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

It's fun to learn some business skills along the way.

It's more possible than ever to build great digital products with a tiny team (or even single person).

If you have a day job, then keep your day job. Start implementing your idea on the side. Do it for at least 1 year. Startup is a marathon. There are a lot of "over night" success stories from media that seek for clicks. But in reality, you'd need to wait for many years to see traction. Do the test drive for 1 year, and see if you still enjoy it.

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 to work, in interviews you'll get to say you "did a startup."

My company is bootstrapped. It isn't growing fast enough to fit PG's definition of a startup, but it's 5 years old and makes 7 figures.

Realizing after a few months that I didn't have to do a "startup" really helped. Whew, no more putzing with decks, trying to figure out how to get into an incubator, trying to raise funds, trying to convince one of my friends to quit their job and be my cofounder, "hustling", committing myself to never sleeping again. I could just focus on building a great product.

And I think my company worked because I was product focused. In the early days I just thought a lot about what the /best possible/ solution to the problem I was solving would look like, built what I saw, put it in front of friends (and eventually strangers from the internet), and made tweaks based on their feedback (and things they didn't say but that I noticed about how they used it).

This is contrary to the "sell first" idea--when I tried to cold pitch friends on my product idea they all said "eh, I don't think I'd really use it over the existing solutions." Those same friends asked me to comp their accounts a couple years later.

It worked for me. "Sell first" might be more important if you're selling to businesses? But like, getting the "x first" part wrong for a few months probably isn't going to kill you. Just start doing stuff. Wiggle around in your space until things start to catch.

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 idea/business might still fail but without actually doing anything you have lost already.

I was speaking to an entrepreneur today, trying to learn about his industry and sell him marketing services. The guy kept coming up with reasons not to grow. Even when I asked him, what if you had 20 more customers willing to spend $15K (his dream cust), he said he would have problems fulfilling those customers.

This guy does not have a growth mindset. Maybe that's by choice; maybe he is happy with the current revenue, which is fine.

But as a new entrepreneur, a growth mindset is essential. The best way I know to overcome this is to have a coach or even better a coach who has already built that kind of business you are trying to build.