Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

B2B customers will definitely care. Some will ask you to have millions in insurance and source code in escrow before they'll work with you. But there are some out there that are more flexible, or who just don't think about it that much.

Regarding (3), it's good to be in a big city for networking purposes, but these days it doesn't really matter that I'm in SV. I go to meetups only occasionally, and most of my networking happens at conferences. If you're finding it's hard to talk with customers remotely, then I guess it would be worth it to consider relocating. But I'd prioritize keeping the burn rate low, which means your small town is going to win out over a big city.

Solo people and even small teams are a huge risk to enterprises. They will have to dedicate time to negotiating with you and integrating your solution. If you just disappear after that, that's a huge problem for them.

Fog Creek talked about this a long time ago, where they priced their B2B product just below the typical limit for an engineer to expense, so that engineers could just buy their product online with a credit card and expense it. Once you enter into vendor vetting, it will be really hard to get out of it.

Get an advisor or contractors or business developer and put them on the "team" page

Make PR like announcements on LinkedIn or Twitter or your newsletter - try to copy the style of corporates

Do free trials/collaborations with midsized customers and then list them as customers on your landing page

Get references from your end users. It doesn't even have to be key opinion leaders but if they are in the business try to get them to agree to a statement and that their face and title would be on your page.

Get a part-time employee if it's possible for your customers to find out how many employees you have.

Save. Whenever you can. Make sure you have plenty of money in the bank once you have some surplus, one day you'll need it and the size of your bankroll will determine whether or not your first crisis will be your last.

Other than that: where you are can be an advantage if the cost of living isn't high.

Marketing: make sure your customers are happy first, then ask if they can be used as references, plenty of them will go to bat for you if your product is good. They might even give you referrals. Good and happy customers >> marketing budget.

As for fundraising: unless you have a very solid plan I wouldn't bother for now, first get your stuff established a bit and then when you have more substance if you are still interested in raising funds you could do it but make sure it is an option and not a must because otherwise you will hand control to your investors before they're even on board (and they are pretty good at detecting that).

best of luck!

Oh, and read The Lean Startup. And probably ignore me, my opinion is probably useless.

Before you worry about recurring customers, fundraising, co-founders, or anything else, just get a minimum-viable product out for people to play around with.

The other stuff will come later; for now, you need feedback on what you’re doing. And that feedback is only valuable if the person giving it to you has experience with your product.

2) A startup is about risk management. At the beginning, there are ALL the risks (can you build it, are you building something people want, can you find those people in a scalable and economically efficient way, will those people pay enough for the product, etc?). Your goal as a founder is to quantify and reduce those risks in a methodical way. Your milestones should be tied to that goal. For instance, to address the first risk listed, you can set a milestone for developing a prototype. For the second, you can set a milestone for getting the first live customer, and so on and so on. My suggestion is to prioritize risk and set your milestones to address the biggest first (hint: it almost always is figuring out whether anyone even wants what you are building). Another thing to consider is the psychology of progress. Momentum feeds on itself so it is a good idea to set aggressive timelines.

3) Theoretically, no one cares where you live. Practically, it may help to be in a tech-dense area for networking, hiring, etc purposes.

4) Not doing enough (any?) marketing is probably going to be why most technical founders fail. The problem for the most part if not whether or not you can build a thing, it is going to be whether or not you can get enough (any) people to buy and use the thing. You should be doing twice as much marketing as coding as a rule of thumb.

5) Fundraising is a tactic, just like any other tactic available in building a company. There are some ideas that are capital intensive (eg high customer acquisition costs) and would be hard to execute without fundraising. If you do decide you need/want to fundraise, you should understand the implications for you and your company and plan accordingly. For some reason, lots of people seem to form their identity around bootstrapping or VC. I don't think this is a useful way of thinking about the topic. It is better to think about it as a tool and decide if that tool is what you want or not.

1. It is just me - is that a red flag?

It has never been an issue for me, but I also had that concern in the beginning. I try to be VERY responsive to emails and quickly address any issues that come up, so that usually helps address their concerns if they have any. I sometimes refer to the business as "we" (e.g. "we are rolling out new functionality"), so it may not be obvious at first that it is a one-person company, but I never deny it, and most publishers I work with and have spoken with know that it is just me.

I've worked with major publishers like Huffington Post, Aol, CNN, Time/Meredith, Yahoo, etc. Some have required approval by their information security team, which can take a very long time. There are always small issues that crop up, but being a one-person team has never stopped me from getting approved.

