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Persisting as a solo founder

vishnu.tech

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Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#241

Post by pknerd »

Some valuable tips. Thanks for sharing.

I have a question from community. Like many I have a routine of creating a to-do list. Often times I end my day with guilt that I didn't do much despite of finishing tasks. It also happens that if I am doing an important task, after X mins I feel to give up and not fully engaged. While I feel this i start feeling bad and try to fill the slot with another task which often makes me unsatisfied and not happy. I feel I did not utilize my time. I don't know what should I do.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#242

Post by dumbfoundded »

tootahe45 wrote: post #220
dumbfoundded wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That goes towards my second point. Everyone has living expenses. Not all founders are in a position where they can afford to drop their income to $0 for extended periods of time.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#243

Post by pknerd »

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…

Dozens of companies or sites? Even sites, why did you make so many Ventures? We're they affiliate sites?

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#244

Post by pknerd »

jv22222 wrote: post #203

If anyone is feeling lonely as an indie founder and looking for an indie founder Slack community where you can reach out and bounce ideas of other founders in real time you can join the Nugget Slack community here: https://nugget.one/join Access to our Slack used to be paid but we've recently opened it up to everyone.

A few years back I was subscribed to newsletter, daily/weekly nuggets about ideas with thorough research. Are you the same?

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#245

Post by aagha »

I've always been a proponent of being a solo founder, but a few years ago I went down the path of starting my (current) business with two other co-founders.

One I fired after a short while as he wasn't carrying his weight.

The remaining co-founder has been a God-send. In January, I was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and he took over the reins. He stepped up in a way I couldn't have ever imagined. Days I was suffering from surgery pains or (daily) chemo, he kept the ship afloat.

Everything OP says is correct, but one of the things my co-fonder gave me was an unplanned plan for the unexpected.

Without my co-founder, I'm not sure we'd have survived.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#246

Post by read_if_gay_ »

afarrell wrote: post #233
totetsu wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I've got a month of procrastination pent up, now if I could only release the hyper productivity! When I did my last masters, I somehow managed to get into a hyper-productive state, hacking on an app to collect participant voice data for a fews sessions close to 20 hours straight. (much to the annoyance of the guy who slept in the graduate lab) I don't think it was healthy, but it sure felt good at the time.

as an ADHDer, one thing I've found key is figuring out what things in my environment and mind are the things I want to signal "you're doing the right thing, keep going." Essentially, what is your 'reward model'? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYylPRX6z4Q Test-Driven-Development is one example of this.

That was an interesting watch but I don't get how it's supposed to illustrate your point. Can you expand a bit?

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#247

Post by jv22222 »

pknerd wrote: post #244
jv22222 wrote: post #203

If anyone is feeling lonely as an indie founder and looking for an indie founder Slack community where you can reach out and bounce ideas of other founders in real time you can join the Nugget Slack community here: https://nugget.one/join Access to our Slack used to be paid but we've recently opened it up to everyone.

A few years back I was subscribed to newsletter, daily/weekly nuggets about ideas with thorough research. Are you the same?

Yes, the very same!

We have gradually iterated from that point toward training and community because we've seen that has a much bigger impact on founder outcomes than supplying ideas.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#248

Post by ilaksh »

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…

I think technically you have to ignore more than 99.99999% of the information that's out there.

Because I mean, realize how big Twitter is. Its much larger than the Twitter that you are generally aware of. The popular stuff for your language and interests is a tiny fraction of the total number of tweets.

Likewise, every subculture has thousands if not millions of web pages or whatever. Every city, state, country has their own news.

Depending on what you are interested in, there may be decades or even centuries of interesting things to study or play with just in that area. For example, if you are into C64, there are thousands and thousands of games, applications, demos, magazines, etc. You could literally spend 20 years exploring it if you were motivated. That is just one subculture.

If you are interested in world history then there could be thousands of years of documents and artifacts to study. Or maybe to understand some ancient literature you need to become fluent in written Latin. You could easily spend five years learning Latin to a high level.

I just feel that if you were to really give all of the interesting stuff that's out there a chance, it is many many lifetimes worth of information.

Which is to say that the number of potential distractions is actually effectively infinite.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#249

Post by pknerd »

jv22222 wrote: post #247
pknerd wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years back I was subscribed to newsletter, daily/weekly nuggets about ideas with thorough research. Are you the same?

Yes, the very same! We have gradually iterated from that point toward training and community because we've seen that has a much bigger impact on founder outcomes than supplying ideas.

Awesome I remember I had specifically created a Google label for your emails. I was kind of disappointed you had quit sending and hide behind a paywall.

Re: Persisting as a solo founder

#250

Post by KajMagnus »

throwawayinfo wrote: post #189
herval wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, I've been building algorithms which explain _why_ something was surfaced, not just being a black box. Everything is controllable from data sources, ranking/filtering weights and a feedback mechanism to tweak this. As for monetisation, I've thought about this a lot - and I don't think the time wasting is needed to create a good product. Google Search certainly isn't fueled by dopamine hits, and from an ads stand…

Feature request: When I find an article that the algorithm did Not suggest — but I like the article.

Then, it'd be nice to know how I could tweak the algorithm and its config values, so it would find such articles, thereafter.

And to dry-run the algorithm to verify that now it does indeed find that article.

(You don't have a website yet?)

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