Serial single founder here. Start building and start selling. If you can’t deliver a product to a paying customer solo then you’re not cut out to be a sole founder.
This pretty much sums up everything. I had a similar problem trying to sell my products. If you're a solo founder learn how to sell first. Finding cool marketing strategies is great, but people need to see real faces before buying your products. It is not always true, but in general that is what I've seen so far.
Sure, by real faces I mean pitching your product to people directly. Not necessarily over the Internet but in person. This is a step that is often missed by a lot of tech people wannabe entrepreneurs (including myself). We think the Internet is a magic place where you can launch anything from your bedroom and reach millions of people if you use the right marketing strategy (ads on youtube, cold emails, viral strategy, gamification, etc). I call this the scaling phase. You can't scale nothing. If you have zero user and zero customer, what do you want to scale?
So step zero consist on acquiring your first customer/user. This is usually when having a non-tech co-founder or someone who's good at selling would make a huge difference. We always bypass this step of acquiring the first customers, it's only when you build something and ship it that you hit a wall. You will not rank in google at first, no one will ever mention your name and the only queries you'll get on your SaaS or whatever product you have will come from your own IP. That's what I'm talking about. You just launched, now what?
So you need to go out there and "manually" pitch your product to people. Introduce yourself, tell your story, prove people what you've built is what they want. You would usually fail capturing the needs at first because of a lack of interaction with your targeted users, you will build something that isn't exactly what they want. So you need to quickly adapt to that early feedback, which is why going out there and trying out your MVP or prototype very quickly is a key to success. This is what I mean by "people need to see real faces". You could pitch your product to your mom, friends, potential users, potential partners who could help you move to the next step, etc.
The best way to find out "how to found a company as a single founder" is to give it a shot. You'll basically collect all the answers to your question.
Even with a SaaS product, unless it's really really cheap, many customer will want to talk with you on the phone or in a video call. It happened to me a lot.
As someone who has been selling all my life, I'm not sure it's a teachable skill. Yes, everyone can learn to improve, but some part of salesmanship has to be in your blood.
With developers routinely making over $200k in Silicon Valley now, if you're a "product person" and not a salesperson, you can probably earn more as an employee than an entrepreneur.
Solo founder here. Same advice with the caveat that 98% of people should never be solo founders - you must be able to code and sell - but even if you can you should still get a partner if they double your speed.
Agree completely. I've never heard of a major company founded by someone who couldn't sell. Those people make products, not businesses, as Mark Cuban says a lot on Shark Tank.
Another reason to consider not going solo is that some experienced engineers will consider it a black mark - here's a guy who either believes he can do it all -or- is too greedy/control-freaky to share; this is someone who didn't meet someone better than themselves in their career or simply couldn't recognize that fact.
The few solo founders I have personally dealt with have fit that description exactly.
I think it would be a distinct recruitment advantage not to have a cofounder. You could reallocate equity you would have given to a cofounder, to early employees. Cofounder or no, money talks.
Maybe it’s my different experience and age, but I definitely nudge people away from solo startups using the examples I’m referring to as concrete examples when talking live to friends.
Reality is no one is so good that having another voice in the room isn’t usually an advantage for the leaf nodes. There are plenty of people who believe they are, though.
I will say this only applies to more traditional startups - seeking funding, hiring a team. It’s different when the solo entrepreneur builds and sells and then is hiring to augment the company. Not sure I would join that either but it is different.
Being a founder means solving all these problems everyday as a background task (usually by hiring a lawyer, payroll firm, accountant, etc). A mentor can help you with the basics and the timing for hiring professionals.
This, plus, just start. There are lots of things you won't know, always. You'll need to dig in and figure out what you need to know. Outsourcing is a good option for things if you have the money. However, you need to understand what you're paying for.
you either just start, and fumble through and make it or never start. there is no such thing as perfectly figuring it all out and then starting. I desperately wish there was, but it doesn't exist.
To clear the minefield someone has to step on them basically. Fortunately these mines won't kill you and you will learn how to disarm them as you walk through the minefield.
I'll try to automate all of this as much as possible. The sad thing is I just want a side project but all this seems mandatory like I'm building a full-blown startup, puts me off.
It might be tempting to get a co-founder with these skills but it's better to buy them. Instead, look for a co-founder with marketing/sales/tech profile.
Ops isn't a problem until you're successful, the taxman won't come after you if you have 10k in revenue, customers won't complain if you haven't sold things to them. It really isn't something to worry about now, at all. Get stressed over not getting any sales, that's what should be freaking you out.
Not knowing what your business is, those are probably minor things you don't need a co-founder for. Just get an accountant/bookeeper on the financial side, you'll need on anyhow. Do some online reading about cookies and GDPR if you have concerns there and don't stress about it - nobodies going to hunt you down if you're very small fish. If you have serious money coming in you can have a more serious look into it - those issues are not fundamental.
If you need to hire people, open an office, write up contracts, deal with immigration lawyers, deal with tricky shareholder stuff, manage customer accounts ... then maybe you need someone to help.
The advice makes sense, but isnt it a bit of chicken-and-egg? How do you sell something you haven't built? (or is it really .. build a little, or enough to illustrate; then 'sell' to validate and seek market fit; and then finally truly build?)
Depends the kind of product you are building but you don't necessary even need market validation, you only need it if your product is exotic enough that there's nothing close to it.
realistically this only works for unique products
there are so many alternatives for EVERYTHING
that most people will just move on to something that is ready today instead.
Not every product can get to MVP in two weeks. If you were building a new kind of airplane, it better take more than two weeks. Our software is quite complex and there isn't going to be an MVP in two weeks, lol!
I do think that building a UI prototype that you can click through is a good first step for complex software.
Ok, but such quick MVP should have some secret sauce - ideally introduce a complexity with a special dependency, otherwise nothing stops a potential lead to take the idea and implement it with someone else.
It's essentially the build a little/sell/build a lot cycle you mentioned, but you want to minimize the first step as much as possible. As tech folks, it's easy for us to overestimate the importance of technology to our end customers. They're not buying code, they're buying a solution that will make their life easier/better.
"Sales" is a long term process, but the first meeting usually starts with understanding the customer's problem. If you build something before that (and demo it at the beginning of the meeting), you can bias the process with your assumptions. Instead, if you try to get inside the mind of your customer, you can get closer to the correct solution.
For a lot of those first sales meetings, you don't necessarily need technology to demo. Instead of showing/telling your customer, you're starting by listening. Then, you can build a small demo of something interesting before the next meeting (often, this is more to keep the conversation going and explore new ideas than to immediately solve the customer's entire problem).
I agree with the other comments mentioning an initial (days/weeks long) MVP build cycle. However, over the past few years, I've found it helpful to adopt this mindset: "my idea for the best possible product is at least slightly wrong, and the more code I write the harder it is to fix". There's a psychological concept of functional fixedness, where you view an object only as its traditional use. I think a similar concept exists in technology. Particularly as a founders-only company, the technology you build has some inertia, and impacts your mental models of the problem you are trying to solve. The more code you write, the higher the "cost" of changing (both in your mental models, and the technology itself).
All this really means is you're right about the build a little/sell/build more cycle - but what you build is less important than what the customer says. The first build is often just a means to start an interesting conversation about the customer's true problem, and you might need less technology for that than you initially assume.