2. How do I set appropriate milestones for me to reach? Do I think about reaching 100 customers before reaching 5 recurring customers for example?

I never really had defined milestones. I was happy to leave that behind when I left my corporate jobs. In the early years, I had so much excitement for the business and its potential that any time another publisher said that they were interested in using the platform, it gave me more motivation to spend time on it and grow it. I guess if no one said they were interested in using it, I would have questioned continuing, but it never came up.

For reference, it took about 3 months for the first publisher to dip their toe in the platform and 6 months for a full integration (god bless them for trying it!). If you are interested, the first sites to sign up were Upworthy, Refinery29, POPSUGAR, Fashionista, and Remodelista (3 of them still use it!).

3. I'm in a small town in PNW. Does that matter if this will be an online thing anyway? Why or when do people move to big cities like Seattle/SF/NYC/Austin etc.

I'm in NYC, but I avoid in-person meetings as much as I can. They take too much time and don't provide much incremental value. I also have not had an in-person meeting since the pandemic started. So no, I don't think it matters.

4. What are some ways to do marketing? Should I even think about that before I have a few customers who are using my product consistently?

I have never spent any money on marketing. I send cold emails pretty often (which is mostly ineffective), but other than that, my business grows through word-of-mouth (it works like a social network, so there is a benefit to publishers to tell their friends, so that they can easily work with them). I also partner with some networks that work with many sites (such as ad yield management companies) who then sends their clients to me.

5. I've been inspired by the Startup School videos. Honestly though I'm not sure about fundraising and all these things, it seems very intimidating to me. What's the difference between those things and starting a company and slowly building it up?

I've never fundraised so can't help here. Unless you absolutely can not survive without outside fundraising, it would be stupid to even consider it as a 1-person company. Way too much of a distraction. That being said, if your plan to quickly build out your team, then sure, go for it.

Landing a big contract with a big company early on can be very problematic. They have a history of screwing small companies.

Small companies often seem to imagine this will solve all their problems. It seems to be the business equivalent of the fantasy of winning the lottery and then having it made in the shade. In reality, winning the lottery frequently doesn't end well and landing a big contract early on often doesn't either.

I used to imagine I would keep a file of such stories but never did. It's been challenging to find examples when I want them. But it also seems to be common knowledge in some circles.

Feel free to bite off more than you can chew and view it as a growth opportunity, but be aware that getting too much of your revenue from one client makes you their bitch. It's like all the downside of being an employee plus all the downside of running a business.

Best of luck.

1. You need to either a) have an answer for "what happens if you get hit by a bus?" or b) create a product for customers to whom that doesn't matter. In general, people really _like_ being able to chat with the founder directly (lean into that! it's a superpower!) but feel very anxious about committing $X0,000/yr to you.

2. It will be somewhere between "vanishingly rare" to "non-existent" to feel like you are moving as fast as you should be. Instead of setting milestones and thinking about metrics, _especially_ in the early goings I'd focus on just spending as much time as you can on critical-path work (chatting with customers, chatting with prospects, improving core flows.)

3. This does not matter. I moved from Seattle to Richmond, VA last year and literally nothing changed about my business.

4. This is a very broad topic that is hard to answer concisely, but the closest answer I can give is "figure out how your first five users found your product and then figure out how to find more people like them".

5. Venture capital is a tool by which you exchange agency for large sums of money. There are a lot of great businesses that require more time, energy, and money than can be provided by a single engineer working for an indefinite amount of time; there are a lot of great businesses that can be built without those things. I would not take a lot of stock in any prescriptive answer that says you HAVE to take VC or you HAVE to bootstrap; it depends on the type of company you want to build and what you consider a successful way to spend a decade or so of your life.

At the same time, don't feel like you have to be too agreeable either. If you have a path to profit that doesn't include investors, then that's the best thing: you incorporated potentially good advice for free, kept equity and potentially opened a door for friendship with investors that in the future might become more valuable for you.

Solopreneur are my heros, I've tried a couple of things, is hard as f*ck.

No offense intended but if other people found value in it you’d be making sales and they’d be praising it to their designer friends. Design products that people want are easy sells. This is a smell you don’t have product market fit. But, that’s ok, because it’s a thing you built for you, so if it doesn’t solve anyone else’s problem you’ve still solved your own. If your product has competition, how are they able to sell to folks? Are they small? Maybe it’s niche and there’s just no market to penetrate.

