharing.
- dadoge 4y agoInteresting…maybe we should normalize/de-stigmatize Dev tooling companies to have a ceo who is an eng for the first ~ 3 yrs, and then hiring a replacement (maybe even some early “vp of product person”) There are probably so many good ideas that devs have, but they don’t have enough interest in being a ceo of a big unicorn company, but understand the problem and can get a prototype up with no red tape
- Bilal_io 4y ago> Interesting…maybe we should normalize/de-stigmatize Dev tooling companies to have a ceo who is an eng for the first ~ 3 yrs, and then hiring a replacement (maybe even some early “vp of product person”) I wasn't aware there was any stigma there. Considering that Gates, Dorsey and Zuckerberg were engineers who wrote code and continued to be CEOs of their companies for very long.
- kukabynd 4y agoThis is an excellent and pragmatic way of looking at scaling team as an engineer. The defragmentation comparison really demonstrates this clearly, thank you for sharing this.
- lokimedes 4y agoDoes anyone have similar recommendations regarding sales, marketing and other business critical functions? As someone contemplating the hard roads of B2B and non-SaaS , I feel a lack of basic advice on going from idea to revenue.
- dahart 4y agoThat’s a legit & hard question, and my startup experience is in consumer SaaS products, but my first thought is: are sales & marketing truly critical to your bootstrapping process, if you’re going B2B? I ask just because I’ve heard a lot of B2B, especially for young companies, happens via referral. Like the article, one way is to do it yourself until you grow and can hire someone into the positions you need. Do you have 1 customer ready to go who will fund solo development? Do you have a team who will jump in if you land a seed round, or will you start building solo? This all depends a lot on your funding & runway situation.
- didgetmaster 4y agoIt seems to me that every great tech company needs two things to get off the ground. A product that actually works well and execution on the business side. Few people have the skills to do both of these things well. Apple got started with the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak). One built the first couple of computer designs. The other was a sales and marketing genius. If you have a product that is possible to launch in just a couple months, then you might be able to get by as this guy did. If your product is much more complicated and takes several years for a solo developer to build, then you have to pick the CEO or CTO role and go with it. My own project has been a work in progress for several years now. I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite lacking. It is a new kind of data management system and it can be really tough to raise awareness and get people to try it out.
- hellolemon 4y agoGetting products to market cost a lot of money. It’s hard to do organically unless you have your niche well defined.
- NetOpWibby 4y agoLink to your project (if it has a site)?
- didgetmaster 4y agohttps://www.Didgets.com https://www.Didgets.com Here is a short demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScBd-71OLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScBd-71OLQ
- NetOpWibby 4y agoNeat! I see a market for this; devs who have inherited a mess of a project and want a low-stress way of managing data.
- navaneethpk 4y agoAgreed. >I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite lacking. Can relate to this. What worked well in the case of ToolJet is that the product did not require marketing efforts to get the initial traction since the project is open-source.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rubenfiszel 4y agoJust want to add, I followed pretty much the same path with Windmill [1], which is also in the developer tool space, and also open-source. Built everything solo for 5 months. I thought it would be impossible to get into YC, it is not and I was fortunate enough to join YC on the latest batch, on my first try [2]. Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made fundraising much easier. Most importantly, even though I worked in tech in the bay many moons ago, at the time I was very isolated in Paris and thought I understood the startup game but I did not really. Being part of a cohort like YC with like-minded amazing peers, truly felt like I was able to go up to speed on many subjects that would have been out of reach for a solo founder. If you are a solo technical founder and considering applying to YC, reach out to me, I am more than happy to help. [1]: https://windmill.dev https://windmill.dev [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793
- xwowsersx 4y agoVery cool, thanks for sharing. Windmill looks well done. I've got a few ideas I'm mulling over in the dev tools space and would consider going the solo technical founder. Will definitely reach out for some advice when the time comes. Out of curiosity, any downsides to use the .dev tld?
- rubenfiszel 4y agoI would prefer the windmill.com domain but a cool windmill museum has it. I have not seen any downsides except Google (who owns the .tld) kept refusing to approve our oauth because the approval team was convinced that .dev could only be for testing.
- xwowsersx 4y agoGood to know. It works well for products like yours.
- bcjordan 4y agoOff-topic but have to say OSS Pipedream is something I've wanted to see for so long. Definitely checking that out!
- darthrupert 4y agoSince a solo founder is a dreamer role, CMPO: Chief Metaphysical Officer.
- mannyv 4y agoThe important point here is that he got funding first, and it sounds like at least half a million because he didn't talk about begging angels for money or running out of runway. He was able to hire someone fast. You won't be this good/lucky. In the traditional non-traditional startup you need a salesperson and engineering to be free, because money. I suppose with dev tools you can get rid of the salesperson because you're selling tools to individuals? Which is more risk, but if it works then go for it.
- mannyv 4y agoFYI, people believe that dev tools don't make money, but atlassian, pagerduty, zendesk, etc show that there is a market. And most tools kind of suck.
- mannyv 4y agoAs a note, if you're in a startup you have no idea how far ahead of most developers you are. I keep forgetting that most developers throw their stuff over the wall to IT and probably don't have a ci pipeline, do IaC, , and probably don't deploy their own microservices or understand the AWS stack. They probably have a 60% chance they use source control instead of just copying folders and changing the folder name. They don't do logging or security. They scale by buying bigger instances. Docker is their current tech boner instead of puppet. Although pathetic, it is an opportunity.
- freedomben 4y agoThis is true, but most of those devs are in that situation because they want to be. They have less than zero interest in taking on more. Often these people also value job security/stability above advancement/novelty. Many of them also do coding only while at work, and if they will learn a new skill/tech it will be because their employer is paying them to. Often this group will not follow any tech news/blogs/anything and isn't even reachable. In short it's a pretty tough group to market to. To be clear, I'm not making a value judgment on this. If those people are happy with life, that's great! That's mostly the point IMHO.
