Persisting as a solo founder • Hacker News Board

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#31

Post by yread » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #19

superasn wrote: post #10

Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add: 1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience. 2. Making a product wi…

I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective? I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations". If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywor…

I would also like to know, but SEO is also about the backlinks. Quantity and what anchor text they use, where are they etc.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#32

Post by ZephyrBlu » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

vishnumohandas wrote: post #15

senojretep356 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of this although I think if you do privacy well there is a core of people willing to pay so yes your market is much smaller but still potentially valuable. My issue really is with taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything. I see the authors comment that he's not a fan of ship fast and apologise later but surely you can put a beta out there even if it's just for feedback from the indie hacke…

> taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything So I spent the first couple of months chasing an on-premise alternative to photo storage[1]. Then I realized that the product was difficult to sell, and required a substantial investment of capital so I pivoted to an E2EE alternative on the cloud. I also spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to raise investment, which I regret at this point. > how long are you…

How much time do you estimate you've spent developing the product?

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#33

Post by jchook » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #19

superasn wrote: post #10

Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add: 1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience. 2. Making a product wi…

I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective? I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations". If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywor…

sitemap.xml can cause your search result to appear with sub-links.

Keyword density (just the right amount) and total word count seem to have an effect and I’ve seen targeted landers work very well for specific search phrases.

Backlinks will probably always be relevant to rankings as they were the original bedrock principle behind PageRank. If you get prominent blogs to link to you, that can help a lot. Inversely, use rel=nofollow on anchors to avoid seeping relevance to other pages.

Ever since Mobilegeddon your site MUST be mobile friendly or you will get penalized. Also other UI stuff matters (E.g. don’t put ads above the fold)

Not an SEO expert here but I would consider those effective and small things you can do for SEO.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#34

Post by pontus » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #22

Solo founder here. Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. The product may be in what appears to be a crowded field. Identify niche opportunities or cases where an established leader is doing a poor job. It's fine to do some consulting on the side to pay the bills. Of course it will take time away from the product you are building; just be able to recognize when it's too much and scale back consul…

I think this is great advice.

I remember when I was an undergraduate physics student, looking forward to grad school and idolizing all the famous physicists. My adviser, who was not the most soft and cuddly type of guy, always pushed this type of hyper-alpha stuff on me, even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It really does damage to you and your self image, and I don't think the advice he gave me was really meant to help me as much as it was meant to help him feel superior.

Anyway, a bit later in life now I look back and realize that there are so many times when I've idolized a certain way of living / doing things that are actually not productive at all but rather just feed that same type of alpha-image.

There's no reason why you can't be successful on your own terms, even if that means taking the weekend off, being a solo founder, or whatever. Sure, I get that startups are hard and draining, but (not to lean too heavily on cliches) there's a difference between working hard and working smart and more often than not I think these types of alpha-founders are glorifying busyness.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#35

Post by eruci » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

Just like you, I quit my day job in my early 30s, and have not looked back since. Have founded a dozen companies in the meantime and am currently having the best financial year of my 15 year solo-founder career.

My advice is, hang in there. If you like what you are doing persist and adapt. My best product thus far is an API I built to support my original business plan. The original product I tried to build is long dead.

All the best. e.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#36

Post by graeme » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #19

superasn wrote: post #10

Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add: 1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience. 2. Making a product wi…

I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective? I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations". If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywor…

A lot of people don’t do technical SEO right. It sounds like you’re asking about whether there is something other than technical SEO and links to do right?

Not really. If you write good content, with relevant keywords, and people link to it, that is good SEO. Not clear what distinction you’re trying to draw.

There may be some scammy stuff with short term results, but you’re always one step away from an algo change or a manual penalty.

Edit: I forgot good internal linking/url schemes. Those matter.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#37

Post by PragmaticPulp » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #22

Solo founder here. Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for. The product may be in what appears to be a crowded field. Identify niche opportunities or cases where an established leader is doing a poor job. It's fine to do some consulting on the side to pay the bills. Of course it will take time away from the product you are building; just be able to recognize when it's too much and scale back consul…

> Make a product that people want and are willing to pay for.

