Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

Regarding (1), are you selling B2B or B2C. I've found that B2C customers typically don't care that much, and if anything they are happy to be communicating with the founder. This is true once you have something built. It may be different when you're still at the idea phase, and thinking about building.

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.

> It is just me - is that a red flag? Some people have asked me about my team and I told them it was just me. I got the feeling that it may have turned them off because the conversation kind of ended right there.

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.

Just you is also a plus: nobody to convince, 100% focus on the product. If you can hack it for a while like that until you need to bring in more people it may work to your advantage, unless you don't like working alone. One thing it will save you from is co-founder trouble (which is pretty common). One thing where you'll be week is criticism of your ideas and implementation, try to find people to have these roles for you in your network, this can be completely remote.

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!

Just do it and figure out the details as you go. You rapidly learn that everyone has an opinion on what you're doing. Some opinions are worth listening to; most aren't. Arguably experience is about working out who those people are. Almost certainly nobody understands your business better than you, even now. You'll get a thick skin when you seem to fail time and again. That's normal; work out how to pick up the pieces and carry on. Keep going as long as you're having fun and are able to. The only point you need to think really carefully is when your start investing your savings.

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

1) As mentioned by another comment, B2B customers may care about the size of your team if you are doing something business critical. From their perspective, they don't want to depend on a product that may not be there if one guy gets sick, takes a vacation, flakes, etc. One approach I have seen some people take is to answer something like "the team is under 10 people" which is technically true (ish)

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.