MVP or fake page with credit card info or email information that says you're sold out.
If you can convert random users to paying customers then you're on to something. Otherwise your project is most likely going to flounder. Some people may think it's dishonest but without verifying you're going to spend weeks to months working on something that will never be used.
That might work for physical product, but when you claim your software download is sold out, people tend to give you funny looks.
You can definitely put up a product page where users can enter an email address and start building up a mailing list, but obviously mailing list recipients are not guaranteed to pay you money.
The purpose is to get some kind of signal that you're on the right track. Many times I've seen would be founders just go off of a hunch without a buy in from any possible users of any degree. Even their voluntary email sign up is far more of a sign than what the founders know users want.
In the brief period I was running my own company (with a friend, not solo) the product we sold was largely unbuilt, or were selling features we hadn't yet built.
We were the 'technical creatives' and with an idea and a cost, and went out to find people who we could sell it to to enable us to build it and make it better for all the users. As our product was video crossover - this was a little easier as people are used to paying for a video before you've made it, but video was actually a very small part of what we were offering - and sometimes not at all.
But selling things that have been bukt yet shouldn't be impossible, or even hard - as long as you can show a track record of delivery.
This is completely rational and works well for some people, but speaking from experience, there is another side to this coin.
If you are the sort of person who enjoys the making side of things, and aren't naturally gifted at selling, this can be a trap. I've seen so many solo founders try to validate a product by selling before building, only to get talked into different features and use cases until they're stuck building some bloated mess of a service. Not super enjoyable.
That said, if selling is your strong suit and you have the discipline to sell a product idea without deviating from your product idea to chase sales, then selling as a validation tool is fantastic.
If you can't sell - should you really attempt to be a solo founder? If you aren't strong enough to 'own the feature-set' and work with potential clients now, will you be the right person to run the company later?
This is a provocation/question - not a statement of fact btw!
Selling/customer development is a skill you can learn—and absolutely must learn if you want to hack it as a single founder. The real trap is staying in your comfort zone.
Definetly not something you have to learn. If you build something customers really want then the product will probably sell itself, and no selling or marketing will be needed.
Single founder here. I think this doesn't work in B2B or may be I am talking to the wrong people, most of the potential customers I've spoken to want to see something - so the first question they ask is what have you built. This is in financial industry, building fraud product and like I said I may not know the right people to talk to. I think having domain contacts in B2B works great, specifically if you have somewhat tried to solve the problem before. I think PG writes this in one of the essays.
Can I ask an honest question respectfully? I don’t have a company or a startup. But I’ve always wanted to start one. So I’m always curious when I see a response like yours.
How do you sell first? There isn’t a product to show. How do you find Customers? Is it the philosophy that the customer doesn’t know better and you have to tell them what they need, all the while understanding what your capabilities are. Like undersell and overdeliver? I’m genuinely curious how you go about selling first.
I joined a startup a few years ago and I did see this in action. The founder was such a believer in his vision he would go to whatever door he managed to get through and was selling them his mock-ups. He is not technical but he has go a good eye to UI and also had great idea. When I joined him (I'm technical with no eye to UI and not very good at human relations) he already had customers aligned (no product yet) and also won 4 desks in local incubator (big brand's incubator...) I found this astonishing and to date I am under impression trying to learn from him where I lack.
I've worked at a couple startups where we would speak MVP with our lips but our actions did not follow our words. None of them were ultimately successful.
In a podcast [1] a mattress company tells a story about how they got started: they just built a one-page site where you could buy a mattress, but the company didn't actually exist: after a certain point it failed and you couldn't buy it.
They publicized the site and soon enough they found that someone had clicked to buy a mattress: a potential customer.
So they effectively "sold" before building. Since the test was good and they found that people were willing to buy mattresses with the features they offered, they then built the company (and are now successful).
It only works for some kind of products and some kind of buyers, obviously. You can't sell someone a can of tomatoes based on a demo.
But, if the value you can provide is immediately obvious to the customer, rather than an incremental improvement on their existing situation, then you can get them to express interest before you have a finished product to provide them with.
"sell first" works if you have such a unique solution/value such that for the customer it's a "either this demo or nothing" situation. that's exceedingly rare.
most of the time there's a healthy large existing set of solutions serving the same market so it's difficult to justify using something new.
even if you have some unique selling points they may not be strong enough or they may be canceled out by the lack of other features and maturity of your new product vs existing established ones.
for example let's say your product is a customer support software. how do you "sell first" when there are so many mature existing companies solving the same problem?
how long will it take you to reach the same capabilities, support, security, reliability of existing solutions?
are your differentiating points really strong enough that someone's going to say "screw Zendesk I'm going to try this random new one-man product because they have this feature X"?
> "Is it the philosophy that the customer doesn’t know better and you have to tell them what they need"
Yes and no. One of the only people to have ever done that successfully that I know of was Steve Jobs, and that's what made him a one-of-a-kind genius billionaire. Believing you can do the same will cause your wheels to spin endlessly without going anywhere. It's pure hubris.
On the flip side, it certainly can help to have some insight, intuition, or flash of inspiration for a product or service. When you have the idea, then you have a hypothesis. Don't treat a hypothesis like a fact! This is where people make the biggest mistake.
Your goal is then to find evidence related to the idea. The evidence will tell you whether the hypothesis has potential or whether it's completely bogus.
Two big places you can find evidence: competitors and customers.
If there are already competitors in your field, that's a big piece of evidence that your idea has merit. If there are no competitors, that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have a chance, but definitely take it as a sign that there's probably a good reason there's nobody else doing it.
If you can find customers, it's nearly proof that you're onto something. Just be cautious because sometimes people will say they like your idea and genuinely believe to themselves that they would pay for it but then actually not in reality.
> "How do you sell first?"
The biggest way that I know of is basically just communicating with people. Find a way to get someone on the phone or get them to open your email or even see them in person, and then pitch your idea to them.
If you're selling a service then it isn't too difficult because you can just verbalize the service and gauge their response. When they like your idea it will be very obvious because they will get excited. If they're not excited then you're talking to the wrong market or your idea/hypothesis needs to be reworked.
If you're selling a product it's essentially the same, but you may need some simple mockups/pictures just to help communicate the idea. You really do not need a full fledged working product or even an "MVP" for this.
The concept of an "MVP" is a huge source of confusion because it assumes you know what "minimally viable" even means. How can you build an MVP when you have no idea what to consider "minimally viable?" The MV part of MVP completely depends on your customer. No customer, no MVP. (This may not quite apply if you're building something specifically to fulfill a need that you have.)
Hope this helps!
By the way, please take this with a grain of salt. This is my personal experience from a couple of failed startups and zero successful startups. I'm clearly not an expert.
The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity.
It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product.
Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.
How specificlaly did you go about promoting your landing page? Just 'hey check this out posts', or did you focus on comments/answers to questions? And how much time do you have invested in this so far?
If you get some free time, you might want to also post this on indiehackers.com. Could help a lot of people out there.
I'm a somewhat frequent contributor on IndieHackers actually. To promote the page, I basically posted it everywhere I could (without getting banned) and started asking my friends to critique the site. When applicable, I would also answer questions on fora as I am now. In terms of time, I'm not really sure, it's an on and off commitment as I also have a job.
