Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?

Buy something.

Put it on Ebay.

Sell it.

Tinker with the product description and price and measure results.

Rinse and repeat.

You will learn more than many wanna bes.

If you can’t build it you have no business.

If you can’t sell it you have no business either.

You are limited by who you are. By your appearance, mannerisms, speech patterns. Your clothing, body language, grooming and hygiene. Your ingrained habits of action, speech and thought. Your age - foolish excitable youth or cramped, ossified old age. Your network and resume. Some of this can be improved, some can't.

It all sets an upper bound on your potential, but you could fall far short of this due to bad luck or bad execution. Almost nobody will be honest with you about any of this. Which means savvy observers may see your limits very quickly, but will not tell you.

Trust is a huge factor, and again, people will not be up front about this. A solo startup has a huge legitimacy gap if selling to big companies. You could just vanish, go on vacation, get sick, steal the company's data, sue the company claiming to be a de facto employee.

So acquire signals of legitimacy aggressively. Sell anything to a big corporation or government agency, no matter how small and out of your specialty, and you have a bragging point. Join industry associations. Get an advisory board with the right resumes. (All this assumes b2b).

If you are not likeable, you will have great difficulty selling. That includes pitching to investors, attracting co-founders, employees and beta testers.

Every time you have contact with a salesman - that includes missionaries, military recruiters, etc. - note down what they did that worked and didn't work. The common denominator I've seen in the good salesman is 1) being likeable and 2) understanding my particular situation.

If you see any way to get objective feedback on you, not the company - do it. For instance, bring a savvy observer on a sales call. He can be an investor, a salesman from one of your suppliers, or a paid advisor. I personally stumbled into that situation and benefited from it.

Maybe I'm overstating this because plenty of seemingly dislikeable people started successful companies.

One will get the lesson faster than the other... and it isn't the one where you spend 6 to 12 months lying to yourself and everyone around you about how you are figuring it out before realizing that you actually aren't a super genius and you actually can't do everything by yourself and you NEED other people.

Why because of what I tell literally every person that asks me about doing this now... At the end of the day even if you were a super genius at everything it takes to make a business be successful... you will run out of time in the day to do everything.

You HAVE to be able to bring other awesome people on to help you or you will burn out and fail.

If its not painfully obvious by now I am speaking from experience.

I tried I failed. That doesn't mean that you will but I just can't recommend anyone try to do this kind of thing by themselves.

I tell people now I feel like the first true test of your business is convincing other people to help your work on it... if you can't convince even 1 other person to help you... do you really even have anything?