Great point. The long-term survival of a business distills down to being able to bring in more money than it costs you to produce a product. It's such a simple concept, but it's easy to forget when you're swept up in the excitement of coding and engineering an idea you're excited about.

Ironically, it's the most ambitious engineers who tend to make the mistake of doing too much engineering work before trying to validate the product. I can't count how many times I've signed up to follow ambitious engineers' startup ventures that turn into years of highly-detailed marketing updates for products that never seem to get any closer to materializing. These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later with blog posts blaming the industry, the timing, the economy, or other external factors for their failure.

In reality, most of them could have determined their market fit, or lack thereof, much faster by launching a smaller version early and iterating with customer feedback.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#38

Post by ZephyrBlu » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #25

Also a solo founder here. The comment about going from dev to marketer is huge. I'm in that phase now and it's pretty daunting. I've spent so much time obsessing about the product and now that I finally have something...how do I get people to use it? I just started brainstorming ideas and it's actually fun to start diving into something I haven't had to think about before. Yes, daunting but so is everything about bei…

I think marketing it becomes a lot easier if you build with it in mind.

If you know what you're building will excite your target demographic, it's super easy to market.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#39

Post by superasn » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #19

superasn wrote: post #10

Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add: 1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience. 2. Making a product wi…

I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective? I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations". If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywor…

Yes SEO is still very much relevant and effective IMO. Regardless of the paid ads, Google sends a lot of organic traffic when you rank for the right keywords. If you were to buy this traffic you would spends thousand of dollars doing it. Same for Youtube. A good video is amazing source of targeted prospects.

Just think about how you find a new service, chances are you googled it and tried the 2-3 results.

Now as for the question - is it necessary? The answer is yes. Because if you don't do it your competitor will and as the joke goes "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google".

> Are there really any "tricks" that work?

I'm no SEO expert and so I don't care for meta tags, keywords. Title and page description are still important I think. I believe the most relevant things are the time user a spends on your page and social signals (shares, etc) and unfortunately backlinks from high authority pages (this is the worst part of SEO).

The good news is that you don't have to do anything sneaky to do SEO anymore. Make an excellent page on which a user spends a lot of time (so good that he actually bookmarks or shares it) and it starts ranking. For all its evilness Google is still doing something right here.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#40

Post by mattbee » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

vishnumohandas wrote: post #15

senojretep356 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of this although I think if you do privacy well there is a core of people willing to pay so yes your market is much smaller but still potentially valuable. My issue really is with taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything. I see the authors comment that he's not a fan of ship fast and apologise later but surely you can put a beta out there even if it's just for feedback from the indie hacke…

> taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything So I spent the first couple of months chasing an on-premise alternative to photo storage[1]. Then I realized that the product was difficult to sell, and required a substantial investment of capital so I pivoted to an E2EE alternative on the cloud. I also spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to raise investment, which I regret at this point. > how long are you…

Oh that looks great (but.. lol)

I'd lead with "Share your family's photos, access them everywhere you want them" rather the rather conspiratorial "corporations cannot be trusted". At least if you want to appeal to families. But what do I know!

I pay $99/year for Mylio which does importing, syncing & basic editing between devices, but my goodness it's slow - the only saving grace is that it's faster than Lightroom. Mylio doesn't really trade on privacy despite the impressive self-hosted cloud sync, and it doesn't trade on sharing between family members despite that being quite useful! If you want to see a very similar product, check out their forums and their very vocal customer base.

I'm also working on a solo startup (accounting) and I feel a lot of your pain - I've got 2 kids and it's mega-slow trying to work about 10hrs/week, but I'd echo what a few other people said here: however painful it feels, spend 50% of your time marketing and testing to make sure you're building the right thing. I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now, but it's valuable to a few users who are giving me feedback.

Good luck and keep in touch with HN :)