Although the author is persisting, I get the sense that he is forcing himself to feel happy about what is essentially a zombie startup* (a photo organizer).
It shouldn’t feel hard or even lonely to be a solo founder. There’s so many people you will have to interact with that are not your co-founder. There’s so many people you can share your feelings with that are not your co-founder. And having a co-founder is no guarantee you won’t be lonely; a technical co-founder spends most his time heads down coding and a sales co-founder spends most his time out making deals. Occasionally you may have meetings about customer feedback and high level strategies but that’s about it; the intent of the relationship is not to spend weekends hiking or riding bikes together or other social activities. If you are feeling lonely the source of that must be coming from other aspects of your life.
Most of the time the loneliness a founder feels comes from the fact that almost no one that matters is enthusiastic about their idea, or at least not enough to pay for it. It creates a mentality that it’s you against a world that just doesn’t understand what you have to “offer”.
I hope he will realize this before too much time has been wasted.
Give this an upvote if you agree.
*edit: I wanted to elaborate on why this is a zombie startup in case people think I threw this out too casually. He calls his product a friendly privacy oriented photo organizer. First off, drop the word friendly, that’s a meaningless word when describing apps and usually just a way to say an application has some decent UX, which is expected by default anyway. Second, “privacy oriented” is a red flag unless your startup is deliberately targeting people who have something they feel they need to hide. This will do nothing to move the needle for most mass market consumers who already consume tons of products without any regard to privacy. A lot of your marketing will have to rely on first making people paranoid so they seek out a privacy focused product, which is kind of scummy. Third, what you’re left with is essentially a photo organizer, whose novelty is questionable in a world that has no lack of photo organization. There’s no way this will be a successful business at this rate. Sorry if you think otherwise, but feel free to justify why.
To reiterate, this really is the happiest I've been.
The initial few months were not smooth (as indicated by the article). Mostly because was an expectation mismatch with respect to how comfortable I believed/was made to believe life would be for an "ex-FAANG engineer" starting up.
Also, the loneliness I felt was more about not having someone to rant to about roadblocks or share small achievements with. This was something I had taken for granted at work.
I wrote down this essay now after I felt that I was in a comfortable place, and that there were learnings that could possibly benefit someone going through a similar journey.
> a zombie startup
That's definitely the case now, and will be for a few more months. I've never been a fan of "ship fast, apologize later". So while it's less exciting to work on a product that's not live, it's something I'm okay with.
But thanks for your thoughts, I can see where you are coming from.
You can be very happy working on zombie startups, but why do it? There’s so many other things you can choose to work on that have the same potential (zero) but might be even more fun and bring more happiness. I work on emulators in my spare coding time knowing they’ll never be any kind of business, but it’s fun. Just don’t keep working hoping the zombie will one day come alive.
1. I'm scratching my own itch. I wanted a privacy friendly alternative to Google Photos to store and organize my memories, I couldn't find any that were as convenient, so I'm building one.
2. I have a clear path towards a public release, so I'm not worried about it being a "zombie" forever. Some projects take longer to see the light of day, and I'm okay with the delayed gratification.
Yea, it's so easy to call any product someone builds a zomby startup'. Once you are live and people do not continue to use your product, then only it might be right to call it a zomby startup, but not before...
I am always quite surprised that many people think "yea, you always can build a software in a few weeks. If not bah, not good'.
I think SOME softwares requires month if not years of building. Because there are difficult technically.
Those complicated softwares can be a game changer in the field, because well, the technical entry is so hard.
So let's see more those softwares like perhaps future BIG success. Not just future 'obvious failures'.
I agree with most of this although I think if you do privacy well there is a core of people willing to pay so yes your market is much smaller but still potentially valuable.
My issue really is with taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything. I see the authors comment that he's not a fan of ship fast and apologise later but surely you can put a beta out there even if it's just for feedback from the indie hackers and hacker news communities.
As the existing photo organizers to increasingly creepy things - face recognition I do think there might be a market but how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out? Right now it's just a theory.
> taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything
So I spent the first couple of months chasing an on-premise alternative to photo storage[1]. Then I realized that the product was difficult to sell, and required a substantial investment of capital so I pivoted to an E2EE alternative on the cloud. I also spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to raise investment, which I regret at this point.
> how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out?
If things don't go terribly wrong, the project should be up for beta testing in early October.
I'd lead with "Share your family's photos, access them everywhere you want them" rather the rather conspiratorial "corporations cannot be trusted". At least if you want to appeal to families. But what do I know!
I pay $99/year for Mylio which does importing, syncing & basic editing between devices, but my goodness it's slow - the only saving grace is that it's faster than Lightroom. Mylio doesn't really trade on privacy despite the impressive self-hosted cloud sync, and it doesn't trade on sharing between family members despite that being quite useful! If you want to see a very similar product, check out their forums and their very vocal customer base.
I'm also working on a solo startup (accounting) and I feel a lot of your pain - I've got 2 kids and it's mega-slow trying to work about 10hrs/week, but I'd echo what a few other people said here: however painful it feels, spend 50% of your time marketing and testing to make sure you're building the right thing. I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now, but it's valuable to a few users who are giving me feedback.
As a thin-skinned introvert, marketing doesn't come naturally to me. But yes, I've been trying to internalize this and in fact this blog post was a step towards putting myself out there.
> I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now
That's fantastic! I hope things work out the way you want them to. :)
Props on pushing your edge with the post. Building or tapping an existing community of early adopters is an enviable position to be in for a solo founder. Very unsticking. The feedback loop provides much desired certainty. Whether Twitter, Discord/Slack, a forum, whatever.
As solo founders we can easily decieve ourselves. That is take on a dodgey narrative to explain our slow progress or failure. In my case I set some magical goals...I think these goals were me setting myself up to fail. If I didn't have x mrr within 6 months then it can't have been my fault because I really, really wanted it to happen.
I'm 9 months in to having given up my job and have taken on some consulting work. Time will tell if the business grows or if I go freelance/employee.
I'm living in day by day land now rather than fantasy land.
Note: the definition of an entrepreneur is someone who doesn't listen to advice (some of it good). This dude says you're startup is "zombie"... Well, he might be right, but if you see an opportunity there... That's what makes you smart. And in 10 years if you're successful, the same people who said your idea was bad will be saying it was obvious.
Privacy apps have their place in the FOSS Linux world. Usually GNU/Linux users don't pay money for software though. There aren't really good polished options on LineageOS and the other FOSS Android forks. Maybe OP could sell software to that community (nothing about being FOSS means you can't charge money). Might as well just skip the mainstream operating systems because people there by default don't care about privacy.
> Over time I’ve realized that action precedes motivation and procrastination precedes guilt
I group tasks into three categories:
1.) Stuff I don't want to do but really need to do.
Get the most important stuff over with so you don't need to feel the shame of procrastinating and you will feel clearer too.
2.) Stuff I shouldn't be doing.
Opening you Inbox first thing in the morning is something you should /NOT/ be doing as a solo founder, aswell as checking social media or news sites like Hackernews. Email (for me) is a TODO list created by other people, and social media just wastes my day on mindless trivia. It is not productive in any way and serves only to make the founders of those social media companies richer, and you poorer.
If you must get your news, setup alerts for major events, or read the Current Events[0] page on Wikipedia which I find to be unbiased and comprehensive.
3.) Stuff I can delegate to others.
For example, do you really need to write blogposts yourself? There are plenty of good content marketers that can churn out good quality blogposts for a fee and you don't necessarily need to be blogging all by your lonesome. I can understand the need to write a personal blogpost that others can't write, but most posts don't have to be personal anecdotes, they can be technical and draw from different sources on the net.
As a solo founder for 10+ years, what I can say is that all "rules" in business are "rules of thumb"... Not laws. It's ok to be a solo founder... Sometimes. Bounce ideas off your team instead of your co-founders. Make use of mentors. There is a workaround for all your challenges. I also recommend listening to podcasts with other founders. I host a podcast called "Open Source Underdogs". Lots of good advice there for all founders... Even if you're not working on open source. But there are plenty more. You need outside ideas... Just seek them out.
Don't burn out your friends talking about your startup. It's not that they aren't interested. But nobody needs a single vector relationship.
Also remember that VC's give tons of bad advice to founders. Or rather founders tend to put VC's on a pedestal, and misinterpret what they are saying as advice, when it is really just filter, convenient lies or lazy analysis. Be hugely skeptical of anything VC's tell you, including "you need co-founders".
Looks like an interesting podcast! Unfortunately, my podcast client doesn't load anything earlier than episode 22, and Spotify doesn't either - it looks like the RSS feed doesn't contain the earlier episodes. Is that expected behavior?