Anything other questions or anything you're working on as well?
I'd like to know more about the "not getting banned" part.
Reddit communities are notorious for not wanting to be sold to.
what's your approach? how do you articulate the post? maybe you could share a link to an actual post as an example?
Many subreddits have rules on when you can do self promotion, such as a separate thread or a specific day for posting. That's when I do it. [See this post for example](https://old.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/a3oz48/meth...). As well, you can see in that post that I don't directly promote my app but instead I ask questions regarding the process by which people schedule their day.
Provide value without expecting value in return. If you look on [/r/entrepreneur](www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneur), you can see some posts where people use their blog posts as a reddit post, which provides value for those who don't read their specific blog. Then, you can link back to your own blog at the end of the post. In doing so, you provide value before you promote yourself, and so any products or services you then promote will be associated with quality to your readerbase.
Thanks for posting this. I am at a very similar place with startups where I am attempting to stop just paying lip service to lean startup ideas. I'm going to look into the tools you mentioned.
BTW, the last startup I worked at we were building a really cool "timeline" interface using react. I see you are using Vue but we still might have some interesting discussions. I found some really fun/difficult product and technical problems with developing that type of interface.
You pretend to have a product, and try to sell it -- market it, advertise, etc. If you get people trying to buy it / use it, you know you're going in the right direction.
So yes, basically you bullshit everyone with some mockups and a pretty website, to determine if anyone would even be interested in the thing you want to build.
You may be able to make a sale and then build it and still keep the sale, but if you think that this is too risky with respect to reputation or having a customer depend on what you’re selling be ready, it’s still worth going through the sales cycle until you’ve found something you can sell.
It won’t magically get easy to sell the product when it’s ready, so it’s possible eliminate bad ideas which are hard for you to sell early, even if you let the sale fall through towards the end.
Once you find a real pain points, people will beg you to buy/use your product, even if all you have is a crappy version rushed out.
To be clear, some startups require to have a super polished version to be successful. But even then, there's often a way to have customers pilot an early version or cheaply test the market.
I hate this advice so much. I've been burned as a developer so many times by people selling products that don't exist and then expecting the dev team to just make them happen by some arbitrary deadline. It's a garbage experience for pretty much everyone.
But I'm not going to argue against it right now. It's too deeply ingrained as startup wisdom to fight it. So instead, I'll offer this compromise: if you're going to sell first and build later, at least build some basic things up front that you are guaranteed to need and that most startups don't build until long after they should.
1. You already know what your programming language strengths and weaknesses are. You can make decisions for your first product iteration already. Are you going to start with a web app? You probably already know what language you want to use. Choose your frameworks, and choose frameworks that address the OWASP top 10 at least. If you are storing data, you have a responsibility--even as a sole founder--to take security seriously. You can think about that and make decisions while you are selling, so do it. You can also make a decision to not store data or store as little as possible and choose frameworks and plugins that help you do that.
2. Along the same lines, if software is involved you have to have a way to deploy it. Set up your DevOps pipeline. If you listened to the first point, you've got somewhere to start. Take your app framework and your plugins and set up a pipeline for deploying/rolling back/backing up/restoring the very basic "hello world" version of the app + plugins. Use a service if you aren't already into DevOps personally--most of these things have a free tier. If you are looking for a native app of some kind, navigate the platform's app store at least once so you know what you're in for. Or if it's cross-platform how you will get the latest version to your users. None of these decisions matter right now in terms of what decisions you make, just that you do make them and learn how to use things.
If you are going to commit to selling first and then building, you are already shortchanging the amount of time you have to deliver after the product is sold. If you haven't made any of these decisions, the time between when you make your first sale and when you deliver it is going to be absolute shit. Give yourself the ability to use that time 100% focused on building the product confidently because you already know how you're going to build it and how you're going to deliver it.
I'm a professional software engineer too and know what you mean. It sounds like you're thinking like an engineer. That's great for building things, not selling them.
You can have the best infrastructure, best pipelines, devops, security, frameworks, styleguides, libraries, etc. etc. Sadly none of that means you're building something anybody wants.
You can spend years building something undoubtedly technically amazing. Yet if you didn't make sure there was a market first you face the very real prospect that people will go "That's nice, why do I care?"
Your advice is great for a personal project that you don't intend to directly make money with. Still would be excellent on a resumé however.
I agree with you. Thinking about setting up a DevOps pipeline before you have anything to send through it (and even before knowing if you'll ever have anything to send through it) has a name in lean management: it's called waste™️. There's so many other things to do instead that could bring immediate value
> You already know what your programming language strengths and weaknesses are. You can make decisions for your first product iteration already. Are you going to start with a web app? You probably already know what language you want to use.
I think if you are thinking about programming language strength and weaknesses when building a product you need to rethink your approach.
Building a great product has very little to do with technology choice, especially at the beginning. Building a great product is about solving a real pain for your target customer and solving it in a novel and delightful way.
If you can’t deliver a product to a paying customer solo then you’re not cut out to be a sole founder.
I really dislike the tone and content of this advice.
I am a solo founder. My first venture (as part of a team) failed - even though we had a product, we had no paying customers and there were other issues. It would have been terrible had someone given advice like this right after that happened - "you're not cut out to be a founder because X or Y." One of the great things about being any kind of founder is learning from mistakes, picking yourself up off the ground, and then creating something that works.
Its not like being a founder is a magical thing. Honestly, being a founder is just someone who can grind it out under adverse conditions. Like any other shit job out there. The point still stands. If you cant grind it out and sell, the core of entrepreneurship, then maybe its not for you.
> If you cant grind it out and sell, the core of entrepreneurship, then maybe its not for you
Yes, I think it's the no 1 reason I saw solopreneneur friends fail. Most are just not willing to put the hours in. I see that people really like to dream and make big plans but sitting down consistently after work each day and actually working on all the mundane small things is a necessity many are not willing to do. The idea/business might still fail but without actually doing anything you have lost already.
Not only the mundane, but the amount of decision making involved. You cant spend too much time and energy on decisions. Most people dont like making decisions. There are many kind of decisions. If you grow big enough, the well being of your employees depends on your decisions. Most cant handle that.
Entrepreneurship is as glamorous as being a doctor at the emergency room.
But a good salesman can even sell a mediocre product to more people than someone with a good product.
And he'll grab more money to, because he isn't afraid to raise the price
If you want to attract people, you need to either pitch the idea in public (or build an MVP) to gather attention and possible partners. Or find people with similar interests and reveal the idea to them. You could also find someone through networking or [1] forums.
Show a good idea, with good leadership and people will follow...
+1 on indiehackers being a fantastic resource for strategies and motivation once you filter out the multi-person companies. I'd also add in http://levels.io - Pieter Levels is a good steward for the 'maker' movement also https://twitter.com/levelsio
Not sure if they are connected somehow, but a website with a very similar name http://levels.fyi with FAANG salaries information makes you quistion your choices about being an indie developer
It's not realistic that the vast majority of people can expected to be hired, or move to those places, let alone achieve those salary levels. I would be amazed if even 1% of applicants actually got hired. You have 5x greater chance of being accepted at Stanford. There is a tremendous bias on HN, because those people that have, frequent here.