- blumomo 4y ago> if someone from the team steps up and adds a lot of value that is expected from a co-founder, we will definitely promote the person as a co-founder How can someone get the title of a cofounder of an already (at least) 2 years old company which is already set up an running? I understand that traditionally this person then represents in investor meetings, but why does it need to be a _founder_ title of something that was founded long ago?
- CalChris 4y agoAgreed. To me, a co-founder is anyone pre-money. Anyone post-money is an employee.
- konfusinomicon 4y agoI'm a co-founder, with the current CEO and one other guy who retired, and have always been on the engineering side of the business. at first, the engineering department was me, and support. I was super green back then and was pretty lucky to be at the right place at the right time and as such, the company grew far faster than myself. I have many superiors now, which is cool with me as I've continued learning and growing professionally by observing them. going from me and 2 other guys to late series C has been a priceless experience, and it's nice to have the title. but oh my, the spam email and phone calls I get from having it on my LinkedIn profile is beyond annoying. many assumptions are made by companies advertising to co-founders, mainly that im C level and involved in sales. I struggle to calculate the total cost of all the sales guy time spent targeting me but I can safely say atleast a low end Lamborghini could have been procured if it was all pooled together.
- anakaine 4y agoHow have you found it starting as a co-founder and now having to report to others? For me personally, I don't think I'd have grown as graciously as you seem to have articulated that you have. I'd like to ha e retained a strong semblance of direction and control in the company as a co-founder.
- awesomegoat_com 4y agoCEO and CTO sounds like too much work. I call myself head of research in my own bootstrapped start-up. :-)
- remexre 4y agoYep, the founder of my company is still the "Vice President of Research"!
- fuzzieozzie 4y ago[unpopular opinion] If you struggle with this decision then you have other problems. There is no time for Worrying about titles -- I was "Jack of All Trades" for 4 years at the company I co-founded before I became CEO!
- Etheryte 4y agoA perhaps not so unpopular opinion is that it would be better to read the article before you comment on it. Despite the title, the article is not about mulling over what title to call yourself.
- cercatrova 4y agoPerhaps you should read the article before deciding to comment.
- asim 4y agoBe careful with advice like this. You don't know if the company has yet succeeded. A lot of it is quite logical but at the same time many things are an anomaly e.g the tool launched and closed fundraising within a short period of time. That's not always how it works out. Just because first commit to funding was 3 months doesn't mean you'll experience the same thing. I struggled for 4 years alone on an OSS project before raising funding. Hiring people, defining the product and executing was even harder. A person's experience only tells you what worked or is working for them or lessons they learned, it can't be cookie cutter fitted to your own journey.
- navaneethpk 4y agoExactly the reason why I wrote the article in a way that it just walks through the journey. The outcome of anything is a function of the context & timing and hence whatever worked for someone at a specific point of time to get to a specific stage might not be relevant for everyone.
- _8j50 4y agoDo you have to give yourself titles everyone else is using? If I start a company I would rather have "Captain" or "Masterchief" or perhaps just keep the C from CEO and be just a "Chief".
- pitched 4y agoIt’s helpful to align titles with the rest of the industry so that everyone outside of your small group knows what role you play without a long explanation. Custom or non-standard titles is like mixing code styles in the same file. So much fun when you’re doing it but such a huge pain when the next person comes in.
- swyx 4y agoTIL about Tooljet from OP's post: https://www.tooljet.com/ https://www.tooljet.com/ between Retool, Budibase, Superblocks, and Tooljet, i'm confused about how to choose. anyone have a good mental map of the low code internal tools landscape?
- anakaine 4y agoYou might also consider appsmith. We found it had a few more options. In the end, they're all pretty good
- rishabhkaul1 4y agoThanks for mentioning Appsmith (I work there)! We've been busy at work!
- kinj28 4y agoTo add to your confusion - try DronaHQ
- qvrjuec 4y agoI love the curmudgeonly comment on the blog post: > A "solo founder" should be too busy with real work to be writing articles like this. Amazing that they couldn't understand the article's marketing value
- didgetmaster 4y agoA solo founder has many things on their plate, but should never pass up an opportunity to raise awareness for their product; especially if it has progressed to what they think is MVP status. Newsletters, blogs, and sites like HN are great places to start 'getting the word out'.
- superzamp 4y agoAnd probably clarity of thought value for the author as well, I've found that writing is usually the best way to clear your thoughts and identify potential remaining blind spots in scenarios like this.
- shaburn 4y agoSo early on CEO is going to be selling customers and employees 80+% of the time but every Founder will need to. So why not delegate that to someone much better than you when you truly need the extra help. If you are not a killer technical founder, than what chance do you have in the market, as you've already signaled you're not the best sales person by not defaulting to the CEO role. Thus I'd argue you have little choice.
- escapecharacter 4y agoC1O
- mgaunard 4y agoYou should look for both a CTO and a COO. Whatever you cannot find a person for, you do yourself.
- justinzollars 4y agoDoesn't matter. You need product market fit and focus on your customers.
- bitL 4y agoCEO all the time. CTO only if you absolutely trust your CEO. But as the saying goes, the optimal number of co-founders is an odd number and three is too much.
- softwarefounder 4y agoMy first startup was founded with a non-technical co-founder; they had no vast experience in what we were founding, but was a good salesman. In the end, they were useless, and I walked away from the company. Make sure everything is in writing, and if you're a technical co-founder, make sure your co-founder is someone you can respect.
- asdev 4y agohow did you get your first customers?
- anticensor 4y agoNeither, just chairman of the board.