I was particularly surprised to learn that Moodle is open-source. I used it in school before the world of software development and open-source was on my radar.
Solo founder for 5+ years. The above message is right on point.
One things that I realized is that what happens to your business tells more about what _market_ you are in, that it tells about yourself as a founder.
A great entrepreneur in a bad market will still have a bad outcome, and vice versa. Like a program is not about the programmer, a business is not "about" its founding member(s).
So a good advice you don't hear often could be "start in an easy market".
Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add:
1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience.
2. Making a product without any user feedback. You work 1 year on a product and realize people don't get your idea. That's why it is essential to get feedback every step of the way and your spouse doesn't count :D
3. The good news is being a solo founder is no longer very unique thing. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are doing this and hang out on online communities like indiehackers, makerlog, etc.
4. After trying out hundred tools I've found that nothing beats trello. To each his own though but you really need a todo tool when working alone to keep on track. I've actually written a local trello for myself with one twist - the tool assigns me a task daily and as soon as mark it as complete it assigns me the next item from the list. But at any moment there is never more than 1 item on my "doing" list. It was because i was spending inordinate amount of time bike-shedding when i don't have one single todo.
I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective?
I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations".
If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?
sitemap.xml can cause your search result to appear with sub-links.
Keyword density (just the right amount) and total word count seem to have an effect and I’ve seen targeted landers work very well for specific search phrases.
Backlinks will probably always be relevant to rankings as they were the original bedrock principle behind PageRank. If you get prominent blogs to link to you, that can help a lot. Inversely, use rel=nofollow on anchors to avoid seeping relevance to other pages.
Ever since Mobilegeddon your site MUST be mobile friendly or you will get penalized. Also other UI stuff matters (E.g. don’t put ads above the fold)
Not an SEO expert here but I would consider those effective and small things you can do for SEO.
A lot of people don’t do technical SEO right. It sounds like you’re asking about whether there is something other than technical SEO and links to do right?
Not really. If you write good content, with relevant keywords, and people link to it, that is good SEO. Not clear what distinction you’re trying to draw.
There may be some scammy stuff with short term results, but you’re always one step away from an algo change or a manual penalty.
Edit: I forgot good internal linking/url schemes. Those matter.
There's gotta be like a github repo somewhere that lays out the actual technical aspects of SEO, without any of the bullshit. Anyone know of a project like that?
Yes SEO is still very much relevant and effective IMO. Regardless of the paid ads, Google sends a lot of organic traffic when you rank for the right keywords. If you were to buy this traffic you would spends thousand of dollars doing it. Same for Youtube. A good video is amazing source of targeted prospects.
Just think about how you find a new service, chances are you googled it and tried the 2-3 results.
Now as for the question - is it necessary? The answer is yes. Because if you don't do it your competitor will and as the joke goes "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google".
> Are there really any "tricks" that work?
I'm no SEO expert and so I don't care for meta tags, keywords. Title and page description are still important I think. I believe the most relevant things are the time user a spends on your page and social signals (shares, etc) and unfortunately backlinks from high authority pages (this is the worst part of SEO).
The good news is that you don't have to do anything sneaky to do SEO anymore. Make an excellent page on which a user spends a lot of time (so good that he actually bookmarks or shares it) and it starts ranking. For all its evilness Google is still doing something right here.
One thing I disagree on is that you should spend equal time on everything, at least at first.
The way I see it is that product development should still come first, but marketing and building an audience should be tied into that process instead of being an afterthought.
When you're building the product out initially there's just so much shit to do, I think if you don't dedicate most of your time to building it takes too long to get anything done.
Perhaps I'm biased as I'm trying to juggle a full-time job and building my product. I barely have enough time to build stuff, let alone get distracted with things like SEO.
While I agree with the sentiment of #1, I would argue that sales are more important than marketing at this stage. You can spin your wheels “learning SEO” and “creating content” with very little tangible results. In the beginning, sales + product are just about all that matter.
Sales without marketing isn't the best strategy, it literally turns you into a one man[selling machine where everything is based on your time. Marketing develops channels of customers.
This really depends on the stage your company is at. If you haven't found product-market fit, you need to spend a majority of your time in sales mode talking to potential customers/users so you can figure out who your ideal market is and what your market wants. If you try to start marketing without finding product-market fit, you may end up wasting a lot of time and money without knowing whether anyone even wants your product.
It also depends on who you're selling to as well. Consumer/SMB customers may require less sales efforts than enterprise customers. You will always want to start with talking to users regardless, which is sales.
Well, you sort of described the position I'm in :)
Given that, do you have any recommendations for developing channels of customers? I haven't really hired for marketing before - what should I be looking for in that role?
- Content writers: Helps with Long tail SEO and building thought leadership; Ask within your network if they know someone.
- Website design and branding: Make a good first impression
- Banner and booth design for Conferences: Hopefully the folks from the design and branding can do this. caveat: Once this becomes a viable channel again.
- Ranking etc: Sign-up for a subscription of SEO Moz or something similar
- Adword: DIY
Honestly it's much much harder hiring for Marketing. If you do hire someone – find someone good at Project managing external resources.
From my experiences over the last year I would say there are too many channels that require so much work to reach a point where your reach matters. So unless you have a team I focus on one channel. If you pick youtube learn to create effective videos and use other social channels to reenforce the youtube content by posting on fb, ig about your new videos.
But that's just general advise trying to cast a big nest. The more effective channels usually come from being part of an existing community (think reddit forum or website forum or facebook group) and offering a product that fixes what people want.
As for hiring. Hire someone who has done marketing before or hire someone who is part of a community you want to be in who is usually doing a lot of unpaided work to make the community better.
Both can be important and it really comes down to who your customer is.
For B2B (SME+) - Absolutely invest in Sales. Worth mentioning that it isn't too hard hiring seasoned sales professionals, with existing relationships who are trying to find their next career move etc. They'll often agree to a higher commission payout in-lieu of a base salary. This doubles up as a good way to get feedback from the market.
For B2C or smaller B2B - Definitely invest in marketing and customer experience if you would like the main driver behind your business to be product-led growth or some form of a self-signup/self-onboarding.
Could you provide any further advice on how to hire sales professionals? I'm starting to feel comfortable hiring tech roles, but hiring for sales still feels like a black box!
Sales can definitely feel like that. Without more context on your market, decision maker personas etc. the one piece of advise that I can give confidently is this:
Start with Senior Sales Leadership. Ideally someone with experience in your target market.
Reach out to a few individuals, in your network or on LinkedIn or similar. Ask them for advice, see the type of advice they provide. If you like them, ask them to recommend someone – the hope is they recommend themselves.
B2B sales is an area I'm going to need help with quite soon. Solo-bootstrapping a startup means that money can be tight though.
Do you think it would be possible to get part-time help using the approach you describe? Alternatively, do some sales professionals work on a commission-only basis?
Also, do you have any idea what typical commission is expected?
Getting part-time help in sales is going to be hard. It will depend on how long your sales cycle is too.
Sales reps will happily work on commission only if they see a huge market for your product. Which might be difficult to show with a new product.
The commission rate is negotiable at the hiring point. If they are great at sales and know there is a big market they will want a lower base with a higher commission. You should also set a commission cap at some point as your variable costs increase your profit will drop and you could end up at a point where the sales team is making more than the company.
On sales leaders:
I personally know some sales leaders who mentor/advise other start-up founders. This includes getting on some client calls.
However it's tricky, in that they wouldn't do it if there was a conflict of interest of any kind, they'd be more likely to do it once they know these people a bit more. There is also the WIIFM factor.
All that to say, it is possible to get help.
--
On sales reps:
As others have mentioned the biggest factor here will be how long it takes to close a deal. If you have quick close cycles (typical in the small to mid-market), a higher commission component or commission only is possible.
Typically, I've seen commissions in B2B to be about 7-10% of Annual Contract Value (ACV) for the first year. Mind you this is highly generalized, based on my experience.
Most sales compensation plans aim for sales reps to earn 1x base as commissions if they meet target. So a base of $60K, would result in $120K in income if they performed.
Based on this you could try finding reps on 14-20% ACV on a commission only basis, paid out on paid invoices.
To be candid, I wouldn't try doing commission-only positions for my own ventures. That said it's worth a try if there are constraints that make it hard to pay a base.
One exception would be if your product has really good and obvious search keywords that are being searched at a reasonably high volume. Google ads can work really well in this scenario. Even better if no one else is buying ads for those keywords.