There are two parts to having a good idea. One is the idea itself, but it's also critical that you have expertise in the domain. My company helps freelance writers and photographers get paid. The CEO was a publisher who had this problem and decided to solve it. He reached out in his circle for a programmer to build it, and he found me. The idea was good enough for me to put time into it, and we had a clear path forward for turning it into a business. My point is that if you have domain knowledge and a genuinely good idea, you'll have no trouble finding co-founders.
First, don't. Actually, its good you ask about attracting co-founders and talent, that's a critical part of success. You're going to want a strong, like-minded cofounder and strong team to help you succeed. The journey is more fun and will likely be more successful with he right team...So, how? Network.....
But lots of people got nowhere from doing the WRONG thing. Focusing on finding a cofounder instead of on furthering the product could definitely be one of those mistakes.
The ultimate question of business is about deciding between alternatives and asking which is best for the company:
1) If I carry on with the product, can I keep quality and speed to improve sales significantly or will I quickly hit a wall which will cause my customers to leave?
2) If I find a good founder instead, will they help me with stuff I am not good at and give me the space to keep quality and speed or is it a distraction?
Of course what you're describing is the ideal, but I think the odds of finding a good co-founder (particularly via "networking") is vanishingly small. In fact I bet that the odds of finding a good co-founder is smaller than the odds of successfully starting a business as a solo founder.
So I'd say yes, do it, but simultaneously be on the lookout for a potential co-founder. If one arises, great. If not, don't let it be an excuse not to follow you dream.
Partnerships consisting of staying on the same page for multiple years, in one's 20s, is harder than marriage. People, priorities and capabilities change too much.
On the other hand having someone join a vision already in progress can help with keeping alignment.
Speaking as a sole founder with many friends that go their path alone as well, this is not anywhere close to a requirement. There are people for whom this journey is natural and they are more suited, and others for whom they'd prefer or need to be with someone else.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution for founders. Co-founders come with their own set of issues--whether you're on the same page about the company's goals, whether your skill sets are complementary or not, what kind of long term commitment you both have to the problem space, etc.
(this is hard to answer well, without knowing your background or the nature of your idea)
I'd recommend starting to develop the idea. If you are non-technical, then begin speaking to potential users and customers, and building relationships i.e. do business development.
If you are technical, it doesn't matter, do the above too. You can also take part of your time to actually begin prototyping a v1 of your product. But remember, your goal is to start a company, not a cool technical demo, so prioritize business development.
Once you have done this, congrats, you have some real momentum on your idea and have either gotten validation from real users and customers or know what needs to be changed and improved. You are now in a stronger position to start talking to people. Its much easier to attract people to your startup if you can demonstrate your idea has some traction.
Your three superpowers as a solo founder need to be:
1) Deep expertise and network with potential customers
2) Ability to empathize and connect with your customers and sell the thing
3) Ability to build some sort of MVP
The deep expertise and empathy will allow you to hone in on the problem you know your customers will face, and so you can narrow down the "paradox of choice" of different features/products you can build. It'll give you a much better starting point for experimentation and iteration. Start small. Talk to these folks. Get people to validate your idea. If you don't have an existing network where you can talk to 30-50 customers (100 is better!), this will be a problem.
The empathy and salespersonship will allow you to get folks to give you feedback and/or pre-sell the thing. Maybe do consulting for them to earn revenue and testimonials. If you can't sell this, you're going to have a hard time.
Finally, you need to be able to build something that delivers value to your customers. You don't have to be the world's greatest programmer (actually, if you were that might hurt you more than it helps!) but you do need some programming chops. Maybe it's automation around an existing process (a chatbot that does something small). Or even a spreadsheet. Maybe it's a full-blown MVP. Either way, you don't have the revenue to pay a developer, and sharing context with someone that you can afford is likely very very difficult.
If you don't have these things, this will be really, really tough. If you do, it will still be very tough, but you have a much better chance of being successful.
Find a network of solopreneurs - either something local to you (where you can meet up periodically) or an online group. This will be invaluable as you run into challenges they solved, and then you can pay it forward for the people that will walk your path later. And, having a place to vent with empathetic folk will help keep you sane.
If you need any help, I'm happy to share my experiences solo-bootstrapping my company to 20+ people. Just email me matt [dot] rogish [at] gmail
It's still too early to declare my new project a success but compared to several failures, it seems like I've finally cracked the code.
There are a number of things I am doing differently this time, but the most significant seems to be that I am now using a coach. This would have made me laugh earlier but it's been great value to me. As a single founder, it can be very hard to stick to commitments and keep a clear vision. So I take calls with my coach every two or three weeks to discuss priorities and goals for next time. She will then ping me regularly and keep me committed -- and call me on my bullshit if I try to weasel out of something.
It feels like some sort of life-cheat-code. I say something that I want to happen on the phone, and then it happens! It doesn't just apply to my business, for instance I've finally managed to meditate consistently because of her. I wish I had discovered this years ago! :-)
It makes perfect sense. It's the same reason I always suggest to someone who's struggling with weight to get a fitness coach; not necessarily for the advice but just so they've got someone to stay accountable to, at least until they build up good habits on their own.
I shelved other ideas until I had a cofounder and capital.
Other ideas I built myself.
I’ve met like minded people that also had the right risk profile typically at mixers and tech meetups on topics that I liked. Never for the explicit purpose of meeting a cofounder. Just people that happened to be in the same fireside chat as me that contributed good conversation. Its all luck but you can improve the odds.
It doesn't matter if you have a strong idea if no-one is willing to pay for it. Get some sales commitments first, even some "soft" commitments will go a long way. Will you even be able to build the company at the rates people are willing to pay?
Good advice. I met a guy who was selling screenshots of a product to ensure it did what people expected. He then got a team and built it and recently sold his company for some good dollars so this isn't as weird advice as it sounds!
Also be careful about using a single customer to "co-design" your product since it can affect appeal to other customers.
the very same idea could be implemented in different ways, some would work, some other would fail
the only way to be sure is to build it and ship it, eg. "does my implementation provide value to customers or not?"
it does not have to be big, it does not have to be perfect, it does not have to be complete (avoid the features creep), but the implementation itself or the product is what determine the value or potential value
other people like co-founder, talents, etc. are basically people who will see the value but think "hey I can build that better", "I can sell that better", etc. and decide to join you in the process
so yeah pretty much "Start building and start selling"
for the founding part it will be either you have the skills (tech, marketing, whatever) and so invest your time, or miss some of those skills and use your own money to cover those parts
I do not believe you can rely solely on "strong ideas"
No they’re not. You can’t even patent or copyright business ideas. The only justification for a business idea is a customer, so GP is correct: no business has value without sales.
That's my point. I don't have any "good" ideas because they're meaningless without the ability to execute. I know my limits, and I know that I can't tell if my ideas are good without intimately knowing the intended market.
There are certainly things that I suspect there would be a huge market for. That, I suppose, is my "good ideas" list (or, because I'm not an oracle, my "wish list").
