Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?

Speaking as a sole founder with many friends that go their path alone as well, this is not anywhere close to a requirement. There are people for whom this journey is natural and they are more suited, and others for whom they'd prefer or need to be with someone else.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution for founders. Co-founders come with their own set of issues--whether you're on the same page about the company's goals, whether your skill sets are complementary or not, what kind of long term commitment you both have to the problem space, etc.

Some advice after spending a couple years navigating from nothing to a team of 10:

0. Pick an area in which you have domain expertise. If you're building something you actually want to use yourself, that's even better. As a solo founder, it's even more important that you have a strong intuition for your users and for your problem space.

1. Make something people want, get people to use it, and talk to them. This comes first, and almost everything else can and should be ignored until you've done this. This is the best way to attract good people. This is also the best way to attract funding. This should be your north star. If you're struggling to find people and/or funding, goto #1.

2. You have advantages, too: as a solo founder, you should be able to move faster than anyone else - even companies with cofounders or entire teams - in the early stages. When you talk to people and they make suggestions, you can and should literally immediately make them, deploy them, and tell them that you did so. This may feel strange once it starts to feel like you're a glorified CS rep, but this is actually the iteration loop that you want to be in. You can do this faster than anyone else because you have zero communication overhead and zero friction between the point at which feedback is received and the point at which improvements are shipped. When you find yourself in this state, bask in it for as long as possible.

3. Give your early people a lot of equity and make sure they feel like they own the company too.

The good thing is that it's been more straightforward than I expected (though certainly not easier than I expected).

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 solo development.

I sell first before coding anything.

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.

Did you build first then sell? Can you elaborate on minimal product in not more than 9 months?

I'm a somewhat frequent contributor on IndieHackers actually. To promote the page, I basically posted it everywhere I could (without getting banned) and started asking my friends to critique the site. When applicable, I would also answer questions on fora as I am now. In terms of time, I'm not really sure, it's an on and off commitment as I also have a job.

Anything other questions or anything you're working on as well?