Hey, I'd be interested in your local trello. I was meaning to write a todo-app based on best psych best practices, especially only presenting the highest priority ( = urgent * important) item at any given time. I also wanted to add ordered sub-tasks, due-date, and time estimate features so that the urgency ramps up automatically as the remaining time to complete a task approaches the estimated length of the task.
You should look at Taskwarrior for some inspiration! I use TW and it has the features you mentioned(and I use them regularly). Urgency is derived from certain coefficients[1].
The problem I have with Taskwarrior is that (from a layman's point of view, i.e. mine) there's a lot of new information you need to learn just to get to the point of a simple TODO. Whereas Trello has the massive benefit of being intuitive and you're up and running in seconds after making the board without even having to read any docs.
Anyway I'd be interested in learning Taskwarrior, but in my day job I work in a team and I can't make them use that kind of tooling.
Sure thing. It's open source and you can find it here (1).
Unfortunately it's very badly written (sorry) because I wrote it just for myself on a weekend and is very limited, just enough to get the job done for me.
It sounds like you have the motivation and persistence figured out. That’s great! Have you read Lean Startup and done some customer research? Maybe I’m wrong, but gut reaction to this app is that very few people would be willing to pay for this. If someone is privacy conscious and anti-google, Apple has a much better track record for privacy. I get multiple gigabytes of cloud backup for free and can add on additional space very cheaply, and I trust them to keep my data replicated and safe. The photo apps are also very robust and have local AI and such. It seems like a hard sell, and that the people who understand and care about end to end encryption could just set up a NextCloud instance and get E2E encrypted backups in their native photo client, in addition to office tools, general data storage, etc.
I wish you luck, and I sincerely say this to try and help you, but I think you should stop adding features and start trying to convert people to paid to see if they will.
> people who understand and care about end to end encryption could just set up a NextCloud instance
This is the exact problem I'd like to solve. It worries me that currently only the tech savvy can afford privacy. I'd like to take a shot at making privacy accessible to a larger audience. Something along the lines of what ProtonMail is doing to GMail.
Of course I might fail at attracting enough attention for this to be a viable "startup", but I would have still built something me and my family can safely use. Also there would be learnings along the way, and I'll just move on to building something else. :)
I think this is a fantastic attitude. Build something that you personally care about. Worst that can happen is you lose a lot of money, but honestly what would be worse if you never tried.
Nextcloud is really not a photo management solution though. The e2e support is nextcloud is really not production quality. Do you use either of these for your setup because I am happy to change my mind.
I use emby these days for managing photos and auto uploads.
You can use nextcloud as the cloud backup and turn off backups within google photos, and then you have a photo manager with encrypted (and self hosted) backups. I have not used nextcloud myself. I use Apple products and pay for icloud. I use Emby as well for media management. What I was getting at is that I don’t want to switch my photo manager and photo workflow when all that the value here is is the fact that the photos are encrypted, there are many solutions to that. Why not sell a hosted end to end encrypted backend that is compatible with google photos and Apple photos?
Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying. So, what you are suggesting is a privacy focused backup option for the existing cloud services. That is indeed an excellent idea. Before I went totally selfhosted, I had a tough time getting my pictures out of Flickr and Picasa web (now both dead!)
Reading the last few lines of this and hearing that he’s the happiest he’s ever been is interesting to me. Does anyone ever regret movement from job to owner/founder? Seems like most don’t?
You do it knowing that it could be a terrible financial decision, cost at least a year of your life minimum, and that 90 to 99% of new businesses fail. Or at least you should know that. But you do it anyways.
Bit of a side note, but the author mentioned https://GitHub.audio, which I'm quite enjoying. However, that site says it plays "string plucks" which I'm not sure I can hear, or at least discern from "bell dings". Is it working properly?
- I started a newsletter with progress updates to keep myself accountable but found that as time goes on I haven't needed it as much
- Motivation can be variable over time and you need to keep making progress even on your down days. I think this is (one of the ways) where a co-founder is super valuable, as you can motivate each other when one of you is down.
On the theory that this thread will be a honeypot for other solo founders: if you're interested in potentially working together or just someone to bounce ideas off of, shoot me an email (address in my profile)
I'm also on the same journey and it all rings true.
I'd like to learn more about their strategy for fund raising, as I'd guess most people going down this path would be tending more towards the bootstrap/indie hacking/rev generating end of the spectrum
Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for.
The product may be in what appears to be a crowded field. Identify niche opportunities or cases where an established leader is doing a poor job.
It's fine to do some consulting on the side to pay the bills. Of course it will take time away from the product you are building; just be able to recognize when it's too much and scale back consulting or turn off the spigot completely once product sales take off.
It's fine to work according to your own schedule and needs, not some idealized '100 hours/week' VC fantasy schedule.
Investors don't care about you, they care about their returns. As you don't fit the pattern of what they expect for a successful startup, they will either ignore you or make very unreasonable demands - find a co-founder, work twice as hard, follow this or that model. Ultimately, it's a waste of time at best, a loss of control and failure at worst.
Once you have cashflow, offload certain business tasks to pros who can do it better and cheaper than attempting it yourself. Hire when you have sufficient cashflow + cushion.
Take pride in what you are building, the customers you attract, and the skills you are learning.
I remember when I was an undergraduate physics student, looking forward to grad school and idolizing all the famous physicists. My adviser, who was not the most soft and cuddly type of guy, always pushed this type of hyper-alpha stuff on me, even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It really does damage to you and your self image, and I don't think the advice he gave me was really meant to help me as much as it was meant to help him feel superior.
Anyway, a bit later in life now I look back and realize that there are so many times when I've idolized a certain way of living / doing things that are actually not productive at all but rather just feed that same type of alpha-image.
There's no reason why you can't be successful on your own terms, even if that means taking the weekend off, being a solo founder, or whatever. Sure, I get that startups are hard and draining, but (not to lean too heavily on cliches) there's a difference between working hard and working smart and more often than not I think these types of alpha-founders are glorifying busyness.
> even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics.
It's always fascinating to see people make claims like this, despite all evidence showing that it's impossible to maintain. Some extreme genetic outliers may be able to sustain performance with around 5 hours of sleep per night, but no one is going to last very long on 2-3 hours per sleep each night.
Has there ever been a documented medical case of someone surviving on less than 3 hours of sleep a night indefinitely?
I've read a lot of sleep studies, and besides some non-scientifically published variations on Buckminster Fuller's 30 minute nap every six hour sleep schedule I haven't read about someone getting such low amounts of sleep.
I had a bad reaction to a 10 day cipro prescription a few years ago and it felt like getting hit by lightening. So many things returned to normal but being able to sleep for more than 4 1/2 hours, was not one of them.
Either he is an extreme genetic outlier (by definition the rarest of the rare) or he exaggerated to enhance his reputation (a trait baked in to everyone and so pervasive we all do it without realizing it). I know which one is more likely.
Extreme genetic outliers still need 5, maybe 4 hours of sleep to function.
Going all the way down to 2 hours of sleep is doable for short bursts, but it will catch up with even the genetic outliers before long.
Many of these people are just exaggerating for effect. If you have poor time management, poor accounting for where you spend your time, and an erratic sleep/wake schedule, it's easy to get confused about actual sleep durations. Some people also use stimulants excessively during the week and then crash on weekends, but they'll only tell you about the nights where they barely slept.
Some people learn to normalize sleep deprivation and coast on a diet of frequent naps. If you take 30-90 minute naps a couple times a day you can coast for a long time on 2-3 hours in bed at night, but you're still sleep deprived. Those weird polyphasic sleep schedules that claim to reduce your need for sleep are simply normalizing sleep deprivation and masking it with naps throughout the day.
Finally, there's a common phenomenon where people misperceive some of their sleep time as being awake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_state_misperception This is a common explanation when people claim they didn't sleep at all on a certain night. It's not uncommon for people to claim extreme insomnia, but then sleep 6+ hours as soon as their sleep is objectively monitored.
In short: You can't trust self-reported sleep times. Especially not when someone feels they have something to gain by claiming minimal sleep.
In this case, there's the additional irony of ignoring science in the name of doing science.
On another note, I can't be the only person who finds this kind of bragging to just fail to register, or even to backfire. Am I meant to be impressed by how poorly they've arranged their weekly routine in terms of work/life balance?
It reminds me of a line from a Jack Reacher novel - a guy with a scarred face (who obviously thinks he looks scary and tough) asks Reacher what his face tells him, and Reacher just replies "it tells me you've lost a lot of fights."
