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Question re solo founders: "A startup is too much work for one person" and if you can't convince even one friend to join you, that doesn't speak well for your i
by mbym 12y ago
Question re solo founders:
"A startup is too much work for one person" and if you can't convince even one friend to join you, that doesn't speak well for your idea! On the other hand, a bad hire/partnership can ruin the company. YC gives signal it really prefers to look at teams than individual applications.
Q: Do you have have advice or rules of thumb re how much time a solo founder should put into finding partner(s)? Or thoughts re how much to prioritise this, vs. just writing code and talking to users to finish initial version yourself?
I don't mean this to be just focused on "getting into YC" but more in general: what's the right way to think about fixing this problem (being a solo founder) vs tackling other things like actually building something initial users can be using? For software ideas surely it is occasionally sensible to make at least a prototype and actually get some users before ever buddying up? Or if I've got this far but am basically still going it alone, am I doing something wrong?
- api 12y agoSeconded: statistics such as these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77525 ... seem to show that very successful sole founder stories do exist. But nearly everything from the YC orbit says "find a partner or you'll fail," etc.
- BinaryIdiot 12y agoI came here to ask the same question. I started working on an idea of my own and I have many friends who are very talented but none that really seem to want to commit to something risky and obviously I don't want to force someone to come if they are not interested in taking the risk with me. This is the main reason my next application to YC will be solo but I am certainly open (and would prefer) a partner.
- niche 12y agoHi BinaryIdiot, I am free and available, I am a TernaryIdiot, we could make a team!
- BinaryIdiot 12y agoWe may have some communication problems! ha
- leanne07 12y agoHi BinaryIdiot! I am also looking for a committed group of people to work on a start up with. Please reach out to me at leannesawyer2007@gmail.com.
- jacquesm 12y agoMake sure you are the person reaching out to the one that you pick, not the other way around.
- zeeshanm 12y agoI find it even in the case when two or more founders were involved in starting some of these most successful companies only one of the founders took the initiative in the very early days. The truth is it only takes one person to start something. And once you build something that has or can have tremendous value people will just join you naturally. There is no such thing as the perfect moment to start something. You just have to do it and keep doing it and things will happen.
- sama 12y agoWe really prefer at least two founders, but it's not a deal-breaker. We funded Drew Houston of Dropbox as a solo founder, but he got a cofounder before the batch started. A bad cofounder is far, far worse than no cofounder. I'd spend maybe 20% of your time looking for a cofounder, and the rest on your business. But don't force a cofounder if you don't have a good, organic option. The more progress you make on the business, the easier it will be to get a great cofounder.
- bhayden 12y agoIt seems like you really need to know the potential cofounder as a person, though, otherwise you won't be sure what they're like when stressed or making mistakes. Doesn't this limit it to people you already know fairly well?
- mbym 12y agoVery helpful, cheers. "The more progress you make on the business, the easier it will be to get a great cofounder" -- agreed -- and being accepted to YC would itself more than help convince people to join the team also :) I hope there are more Drew Houstons out there with confidence to apply.
- niche 12y agoThanks sama and mbym. As a confounded solo founder waiting for organic cofundity, this is nice to hear.
- 12y ago
- beachstartup 12y agoin my opinion, after starting multiple failed companies and one that seems to be working so far, individual founders are the exception that prove the rule. at the end of the day, it's just a ton of work. even very very hard working and smart people are not physically capable doing this much work on their own - in terms of actual output founding a company is like 6 or 7 fulltime jobs' worth of deliverables, shared by 2 or 3 founders. if you're a single founder, i think you'd have to raise money very early and make some key hires quickly in order to succesfully do it. from what i can, that's usually the case with single founders who were previously part of an all-star founding team that had a good exit.
- paul 12y agoPlease don't let the lack of a cofounder discourage you from applying. It's definitely a huge help to have a good cofounder, but we accept great founders regardless. There's a tendency for people to want to reduce the world to black-and-white rules like, "yc doesn't accept single founders", but it simply isn't true. We are specifically looking for outliers, so any such rule would be a huge mistake (because the big hits are, by definition, exceptions).
- vagab0ndk1ng 12y agoThank you for that! What makes you believe that someone or something is an outlier? How much of it is a gut feeling versus observable data, for example?
- paul 12y agoNo two are the same, but generally a good sign is if they have outlier behavior in their past. For example, if you won a gold medal in the Olympics, there's a good chance that you would at least get an interview -- the level of determination and persistence required to accomplish something like that would definitely be helpful in founding a startup. (that said, I don't know that we've ever actually funded an Olympian) A more common example would be creating a popular open source project (e.g. the creator of Sails.js is in the current batch).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- loceng 12y agoHi Paul. I applied last time with a video with the team, however with updated rules (they own less than 10% each) then they're not supposed to be in application video; I started my company many years ago and small team relatively recently joined as relating to the equity. I don't have time to redo an application video, and with a comment on HN from someone at YC during last application process - applying early increased chances of being selected, meaning once startups selected for interview that the application process still remains open - the odds feel negligible. Any thoughts?
- 12y ago
- pbreit 12y agoI think you're still missing the importance of the cofounder. It's to demonstrate that you are able to convince at least one single person to join you on the journey. Running a startup is basically one continuous stream of persuasion. Persuading customers. Persuading recruits. Persuading investors. Persuading employees. Persuading investors. Persuading the media. Etc. Etc. Building product, while fun, is easy (in most cases). Being able to persuade lots of people to row your boat in the direction you want is singularly difficult. Until you persuade that one person to join your pursuit, it's extremely difficult to think you have the skills of persuasion necessary to carry out the nearly impossible task of starting a startup.
- aagha 12y agoWhat if you've already convinced people/companies to buy your product/service? Do you think you still need a co-founder then?