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Persisting as a solo founder

vishnu.tech

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Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#41

Post by PragmaticPulp »

pontus wrote: post #34
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 imag…

> even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics.

It's always fascinating to see people make claims like this, despite all evidence showing that it's impossible to maintain. Some extreme genetic outliers may be able to sustain performance with around 5 hours of sleep per night, but no one is going to last very long on 2-3 hours per sleep each night.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#42

Post by tmilard »

Many advantages as being solo. 1) If you fail, it only impacts you. Often underated but important as in startup ventures, failure will be 80% of cases. Solo : you hurt no one. 2) You can change path easily. To come to sucess, you will inevitably change of directions (technically or on the clients you are targeting, ect). I think Being alone is cool because you need no explanation. So You can go fast.

Drawback : Social validation ! Of course, your friends, your familly, many potential investors will not be friend at all with the idea of being alone here. So yes, this is tough. It was for me.

Now, I see it more as a test : If you can accept that being alone for a while is socially painfull but not that horrible, well go on : build your software, full time or part-time if you have no more cash.

And think about it. How many people is needed to drive a car ? A Solo driver.

Solo mean YOU DRIVE the experiment --> This is good

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#43

Post by kyle_morris_ »

First company I started was solo, second company was with a co-founder.

My perspective is that this proverb is right on: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Having a cofounder completely changed my second company's trajectory. Having someone who takes on the parts of the business where I am weak, and visa-versa, has made a world of difference.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#44

Post by xwdv »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41
pontus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imag…

> even telling me that he himself only sleeps 2-3 hours per night just so that he can do more physics. It's always fascinating to see people make claims like this, despite all evidence showing that it's impossible to maintain. Some extreme genetic outliers may be able to sustain performance with around 5 hours of sleep per night, but no one is going to last very long on 2-3 hours per sleep each night.

How do you rule out if the professor is an extreme genetic outlier? Seems like the kind of place you’d expect to find such an outlier.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#45

Post by ZephyrBlu »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #37
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 mis…

It's hard to get out of an engineering mindset and into a product/customer focused mindset.

We like building things, and making them fast and powerful and efficient.

The customer doesn't care about any of that though. They just want something that helps them.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#46

Post by jahbrewski »

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…

While I agree with the sentiment of #1, I would argue that sales are more important than marketing at this stage. You can spin your wheels “learning SEO” and “creating content” with very little tangible results. In the beginning, sales + product are just about all that matter.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#47

Post by dragstor »

Akcium wrote: post #4

Don't know if it's relevant but I spent almost a year on "zombie startup" and still is working on it. I wrote about some techniques how to keep persistence for solo founders: https://medium.com/@victor.ponamariov/how-therapy-turned-out...

Interesting read! Friend sent the link to this article to me like a week ago. Nice one.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#48

Post by gramakri »

lukevp wrote: post #14

It sounds like you have the motivation and persistence figured out. That’s great! Have you read Lean Startup and done some customer research? Maybe I’m wrong, but gut reaction to this app is that very few people would be willing to pay for this. If someone is privacy conscious and anti-google, Apple has a much better track record for privacy. I get multiple gigabytes of cloud backup for free and can add on additional…

Nextcloud is really not a photo management solution though. The e2e support is nextcloud is really not production quality. Do you use either of these for your setup because I am happy to change my mind.

I use emby these days for managing photos and auto uploads.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#49

Post by gramakri »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #29
lukevp wrote: post #14

It sounds like you have the motivation and persistence figured out. That’s great! Have you read Lean Startup and done some customer research? Maybe I’m wrong, but gut reaction to this app is that very few people would be willing to pay for this. If someone is privacy conscious and anti-google, Apple has a much better track record for privacy. I get multiple gigabytes of cloud backup for free and can add on additional…

This was valuable feedback, thanks. > people who understand and care about end to end encryption could just set up a NextCloud instance This is the exact problem I'd like to solve. It worries me that currently only the tech savvy can afford privacy. I'd like to take a shot at making privacy accessible to a larger audience. Something along the lines of what ProtonMail is doing to GMail. Of course I might fail at attra…

I think this is a fantastic attitude. Build something that you personally care about. Worst that can happen is you lose a lot of money, but honestly what would be worse if you never tried.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#50

Post by [deleted] »

jahbrewski wrote: post #46
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…

While I agree with the sentiment of #1, I would argue that sales are more important than marketing at this stage. You can spin your wheels “learning SEO” and “creating content” with very little tangible results. In the beginning, sales + product are just about all that matter.

[deleted]
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