Maybe going on a cocaine/stim bender can sustain this for a little while then crash through the weekends when everyone is less productive. Obviously a terrible idea long-term to avoid chemical dependence/brain damage, but it's common enough that I've met quite a few of these "barely sleep yet hyper-productive" types that are abusing stimulants beyond coffee to keep it going during the work week.
> Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for.
Great point. The long-term survival of a business distills down to being able to bring in more money than it costs you to produce a product. It's such a simple concept, but it's easy to forget when you're swept up in the excitement of coding and engineering an idea you're excited about.
Ironically, it's the most ambitious engineers who tend to make the mistake of doing too much engineering work before trying to validate the product. I can't count how many times I've signed up to follow ambitious engineers' startup ventures that turn into years of highly-detailed marketing updates for products that never seem to get any closer to materializing. These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later with blog posts blaming the industry, the timing, the economy, or other external factors for their failure.
In reality, most of them could have determined their market fit, or lack thereof, much faster by launching a smaller version early and iterating with customer feedback.
Of course the customer cares about fast, powerful and efficient things they can use.
What happens is that most of the time making something fast, powerful and efficient implies so much resources that the ambitious engineer can not complete the project in time.
Customers prefer something that works today, even with limited functionality that something perfect that only works inside the mind of the engineer.
That is the reason Steve Jobs said no so many times, because this way his company could ship products in time.
That in engineers mindset problem: It is painful to say No, like the song says, we "want it all".
Not only that -- a lot of people pursue "innovative" technologies and try to build something all new, when existing ideas have only reached 1% of the market that need them because it takes a lot of work to actually get people on board.
--Ironically, it's the most ambitious engineers who tend to make the mistake of doing too much engineering work before trying to validate the product--
? Not trying to be argumentative but that doesn't seem ironic to me at all. I would expect the most ambitious engineers to think that simply building the thing would be enough.
> These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later
Is that really the most common problem? I would probably be one of those engineers (if I'd start a business) and I'm a lot more afraid to sell something that doesn't exist yet than the other way around. Because now in addition to your usual problems you have legal obligations to deliver a product. I think this is one of the reasons for the crazy crunch culture of many startups.
Instead of selling a fake MVP product it is probably more healthy to be upfront to customers and let them pay for your development time like a consultant... And then repeat the work faster for different customers until you can spin the process out into a actual product.
In the case of the startups you describe I always imagine they have great sales and marketing people but no actual product, and thus survive only until the VC money dries up...
Statistically, more startup ventures fail than succeed.
> Instead of selling a fake MVP product it is probably more healthy to be upfront to customers and let them pay for your development time like a consultant
Careful, no one is advocating selling "fake" products. The key is to develop a minimal product that can be sold. It has to work, though. Fraud will sink a startup very quickly.
From there, you can contract with additional customers to expand the product to meet their needs. This is more difficult than it sounds, though, as you'll quickly be torn between working on what's best for the product as a whole, and what's best for an individual customer's unique needs.
I've seen many startups go down this path with best intentions, but ultimately become contracting shops with a single customer. That's fine if that's your goal, but it's painful when the contracts dry up and you don't have a product that appeals to the mass market.
The most common problem, if you're a really talented engineer, is that you could work for a big company and be paid more in a single year than your business will bring in for its entire lifetime.
Conversely what you really find is, the people running 20+ person companies with tens of millions in investor money to bring in only $1m in revenue a year - they lacked the talent, actually, to just make the money at a big company. That you should start with the assumption that capitalism works, and that the person doing this thing is not stupid but just shut out from a better opportunity.
So maybe you're a really talented engineer but you are foreign so you'd need an H1-B to work for Google. Or maybe you're a former product manager from Microsoft who didn't quit, but was laid off, so you really can't just go and make the money.
A transplant surgeon brings in about $1m in revenue per day for heart transplants. There is no risk there, there is unlimited demand for heart transplants. It's just extremely hard to become a transplant surgeon, it is extremely competitive, much more competitive than making a website. While I'm not suggesting every startup CEO is just a washed-out up-and-coming surgeon, there is other stuff they may have washed out from broadly, like just medicine itself, that led them to chase the worse economics of where they are.
So, you've got a choice: $200K/year at bigco, or $120K/year + a one time payout of $2m when you sell your company in five year. Yes, slow and steady can win the race, but last I looked, $200K x5 is $1m. The solo founder will make $2.6m. Of course, there's no guarantee of any of this. The talented engineer could be caught up in layoffs at bigco, and the founder could go out of business or never sell. Usually, exits are done at a multiple of revenue, so it is not uncommon to sell a small company with $600-700K/year of revenue for 3-5x that amount.
BTW, raising tens of millions for one million in revenue doesn't happen that often.
Everyone I know who has worked at the top tech companies for 5 years has earned considerably more than the entire startup's revenue. I wasn't ever talking about the startup's equity value, but even if I was, they were earning more than the equity value they would receive too.
I've seen companies raise single digit millions and not even get close to $1M in revenue, over 5 years later. The result is founders have been diluted massively after a couple of down rounds. Meanwhile, preferred dividends are accruing year after year. The odds of a big payoff gets smaller and smaller the longer this goes on.
Odds are you'd make more money taking a job at BigCo, live like you only needed half what you're making, and invest that extra money into the public market. This isn't as fun though.
The first business I started out of college was enabled solely by the fact I couldn’t find a full-time job. Like, at all really, for any pay. Was the business I started modestly successful? Sure. But did I move on when far better opportunities came about? Yes, I did. Opportunity cost is very much a real thing that dictates who actually starts a business or goes to work for one for under market rates.
I have met some people who implicitly or even explicitly claimed they were above being an employee but I think they weren’t being honest about their actual employment prospects.
This is entirely correct, and it also true that there are more opportunities in the startup world to build something meaningful and exciting from scratch and to have an unforgettable experience doing it. Not quite everyone is in tech for the money..
I think it's often more about personality than talent or money. Founders tend to be the kind of people that hate the idea of being a cog (even a very well paid cog) in a big machine. People often start companies not because they can't get a good job, but because they can't stand working on other people's ideas when they've got a head full of their own.
> let them pay for your development time like a consultant...
Do they not then own at least a share of the IP? You'd be lucky to find a customer that takes you on as a consultant but lets you keep the IP you develop during that time.
The more simple your MVP can be, the more indicative it is that you have a market.
If you need to build for years to release something [1], it's less likely that you're addressing a real need. The best products can start dead simple, even ugly, but still solve the problem.
The problem with some deep tech is the tech doesn't solve a problem until the next generation. It's less appealing as a solo bootstrap founder business.
The toughest part of this is finding a product that people are willing to pay for. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and everyone doubles down on pushing the product and iterating until they finally have no choice but to admit failure. I think YC does a great job of getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea. Can you send texts instead of build an app? Can you do it all manually for the first 5 customers? Be quick to throw away things that aren't working, you don't have the bandwidth as a solo founder to make a perfect product, you NEED to see market acceptance to make it worth your time.
>getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea
This is even a problem in the sciences! Everyone wants to kick the can (getting feedback on their pet hypothesis from reality) down the road & play with their shiny, awesome tech/math in the meantime.
"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Thomas Huxley
100% disagree.
People good at this “know it when they see it” on the “finding a product that people are willing to pay for”. They don’t find this part hard.
What is hard is keeping mistakes/ignorance marginally less fatal than the ground you gain in your successes... forever.
I’m a full time software engineer for a small company. No amount of googling answers my question: what exactly is part time consulting? At least, in your context
Here's my understanding. YMMV.
Moonlighting: working side job/s for other entities while you are employed full time by one entity.
The full-time employment entity is your own company (if you are the founder) or your full-time employer and there could be other companies or individuals to whom you work for part-time (1 day a week, adhoc days/hours, weekends etc) and you are paid for that work.
You have two things to consider:
1. Make sure it is legal (for example if you are on certain types of work-permit visa in some countries it might be illegal to work for anyone other than the work visa sponsor).
2. Make sure you don't have conflict in your employment contract clauses (many full-time employment contracts have clauses that prevent you from working for others even for part-time without explicit permission from the full-time employer).
Usually if you ask your full-time employer, they may permit you to do one-off consultations to other companies (and get paid for it) if they think it would not take your focus away from your FTE work and if there is no conflict of interest or potential to reveal trade-secrets (example: if that other company is a competitor etc).
Yeah, it is a twofold task really: 1) devise & ship something that makes sense and actually adds some value somewhere for a good number of people; 2) put it in front of the target niche through the cheapest feasible means of any type, aka do not get into the social media marketing rat trap.