An incredible execution with no good idea is also pretty meaningless, so clearly having a good idea must be some sort of force multiplier and thus have value.
the idea can already be there, already implemented and even already successful
and an incredible execution can just take over
you don't take over on ideas, you do take over on implementation
few examples: hotmail and then boom gmail took over, IE6 and boom Firefox took over, etc.
in fact implementation is so much more important that you have to keep doing it right otherwise someone else take over
also you can not keep an idea secret forever, once you release your product, everyone know about it and get a shot at their own implementation of your idea
That is certainly possible. However, the trick here is hidden in your saying the idea is "fully fleshed." Our temptation often is to fully flesh ideas either in our own imagination, with our friends, or with internet research. If instead you actually flesh out ideas by speaking to customers, building prototypes and testing them, gathering real user data, and even actual sales data, then definitely yes that idea could be worth a ton. But if this idea is fully fleshed out like in a research paper where you've spent 24 hours in a library, then your case is much harder to make.
A solo founder here. I had started my two previous companies with a co-founder, but this time I decided I want to move on alone to stay independent. Having a co-founder, investors, employees are great as you can move quickly, but not necessarily in the direction that you would like to.
So far I enjoy it a lot, I can experiment, live my own life and if I fail, I'll fail, no worries. I do realise, however, that I will sooner or later face the wall and I'll need someone to support me. But I still have time.
Are there really any single founders? In most successful single founder companies, there are few people who effectively does cofounder like stuff. In this case initial recruits would just not have the cofounder title, but the same work.
Also initial recruits will stick around and will give their best only if they have enough incentive, which is equity(a cofounder thing)
Thomas Edison was a solo founder. So was Edwin Land (Polaroid). You could make the case that Thomas Watson Sr. (IBM) was also a solo founder, and they all did just fine. :-)
It's not magic. In the past I thought I need to be really innovative, have my own product, be rich, be a business man from top to bottom, have cofounders etc. etc.
I was going straight from software freelancing to founding my own company (also switched countries to Cyprus) and created a Limited all on my own. Still working for clients and I have this legal person (Limited) now acting as a shell for me on a legal side but beside that: nothing changed.
Cofounders are like a marriage... you should be 101% sure about them ;)
Cofounders are indeed critical to success. Don't feel tempted to compromise just because you are in a hurry (same as marriage!).
Also, you should plan for bad outcomes like a founder who doesn't fit in, can't fit in, etc. and ensure you haven't signed away a load of equity, which will make you want to keep them on board! Take legal advice on a good balance between attracting good talent and not risking the company equity in the process.
Check out Rob Walling. He's got some podcasts and grown to some conferences now, but i keep going back to his book: Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup
Edit: just looked it up but see also Rob's new project TinySeed.com: The First Startup Accelerator Designed for Bootstrappers.
Stop thinking about your idea as being good or bad. Start with customers. What will they pay for right now?
Ideas don’t have value without the ability to execute. If all you can offer is an idea (no money, no sales pipeline, no engineering) then you shouldn’t start a company. No worthwhile cofounder would work with you.
I’ve been single founding side project ideas for years and that’s been a lot of fun. Recently I had a chance to do it full time for a long period of time. Having gone through that I will say that it isn’t something I would ever do alone again. The highs were muted and the lows were magnified. You are far better off if you can do the journey with someone than without anyone.
That being said here are some things that helped:
1. Have a friend that you can call that is interested enough to listen to what you’re doing. We joked that my buddy was like a free co-founder. This helped a lot but it was still not as great as the real thing.
2. Make lists. Figure out all of the things that need to happen for your month/week/day to be successful and figure out how to make that happen.
3. Focus on things that being small give you an advantage over a large company. One book I read said something along the lines of, “if you’re a small guy being chased by a big fat bully you should run up the stairs as it would be easier for you and tire the bully out”. How this plays out in practice is going to depend on your competition.
4. Don’t get married to your initial idea. It will certainly change as you learn more. The more resistance you put to change the longer it will take for you to find success. Start with something and start getting feedback ASAP.
5. Getting meetings is very hard. Cold calling sucks and cold emails are even worse. Use your network. Even people you might not think are connections can be huge help. When you’re stuck just go through your contact list thinking about how you can get a warm connection to what you’re trying to do. Be honest about why you are calling your contact so they don’t feel used.
6. This may be controversial but when you haven’t even validated the market unit tests just don’t seem like the best use of time.
Life is short and I find it more enjoyable with friends. If you’re like me then you’ll enjoy this journey more if you take someone with you. That being said I realize everyone is different. I thought being a solo founder was going to be great but next time I’m finding a buddy to join me.
If you want to bounce ideas off of a random person or hit me up for networking to get meetings you need please send me an email (in my profile). Good luck and enjoy the highs! They are so exciting.
There's not really a lot to go on here. Are you from a sales background? Management? Development?
Or do you have an amazing idea for a YouTube / Facebook hybrid and want to give me 5% equity in exchange for working on it for free for the next 6 months?
If I had a penny for every time I'd heard that amazing offer...
True! There is a lot missing. Is this just a side-project, never more than a few hundred bucks a month or is the plan that you want/expect it to take off and then you can hir emore people?
YCombinator will not take on companies with one founder because the non-direct workload is significant in most cases and few people would have the energy to keep going through all the set backs. Even if you can, you are unlikely to go fast enough to make the most of your product before the competition starts taking your customers.
Of course there are exceptions and small projects that just work but unfortunately, you have to take some serious risks to give your company the best chance of success so trying to hold on to a "day job", for example is a distraction from your new company.
Best advice is probably to find some local entrepreneurs and get their advice. Paul Graham writes about stuff but although he has a lot of experience, it doesn't necessarily mean his advice is 100% reliable or accurate - which also doesn't mean that you should ignore it!
I can’t provide a good answer to your question, but as a failed solo founder my talk on my experience may interest you: https://youtu.be/huOzokY_fME
In particular in the Q&A I talk about some things I would have done differently. But one of those things was that I would not be a solo founder again - I just don’t have all the skills necessary to both do the product and the business side.
It is very hard to honestly evaluate your own idea, because it's, well, your idea.
You get to tell about it to someone. And when you tell and ask for feedback and help - voila, you are not a pure solo founder anymore.
Not sure I agree. Most revolutionary ideas are unappealing when first presented. The world thought Walt Disney was crazy for making a feature cartoon (Snow White) that went on to be one of the most profitable movies in history. Even after that, they thought he was nuts for starting a theme park.
Henry Ford once quipped, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, 'A faster horse.'"
Really? You think those guys got where they were by throwing out random ideas? The point is that with the right skills and chutzpah, solo founders can make it.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadDo you mean full on sales calls (vs. just marketing) would be needed for a SaaS product of relative complexity? Or am I missing the point?
Thanks
So step zero consist on acquiring your first customer/user. This is usually when having a non-tech co-founder or someone who's good at selling would make a huge difference. We always bypass this step of acquiring the first customers, it's only when you build something and ship it that you hit a wall. You will not rank in google at first, no one will ever mention your name and the only queries you'll get on your SaaS or whatever product you have will come from your own IP. That's what I'm talking about. You just launched, now what?
So you need to go out there and "manually" pitch your product to people. Introduce yourself, tell your story, prove people what you've built is what they want. You would usually fail capturing the needs at first because of a lack of interaction with your targeted users, you will build something that isn't exactly what they want. So you need to quickly adapt to that early feedback, which is why going out there and trying out your MVP or prototype very quickly is a key to success. This is what I mean by "people need to see real faces". You could pitch your product to your mom, friends, potential users, potential partners who could help you move to the next step, etc.