Why the b2b targeting? Aim it at b2c and skip the enterprise bs. Again, if it is valuable to designers, they will purchase for themselves personally and use it at both work and at home, and that is frictionless compared to contract negation and vetting, snail paced security audits, and nonsense terms and scope creep added to sign a deal. It’s not needed here imo and it’ll force you to sell your souls to get deals and your passion project will morph into a monster you don’t even like.

5) bootstrapping is super hard (doing it right now) and early on usually accompanied by some contract work on the side to sustain yourself until ramen profitability

happy to connect and point out some examples if it helps ioannis@algora.io best of luck!!

https://robwalling.com/

There are a lot of people like you. You don’t need to move and you don’t need to hire anyone unless you want to. You need product market fit and the ability to learn. Find others to speak to, maybe go to microconf.

You are not big enough to drive enough revenue to grow yet. A company takes a lot of work besides a few good ideas, and most people just can’t afford to risk sweat equity. Asking software/engineering people to work for “free”/”shares of nothing” sours most conversations pretty quickly. People with skills usually get scammed once or twice before they learn this lesson.

2. How do I set appropriate milestones for me to reach?

You are currently in the independent-contractor or owner-operator class. If you plan to self bootstrap, than don’t enter into a public market without a war chest over $500k. You will need to hit hard and fast in a very lucrative/narrow niche, then bail-out of the sector before an army of losers show up to compete. A small team of 5 can do a lot, but focus on hard small problems if you want to survive. Recall people don’t make money writing software, but rather reselling the same product/services many times over.

3. I'm in a small town in PNW.

No, your product in hand at a trade-show is all that matters, and a small office for meetings is like $600/month. Again, think about disposable-products and services as you can’t protect anything yet. Strategic truth means not volunteering information that can harm your position. The only difference between a bum in a cheap suit and a CEO is money.

4. What are some ways to do marketing?

Trade-shows and related events where in-person meetings are more probable, and listen to what customers are shopping for at first. Each event is usually worth about 5 months of online marketing in terms of sales leads.

5. I've been inspired by the Startup School videos.

Most startup rants are BS stories of winning a lottery… No one relevant shows up to an event with 450 competitors and talks about what they are planning.

YMMV, =)

1. If you communicate that you're in the early stages of building an exciting new business and wanting to get feedback from early-access customers, there should be businesses that are OK with you being solo. They will adapt to that risk, and you won't be able to sell to everyone, but it shouldn't exclude you from everyone either. You might just not be talking to the right customers yet.

2. For milestones (and fundraising) you should think about your goals - what are you trying to get out of this? Do you want to build and scale a big team, serve giant amounts of customers, etc. Or do you just want to augment or replace your income? Or something in-between? You can think about this from different angles: team size, revenue, geographic scope, your personal exit or income, etc.

Here are a couple of examples from my journey in case they're helpful:

In my prior business (https://www.bigleaf.net) my first milestone was to get a working product. I didn't feel as though just talking about it would be convincing enough (and it wasn't), but once I could demo an MVP then it really wow'd customers. Along the way I added a milestone to get a technical co-founder since I got burnt out doing it myself. Those 2 major steps took just over a year. The next milestone was getting our first revenue (took just a month or so after the MVP), then milestones just kept being added from there logically based on the strategic path we chose to be on at that moment.

In my current business (https://www.companycraft.ai) I had a mix of some early milestones. I wanted to talk to potential customers (entrepreneurs) to ensure the problems I wanted to solve matched up with pain they had, and I also wanted to build an MVP ASAP. I completed those in about 3 months, with many other smaller steps and goals along the way. My current milestone is to do a full "v1" public launch in November.

So you just set some milestones that are logical based on where you are and where you want to be in the coming months and years, then hold yourself accountable to them (or ideally be connected with a peer or mentor who can be an accountability partner of sorts).

3. On location, I go back to your team goals. If you're going to stay solo then no, location shouldn't matter. If you want to build a fully remote team then it shouldn't matter much (though being near-ish to a decent airport would be valuable for visiting the team and customers). If you want any local team members then you should think about where you'll gather and what the talent pool is like in your area.

4. It sounds like you're already on a good track here - talking to people who have the pain you're solving and gathering their emails. If that has you on the right track I'd just keep doing that. However you mentioned below that you're selling this B2B...so in that case you may want to consider if you're actually talking to the buyer of your product. Are the people you've met the people who would approve the purchase of your solution? If not, try to connect with those people. Identifying a list of them on LinkedIn and cold reaching out could be one method.