In my very limited recent case, I produced a Kindle booklets series earlier this year (20 academic literature reviews) and started selling some through targeted ads on Amazon.com, at $0.03 per click, on top of a very few thousand visualizations per day.
Ramen profitable, but a platform to start from for small incremental updates in the mid- to long- term, hopefully.
The trap I fall into is thinking about whether a solution 'ought to exist', disregarding the reasons why it doesn't already.
There are lots of tools people on appreciate when they are gone, and getting people to pay for them takes a much better salesman than I'm used to having available.
> Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for.
Exactly. In fact, it's not even about the product. You need to solve somebody's problem in a way that they are willing to pay for. The product is just how you choose to do that. The designs and code and engineering decisions and artwork etc. etc. aren't for the customer, they're for you. What the customer is paying you for is solving their problem.
The comment about going from dev to marketer is huge. I'm in that phase now and it's pretty daunting. I've spent so much time obsessing about the product and now that I finally have something...how do I get people to use it?
I just started brainstorming ideas and it's actually fun to start diving into something I haven't had to think about before. Yes, daunting but so is everything about being a solo founder. It's just another hurtle to jump.
If you're serious about your product and enjoy the solo founder journey, you'll find comfort and stimulation in the new adventures that present themselves to you.
I'm D2C, so social media strategy, brand building and generally getting enough volume to convert in order to sustain the product without a huge ad budget is very tedious. Very much the long game to get people interested (probably over the course of years unless you go viral and have good network effects).
Yes, very true. When you read marketing books, it seems very obvious. But trying to actually decide pricing, naming, positioning etc is a different story.
Great post, these strategies are very similar to mine. I've been bootstrapping solo for 12 years while holding fulltime jobs and growing my family to 5. I'm currently working on my 3rd project and as life throws more and more distractions and negative thoughts emerge from my unconscious, having a consistent plan like this is best way forward.
The main take away is goals, tasks, ideas, and random thoughts, you have to get them out of your head and onto paper (digital or otherwise) and this could be as unstructured as the thoughts themselves. They key is to materialize internal thoughts externally, to capture the essence outside myself, and to give myself room to work on that small task that will push me forward now.
> I quit my job in January 2020 to build a privacy friendly photo organizer
> what I had underestimated was the difficulty involved in finding a co-founder and how that would compound the difficulty involved in finding an investor
Whoops.
I just shelve ideas until the pieces align.
If my idea involves being able to get into certain rooms to be taken more seriously because I have a co-founder, then I don't do that idea until I have a co-founder, and do other ideas.
Look guys, your competition has a lot of ideas. A lot of viable ideas, and this is not a coveted position, it just is. If your brain coincidentally functions like that once, it isn't a good enough reason to pursue it.
Just like you, I quit my day job in my early 30s, and have not looked back since. Have founded a dozen companies in the meantime and am currently having the best financial year of my 15 year solo-founder career.
My advice is, hang in there. If you like what you are doing persist and adapt.
My best product thus far is an API I built to support my original business plan. The original product I tried to build is long dead.
Totally worth it. I'm currently earning around four times a senior software engineer salary, and I've got plenty of free time. Overall my average earnings over the whole 15 year period have been double what I'd have been getting in a day job.
I originally started https://foodpages.ca and dinehere.us then built https://geocode.ca to provide local search functionality, then expanded worldwide with geocode.xyz and 3geonames.org, also got into collaborative fiction writing with fictionpad.com and price comparison engines with comparify.xyz & askvini.com (which I sold on flippa) and real estate aggregator sites (shitet.net and landhub.ca, landhub.us).
Currently geocode.xyz and geocoder.ca are my most profitable businesses.
Thanks for your kind reply. I might like to have some guidance for starting as a solo founder. Is it possible to ask you a few questions via Email or something? How may I contact you, provided if you are willing?
Many advantages as being solo.
1) If you fail, it only impacts you. Often underated but important as in startup ventures, failure will be 80% of cases. Solo : you hurt no one.
2) You can change path easily. To come to sucess, you will inevitably change of directions (technically or on the clients you are targeting, ect). I think Being alone is cool because you need no explanation. So You can go fast.
Drawback : Social validation !
Of course, your friends, your familly, many potential investors will not be friend at all with the idea of being alone here. So yes, this is tough. It was for me.
Now, I see it more as a test : If you can accept that being alone for a while is socially painfull but not that horrible, well go on : build your software, full time or part-time if you have no more cash.
And think about it. How many people is needed to drive a car ? A Solo driver.
Solo mean YOU DRIVE the experiment --> This is good
First company I started was solo, second company was with a co-founder.
My perspective is that this proverb is right on: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Having a cofounder completely changed my second company's trajectory. Having someone who takes on the parts of the business where I am weak, and visa-versa, has made a world of difference.
The aim isn’t to compete with the companies at large. But to provide an alternative for users who (like me) care both about privacy and convenience when it comes to the niche space of photo storage. The size of the audience might be small, but I’m optimistic about it being large enough for me to sustain this as a small business.
And yes, I am using Flutter to build the mobile apps. It does come with its own set of problems that I have to bang my head against, but I can’t complain as it’s saving me quite a bit of effort.
> While not all of them genuinely care, some do, and these conversations force me to reflect on how well I’m doing what I’m doing.
The act of describing what you're doing clearly enough that a 3rd party can make sense of it already helps, no matter who your conversation target is and how much they care.
I have done Meditation, gratitude journals and focused transitions. It all helps.
However, for me the activity that helps the most is hard workouts early in the morning. Once I get going, I am fighting against gravity and fatigue. I am no longer thinking about my past, future or even the day. Just focused on the moment.
I am in a similar boat as you OP. I am very happy on a daily basis, building the product. I am also pretty financially stretched so that adds a level of stress. I hope your product is a giant success.
I go for a 5k run in the morning. Despite it taking a little time from your morning, it'll pay for itself threefold in terms of productivity throughout the rest of the day.
Also, if you work alone and get stuck on a problem or need a little help with being creative (ie: UI design, marketing), try smoking a joint! It might not be as good as bouncing ideas off of someone else, but it's definitely helped me think of ideas I might not have come up with otherwise.
I see that you worked for a FAANG - how much of your motivation for building ente.io came from an insider view of how corporations leverage user data? In other words, did your stint at a FAANG fuel your desire for a privacy friendly photos alternative?
P.S: Native Malayalam speaker here - love the name "ente.io". Nannayi varatte :)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadIt shouldn’t feel hard or even lonely to be a solo founder. There’s so many people you will have to interact with that are not your co-founder. There’s so many people you can share your feelings with that are not your co-founder. And having a co-founder is no guarantee you won’t be lonely; a technical co-founder spends most his time heads down coding and a sales co-founder spends most his time out making deals. Occasionally you may have meetings about customer feedback and high level strategies but that’s about it; the intent of the relationship is not to spend weekends hiking or riding bikes together or other social activities. If you are feeling lonely the source of that must be coming from other aspects of your life.
Most of the time the loneliness a founder feels comes from the fact that almost no one that matters is enthusiastic about their idea, or at least not enough to pay for it. It creates a mentality that it’s you against a world that just doesn’t understand what you have to “offer”.
I hope he will realize this before too much time has been wasted.
Give this an upvote if you agree.
*edit: I wanted to elaborate on why this is a zombie startup in case people think I threw this out too casually. He calls his product a friendly privacy oriented photo organizer. First off, drop the word friendly, that’s a meaningless word when describing apps and usually just a way to say an application has some decent UX, which is expected by default anyway. Second, “privacy oriented” is a red flag unless your startup is deliberately targeting people who have something they feel they need to hide. This will do nothing to move the needle for most mass market consumers who already consume tons of products without any regard to privacy. A lot of your marketing will have to rely on first making people paranoid so they seek out a privacy focused product, which is kind of scummy. Third, what you’re left with is essentially a photo organizer, whose novelty is questionable in a world that has no lack of photo organization. There’s no way this will be a successful business at this rate. Sorry if you think otherwise, but feel free to justify why.
To reiterate, this really is the happiest I've been.
The initial few months were not smooth (as indicated by the article). Mostly because was an expectation mismatch with respect to how comfortable I believed/was made to believe life would be for an "ex-FAANG engineer" starting up.
Also, the loneliness I felt was more about not having someone to rant to about roadblocks or share small achievements with. This was something I had taken for granted at work.
I wrote down this essay now after I felt that I was in a comfortable place, and that there were learnings that could possibly benefit someone going through a similar journey.
> a zombie startup
That's definitely the case now, and will be for a few more months. I've never been a fan of "ship fast, apologize later". So while it's less exciting to work on a product that's not live, it's something I'm okay with.
