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Persisting as a solo founder

vishnu.tech

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Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#211

Post by not_a_moth »

gkoberger wrote: post #166

As a single founder, I agree. The only advice I give anyone, ever, when starting a company is to not do it alone. Think about how much of a disadvantage you are, early on, when you have to switch between tech and business. Longer term vision vs short term. Running a product vs running a company. It's almost impossible. That being said, you mentioned "how that would compound the difficulty involved in finding an inves…

I think this is good advice only if you know someone who would be perfect as cofounder who you have a long working relationship with.

Otherwise "get a cofounder to get a cofounder" can definitely ruin a project. Am someone who went through 3 in one year, made it harder to change things, strategize, and there was always some misalignment between product, sales, and content. Find that I'm making significantly more progress as solo founder now.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#212

Post by bvivek77 »

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…

Very true!

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#214

Post by taneq »

richard_g wrote: post #183
koolba wrote: post #173

Earlier 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.

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!

Ah, that old dilemma: Do I work best under pressure, or do I work only under pressure?

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#215

Post by taneq »

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.

Exactly. In fact, it's not even about the product. You need to solve somebody's problem in a way that they are willing to pay for. The product is just how you choose to do that. The designs and code and engineering decisions and artwork etc. etc. aren't for the customer, they're for you. What the customer is paying you for is solving their problem.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#216

Post by taneq »

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…

> Of course the customer cares about fast, powerful and efficient things they can use.

Only if the thing being fast, powerful and efficient actually solves their problem better.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#217

Post by taneq »

captainmuon wrote: post #111
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> let them pay for your development time like a consultant...

Do they not then own at least a share of the IP? You'd be lucky to find a customer that takes you on as a consultant but lets you keep the IP you develop during that time.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#218

Post by bitcoinmoney »

eruci wrote: post #35

Just 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…

Was it worth it financially? Like are you earning loads now?

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#219

Post by taneq »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #178
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In this case, there's the additional irony of ignoring science in the name of doing science. On another note, I can't be the only person who finds this kind of bragging to just fail to register, or even to backfire. Am I meant to be impressed by how poorly they've arranged their weekly routine in terms of work/life balance?

It reminds me of a line from a Jack Reacher novel - a guy with a scarred face (who obviously thinks he looks scary and tough) asks Reacher what his face tells him, and Reacher just replies "it tells me you've lost a lot of fights."

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#220

Post by tootahe45 »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #147
xivzgrev wrote: post #146

Why do you need VC funding? Plenty of people have bootstrapped businesses with no outside funding. Don’t ask VCs to pay your paycheck - ask customers to. Make something that’s worth paying for.

Some ideas have huge buy in. They're capital intensive and that's just the way it is. Even for other ideas, sometimes it's nice to have founders not worried if they're going to be homeless. Definitely tradeoffs on both approaches but I can see the reason why some choose to pursue VC funding from the beginning.

A photo organizer is not capital intensive, unless of course you have a lot of users and need more compute space or something.
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