Two paths. 1) start selling to and building for customers. 2) start recruiting cofounder(s) then fundraise. Which one is better depends on the nature of your startup and skill set.
Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
141–150 of 243 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not like being a founder is a magical thing. Honestly, being a founder is just someone who can grind it out under adverse conditions. Like any other shit job out there. The point still stands. If you cant grind it out and sell, the core of entrepreneurship, then maybe its not for you. Edit: typo
> If you cant grind it out and sell, the core of entrepreneurship, then maybe its not for you Yes, I think it's the no 1 reason I saw solopreneneur friends fail. Most are just not willing to put the hours in. I see that people really like to dream and make big plans but sitting down consistently after work each day and actually working on all the mundane small things is a necessity many are not willing to do. The ide…
Not only the mundane, but the amount of decision making involved. You cant spend too much time and energy on decisions. Most people dont like making decisions. There are many kind of decisions. If you grow big enough, the well being of your employees depends on your decisions. Most cant handle that.
Entrepreneurship is as glamorous as being a doctor at the emergency room.
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this except switch the order. First, start selling. Then start building. It is so easy to waste so much time building something nobody wants, and you won't know until it's too late if you try to sell it afterward. Selling first will inform your decisions on what to build.
Can I ask an honest question respectfully? I don’t have a company or a startup. But I’ve always wanted to start one. So I’m always curious when I see a response like yours. How do you sell first? There isn’t a product to show. How do you find Customers? Is it the philosophy that the customer doesn’t know better and you have to tell them what they need, all the while understanding what your capabilities are. Like unde…
> "Is it the philosophy that the customer doesn’t know better and you have to tell them what they need"
Yes and no. One of the only people to have ever done that successfully that I know of was Steve Jobs, and that's what made him a one-of-a-kind genius billionaire. Believing you can do the same will cause your wheels to spin endlessly without going anywhere. It's pure hubris.
On the flip side, it certainly can help to have some insight, intuition, or flash of inspiration for a product or service. When you have the idea, then you have a hypothesis. Don't treat a hypothesis like a fact! This is where people make the biggest mistake.
Your goal is then to find evidence related to the idea. The evidence will tell you whether the hypothesis has potential or whether it's completely bogus.
Two big places you can find evidence: competitors and customers.
If there are already competitors in your field, that's a big piece of evidence that your idea has merit. If there are no competitors, that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have a chance, but definitely take it as a sign that there's probably a good reason there's nobody else doing it.
If you can find customers, it's nearly proof that you're onto something. Just be cautious because sometimes people will say they like your idea and genuinely believe to themselves that they would pay for it but then actually not in reality.
> "How do you sell first?"
The biggest way that I know of is basically just communicating with people. Find a way to get someone on the phone or get them to open your email or even see them in person, and then pitch your idea to them.
If you're selling a service then it isn't too difficult because you can just verbalize the service and gauge their response. When they like your idea it will be very obvious because they will get excited. If they're not excited then you're talking to the wrong market or your idea/hypothesis needs to be reworked.
If you're selling a product it's essentially the same, but you may need some simple mockups/pictures just to help communicate the idea. You really do not need a full fledged working product or even an "MVP" for this.
The concept of an "MVP" is a huge source of confusion because it assumes you know what "minimally viable" even means. How can you build an MVP when you have no idea what to consider "minimally viable?" The MV part of MVP completely depends on your customer. No customer, no MVP. (This may not quite apply if you're building something specifically to fulfill a need that you have.)
Hope this helps!
By the way, please take this with a grain of salt. This is my personal experience from a couple of failed startups and zero successful startups. I'm clearly not an expert.
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#144I'm a solo founder (pullreminders.com) and have been at it for about a year and a half. There are definitely a lot of highs and lows but overall I enjoy the way my work feels very personal and autonomous.
I love this quote by Derek Sivers:
> Nobody gives a novelist shit for writing alone. But an entrepreneur, programmer, or musician is expected to collaborate. I disagree, for me. I prefer the life of a novelist, whether I’m writing code, music, or systems.
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#145The mechanics aren't the hard part, I don't think. Managing emotions and being energetic are. If I were trying to start a company on my own I'd make sure I had a hobby that involved interactions with other people, and then try to find people to talk to about company building stuff.
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, even better, build a minimal MVP (1-2 weeks dev time) and use this to attract attention and get feedback.
Not every product can get to MVP in two weeks. If you were building a new kind of airplane, it better take more than two weeks. Our software is quite complex and there isn't going to be an MVP in two weeks, lol! I do think that building a UI prototype that you can click through is a good first step for complex software.
Absolutely, good point.
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this except switch the order. First, start selling. Then start building. It is so easy to waste so much time building something nobody wants, and you won't know until it's too late if you try to sell it afterward. Selling first will inform your decisions on what to build.
Single founder here. I think this doesn't work in B2B or may be I am talking to the wrong people, most of the potential customers I've spoken to want to see something - so the first question they ask is what have you built. This is in financial industry, building fraud product and like I said I may not know the right people to talk to. I think having domain contacts in B2B works great, specifically if you have somewh…
It can work in B2B, but maybe harder in finance as you say.
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#148I've done it twice. The first time because I was so young. I'm not even sure "startup" was in our vocabulary in 2006. Oh boy I wish I would've had a founder to help me out. I had no idea how to monetize all the traffic I was getting. I learned to code while building the website, so things were pretty shotty. What could have been...
The second time I had to ditch my partner. I found him stealing money, he had no drive either. Just a wretched scrap of humanity. After taking the code and letting him keep the worthless domain he was supposed to do SEO on I registered a new domain and got the site up in a night. Ended up being reasonably profitable at $2,000 a month, but was just too much work for one person. I sold the site in 2014.
Since then every time I find a "co-founder" it seems I end up doing most of the work. Maybe there is something wrong with me or maybe its really hard to find a good co-founder.
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#149You don't have to have superpowers. You just have to have some product sense, some engineering chops, and the ability to take 6 months off (not everyone can afford this, and that sucks) to build the thing and see if you can get people to look at it and buy it. You'll learn all the other stuff along the way (taxes, marketing, and eventually: hiring). Just give it a shot. If you run out of savings and have to go back t…
Part of the excellence of interviewcake is that it feels like it was made by a person. When you're reading passages on the site, you can tell that the same person wrote them all. When you have an issue or a suggestion, you email it in, and the founder emails you back immediately.
It doesn't feel like a venture-backed company that provides an anemic free trial, but designs the entire product to upsell you to the subscription. Nope. It costs a few hundred bucks. Take it or leave it. If it doesn't work, you can get a refund.
This probably isn't a scalable way to do business, but isn't it nice that ignoring the growth impulse can actually make your product better?
Re: Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this except switch the order. First, start selling. Then start building. It is so easy to waste so much time building something nobody wants, and you won't know until it's too late if you try to sell it afterward. Selling first will inform your decisions on what to build.
Can I ask an honest question respectfully? I don’t have a company or a startup. But I’ve always wanted to start one. So I’m always curious when I see a response like yours. How do you sell first? There isn’t a product to show. How do you find Customers? Is it the philosophy that the customer doesn’t know better and you have to tell them what they need, all the while understanding what your capabilities are. Like unde…
I'm creating an open source todo list + calendar webapp (https://getartemis.app, source at https://github.com/satvikpendem/artemis) made by just me, and I can tell you how I approached the problem.
The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity.
It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product.
Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.