The best way to find out "how to found a company as a single founder" is to give it a shot. You'll basically collect all the answers to your question.
With developers routinely making over $200k in Silicon Valley now, if you're a "product person" and not a salesperson, you can probably earn more as an employee than an entrepreneur.
Pros and cons to both paths.
I think the biggest reason not to go solo, is not many people are good at both the tech AND talking to customers and thinking big picture.
The few solo founders I have personally dealt with have fit that description exactly.
Reality is no one is so good that having another voice in the room isn’t usually an advantage for the leaf nodes. There are plenty of people who believe they are, though.
I will say this only applies to more traditional startups - seeking funding, hiring a team. It’s different when the solo entrepreneur builds and sells and then is hiring to augment the company. Not sure I would join that either but it is different.
Marketing/Selling, and building the right thing ... this is the hard part.
If you can do the later, most of the ops becomes ... just ops. It's just work. It can be done.
If you need to hire people, open an office, write up contracts, deal with immigration lawyers, deal with tricky shareholder stuff, manage customer accounts ... then maybe you need someone to help.
It is so easy to waste so much time building something nobody wants, and you won't know until it's too late if you try to sell it afterward.
Selling first will inform your decisions on what to build.
so, setup a landing page with a "send us our email so we can tell you when our tool is read!" form and see if it attracts people.
I do think that building a UI prototype that you can click through is a good first step for complex software.
"Sales" is a long term process, but the first meeting usually starts with understanding the customer's problem. If you build something before that (and demo it at the beginning of the meeting), you can bias the process with your assumptions. Instead, if you try to get inside the mind of your customer, you can get closer to the correct solution.
For a lot of those first sales meetings, you don't necessarily need technology to demo. Instead of showing/telling your customer, you're starting by listening. Then, you can build a small demo of something interesting before the next meeting (often, this is more to keep the conversation going and explore new ideas than to immediately solve the customer's entire problem).
I agree with the other comments mentioning an initial (days/weeks long) MVP build cycle. However, over the past few years, I've found it helpful to adopt this mindset: "my idea for the best possible product is at least slightly wrong, and the more code I write the harder it is to fix". There's a psychological concept of functional fixedness, where you view an object only as its traditional use. I think a similar concept exists in technology. Particularly as a founders-only company, the technology you build has some inertia, and impacts your mental models of the problem you are trying to solve. The more code you write, the higher the "cost" of changing (both in your mental models, and the technology itself).
All this really means is you're right about the build a little/sell/build more cycle - but what you build is less important than what the customer says. The first build is often just a means to start an interesting conversation about the customer's true problem, and you might need less technology for that than you initially assume.
If you can convert random users to paying customers then you're on to something. Otherwise your project is most likely going to flounder. Some people may think it's dishonest but without verifying you're going to spend weeks to months working on something that will never be used.
You can definitely put up a product page where users can enter an email address and start building up a mailing list, but obviously mailing list recipients are not guaranteed to pay you money.
We were the 'technical creatives' and with an idea and a cost, and went out to find people who we could sell it to to enable us to build it and make it better for all the users. As our product was video crossover - this was a little easier as people are used to paying for a video before you've made it, but video was actually a very small part of what we were offering - and sometimes not at all.
But selling things that have been bukt yet shouldn't be impossible, or even hard - as long as you can show a track record of delivery.
If you are the sort of person who enjoys the making side of things, and aren't naturally gifted at selling, this can be a trap. I've seen so many solo founders try to validate a product by selling before building, only to get talked into different features and use cases until they're stuck building some bloated mess of a service. Not super enjoyable.
That said, if selling is your strong suit and you have the discipline to sell a product idea without deviating from your product idea to chase sales, then selling as a validation tool is fantastic.
This is a provocation/question - not a statement of fact btw!
Not saying that this never happens, but it is extremely rare and closer to gambling than to running a company.
I've found Steve Blanks book "The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company" very insightful.
How do you sell first? There isn’t a product to show. How do you find Customers? Is it the philosophy that the customer doesn’t know better and you have to tell them what they need, all the while understanding what your capabilities are. Like undersell and overdeliver? I’m genuinely curious how you go about selling first.
In a podcast [1] a mattress company tells a story about how they got started: they just built a one-page site where you could buy a mattress, but the company didn't actually exist: after a certain point it failed and you couldn't buy it.
They publicized the site and soon enough they found that someone had clicked to buy a mattress: a potential customer.
So they effectively "sold" before building. Since the test was good and they found that people were willing to buy mattresses with the features they offered, they then built the company (and are now successful).
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/061-jt-marino-of-tuft-&...
But, if the value you can provide is immediately obvious to the customer, rather than an incremental improvement on their existing situation, then you can get them to express interest before you have a finished product to provide them with.
"sell first" works if you have such a unique solution/value such that for the customer it's a "either this demo or nothing" situation. that's exceedingly rare.
most of the time there's a healthy large existing set of solutions serving the same market so it's difficult to justify using something new.
even if you have some unique selling points they may not be strong enough or they may be canceled out by the lack of other features and maturity of your new product vs existing established ones.
for example let's say your product is a customer support software. how do you "sell first" when there are so many mature existing companies solving the same problem?
how long will it take you to reach the same capabilities, support, security, reliability of existing solutions?
are your differentiating points really strong enough that someone's going to say "screw Zendesk I'm going to try this random new one-man product because they have this feature X"?
Yes and no. One of the only people to have ever done that successfully that I know of was Steve Jobs, and that's what made him a one-of-a-kind genius billionaire. Believing you can do the same will cause your wheels to spin endlessly without going anywhere. It's pure hubris.
On the flip side, it certainly can help to have some insight, intuition, or flash of inspiration for a product or service. When you have the idea, then you have a hypothesis. Don't treat a hypothesis like a fact! This is where people make the biggest mistake.
Your goal is then to find evidence related to the idea. The evidence will tell you whether the hypothesis has potential or whether it's completely bogus.
Two big places you can find evidence: competitors and customers.
If there are already competitors in your field, that's a big piece of evidence that your idea has merit. If there are no competitors, that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have a chance, but definitely take it as a sign that there's probably a good reason there's nobody else doing it.
If you can find customers, it's nearly proof that you're onto something. Just be cautious because sometimes people will say they like your idea and genuinely believe to themselves that they would pay for it but then actually not in reality.
> "How do you sell first?"
The biggest way that I know of is basically just communicating with people. Find a way to get someone on the phone or get them to open your email or even see them in person, and then pitch your idea to them.
If you're selling a service then it isn't too difficult because you can just verbalize the service and gauge their response. When they like your idea it will be very obvious because they will get excited. If they're not excited then you're talking to the wrong market or your idea/hypothesis needs to be reworked.
If you're selling a product it's essentially the same, but you may need some simple mockups/pictures just to help communicate the idea. You really do not need a full fledged working product or even an "MVP" for this.
The concept of an "MVP" is a huge source of confusion because it assumes you know what "minimally viable" even means. How can you build an MVP when you have no idea what to consider "minimally viable?" The MV part of MVP completely depends on your customer. No customer, no MVP. (This may not quite apply if you're building something specifically to fulfill a need that you have.)
