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What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

tik.dev

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#21

I've been working on a project with a couple people that I don't get a lot of value from as co-founders right now because they aren't designers or engineers. They are trying to help us define the set of requirements given their relationships in the industry, but they have not really done product work before. I keep telling myself how valuable they will be once we launch because they will bring customers. Echoed by th…

I were in similar situation. I had two shareholders in company that will bring value in the future - that was the hope. They have some skills that I were missing (I thought). At the end I was alone with my product and was stagnating. I decided to ask them to leave the company as I will re-write the product from scratch and make the product core as open source. They agreed to leave the company. Now, I'm 100% solo. Sometimes it is very hard - you even cant talk to anyone. But I know that I'm going to make everything myself or hire a freelancers for help, but I am not relaying on anyone and I think this helps me stay motivated. Having shareholders (or cofounders) that are not shipping regularly with you is very demotivating in my opinion.

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#22
post #19

I've been working on a project with a couple people that I don't get a lot of value from as co-founders right now because they aren't designers or engineers. They are trying to help us define the set of requirements given their relationships in the industry, but they have not really done product work before. I keep telling myself how valuable they will be once we launch because they will bring customers. Echoed by th…

one thing they could and should be doing is enabling those conversations with potential customers right now so you can validate the product/features you're building as well as have them be ready/aware to use your product when you do launch.

Agree with this. Your domain experts should already be inputting into the product and bringing early adopters to the table to help you build the right product. You development for X months whilst they wait for the product to be fully baked is the wrong way to go about it.

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#23
post #3

Thanks for sharing! I have spent a lot of time as a solo founder and I’ve spent time as a co-founder. I thought it might be helpful to contrast my experiences. As a solo founder I found that the highs were muted and the lows were amplified. This likely won’t be true for everyone but this was very true for me. As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so ma…

"Statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder" is true in the sense that accelerators like YC have this as a selection criterion. I'd be curious to see if this is true without the selection effect.

There's this, https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/2-founders-are..., which I intuitively agree with, but I'm not sure how strong MBA-style research can be.

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#24
I ran my company successfully as a single founder for 5 years, till one day I was told I would become a quadriplegic & I had to close my company as there's no other executive to take care of it.

I had Facebook Fb Start accelerated product with 2,50,000 customers , any company expressing interest in acquiring my product wanted me to work for them; which wasn't possible as I was recovering from surgery.

Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company.

I used to despise YCombinator's co-founder requirement, now I advice everyone to get a co-founder before they start their operations.

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#25

I ran my company successfully as a single founder for 5 years, till one day I was told I would become a quadriplegic & I had to close my company as there's no other executive to take care of it. I had Facebook Fb Start accelerated product with 2,50,000 customers , any company expressing interest in acquiring my product wanted me to work for them; which wasn't possible as I was recovering from surgery. Being single fo…

Wow I am sorry to hear that. Best of luck man.

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#26

After running a thing by myself for nearly ten years, I would say the most important factor is anxiety management. People experience anxiety very differently, so it's hard to give advice, but without some way of dealing with and reducing this stress it is not possible to run a solo business for a sustained period of time. Some examples of what can make you anxious working solo: * A "lumpy" income stream that is hard…

How did it go with the competitor? Look on the bright side, at least a partner didn't steal your IP and go on to compete. I have seen that happen to at least 3 people I know fairly well irl.

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#27

After running a thing by myself for nearly ten years, I would say the most important factor is anxiety management. People experience anxiety very differently, so it's hard to give advice, but without some way of dealing with and reducing this stress it is not possible to run a solo business for a sustained period of time. Some examples of what can make you anxious working solo: * A "lumpy" income stream that is hard…

How did it go with the competitor? Look on the bright side, at least a partner didn't steal your IP and go on to compete. I have seen that happen to at least 3 people I know fairly well irl.

I bought them

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#28

I've been working on a project with a couple people that I don't get a lot of value from as co-founders right now because they aren't designers or engineers. They are trying to help us define the set of requirements given their relationships in the industry, but they have not really done product work before. I keep telling myself how valuable they will be once we launch because they will bring customers. Echoed by th…

Note that the below makes big assumptions as to what the situation looks like. I read a lot between the lines, so take the words below with a grain of salt.

I won't sugar coat it: it's a tough situation to be in because you need to fix a potential mistake that was done a while back and doing so, while going in the proper direction of fairness, can be interpreted as unfair by other parties.

First I would have a discussion by putting yourself in the shoes of the company, not your personal shoes, as you have a fiduciary duty to do it. This removes your personal interests from the discussion, as it should, and will make it less personal (as it should too). From that perspective, the company needs to do what's best for itself, and giving away significant equity for little in return doesn't seem to fulfill that duty. I imagine your cofounders also have a fiduciary duty to make decisions that are aligned with the company's interests, even if these decisions aren't the best for themselves. This is a good test for that.

If the contributions of your other co-founders are minimal, then it needs to be reflected in the equity allocation.

Perhaps an acceptable solution would be to turn these "future founders" into advisors. You can use the Founder Advisor Standard Template as a simple framework to allocate shares vs contributions (see https://fi.co/fast ) - this will keep them engaged, compensated for their current contributions, and also gives the company a way to have a history with them to decide whether it makes sense to turn them into co-founders later or not (whether you want to call it co-founders when that happens is irrelevant).

What's nice about the FAST template is twofold: first, it formalizes the type of work that advisors do (in terms of workload too) and it relates that to a specific percentage of equity, allowing you to map their levels contributions to a more reasonable compensation. Second, it was not engineered by you: you have not written the template so you cannot be accused of influencing it for your benefit.

Lastly, a lot of this depends on how the relationship between the founders is. You may find out that things don't work out as easy as you'd want to, and that's a lesson that's better to have earlier than later. Conversely, you may find out that your cofounders agree and perhaps were a bit uneasy by the unfair allocation.

Good luck!

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#29
post #3

Thanks for sharing! I have spent a lot of time as a solo founder and I’ve spent time as a co-founder. I thought it might be helpful to contrast my experiences. As a solo founder I found that the highs were muted and the lows were amplified. This likely won’t be true for everyone but this was very true for me. As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so ma…

Solo founder is such a loaded term. Every freelancer, dropshipper, consultant is also a solo-founder. it's just not as glamorous as building a venture backed product.

Re: What I Learned in My First Year Year as a Solo Founder

#30

After running a thing by myself for nearly ten years, I would say the most important factor is anxiety management. People experience anxiety very differently, so it's hard to give advice, but without some way of dealing with and reducing this stress it is not possible to run a solo business for a sustained period of time. Some examples of what can make you anxious working solo: * A "lumpy" income stream that is hard…

I’m dealing with this right now. There just needs to be a single anxious thought and I’ll be crippled with the fear of failure - what if it doesn’t workout, what if this, what if that - and consequently my productivity gets destroyed.
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