But thanks for your thoughts, I can see where you are coming from.
1. I'm scratching my own itch. I wanted a privacy friendly alternative to Google Photos to store and organize my memories, I couldn't find any that were as convenient, so I'm building one.
2. I have a clear path towards a public release, so I'm not worried about it being a "zombie" forever. Some projects take longer to see the light of day, and I'm okay with the delayed gratification.
I am always quite surprised that many people think "yea, you always can build a software in a few weeks. If not bah, not good'.
I think SOME softwares requires month if not years of building. Because there are difficult technically. Those complicated softwares can be a game changer in the field, because well, the technical entry is so hard. So let's see more those softwares like perhaps future BIG success. Not just future 'obvious failures'.
I think this makes sence.
My issue really is with taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything. I see the authors comment that he's not a fan of ship fast and apologise later but surely you can put a beta out there even if it's just for feedback from the indie hackers and hacker news communities.
As the existing photo organizers to increasingly creepy things - face recognition I do think there might be a market but how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out? Right now it's just a theory.
So I spent the first couple of months chasing an on-premise alternative to photo storage[1]. Then I realized that the product was difficult to sell, and required a substantial investment of capital so I pivoted to an E2EE alternative on the cloud. I also spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to raise investment, which I regret at this point.
> how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out?
If things don't go terribly wrong, the project should be up for beta testing in early October.
[1]: https://orma.in
If your question is from an engineering perspective, I'd say ~65% of my working hours were spent in writing and rewriting code.
I'd lead with "Share your family's photos, access them everywhere you want them" rather the rather conspiratorial "corporations cannot be trusted". At least if you want to appeal to families. But what do I know!
I pay $99/year for Mylio which does importing, syncing & basic editing between devices, but my goodness it's slow - the only saving grace is that it's faster than Lightroom. Mylio doesn't really trade on privacy despite the impressive self-hosted cloud sync, and it doesn't trade on sharing between family members despite that being quite useful! If you want to see a very similar product, check out their forums and their very vocal customer base.
I'm also working on a solo startup (accounting) and I feel a lot of your pain - I've got 2 kids and it's mega-slow trying to work about 10hrs/week, but I'd echo what a few other people said here: however painful it feels, spend 50% of your time marketing and testing to make sure you're building the right thing. I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now, but it's valuable to a few users who are giving me feedback.
Good luck and keep in touch with HN :)
Mylio looks really cool, thanks for sharing!
> spend 50% of your time marketing
As a thin-skinned introvert, marketing doesn't come naturally to me. But yes, I've been trying to internalize this and in fact this blog post was a step towards putting myself out there.
> I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now
That's fantastic! I hope things work out the way you want them to. :)
I have a bunch of happy beta users that had previously tried and given up on Mylio. You're certainly welcome to try it out!
https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/
I'm 9 months in to having given up my job and have taken on some consulting work. Time will tell if the business grows or if I go freelance/employee.
I'm living in day by day land now rather than fantasy land.
Though an extremely tough market to crack, something drop box realised early on and moved out of photo business
I wrote about some techniques how to keep persistence for solo founders: https://medium.com/@victor.ponamariov/how-therapy-turned-out...
I group tasks into three categories:
1.) Stuff I don't want to do but really need to do. Get the most important stuff over with so you don't need to feel the shame of procrastinating and you will feel clearer too.
2.) Stuff I shouldn't be doing. Opening you Inbox first thing in the morning is something you should /NOT/ be doing as a solo founder, aswell as checking social media or news sites like Hackernews. Email (for me) is a TODO list created by other people, and social media just wastes my day on mindless trivia. It is not productive in any way and serves only to make the founders of those social media companies richer, and you poorer.
If you must get your news, setup alerts for major events, or read the Current Events[0] page on Wikipedia which I find to be unbiased and comprehensive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
3.) Stuff I can delegate to others. For example, do you really need to write blogposts yourself? There are plenty of good content marketers that can churn out good quality blogposts for a fee and you don't necessarily need to be blogging all by your lonesome. I can understand the need to write a personal blogpost that others can't write, but most posts don't have to be personal anecdotes, they can be technical and draw from different sources on the net.
Don't burn out your friends talking about your startup. It's not that they aren't interested. But nobody needs a single vector relationship.
Also remember that VC's give tons of bad advice to founders. Or rather founders tend to put VC's on a pedestal, and misinterpret what they are saying as advice, when it is really just filter, convenient lies or lazy analysis. Be hugely skeptical of anything VC's tell you, including "you need co-founders".
This is not the same as ‘good’ advice, and will often be diametrically opposed to it.
I was particularly surprised to learn that Moodle is open-source. I used it in school before the world of software development and open-source was on my radar.
One things that I realized is that what happens to your business tells more about what _market_ you are in, that it tells about yourself as a founder. A great entrepreneur in a bad market will still have a bad outcome, and vice versa. Like a program is not about the programmer, a business is not "about" its founding member(s).
So a good advice you don't hear often could be "start in an easy market".
1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience.
2. Making a product without any user feedback. You work 1 year on a product and realize people don't get your idea. That's why it is essential to get feedback every step of the way and your spouse doesn't count :D
3. The good news is being a solo founder is no longer very unique thing. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are doing this and hang out on online communities like indiehackers, makerlog, etc.
4. After trying out hundred tools I've found that nothing beats trello. To each his own though but you really need a todo tool when working alone to keep on track. I've actually written a local trello for myself with one twist - the tool assigns me a task daily and as soon as mark it as complete it assigns me the next item from the list. But at any moment there is never more than 1 item on my "doing" list. It was because i was spending inordinate amount of time bike-shedding when i don't have one single todo.
I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations".
If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?
Keyword density (just the right amount) and total word count seem to have an effect and I’ve seen targeted landers work very well for specific search phrases.
Backlinks will probably always be relevant to rankings as they were the original bedrock principle behind PageRank. If you get prominent blogs to link to you, that can help a lot. Inversely, use rel=nofollow on anchors to avoid seeping relevance to other pages.
Ever since Mobilegeddon your site MUST be mobile friendly or you will get penalized. Also other UI stuff matters (E.g. don’t put ads above the fold)
Not an SEO expert here but I would consider those effective and small things you can do for SEO.
Not really. If you write good content, with relevant keywords, and people link to it, that is good SEO. Not clear what distinction you’re trying to draw.
There may be some scammy stuff with short term results, but you’re always one step away from an algo change or a manual penalty.
Edit: I forgot good internal linking/url schemes. Those matter.
Just think about how you find a new service, chances are you googled it and tried the 2-3 results.
Now as for the question - is it necessary? The answer is yes. Because if you don't do it your competitor will and as the joke goes "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google".
> Are there really any "tricks" that work?
I'm no SEO expert and so I don't care for meta tags, keywords. Title and page description are still important I think. I believe the most relevant things are the time user a spends on your page and social signals (shares, etc) and unfortunately backlinks from high authority pages (this is the worst part of SEO).
The good news is that you don't have to do anything sneaky to do SEO anymore. Make an excellent page on which a user spends a lot of time (so good that he actually bookmarks or shares it) and it starts ranking. For all its evilness Google is still doing something right here.
The way I see it is that product development should still come first, but marketing and building an audience should be tied into that process instead of being an afterthought.
When you're building the product out initially there's just so much shit to do, I think if you don't dedicate most of your time to building it takes too long to get anything done.
Perhaps I'm biased as I'm trying to juggle a full-time job and building my product. I barely have enough time to build stuff, let alone get distracted with things like SEO.
It also depends on who you're selling to as well. Consumer/SMB customers may require less sales efforts than enterprise customers. You will always want to start with talking to users regardless, which is sales.
Given that, do you have any recommendations for developing channels of customers? I haven't really hired for marketing before - what should I be looking for in that role?
- Content writers: Helps with Long tail SEO and building thought leadership; Ask within your network if they know someone.
- Website design and branding: Make a good first impression
- Banner and booth design for Conferences: Hopefully the folks from the design and branding can do this. caveat: Once this becomes a viable channel again.
- Ranking etc: Sign-up for a subscription of SEO Moz or something similar
- Adword: DIY
Honestly it's much much harder hiring for Marketing. If you do hire someone – find someone good at Project managing external resources.
From my experiences over the last year I would say there are too many channels that require so much work to reach a point where your reach matters. So unless you have a team I focus on one channel. If you pick youtube learn to create effective videos and use other social channels to reenforce the youtube content by posting on fb, ig about your new videos.