Hope this helps!
By the way, please take this with a grain of salt. This is my personal experience from a couple of failed startups and zero successful startups. I'm clearly not an expert.
The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity.
It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product.
Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.
How specificlaly did you go about promoting your landing page? Just 'hey check this out posts', or did you focus on comments/answers to questions? And how much time do you have invested in this so far?
If you get some free time, you might want to also post this on indiehackers.com. Could help a lot of people out there.
Anything other questions or anything you're working on as well?
thanks for the insight!
Provide value without expecting value in return. If you look on [/r/entrepreneur](www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneur), you can see some posts where people use their blog posts as a reddit post, which provides value for those who don't read their specific blog. Then, you can link back to your own blog at the end of the post. In doing so, you provide value before you promote yourself, and so any products or services you then promote will be associated with quality to your readerbase.
BTW, the last startup I worked at we were building a really cool "timeline" interface using react. I see you are using Vue but we still might have some interesting discussions. I found some really fun/difficult product and technical problems with developing that type of interface.
So yes, basically you bullshit everyone with some mockups and a pretty website, to determine if anyone would even be interested in the thing you want to build.
It won’t magically get easy to sell the product when it’s ready, so it’s possible eliminate bad ideas which are hard for you to sell early, even if you let the sale fall through towards the end.
To be clear, some startups require to have a super polished version to be successful. But even then, there's often a way to have customers pilot an early version or cheaply test the market.
Buy something.
Put it on Ebay.
Sell it.
Tinker with the product description and price and measure results.
Rinse and repeat.
You will learn more than many wanna bes.
All of these things can be done while making the product and will inform the production process.
But.. I need to take my own advice. Too easy to retreat to building. Or passively reading and thinking that is market research.
That's my safety zone, hidden away from scrutiny and judgement.
But I'm not going to argue against it right now. It's too deeply ingrained as startup wisdom to fight it. So instead, I'll offer this compromise: if you're going to sell first and build later, at least build some basic things up front that you are guaranteed to need and that most startups don't build until long after they should.
1. You already know what your programming language strengths and weaknesses are. You can make decisions for your first product iteration already. Are you going to start with a web app? You probably already know what language you want to use. Choose your frameworks, and choose frameworks that address the OWASP top 10 at least. If you are storing data, you have a responsibility--even as a sole founder--to take security seriously. You can think about that and make decisions while you are selling, so do it. You can also make a decision to not store data or store as little as possible and choose frameworks and plugins that help you do that.
2. Along the same lines, if software is involved you have to have a way to deploy it. Set up your DevOps pipeline. If you listened to the first point, you've got somewhere to start. Take your app framework and your plugins and set up a pipeline for deploying/rolling back/backing up/restoring the very basic "hello world" version of the app + plugins. Use a service if you aren't already into DevOps personally--most of these things have a free tier. If you are looking for a native app of some kind, navigate the platform's app store at least once so you know what you're in for. Or if it's cross-platform how you will get the latest version to your users. None of these decisions matter right now in terms of what decisions you make, just that you do make them and learn how to use things.
If you are going to commit to selling first and then building, you are already shortchanging the amount of time you have to deliver after the product is sold. If you haven't made any of these decisions, the time between when you make your first sale and when you deliver it is going to be absolute shit. Give yourself the ability to use that time 100% focused on building the product confidently because you already know how you're going to build it and how you're going to deliver it.
You can have the best infrastructure, best pipelines, devops, security, frameworks, styleguides, libraries, etc. etc. Sadly none of that means you're building something anybody wants.
You can spend years building something undoubtedly technically amazing. Yet if you didn't make sure there was a market first you face the very real prospect that people will go "That's nice, why do I care?"
Your advice is great for a personal project that you don't intend to directly make money with. Still would be excellent on a resumé however.
I think if you are thinking about programming language strength and weaknesses when building a product you need to rethink your approach.
Building a great product has very little to do with technology choice, especially at the beginning. Building a great product is about solving a real pain for your target customer and solving it in a novel and delightful way.
I really dislike the tone and content of this advice.
I am a solo founder. My first venture (as part of a team) failed - even though we had a product, we had no paying customers and there were other issues. It would have been terrible had someone given advice like this right after that happened - "you're not cut out to be a founder because X or Y." One of the great things about being any kind of founder is learning from mistakes, picking yourself up off the ground, and then creating something that works.
Edit: typo
Yes, I think it's the no 1 reason I saw solopreneneur friends fail. Most are just not willing to put the hours in. I see that people really like to dream and make big plans but sitting down consistently after work each day and actually working on all the mundane small things is a necessity many are not willing to do. The idea/business might still fail but without actually doing anything you have lost already.
Entrepreneurship is as glamorous as being a doctor at the emergency room.
But a good salesman can even sell a mediocre product to more people than someone with a good product. And he'll grab more money to, because he isn't afraid to raise the price
If you can’t build it you have no business.
If you can’t sell it you have no business either.
Show a good idea, with good leadership and people will follow...
[1] https://indiehackers.com
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/
co-founders are usually people you already know. so talk to them and start persuading or start meeting more people.
employees are attracted to salaries, offer it (get funding if needed).
if you have no idea what's involved in working on a startup, maybe watch the startup school videos.
Who would have thought... :-)
No one got anywhere by doing nothing. I would think its better to try and fail.
1) If I carry on with the product, can I keep quality and speed to improve sales significantly or will I quickly hit a wall which will cause my customers to leave? 2) If I find a good founder instead, will they help me with stuff I am not good at and give me the space to keep quality and speed or is it a distraction?
So I'd say yes, do it, but simultaneously be on the lookout for a potential co-founder. If one arises, great. If not, don't let it be an excuse not to follow you dream.
Partnerships consisting of staying on the same page for multiple years, in one's 20s, is harder than marriage. People, priorities and capabilities change too much.
On the other hand having someone join a vision already in progress can help with keeping alignment.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution for founders. Co-founders come with their own set of issues--whether you're on the same page about the company's goals, whether your skill sets are complementary or not, what kind of long term commitment you both have to the problem space, etc.
I'd recommend starting to develop the idea. If you are non-technical, then begin speaking to potential users and customers, and building relationships i.e. do business development.
If you are technical, it doesn't matter, do the above too. You can also take part of your time to actually begin prototyping a v1 of your product. But remember, your goal is to start a company, not a cool technical demo, so prioritize business development.
Once you have done this, congrats, you have some real momentum on your idea and have either gotten validation from real users and customers or know what needs to be changed and improved. You are now in a stronger position to start talking to people. Its much easier to attract people to your startup if you can demonstrate your idea has some traction.
1) Deep expertise and network with potential customers
2) Ability to empathize and connect with your customers and sell the thing
3) Ability to build some sort of MVP
The deep expertise and empathy will allow you to hone in on the problem you know your customers will face, and so you can narrow down the "paradox of choice" of different features/products you can build. It'll give you a much better starting point for experimentation and iteration. Start small. Talk to these folks. Get people to validate your idea. If you don't have an existing network where you can talk to 30-50 customers (100 is better!), this will be a problem.
The empathy and salespersonship will allow you to get folks to give you feedback and/or pre-sell the thing. Maybe do consulting for them to earn revenue and testimonials. If you can't sell this, you're going to have a hard time.
