My Tech Cofounder Quit
Committed all my savings and blood into it. We had been full time for the past 8 months. He got a compelling offer from a famous company. Quit.
// Edit 1: Thanks for the helpful comments
// Edit 2: This is what I have at the moment:
https://bubbl.in (A Youtube of Flipbooks)
It is production ready. Rather just short of MVP.
// Edit 3: If you're in love with RoR/Javascript and Books, and wish to jump full time into this, please feel free to write to me at marvin at bubbl dot in.
// Edit 4: I do the design, HTML and photoshop. Can code a little too but still learning.
69 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadImportant question for future learning, though: let's say that you were production ready, today. If you're already maxing out your savings, how could you take this product to market with no budget to pay yourselves a living wage until you can demonstrate enough traction to raise a seed round?
I know that bootstrapping is sexy, but human willpower is finite - especially once you're paying for groceries on your credit card and the fear kicks in.
Good luck with your venture!
But what exactly are you trying to achieve with this post? Get Advice? Find a new partner on HN? Just post it as a cautionary tale for other people?
The "Youtube of Flipbooks" tagline makes no sense. It's not really clear what this is trying to express.
The term "flipbooks" also seems to be misused. That term already refers to printed books with pictures that differ slightly from one page to the next. Rapidly flipping through the pages ends up rendering a crude animation. The term "flipbook" is also sometimes used to describe books aimed at children where there's a flap of paper or cardboard that can be flipped up to reveal some image or text underneath. Trying to add a new meaning only leads to confusion.
And while I understand it's still a work in progress, the experience is not very good. Even with a large desktop monitor and a fullscreen browser window, scrolling is required to view the complete pages. The page flipping is also rather distracting. And the content available so far is not very enticing, I'm afraid to say. The low-quality images used in some of the books does not help.
So I have a hard time seeing what value this site provides. The freely available content isn't very appealing, and the reading experience itself is very poor. If the experience won't attract and keep users, then it's unlikely that publishers will be interested. If publishers aren't interested, then users will additionally not be interested. And both of those factors will, of course, directly impact the potential profitability of such a venture.
I think that every aspect of this offering needs to be reworked, unfortunately. Which leads me back to the original question, "What exactly are you trying to achieve with this product?"
Nothing happens in a vacuum. This is why combat teams debrief after actions.
What made the offer a reasonable alternative for the tech person?
Were they always more inclined toward salary than risk?
Were they ever all in? If so what was the turning point?
Did they feel adequately in control of the startup's future?
How was equity allocated?
Why was communication such that this was a surprise?
The answers won't change the current situation. They will prepare you for the next venture.
Whenever I read comments like this I get flashbacks to the people deriding the stupidity of the people who had 500k in Bitcoin on Mt. Gox.
Might be harder if you're just an idea guy.
Good luck. It's a long hard road either way.
There was also a story 3-6 months ago here. The story was the co-founder quit while OP spent all his time and money in the product. Boom. That was it for him. Another story was the co-founder quit the night before pitching to investor...
A company is an entity. And as such should run without it's founders over time. Sounds like you didn't de-risk the company for a long time until a potential liability become real.
You are building a tech product so either you should learn to code or have backup devs that could take the slack and keep on plowing forward.
1. Prefer freelancers to co-founders.
Having a technical co-founder is sexy but partnerships are tricky and you don't need to start with one. Using freelancers isn't risk free (nothing is) but there are a few advantages:
- You will probably have a lot more control over cost and schedule. A lot of freelance developers are willing to work on a fixed price basis if you have a reasonable enough spec, and in my experience freelancers are usually far better at estimating cost and schedule because it's virtually impossible to be successful as a freelancer if you can't develop cost and schedule estimates. If you encounter a freelance develop who can't provide cost estimates and schedules you're not dealing with a professional.
- If you select somebody who has been working as a freelancer full time for at least several years straight and who has happy client references (ask for these!), you probably don't have to worry about getting an email letting you know that they're joining Google. Actually at a certain point somebody who has been freelancing for a while is not going to be considered an attractive employee by a major company except under rare circumstances.
- Finding good freelance developers can be difficult, but in this market it's less difficult than finding a good developer who wants to work full time for a startup/company as a cofounder/employee.
2. Carefully consider your stack.
Some of the sexiest stacks (RoR, Node, etc.) are a bootstrapped founder's worst nightmare. The labor pools are smaller, and the rates are higher. LAMP isn't sexy but in a bind you're not going to have a problem finding a half decent freelance LAMP developer at a reasonable rate.
The reason is that a startup is basically an extended learning process: its goal is to learn enough about the market and technology to bridge them, and then capture that knowledge in an organization. If you're employing a freelancer to build the project, then that learning is captured in their head, not in your organization. If it looks like you actually have a good idea (most people don't), then there is nothing stopping them from building your MVP and then choosing not to renew the contract, and instead going into business with a competing product that captures all the knowledge & experience they gained building yours.
This is exactly what Mark Zuckerburg did to the Winklevoss twins. While the latter did manage to sue for some small piece of the company - whose position would you rather be in?
2. When you're bootstrapping you don't have the luxury of an "extended learning process."
3. There is absolutely no reason a non-technical founder can't "learn enough about the market and technology to bridge them." Just because you can't build an app doesn't mean you don't understand technology, and just because you can build an app doesn't mean you can understand a market.
4. If you're relying on a technical co-founder with no domain expertise to bridge your market and technology for you, you're going to fail 99% of the time because it's not going to happen.
5. Notwithstanding the point that a co-founder can run off with your idea too, if you're only coming to the table with an idea you're probably doomed anyway. It's not about ideas. It's about domain expertize, industry relationships, sales know-how and the motivation to execute. Most freelancers and people who are going to come on board as co-founders would be running their own startups if they had those things.
6. Facebook/Zuck are usually unrealistic examples for most founders.
Starting up with freelancer is not good idea. The freelancer model will work only if you have a fixed spec which is not the case with most of the tech startup. You always have to take market feedback and quickly incorporate into your product.
Sure, I don't have 40 hours a week from each of them but there's nothing magical about a 40 hour work week. Agile sprints are time bound and time bound doesn't mean "40 hours".
By the way, most startups don't have an idealized feedback loop where market feedback is coming in at a rapid pace on a constant basis and your developers are busy 5 days a week responding to that feedback.
Most startups take longer to get going than the founders would like. If you're paying a salary to your technical co-founder a lot of it is likely going to go to waste because you probably won't be able to utilize them 100%. And even if they're not taking a salary they're going to get bored (and might jump ship) if they're expecting things to take off overnight.
Remember, Google is forever.
Trust me on this.
I'm still cleaning the Vaseline out of my ass from the last time! But that was quite a while ago and I'm as happy as I've ever been and (thank God) smarter for it.
Trust me!
Good luck and go kick ass!