But that's just general advise trying to cast a big nest. The more effective channels usually come from being part of an existing community (think reddit forum or website forum or facebook group) and offering a product that fixes what people want.
As for hiring. Hire someone who has done marketing before or hire someone who is part of a community you want to be in who is usually doing a lot of unpaided work to make the community better.
For B2B (SME+) - Absolutely invest in Sales. Worth mentioning that it isn't too hard hiring seasoned sales professionals, with existing relationships who are trying to find their next career move etc. They'll often agree to a higher commission payout in-lieu of a base salary. This doubles up as a good way to get feedback from the market.
For B2C or smaller B2B - Definitely invest in marketing and customer experience if you would like the main driver behind your business to be product-led growth or some form of a self-signup/self-onboarding.
Start with Senior Sales Leadership. Ideally someone with experience in your target market.
Reach out to a few individuals, in your network or on LinkedIn or similar. Ask them for advice, see the type of advice they provide. If you like them, ask them to recommend someone – the hope is they recommend themselves.
Do you think it would be possible to get part-time help using the approach you describe? Alternatively, do some sales professionals work on a commission-only basis?
Also, do you have any idea what typical commission is expected?
Sales reps will happily work on commission only if they see a huge market for your product. Which might be difficult to show with a new product.
The commission rate is negotiable at the hiring point. If they are great at sales and know there is a big market they will want a lower base with a higher commission. You should also set a commission cap at some point as your variable costs increase your profit will drop and you could end up at a point where the sales team is making more than the company.
However it's tricky, in that they wouldn't do it if there was a conflict of interest of any kind, they'd be more likely to do it once they know these people a bit more. There is also the WIIFM factor.
All that to say, it is possible to get help.
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On sales reps: As others have mentioned the biggest factor here will be how long it takes to close a deal. If you have quick close cycles (typical in the small to mid-market), a higher commission component or commission only is possible.
Typically, I've seen commissions in B2B to be about 7-10% of Annual Contract Value (ACV) for the first year. Mind you this is highly generalized, based on my experience.
Most sales compensation plans aim for sales reps to earn 1x base as commissions if they meet target. So a base of $60K, would result in $120K in income if they performed.
Based on this you could try finding reps on 14-20% ACV on a commission only basis, paid out on paid invoices.
To be candid, I wouldn't try doing commission-only positions for my own ventures. That said it's worth a try if there are constraints that make it hard to pay a base.
[1] https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html
Anyway I'd be interested in learning Taskwarrior, but in my day job I work in a team and I can't make them use that kind of tooling.
Unfortunately it's very badly written (sorry) because I wrote it just for myself on a weekend and is very limited, just enough to get the job done for me.
(1) https://github.com/san-kumar/kanban
I wish you luck, and I sincerely say this to try and help you, but I think you should stop adding features and start trying to convert people to paid to see if they will.
> people who understand and care about end to end encryption could just set up a NextCloud instance
This is the exact problem I'd like to solve. It worries me that currently only the tech savvy can afford privacy. I'd like to take a shot at making privacy accessible to a larger audience. Something along the lines of what ProtonMail is doing to GMail.
Of course I might fail at attracting enough attention for this to be a viable "startup", but I would have still built something me and my family can safely use. Also there would be learnings along the way, and I'll just move on to building something else. :)
I use emby these days for managing photos and auto uploads.
how is it tho ?
So no, I think most don't regret it.
- I started a newsletter with progress updates to keep myself accountable but found that as time goes on I haven't needed it as much
- Motivation can be variable over time and you need to keep making progress even on your down days. I think this is (one of the ways) where a co-founder is super valuable, as you can motivate each other when one of you is down.
On the theory that this thread will be a honeypot for other solo founders: if you're interested in potentially working together or just someone to bounce ideas off of, shoot me an email (address in my profile)
I'd like to learn more about their strategy for fund raising, as I'd guess most people going down this path would be tending more towards the bootstrap/indie hacking/rev generating end of the spectrum
Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for.
The product may be in what appears to be a crowded field. Identify niche opportunities or cases where an established leader is doing a poor job.
It's fine to do some consulting on the side to pay the bills. Of course it will take time away from the product you are building; just be able to recognize when it's too much and scale back consulting or turn off the spigot completely once product sales take off.
It's fine to work according to your own schedule and needs, not some idealized '100 hours/week' VC fantasy schedule.
Investors don't care about you, they care about their returns. As you don't fit the pattern of what they expect for a successful startup, they will either ignore you or make very unreasonable demands - find a co-founder, work twice as hard, follow this or that model. Ultimately, it's a waste of time at best, a loss of control and failure at worst.
Once you have cashflow, offload certain business tasks to pros who can do it better and cheaper than attempting it yourself. Hire when you have sufficient cashflow + cushion.
Take pride in what you are building, the customers you attract, and the skills you are learning.
I remember when I was an undergraduate physics student, looking forward to grad school and idolizing all the famous physicists. My adviser, who was not the most soft and cuddly type of guy, always pushed this type of hyper-alpha stuff on me, even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It really does damage to you and your self image, and I don't think the advice he gave me was really meant to help me as much as it was meant to help him feel superior.
Anyway, a bit later in life now I look back and realize that there are so many times when I've idolized a certain way of living / doing things that are actually not productive at all but rather just feed that same type of alpha-image.
There's no reason why you can't be successful on your own terms, even if that means taking the weekend off, being a solo founder, or whatever. Sure, I get that startups are hard and draining, but (not to lean too heavily on cliches) there's a difference between working hard and working smart and more often than not I think these types of alpha-founders are glorifying busyness.
It's always fascinating to see people make claims like this, despite all evidence showing that it's impossible to maintain. Some extreme genetic outliers may be able to sustain performance with around 5 hours of sleep per night, but no one is going to last very long on 2-3 hours per sleep each night.
I've read a lot of sleep studies, and besides some non-scientifically published variations on Buckminster Fuller's 30 minute nap every six hour sleep schedule I haven't read about someone getting such low amounts of sleep.
Going all the way down to 2 hours of sleep is doable for short bursts, but it will catch up with even the genetic outliers before long.
Many of these people are just exaggerating for effect. If you have poor time management, poor accounting for where you spend your time, and an erratic sleep/wake schedule, it's easy to get confused about actual sleep durations. Some people also use stimulants excessively during the week and then crash on weekends, but they'll only tell you about the nights where they barely slept.
Some people learn to normalize sleep deprivation and coast on a diet of frequent naps. If you take 30-90 minute naps a couple times a day you can coast for a long time on 2-3 hours in bed at night, but you're still sleep deprived. Those weird polyphasic sleep schedules that claim to reduce your need for sleep are simply normalizing sleep deprivation and masking it with naps throughout the day.
Finally, there's a common phenomenon where people misperceive some of their sleep time as being awake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_state_misperception This is a common explanation when people claim they didn't sleep at all on a certain night. It's not uncommon for people to claim extreme insomnia, but then sleep 6+ hours as soon as their sleep is objectively monitored.
In short: You can't trust self-reported sleep times. Especially not when someone feels they have something to gain by claiming minimal sleep.
On another note, I can't be the only person who finds this kind of bragging to just fail to register, or even to backfire. Am I meant to be impressed by how poorly they've arranged their weekly routine in terms of work/life balance?
Great point. The long-term survival of a business distills down to being able to bring in more money than it costs you to produce a product. It's such a simple concept, but it's easy to forget when you're swept up in the excitement of coding and engineering an idea you're excited about.
Ironically, it's the most ambitious engineers who tend to make the mistake of doing too much engineering work before trying to validate the product. I can't count how many times I've signed up to follow ambitious engineers' startup ventures that turn into years of highly-detailed marketing updates for products that never seem to get any closer to materializing. These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later with blog posts blaming the industry, the timing, the economy, or other external factors for their failure.
In reality, most of them could have determined their market fit, or lack thereof, much faster by launching a smaller version early and iterating with customer feedback.
We like building things, and making them fast and powerful and efficient.
The customer doesn't care about any of that though. They just want something that helps them.
What happens is that most of the time making something fast, powerful and efficient implies so much resources that the ambitious engineer can not complete the project in time.
Customers prefer something that works today, even with limited functionality that something perfect that only works inside the mind of the engineer.
That is the reason Steve Jobs said no so many times, because this way his company could ship products in time.
That in engineers mindset problem: It is painful to say No, like the song says, we "want it all".
Only if the thing being fast, powerful and efficient actually solves their problem better.
? Not trying to be argumentative but that doesn't seem ironic to me at all. I would expect the most ambitious engineers to think that simply building the thing would be enough.
