One Person Profitable (In defense of single founders) (jamtoday.org)

I'm compiling a list of founders who have achieved OPP. There are the obvious ones like Markus Frind and Gabe Rivera, but I'm sure there are many HN readers who have also successfully bootstrapped as single founders.

Anyone know of a verified one person profitable startup? Have any YC founders accomplished it?

why does everyone on hacker news think they need to defend solo founders?

if you can do it alone, do it. I haven't done that in either of the two companies I've started, but I like the camaraderie. Not everyone needs a partner.

For the sake of your loved ones / significant other, make sure you do your documentation, proper code control, and procedures so that they can sell the company if something bad should happen. It's good discipline and will allow someone else to take over (or be prep for when you hire staff so you can go on vacation).

What's the rationale for the "no debt" condition?

Basically, if a company's revenues are greater than its spending, it is profitable. It doesn't matter if the company hasn't eliminated debt or hasn't recouped the initial investment yet: being profitable means that it's being successful at getting at either of those goals.

The thing that's rarely answered sufficiently is the question of how to find a good co-founder. The answer is often "Find someone you worked with or went to school with that wants to start a company with you"

The thing is that there are a limited number of people to pick from based on these criteria. Out of these you have to find someone that's smart, gets things done and has the stamina to do a startup. For most people this amounts to a grand total of zero people.

I've done startups where I slacked on the co-founder criteria, thinking "Oh he's not the smartest guy I know, but he's a hard worker" or "he knows everything there is to know about this domain, but he's not 100% motivated" and I've been disappointed every time.

If you don't have a perfect match I'd recommend going it alone.

just curious, is there a compiled list of compelling single founder startups which are profitable or made an exit recently? the only thing that comes to mind right now is aaron patzer (mint.com)

Single person profitability sounds great. But I guess it really depends on why you started a company in the first place.

Did you start a company primarily because you didn't want to work for anyone else and really didn't care to work with anyone else?

Or did you start a company because you wanted to work on an idea that would change the landscape of the industry you're entering? Did you do it because you wanted to build something 10s of thousands (if not 100s or millions) of people would use? Did you do it to grow a real company that would have real impact and be worth a decent amount of money?

I think that if you want to do the latter, 9 times out of 10, you need to have more than 1 person. I'd rather be Mark Zuckerberg pre-profitability than random person doing random thing but profitable. That's just me.

If you want to be single-person profitable, you can always just do your own consultancy.

In case anybody missed it, the bolded words in middle of his sentences are sometimes, but not always, links. A questionable style choice.

I think we might be coming at it from the wrong angle. Fundamentally, why does the Internet enable businesses which scale (out of proportion to headcount, out of proportion to budget, out of proportion to time, etc) in ways which are difficult to imagine for businesses historically?

I think you could identify a couple of things here: Google (and the App Store and Twitter and Facebook and all the things you cool people use) is a huge force multiplier for distribution. OSS is a force multiplier for software development. Modern web frameworks are a force multiplier for software development. The whole lean startup ball-o-wax is a force multiplier for customer development. Cheap outsourcers are a force multiplier for any sort of easily described, easily checkable, repetitive work. The astounding variety -- an ecosystem of ecosystems -- of companies/APIs which you can just throw trivial time/money at and hook an enterprise-scale solution into your business is a force multiplier for, well, pretty much anything you can think of. ("Oh effity I have no accounts receivable department full of people whose only job it is to chase down folks who owe me money, get their money, and then make sure it gets to my accounts. Wait, you mean Paypal makes that irrelevant? For like a buck a transaction? And it can be integrated into a website in like an hour? Whoa!")

Heck, some of these are less multipliers and more exponentiators.

The question is -- which if any of the above are not available for you if you have one person but might be available if you have two? And the answer, I think, is none of them.

The barriers are getting further lowered all the time, too, and the things force multipliers are getting better. A great example of this -- and I swear, it will create several multi-million dollar businesses this year -- is Twilio. You can now run a telephony company from your freaking kitchen. Holy "#$&"#$"#$"# we are living in the future.

It's a great time to be single. (Not that it's a bad time to have co-founders -- I wish y'all the best, too. Make awesome stuff and have lots of success doing it.)

Apart from the usual Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Larry/Sergey anecdotes, there's little evidence that two is a natural lower bound on the number of founders. It's sometimes claimed that a startup is "too much work" for one person, but the productivity of individual programmers is not fixed; with today's tools, solo founders can be as productive as a dozen developers from fifteen years ago. Another common argument is that you need a cofounder as a sounding board and as a source of moral support. These roles are vital, but they don't necessarily have to be filled by a cofounder. Einstein needed the help of his friend Michele Besso to develop special relativity, but Besso wasn't a coauthor on Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper.

Unfortunately, the need for cofounders is a deeply entrenched belief among investors, so much so that it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Co-founders can create a feedback loop between themselves that a single founder cannot.

Comparing my "single founder" and "one of two" experiences, when there is another party the ability to talk and get feedback makes a huge difference. When you are on your own it is much easier to go down the wrong path because questions didn't get asked earlier on. It is much easier to become demoralised. It is much easier to waste time.

Having someone else around doesn't work as well as having a co-founder. While you can get some feedback, the nature of the conversations changes (at least for me), and there are some things you don't really talk about to others.

  Co-founders can create a feedback loop between themselves
  that a single founder cannot.

  When you are on your own it is much easier to go down the
  wrong path because questions didn't get asked earlier on.

  It is much easier to become demoralised. It is much easier 
  to waste time.

There seems to be so many different opionions on this. I think that a single founder is good for some people and not for others.

Some people need some kind of support, or some people can't do programming and sales.

But most of all, not all start-ups are the same... saying "two founders is better than one" is totally subjective to the start-up, surely?

Being a single founder is great for building amazingly great products. The same person is leading the product vision and also obsessing over every detail.

If there's more than one founder, somebody has to be in charge.

Would a painter ever co-paint an oil painting with another painter?

If the investors would appreciate the fact that they are the second person, then no one would have anything different to say about single founders, because any extra load would effectively be taken up by the resources that the investors give the true founder (adding someone to the team when there is too much load doesn't make them a founder just because it's early on, they can help in just the same way as if they were a normal employee).