31–40 of 70 posts
I would say the hardest part for me is balancing time between building and outreach. It's always concerning to build stuff mindlessly without having a tight user loop, but in the beginning it's really hard to wear multiple hats and figure out how to do both. I wish I had a great co-founder who could handle the outreach and audience part, but that's probably like wishing for a genie.
If anyone invests in crypto or stocks at all, feel free to check them out [0][1] - I am always looking for feedback (I haven't publicly "launched" yet but am close).
Fun fact: everything here is in Python, both frontend and backend.
[1]: https://stockquanta.com (only landing page)
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…
I've been a solo founder for some time. By far the toughest thing for me has been the cognitive load. I don't mean raw time. I generally have enough time to get done what I need to get done. I'm talking about the sheer number of different things I have to think about and pay attention to. It's more about mental clutter and management of it than time management, at least for my own case. Burnout can be an issue too an…
I've been on this for 4 years and I feel like my personality has changed due to the fact that my brain can't dedicate reasonable resources to anything other than running the business. I used to have several interests (musical instruments, travel, film, photography) and now I can only afford to care about business and family. The only things I can talk about are related to business or child-rearing.
What keeps me going is that I should be able to retire at least 20 years sooner than I would by working a regular 9 to 5 job, so I'll have plenty of time to dedicate to other interests.
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 had clear skin my entire life until I started to develop severe cystic acne as a 32 year old adult (after about 6 months of non-stop work into my startup). Once I started dialing things back, my skin got way better.
Both of these were with people I knew for a while and initially had good chemistry with - but it ended up going sour over ultimately product/idea differences (both over 3 year stretches). I feel I did most of the work anyway (development work in a deep tech startup) and the sales/business partner basically just walked away with the biggest clients (since they were the face of the company as far as the client was concerned).
The next startup I do, I'll just pay for sales/consulting with cash, rather than cofounder equity.
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…
Good luck
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…
Note that depending on scale and industry, you can design around this to an extent. My company largely runs automatically. I mostly work on growing it. I have a contract programmer and support rep who handle stuff. Requires very little day to day input from me.
Don't get me wrong. If I became quadrapeligic, things would gradually break. But depending on time required away, I could have someone come and take input from me on some decisions, stop some functions, etc
I got this from the 4 hour workweek, which is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to make a solo business based on systems.
I do know the system works incidentally: there have been periods where for 1-2 months I did almost nothing. Just coming out of one due to a concussion that knocked me out of work. The business grew nonetheless, though I have a backlog of some things to take care of.
So, if you are starting a solo business, you have a bus factor of 1. You should consider the design of it, and what happens if you become unable to work on it.
Of course, this bars you from some industries or business models.