5. Fundraising goes back to your goals as an entrepreneur :) If you want to grow this to IPO or a really big exit, have a team of hundreds, and build a market-changing or world-impacting offering, then you probably need to raise outside funds at some point. However, if your desired scale is smaller and/or you see a path to profitability without fundraising then you get to keep control of your destiny, which is great. If you can afford it and you don't sense the market is going to run away without you, I'd advise continue building, talking to customers, and close your first deals; don'...

2. I'd shoot for 5 reference customers (paying list price, using it as you'd expect and genuinely delighted). Along the way I'd track who you try to sell to in a spreadsheet (including those that just drag on and never close) and I'd score them across the behaviors/things you would expect your target audience would have in common. This will help you create an Ideal Customer Profile - which you can then target more and more heavily (where you do marketing / what you build next and so on in future). Be _very_ specific not just ie by industry. For example, paypal targeted ebay power sellers in the early days.

3. Absolutely not. I've more than 40K customers at my startup and I live in a village no one has heard of in the UK.

4. Don't worry about scaling up via marketing until you have 5 reference customers (and generally do more of what got you the first 5 as your first step)

5. Read Secrets of Sandhill Road to understand the VC model more deeply. If you bootstrap - you have total control, might make more if you sell (because of how preferred shares work) but it will probably cause you more personal financial stress. Decide what motivates you - lifestyle business or trying to build a $10bn company. VC is an irreversible door, more or less, whereas bootstrapping isn't. I'd default with bootstrapping if unsure.

2. There are 3 phases for your business:

   - Verifying product-market fit (this includes getting at least 1 paying customer)
   - Finding a way to get a more or less stable stream of new customers
   - Building up an organization

4. Marketing will become one of the hardest parts of your business once you verify product-market fit. Have at least a newsletter and a referral program - they cost little but work.

1) I am same as you, I like to work alone. Working with another is irritating, to say the least. I always think I can move faster when I don't have to communicate with anybody else.

But. Doing business is less about doing stuff well and more about avoiding really stupid shit. Having other people to work with and especially a cofounder is one of the best ways to get feedback for really stupid stuff you could do.

It is all about reducing the time and cost between when you become wrong and when you stop being wrong. For some reason it is very hard to do it on your own.

2. Don't set milestones. Understand the problem you are trying to solve for your customers. Do your best solution of the problem, the best way you can. The customers are just validation of your idea -- if they come you might be onto something and if they are not coming you are doing something wrong.

3. No. It is up to you. If you are asking this question you haven't thought this solopreneurship thing yet. The whole point of doing it solo is to be able to make those decisions yourself.

4. The best way is to make a good product/service. The customers will come. Don't focus on the customers, focus on the best service you can. The more customers you have the harder it will be to focus on the service, so cherish the ability to move fast while you have no/few customers yet.

5. You want to slowly build it up. Financing is a hack that should only be used by people with experience -- not you, at least not yet.

Your goal for your first business should be to avoid getting killed financially (don't get into debt!). As long as you do that, you have ability to iterate. Most of successful people I know have started multiple businesses before they finally succeeded. That assumes ability to start another business after the first one fails. Bankruptcy will very likely put an end to your career as an enterpreneur.

Also, slowly building it up gives you time necessary to learn, to transform yourself. And build a product. It takes time to think all those things and integrate it into your experience and trying to hack it will just leave you woefully unprepared.

Also, when you get financing it suddenly puts a timer on your business. It puts a pressure that makes it difficult to focus and make your own decisions. Everything from now on is a compromise. And, at least in my mind, this conflicts with trying to build the best product you can.

Also, when you get financing, the cost of that financing will depend on how risky the investment is (I am kind of expert when it comes to risk). You don't give loans for nothing, you want to earn some money. And the riskier the investment, the more you want to earn. And as a first business with an unexperienced founder, running solo, you are as risky as it can be. If you ever get somebody to invest money in your business it will necessarily come at an exorbitant price and you are also very possibly get abused by somebody with much more experience than you.

Repeat after me: emotional intelligence and situational awareness. You've been asked that question not for the answer but to see how you'd respond to it. He knows you're alone. So he asks. Will you loose your shit? Will you understand what he's trully doing? Have you prepared for it? How come you let such an obvious hole in your defense?

Dont ever ever make the mistake to think people are dumb. They play dumb. Most people are engineers just like you. Except they dont do the same engineering than you do. They do emotional engineering. People love it. They crave for it.

Do you get it? If you're not sure, then you dont get it. So get it. People dont trust an emotionally dumb person. Period. Trust me I know.

Thats your answers to all your questions but the product. You will sell once you're emotionally smart because of the strong effect it has on people.