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Persisting as a solo founder

vishnu.tech

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Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#181

Post by Phil-bitplex »

dsbleia wrote: post #119

>I’ve reduced my information consumption to free up brain cycles. This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria. I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Y…

I agree - I have to consciously choose what I want to feed my brain. It's so easy to choose things that don't align with my goals, whether that be family, personal or business goals.

Do I find the non-stop inexplicable US politics fascinating? Yes. Is it helpful to my business? Nope.

Every week i have to revisit my goals, decide whats important, and remind myself that I don't need to learn everything, be all things to all people. It's okay to choose and to say 'no' to distractions, information sources and people.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#182

Post by tolbish »

throwawayinfo wrote: post #139
dsbleia wrote: post #119

>I’ve reduced my information consumption to free up brain cycles. This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria. I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Y…

I'm trying to build something which tackles this problem. The idea would be delegating the decision of what you consume to an algorithm (that you can control), and you'll be delivered a subset of news/content daily. Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit. Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?

You are describing an RSS feed.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#183

Post by richard_g »

koolba wrote: post #173
dsbleia wrote: post #119

>I’ve reduced my information consumption to free up brain cycles. This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria. I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Y…

The most productive and successful individuals I know oscillate between multi day 16+ hour sessions of hyper productivity and multi day sessions of total procrastination. It’s never chugging along at a consistent marathon pace. It’s always a series of sprints.

I've found the same. When you have things to done you get them done. When you don't, you can sit around browsing the internet all day. It tends to be when things pile up that you are most effective at getting through them!

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#184

Post by novocaine »

an_opabinia wrote: post #131
captainmuon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later Is that really the most common problem? I would probably be one of those engineers (if I'd start a business) and I'm a lot more afraid to sell something that doesn't exist yet than the other way around. Because now in addition to your usual problems you have legal obligations to deliver a product. I think this is one of the reasons for the crazy crunch culture…

> Is that really the most common problem? The most common problem, if you're a really talented engineer, is that you could work for a big company and be paid more in a single year than your business will bring in for its entire lifetime. Conversely what you really find is, the people running 20+ person companies with tens of millions in investor money to bring in only $1m in revenue a year - they lacked the talent, a…

This is entirely correct, and it also true that there are more opportunities in the startup world to build something meaningful and exciting from scratch and to have an unforgettable experience doing it. Not quite everyone is in tech for the money..

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#185

Post by loktarogar »

koolba wrote: post #173
dsbleia wrote: post #119

>I’ve reduced my information consumption to free up brain cycles. This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria. I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Y…

The most productive and successful individuals I know oscillate between multi day 16+ hour sessions of hyper productivity and multi day sessions of total procrastination. It’s never chugging along at a consistent marathon pace. It’s always a series of sprints.

Yep. Over the last two years i've been fortunate enough to have a lot of time on my hands. In that time i've built 3 and a half successful products. 6 days of (thinking mostly, some research) about what to do. 1 day of actually doing it. It's so easy to spend that one day completely and productively - I already know what i'm supposed to do, I just have to sit down and do it.

The 6 days (not always 6 - maybe more, maybe less) let me come up with and throw out stupid ideas before i've coded them. By the time I come to build something it's a carefully considered thing that'll actually be useful most of the time.

It's not just feature ideas either, it's code design, data design, anything that might be complicated enough that I used to spend multiple days experimenting. It doesn't always work out, but when it doesn't, i've thought it through enough that I have a head start on coming up with a better design.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#186

Post by richard_g »

pritovido wrote: post #156
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course the customer cares about fast, powerful and efficient things they can use. What happens is that most of the time making something fast, powerful and efficient implies so much resources that the ambitious engineer can not complete the project in time. Customers prefer something that works today, even with limited functionality that something perfect that only works inside the mind of the engineer. That is th…

Not only that -- a lot of people pursue "innovative" technologies and try to build something all new, when existing ideas have only reached 1% of the market that need them because it takes a lot of work to actually get people on board.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#187

Post by richard_g »

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…

Spending a lot of time building something is a great way to put off the painful realization that people don't want to pay for it.

Asking for sales up front means you have to face that right away. It's better for the business but harder for the founder.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#188

Post by jimbokun »

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.

At what point does sales end and marketing begins?

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#189

Post by throwawayinfo »

herval wrote: post #174
throwawayinfo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to build something which tackles this problem. The idea would be delegating the decision of what you consume to an algorithm (that you can control), and you'll be delivered a subset of news/content daily. Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit. Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?

Isn't that pretty much what all platforms these platforms do these days, with algorithmic feeds? What level of control do you plan to add on top of it? And more importantly - how do you plan to monetize a model that's pretty much dependent on dopamine hits, without making it _more_ addictive/a time-waste?

Well, I've been building algorithms which explain _why_ something was surfaced, not just being a black box. Everything is controllable from data sources, ranking/filtering weights and a feedback mechanism to tweak this.

As for monetisation, I've thought about this a lot - and I don't think the time wasting is needed to create a good product. Google Search certainly isn't fueled by dopamine hits, and from an ads standpoint, our users are saying exactly what they want to see every morning.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#190

Post by throwawayinfo »

koolba wrote: post #173
dsbleia wrote: post #119

>I’ve reduced my information consumption to free up brain cycles. This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria. I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Y…

The most productive and successful individuals I know oscillate between multi day 16+ hour sessions of hyper productivity and multi day sessions of total procrastination. It’s never chugging along at a consistent marathon pace. It’s always a series of sprints.

This is me. I always thought it was some kind of undiagnosed ADHD, ngl.
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