Finally, you need to be able to build something that delivers value to your customers. You don't have to be the world's greatest programmer (actually, if you were that might hurt you more than it helps!) but you do need some programming chops. Maybe it's automation around an existing process (a chatbot that does something small). Or even a spreadsheet. Maybe it's a full-blown MVP. Either way, you don't have the revenue to pay a developer, and sharing context with someone that you can afford is likely very very difficult.
If you don't have these things, this will be really, really tough. If you do, it will still be very tough, but you have a much better chance of being successful.
Find a network of solopreneurs - either something local to you (where you can meet up periodically) or an online group. This will be invaluable as you run into challenges they solved, and then you can pay it forward for the people that will walk your path later. And, having a place to vent with empathetic folk will help keep you sane.
If you need any help, I'm happy to share my experiences solo-bootstrapping my company to 20+ people. Just email me matt [dot] rogish [at] gmail
Good luck!
Would love to connect to learn more about your experiences- I'm at matt@puresomni.com. Is there a best email to reach you at?
Cheers,
Matt
There are a number of things I am doing differently this time, but the most significant seems to be that I am now using a coach. This would have made me laugh earlier but it's been great value to me. As a single founder, it can be very hard to stick to commitments and keep a clear vision. So I take calls with my coach every two or three weeks to discuss priorities and goals for next time. She will then ping me regularly and keep me committed -- and call me on my bullshit if I try to weasel out of something.
It feels like some sort of life-cheat-code. I say something that I want to happen on the phone, and then it happens! It doesn't just apply to my business, for instance I've finally managed to meditate consistently because of her. I wish I had discovered this years ago! :-)
Naw, but I guess that's technically two people.
I shelved ideas until I had a cofounder.
I shelved other ideas until I had a cofounder and capital.
Other ideas I built myself.
I’ve met like minded people that also had the right risk profile typically at mixers and tech meetups on topics that I liked. Never for the explicit purpose of meeting a cofounder. Just people that happened to be in the same fireside chat as me that contributed good conversation. Its all luck but you can improve the odds.
Also be careful about using a single customer to "co-design" your product since it can affect appeal to other customers.
the very same idea could be implemented in different ways, some would work, some other would fail
the only way to be sure is to build it and ship it, eg. "does my implementation provide value to customers or not?"
it does not have to be big, it does not have to be perfect, it does not have to be complete (avoid the features creep), but the implementation itself or the product is what determine the value or potential value
other people like co-founder, talents, etc. are basically people who will see the value but think "hey I can build that better", "I can sell that better", etc. and decide to join you in the process
so yeah pretty much "Start building and start selling"
for the founding part it will be either you have the skills (tech, marketing, whatever) and so invest your time, or miss some of those skills and use your own money to cover those parts
I do not believe you can rely solely on "strong ideas"
Fully fleshed and well-justified ideas worth hell of a lot.
There are certainly things that I suspect there would be a huge market for. That, I suppose, is my "good ideas" list (or, because I'm not an oracle, my "wish list").
the idea can already be there, already implemented and even already successful
and an incredible execution can just take over
you don't take over on ideas, you do take over on implementation
few examples: hotmail and then boom gmail took over, IE6 and boom Firefox took over, etc.
in fact implementation is so much more important that you have to keep doing it right otherwise someone else take over
also you can not keep an idea secret forever, once you release your product, everyone know about it and get a shot at their own implementation of your idea
Investors don't give people money for plans and research because they don't mean anything. It's easy to make a plan or find a hypothetical market.
The only people who get money without customers are founders with huge exits on their resume already.
Especially the last one.
showing the idea is proof
"Fully fleshed and well-justified ideas" are worth 100% of $0.
Execution is everything. How you implement and execute the idea is what sets you apart.
So far I enjoy it a lot, I can experiment, live my own life and if I fail, I'll fail, no worries. I do realise, however, that I will sooner or later face the wall and I'll need someone to support me. But I still have time.
I was going straight from software freelancing to founding my own company (also switched countries to Cyprus) and created a Limited all on my own. Still working for clients and I have this legal person (Limited) now acting as a shell for me on a legal side but beside that: nothing changed.
Cofounders are like a marriage... you should be 101% sure about them ;)
Also, you should plan for bad outcomes like a founder who doesn't fit in, can't fit in, etc. and ensure you haven't signed away a load of equity, which will make you want to keep them on board! Take legal advice on a good balance between attracting good talent and not risking the company equity in the process.
Edit: just looked it up but see also Rob's new project TinySeed.com: The First Startup Accelerator Designed for Bootstrappers.
Ideas don’t have value without the ability to execute. If all you can offer is an idea (no money, no sales pipeline, no engineering) then you shouldn’t start a company. No worthwhile cofounder would work with you.
That being said here are some things that helped:
1. Have a friend that you can call that is interested enough to listen to what you’re doing. We joked that my buddy was like a free co-founder. This helped a lot but it was still not as great as the real thing.
2. Make lists. Figure out all of the things that need to happen for your month/week/day to be successful and figure out how to make that happen.
3. Focus on things that being small give you an advantage over a large company. One book I read said something along the lines of, “if you’re a small guy being chased by a big fat bully you should run up the stairs as it would be easier for you and tire the bully out”. How this plays out in practice is going to depend on your competition.
4. Don’t get married to your initial idea. It will certainly change as you learn more. The more resistance you put to change the longer it will take for you to find success. Start with something and start getting feedback ASAP.
5. Getting meetings is very hard. Cold calling sucks and cold emails are even worse. Use your network. Even people you might not think are connections can be huge help. When you’re stuck just go through your contact list thinking about how you can get a warm connection to what you’re trying to do. Be honest about why you are calling your contact so they don’t feel used.
6. This may be controversial but when you haven’t even validated the market unit tests just don’t seem like the best use of time.
Life is short and I find it more enjoyable with friends. If you’re like me then you’ll enjoy this journey more if you take someone with you. That being said I realize everyone is different. I thought being a solo founder was going to be great but next time I’m finding a buddy to join me.
If you want to bounce ideas off of a random person or hit me up for networking to get meetings you need please send me an email (in my profile). Good luck and enjoy the highs! They are so exciting.
Or do you have an amazing idea for a YouTube / Facebook hybrid and want to give me 5% equity in exchange for working on it for free for the next 6 months?
If I had a penny for every time I'd heard that amazing offer...
YCombinator will not take on companies with one founder because the non-direct workload is significant in most cases and few people would have the energy to keep going through all the set backs. Even if you can, you are unlikely to go fast enough to make the most of your product before the competition starts taking your customers.
Of course there are exceptions and small projects that just work but unfortunately, you have to take some serious risks to give your company the best chance of success so trying to hold on to a "day job", for example is a distraction from your new company.
Best advice is probably to find some local entrepreneurs and get their advice. Paul Graham writes about stuff but although he has a lot of experience, it doesn't necessarily mean his advice is 100% reliable or accurate - which also doesn't mean that you should ignore it!
In particular in the Q&A I talk about some things I would have done differently. But one of those things was that I would not be a solo founder again - I just don’t have all the skills necessary to both do the product and the business side.
Henry Ford once quipped, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, 'A faster horse.'"