Is that really the most common problem? I would probably be one of those engineers (if I'd start a business) and I'm a lot more afraid to sell something that doesn't exist yet than the other way around. Because now in addition to your usual problems you have legal obligations to deliver a product. I think this is one of the reasons for the crazy crunch culture of many startups.
Instead of selling a fake MVP product it is probably more healthy to be upfront to customers and let them pay for your development time like a consultant... And then repeat the work faster for different customers until you can spin the process out into a actual product.
In the case of the startups you describe I always imagine they have great sales and marketing people but no actual product, and thus survive only until the VC money dries up...
> Instead of selling a fake MVP product it is probably more healthy to be upfront to customers and let them pay for your development time like a consultant
Careful, no one is advocating selling "fake" products. The key is to develop a minimal product that can be sold. It has to work, though. Fraud will sink a startup very quickly.
From there, you can contract with additional customers to expand the product to meet their needs. This is more difficult than it sounds, though, as you'll quickly be torn between working on what's best for the product as a whole, and what's best for an individual customer's unique needs.
I've seen many startups go down this path with best intentions, but ultimately become contracting shops with a single customer. That's fine if that's your goal, but it's painful when the contracts dry up and you don't have a product that appeals to the mass market.
The most common problem, if you're a really talented engineer, is that you could work for a big company and be paid more in a single year than your business will bring in for its entire lifetime.
Conversely what you really find is, the people running 20+ person companies with tens of millions in investor money to bring in only $1m in revenue a year - they lacked the talent, actually, to just make the money at a big company. That you should start with the assumption that capitalism works, and that the person doing this thing is not stupid but just shut out from a better opportunity.
So maybe you're a really talented engineer but you are foreign so you'd need an H1-B to work for Google. Or maybe you're a former product manager from Microsoft who didn't quit, but was laid off, so you really can't just go and make the money.
A transplant surgeon brings in about $1m in revenue per day for heart transplants. There is no risk there, there is unlimited demand for heart transplants. It's just extremely hard to become a transplant surgeon, it is extremely competitive, much more competitive than making a website. While I'm not suggesting every startup CEO is just a washed-out up-and-coming surgeon, there is other stuff they may have washed out from broadly, like just medicine itself, that led them to chase the worse economics of where they are.
BTW, raising tens of millions for one million in revenue doesn't happen that often.
Odds are you'd make more money taking a job at BigCo, live like you only needed half what you're making, and invest that extra money into the public market. This isn't as fun though.
I have met some people who implicitly or even explicitly claimed they were above being an employee but I think they weren’t being honest about their actual employment prospects.
Do they not then own at least a share of the IP? You'd be lucky to find a customer that takes you on as a consultant but lets you keep the IP you develop during that time.
If you need to build for years to release something [1], it's less likely that you're addressing a real need. The best products can start dead simple, even ugly, but still solve the problem.
[1] Deep tech is the obvious exception here.
Asking for sales up front means you have to face that right away. It's better for the business but harder for the founder.
This is even a problem in the sciences! Everyone wants to kick the can (getting feedback on their pet hypothesis from reality) down the road & play with their shiny, awesome tech/math in the meantime.
"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Thomas Huxley
What is hard is keeping mistakes/ignorance marginally less fatal than the ground you gain in your successes... forever.
I’d love to check it out. I bet others here would as well.
The full-time employment entity is your own company (if you are the founder) or your full-time employer and there could be other companies or individuals to whom you work for part-time (1 day a week, adhoc days/hours, weekends etc) and you are paid for that work.
You have two things to consider:
1. Make sure it is legal (for example if you are on certain types of work-permit visa in some countries it might be illegal to work for anyone other than the work visa sponsor).
2. Make sure you don't have conflict in your employment contract clauses (many full-time employment contracts have clauses that prevent you from working for others even for part-time without explicit permission from the full-time employer).
Usually if you ask your full-time employer, they may permit you to do one-off consultations to other companies (and get paid for it) if they think it would not take your focus away from your FTE work and if there is no conflict of interest or potential to reveal trade-secrets (example: if that other company is a competitor etc).
In my very limited recent case, I produced a Kindle booklets series earlier this year (20 academic literature reviews) and started selling some through targeted ads on Amazon.com, at $0.03 per click, on top of a very few thousand visualizations per day.
Ramen profitable, but a platform to start from for small incremental updates in the mid- to long- term, hopefully.
There are lots of tools people on appreciate when they are gone, and getting people to pay for them takes a much better salesman than I'm used to having available.
Exactly. In fact, it's not even about the product. You need to solve somebody's problem in a way that they are willing to pay for. The product is just how you choose to do that. The designs and code and engineering decisions and artwork etc. etc. aren't for the customer, they're for you. What the customer is paying you for is solving their problem.
The comment about going from dev to marketer is huge. I'm in that phase now and it's pretty daunting. I've spent so much time obsessing about the product and now that I finally have something...how do I get people to use it?
I just started brainstorming ideas and it's actually fun to start diving into something I haven't had to think about before. Yes, daunting but so is everything about being a solo founder. It's just another hurtle to jump.
If you're serious about your product and enjoy the solo founder journey, you'll find comfort and stimulation in the new adventures that present themselves to you.
If you know what you're building will excite your target demographic, it's super easy to market.
I'm D2C, so social media strategy, brand building and generally getting enough volume to convert in order to sustain the product without a huge ad budget is very tedious. Very much the long game to get people interested (probably over the course of years unless you go viral and have good network effects).
The main take away is goals, tasks, ideas, and random thoughts, you have to get them out of your head and onto paper (digital or otherwise) and this could be as unstructured as the thoughts themselves. They key is to materialize internal thoughts externally, to capture the essence outside myself, and to give myself room to work on that small task that will push me forward now.
> what I had underestimated was the difficulty involved in finding a co-founder and how that would compound the difficulty involved in finding an investor
Whoops.
I just shelve ideas until the pieces align.
If my idea involves being able to get into certain rooms to be taken more seriously because I have a co-founder, then I don't do that idea until I have a co-founder, and do other ideas.
Look guys, your competition has a lot of ideas. A lot of viable ideas, and this is not a coveted position, it just is. If your brain coincidentally functions like that once, it isn't a good enough reason to pursue it.
My advice is, hang in there. If you like what you are doing persist and adapt. My best product thus far is an API I built to support my original business plan. The original product I tried to build is long dead.
All the best. e.
It's also fine to just dance back to a 9-5. Having a paycheck and living an OK life if perfectly fine.
Currently geocode.xyz and geocoder.ca are my most profitable businesses.
Thanks
Drawback : Social validation ! Of course, your friends, your familly, many potential investors will not be friend at all with the idea of being alone here. So yes, this is tough. It was for me.
Now, I see it more as a test : If you can accept that being alone for a while is socially painfull but not that horrible, well go on : build your software, full time or part-time if you have no more cash.
And think about it. How many people is needed to drive a car ? A Solo driver.
Solo mean YOU DRIVE the experiment --> This is good
My perspective is that this proverb is right on: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Having a cofounder completely changed my second company's trajectory. Having someone who takes on the parts of the business where I am weak, and visa-versa, has made a world of difference.
There are benefits to working alone (insert Mr. Incredible Meme here)
No need to worry about salary or splitting the company. You can pivot really easily and you have 100% control of decisions.
You may want to use Flutter or similar tool so you don't have to write it twice.
And yes, I am using Flutter to build the mobile apps. It does come with its own set of problems that I have to bang my head against, but I can’t complain as it’s saving me quite a bit of effort.
Could you point out what problems you faced with Flutter? I ask because I'm planning to use it to build an app.
The act of describing what you're doing clearly enough that a 3rd party can make sense of it already helps, no matter who your conversation target is and how much they care.
I have done Meditation, gratitude journals and focused transitions. It all helps.
However, for me the activity that helps the most is hard workouts early in the morning. Once I get going, I am fighting against gravity and fatigue. I am no longer thinking about my past, future or even the day. Just focused on the moment.
I am in a similar boat as you OP. I am very happy on a daily basis, building the product. I am also pretty financially stretched so that adds a level of stress. I hope your product is a giant success.
This is interesting, thanks for sharing, I’ll try this out.
All the best to you too. It’s good to know that you’re happy. I hope everything works out the way you want them to.
Also, if you work alone and get stuck on a problem or need a little help with being creative (ie: UI design, marketing), try smoking a joint! It might not be as good as bouncing ideas off of someone else, but it's definitely helped me think of ideas I might not have come up with otherwise.
Been running my company for 8 years, and I take the same approach to the day.
P.S: Native Malayalam speaker here - love the name "ente.io". Nannayi varatte :)