Glad to see others talking about being a solo founder. I run a virtual meetup for fellow solo founders. We share the notes at solofounders.substack.com
Persisting as a solo founder
221–230 of 263 posts
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#222>To minimize the overhead of context switches, I split tasks into a tree of checkpoints. Before taking a break I note down the next simplest checkpoint so that when I get back to work there’s little friction to resume.
This reminds me of a trick I deployed while studying for an tedious exam back in the college days, that worked super good at the time but I haven't tried it since.
I used to have the problem to wander off in my thoughts unrelated to the exam(task) at hand. It would often also be interesting thoughts: "well if X is true as this course material claims what about Z? oh that remind me of Y! let me just quickly google/wikipedia...." so letting the thought go was incredibly hard.
The simple solution was to realize as quickly as possible when I fell in to those thought pattern, write down what started the thought, and what associations propagated it. Then write down where it stopped, and the potential rest of the thought chain I could think of. All on one A4 paper that I promised to review at the end of the day after the exam study. The mere promise of reviewing it at the end of the day reduced the procrastination due wandering off from approx 2-4 hours a day to 30min max.
Worked quite fine, and it was easy to see what thought were actually interesting and demanded follow ups, and what was just useless (but enjoyable) thought experiments.
It also helped to have the "Todo today list" A4 paper next to this "chain of thought" paper while writing it down, to get back to the study quicker.
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#223As a solo founder for 10+ years, what I can say is that all "rules" in business are "rules of thumb"... Not laws. It's ok to be a solo founder... Sometimes. Bounce ideas off your team instead of your co-founders. Make use of mentors. There is a workaround for all your challenges. I also recommend listening to podcasts with other founders. I host a podcast called "Open Source Underdogs". Lots of good advice there for…
Looks like an interesting podcast! Unfortunately, my podcast client doesn't load anything earlier than episode 22, and Spotify doesn't either - it looks like the RSS feed doesn't contain the earlier episodes. Is that expected behavior? I was particularly surprised to learn that Moodle is open-source. I used it in school before the world of software development and open-source was on my radar.
I managed to find playable early episodes here -> https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/open-source-underdogs-o...
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#224Just 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 de…
I did the same and I regret most of it :) All my attempts were total failures.
It's also fine to just dance back to a 9-5. Having a paycheck and living an OK life if perfectly fine.
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#225Earlier 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?
Some platforms like Facebook and Twitter do, but HN and Reddit are (outwardly) based on votes, so you're seeing what the community thinks is important, not what you yourself do.
Mind you, there's a lot of people (myself included) who want to keep up to date on what others find interesting at the moment.
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I'd be interested in your local trello. I was meaning to write a todo-app based on best psych best practices, especially only presenting the highest priority ( = urgent * important) item at any given time. I also wanted to add ordered sub-tasks, due-date, and time estimate features so that the urgency ramps up automatically as the remaining time to complete a task approaches the estimated length of the task.
You should look at Taskwarrior for some inspiration! I use TW and it has the features you mentioned(and I use them regularly). Urgency is derived from certain coefficients[1]. [1] https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html
The problem I have with Taskwarrior is that (from a layman's point of view, i.e. mine) there's a lot of new information you need to learn just to get to the point of a simple TODO. Whereas Trello has the massive benefit of being intuitive and you're up and running in seconds after making the board without even having to read any docs.
Anyway I'd be interested in learning Taskwarrior, but in my day job I work in a team and I can't make them use that kind of tooling.
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#227Earlier 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.
Maybe going on a cocaine/stim bender can sustain this for a little while then crash through the weekends when everyone is less productive. Obviously a terrible idea long-term to avoid chemical dependence/brain damage, but it's common enough that I've met quite a few of these "barely sleep yet hyper-productive" types that are abusing stimulants beyond coffee to keep it going during the work week.
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#228>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…
sometimes a person seemingly doing unrelated things is still 'working'. i know at least for myself, i run through various scenarios of the outcome rather than staring at the code before i make my decision to implement. edit: and i'll typically run through those scenarios while doing seemingly unrelated stuff, like shitposting on reddit or sitting in a blacked out room.
In a similar vein I often like to try out a few avenues, because thinking about them won't get me any further, i need to interact with them to build meaningful scenarios.
Of course if you try three ways to get the right way, you've "wasted" time on trying to two wrong things.
E.g. when selecting a library it's often hard to find the one case that breaks, just from reading documentation, instead playing around with the library can get you there faster.
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#229Being 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…
Hey, I'd be interested in your local trello. I was meaning to write a todo-app based on best psych best practices, especially only presenting the highest priority ( = urgent * important) item at any given time. I also wanted to add ordered sub-tasks, due-date, and time estimate features so that the urgency ramps up automatically as the remaining time to complete a task approaches the estimated length of the task.
Try this open source project, I set it up on shared hosting and it's amazing and full-featured https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard
Re: Persisting as a solo founder
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, may…
Want to share your 2.5 successful products built this way?