4 ms·
What I'm learning as an early stage solo founder... 1. Not having co-founders is no excuse to not work. I want to turn this idea in my head into a working prod
by beat 13y ago
What I'm learning as an early stage solo founder...
1. Not having co-founders is no excuse to not work. I want to turn this idea in my head into a working product. Saying you can't do it because you don't have a co-founder is an excuse, not a reason. It's not impossible, merely harder.
2. The critical problem is bandwidth. I'm day-jobbing to make ends meet, which bites even more into my time. My primary challenge now is finding a way to go full time, either with funding or with a revenue-generating subset of the functionality.
3. I'm the visionary. If I can find a technical co-founder to take over the coding work, great - better, even, because coding is bad for my big-picture focus. But ultimately, it's my product and my vision. If I find "co-founders" at this point, it will likely be just a label to make investors happy. In practice, they will be early employees.
4. Team-building, on the other hand, is going well. I'm a social person, an extrovert, and I can generate a pretty decent reality distortion field. I've been able to get help so far as I've needed it, and I think this will continue. Part of this comes from not asking too much of people, which is what the usual co-founder issue seems to be.
- w0rd-driven 13y agoAn extrovert is typically better at marketing and sales, namely for the social aspect. For someone like me that's an introvert and extremely shy around new people, I gain XP by tackling technical problems. That doesn't mean technical people can't be a visionary too because you'll definitely need it. Someone that can get a complete grasp of the scope to tell you when a decision will lead you into more or less technical debt. You can make all the right business decisions and still fail miserably if you make wrong technical ones. I'm likely not telling you anything you don't already know but I just wanted to make sure you weren't compartmentalizing things too much.
- beat 13y agoI think I'm a visionary technical person. The problem I'm addressing is based on two decades of experience in enterprise configuration management - solving the forest/trees problem of seeing small technical changes in the context of bigger business changes, and/or drilling down from the big business tasks to the technical details that implement them. It's a boundary-crossing technical issue that's near and dear to my heart. A good CTO could devise their own implementation path rather than following mine, but that's not really "vision". That's about how it works, not why it needs to exist. I can do the "how" myself, but I don't think it's a good use of my time and focus.
- pnathan 13y agoHey, configuration management is something really interesting to me. I don't suppose you'd mind emailing me with a link to your startup (email in profile)?