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I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely

#11

Post by goodgoblin »

Long hours without alot of positive feedback from the business you are building can be very lonely.

Its kind of like the first 6 months you are taking care of a baby, they really don't do much but need to be attended to constantly, and usually you can take solace in the sheer love of what you are making, but sometimes at 4 am when the little thing is crying and all you want to do is get some sleep and then you have to get up and go into work the next day anyway, having someone to share the experience with is great.

I like the idea of meetups, but I'm in the Hartford area, not sure there are a ton of startups around. What would be kind of cool though would be some kind of "Who's working on their startup now" list, maybe even here on YC's site, where people could sign-in when you start working and we could have some kind of quiet community, even if its just the ethereal prescence of our names.

Re: I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely

#12

Post by zaidf »

volida wrote: post #8

zaidf, amichail the thing is that most of the time you don't care. But there are times that suddenly you become aware of it, and if its one of the times that it annoys you then it strikes you, and thats when you need maybe somebody to either support you (the case of someone who is active part in the early process of starting up) or fulfil it before it becomes a need. And as always you must get over it

Trust me I've gone through it. I've posted before my success ratio in partner versus no partner ventures. In my case I couldn't get over it and after few too many projects going no where, I decided to take the partner route.

I doubt I'll be starting anything in future without a partner or two.

Re: I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely

#13

Post by danw »

joshwa wrote: post #9

has anyone found any of the various web2.0/entrepreneur meetups to be useful for this? I'll be at the next web2.0 meetup in NYC -- http://newtech.meetup.com/21/

I've found events such as opencoffee and barcamps to be encouraging. Only trouble is the barcamps only happen every few weeks

Re: I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely

#14

Post by brett »

Definitely. I think there's more to it, but you've captured the fact the most the major downsides are emotional/psychological. There's no one to temper doubts. Worse, you're not letting anyone else down if you slack off; having others depend on your efforts is a powerful motivator.

"so freaking lonely" does sum it up pretty well though.

Re: I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely

#18

Post by floozyspeak »

i totally agree with this, here in the midwest i can barely find a handful of folks that even know what i'm talking about when it comes to 2.0 type ideas...

it is heavy, and you feel lonely, and yet you also feel like you got nothing to lose other than a house, a life, family and everything else... which is why we all need to be more wealthy, and more sane via yoga and good workouts...

Re: I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely

#19

Post by far33d »

pg wrote: post #7

I believe it. Oddly enough, it's lonely even when there are a couple of you. This is one of the main reasons we do YC in batches. The startups all become one another's friends, because they're all in the same situation. I think it's well worth the inconvenience of moving in order to have a large group of energetic and sympathetic peers. That's the deal with college, after all.

I constantly miss that one aspect of college: thousands of intelligent, motivated, somewhat naive, experimental people thinking about the same problems for no reason other than "because it's interesting".
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