Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO? • Hacker News Board

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#31

Post by dahart » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

lokimedes wrote: post #10

Does anyone have similar recommendations regarding sales, marketing and other business critical functions? As someone contemplating the hard roads of B2B and non-SaaS , I feel a lack of basic advice on going from idea to revenue.

That’s a legit & hard question, and my startup experience is in consumer SaaS products, but my first thought is: are sales & marketing truly critical to your bootstrapping process, if you’re going B2B? I ask just because I’ve heard a lot of B2B, especially for young companies, happens via referral.

Like the article, one way is to do it yourself until you grow and can hire someone into the positions you need. Do you have 1 customer ready to go who will fund solo development? Do you have a team who will jump in if you land a seed round, or will you start building solo? This all depends a lot on your funding & runway situation.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#32

Post by xwowsersx » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

rubenfiszel wrote: post #16

Just want to add, I followed pretty much the same path with Windmill [1], which is also in the developer tool space, and also open-source. Built everything solo for 5 months. I thought it would be impossible to get into YC, it is not and I was fortunate enough to join YC on the latest batch, on my first try [2]. Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made…

Very cool, thanks for sharing. Windmill looks well done. I've got a few ideas I'm mulling over in the dev tools space and would consider going the solo technical founder. Will definitely reach out for some advice when the time comes. Out of curiosity, any downsides to use the .dev tld?

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#33

Post by matchagaucho » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

blumomo wrote: post #28

> if someone from the team steps up and adds a lot of value that is expected from a co-founder, we will definitely promote the person as a co-founder How can someone get the title of a cofounder of an already (at least) 2 years old company which is already set up an running? I understand that traditionally this person then represents in investor meetings, but why does it need to be a _founder_ title of something that…

"Founder" is not a title you can add casually under US law.

It's determined at the time of incorporation and stock issuance. QSBS, and other legal structures, do not allow transferability of "Founder" to follow-on Investors and employees.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#34

Post by awesomegoat_com » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

CEO and CTO sounds like too much work.

I call myself head of research in my own bootstrapped start-up. :-)

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#35

Post by dnadler » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

navaneethpk wrote: post #24

mannyv wrote: post #19

The important point here is that he got funding first, and it sounds like at least half a million because he didn't talk about begging angels for money or running out of runway. He was able to hire someone fast. You won't be this good/lucky. In the traditional non-traditional startup you need a salesperson and engineering to be free, because money. I suppose with dev tools you can get rid of the salesperson because y…

The part where I begged for funding is another story: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-... Also the link to HN launch that helped a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408

FYI, the Tutorial link in the footer of the tooljet site seems to be dead: https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/intro

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#36

Post by rubenfiszel » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

xwowsersx wrote: post #32

rubenfiszel wrote: post #16

Just want to add, I followed pretty much the same path with Windmill [1], which is also in the developer tool space, and also open-source. Built everything solo for 5 months. I thought it would be impossible to get into YC, it is not and I was fortunate enough to join YC on the latest batch, on my first try [2]. Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made…

Very cool, thanks for sharing. Windmill looks well done. I've got a few ideas I'm mulling over in the dev tools space and would consider going the solo technical founder. Will definitely reach out for some advice when the time comes. Out of curiosity, any downsides to use the .dev tld?

I would prefer the windmill.com domain but a cool windmill museum has it. I have not seen any downsides except Google (who owns the .tld) kept refusing to approve our oauth because the approval team was convinced that .dev could only be for testing.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#37

Post by navaneethpk » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

matchagaucho wrote: post #33

blumomo wrote: post #28

> if someone from the team steps up and adds a lot of value that is expected from a co-founder, we will definitely promote the person as a co-founder How can someone get the title of a cofounder of an already (at least) 2 years old company which is already set up an running? I understand that traditionally this person then represents in investor meetings, but why does it need to be a _founder_ title of something that…

"Founder" is not a title you can add casually under US law. It's determined at the time of incorporation and stock issuance. QSBS, and other legal structures, do not allow transferability of "Founder" to follow-on Investors and employees.

I might be wrong here but "Founder" is just a title and it has nothing to do with law or investors. Adding another "Director"/"Officer" requires some paperwork though.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#38

Post by xwowsersx » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

navaneethpk wrote: post #6

intelVISA wrote: post #4

#1 is too true, it's a nightmare to try find someone suitable & non-technical to augment any dev tooling (or similar) venture IME How did you handle the VC raise or were you entirely bootstrapped?

I've written another article that explains how we raised seed round here: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-...

Good post, very helpful. So it sounds a good approach, or at least one, if you can't just quit your job and go full-time without some funding is to launch the project/product and go straight for a seed round which then gives you the resources you need to go full-time. Great to hear this is a plan that can work, assuming the project gets enough love.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#39

Post by dilyevsky » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

blumomo wrote: post #28

> if someone from the team steps up and adds a lot of value that is expected from a co-founder, we will definitely promote the person as a co-founder How can someone get the title of a cofounder of an already (at least) 2 years old company which is already set up an running? I understand that traditionally this person then represents in investor meetings, but why does it need to be a _founder_ title of something that…

Some startups now retrofit co-founder title to employees as recruiting tactic. Part of the overall title inflation trend I presume. I’ve seen some extreme examples where there are dozens of “co-founders” on the roster.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#40

Post by e1g » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

navaneethpk wrote: post #29

e1g wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your experience was - having a social circle to intro investors, inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for solo founders with negligible traction.

> having a social circle to intro investors > with negligible traction Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.

"GitHub stars", like "the number of downloads", is a weak signal, rarely meaningful in traction talks unless there's nothing more substantial to discuss. Traction indicators for a low-code platform would be revenue, number of paid users, number of apps deployed/updated with ToolJet, number of different people using ToolJet apps, the volume of data captured/processed per week, etc.