Zero outside investment. Zero other employees (I've been doing this full-time for ~3.5 years). I hired an artist for the illustrations. And used a lot of open source projects.
Cool. Do you have a blog? Or perhaps you can share some bootstrapped, single founder stories. There just aren't enough of those here. I would find them especially enlightening.
Great, thanks. Hope you don't mind, but the questions are "gushing" out right now. Your story is very compelling to me (and probably quite a few others, too):
1. Did you have personal savings before you got started?
2. In that 3.5 years, how much time did you spend on other jobs? Employee or contractor?
3. Which month (of the 42) did you see your first revenue?
4. Did you do all of the hacking, hosting, and marketing? Which was most on the "critical path"?
5. When you encountered problems (of any type), where did you turn for help?
6. Did you ever get lonely? How did you manage that?
7. If you didn't get your exit, how long were you prepared to continue this?
8. How did you manage to find your exit?
I'll probably think of more. Thanks so much for joining us and sharing!
1. Yes but not much. I lived at home at first. Telling people I lived with my parents so I could develop a "fantasy game" elicited some fantastic reactions.
2. I tried to work part-time the first year. It's a bad idea. You can't do two things at once.
3. It's difficult to measure this because the site is seasonal. The first year was OK but I had to wait 8 months to see the improvement. I started making a non-negligible amount of money the second season, August 2006.
4. Yes to all 3. Obviously the most important thing is to start developing. My only focus this whole time was to make the best product. The ad money will come later. (This isn't true for all startups. Fantasy football players comprise an unusually lucrative advertising demographic.)
5. It's tough. I was pretty much on my own. I read this somewhere: "In a startup, nothing happens unless you make it happen."
6. I'm pretty stable but you can definitely go insane working alone all day every day. I don't have any advice on how to cope with this. No startup is easy.
7. I have unwavering confidence in what I am doing. I received very positive feedback almost from the first day. The site was profitable so I could have kept going indefinitely. Also, this is definitely a dream job. Fantasy applications are interesting from a comp sci perspective.
8. I was approached by AOL (and others).
As for YC, I applied and was accepted right when the AOL negotiations took off. So I decided I couldn't do YC at that moment.
10. At what point did you incorporate, and what entity type did you use?
11. Can you give us a ballpark on the acquisition price? Even just a "6-figures", "7-figures", "first half of 8-figures", "2nd half of 8-figures" range?
10. NJ LLC, incorporated a month after the site went live.
11. Sorry, can't comment.
12. 8+ months of full-time development. Plus it had been on my mind a long time before that.
13. Every website does, it's inevitable. With fantasy sports applications the problem is magnified because every single one of your users will access the site at the exact same time (e.g., 4 PM on Sundays for football).
Apparently they will "take a chance" on you as a solo founder if you have an already-established profitable business you've built up over several years to the point where an M&A event is imminent.
I very reluctantly (reluctantly because pg is very kind to have any kind of seed funding program or startup school at all) have to agree with your post. A nicer way of putting it is, "we're not going to go against our #1 rule about not having startups because that would make us look bad, unless rejecting a single founder would make us look even worse." In other words, YCombinator doesn't want to prove themselves wrong except when the case is such that rejecting a clear super-star would make them look even more wrong. But that doesn't mean there aren't good reasons.
I think the idealistic idea that people should move to Silicon Valley, meet other smart people, live near smart VC's, and then start with some funding and multiple founders is excellent advice; however, it doesn't seem fair to reject those 20 year old single founders who already started as single founders, and who are fine having users instead of cofounders, because they feel they're months away from success, don't know anybody who is a worthy programmer and don't have time to look, and don't know any good VC's and don't have time to look. In fact, the whole reason single founders apply to YC is so they could move to Silicon Valley, meet other smart people, live near smart VC's, and more...
However, being a solo founder for a long time could mean the founder may not take YCombinator advice as well as multiple founders might (in which case, neither of whom may have much of a leg up or time invested in the project, and would be willing to do whatever pg says, making pg's job easier.) In general, I believe that having multiple founders makes lives better for the startup, for the users, and for investors.
I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done differently, except to take those hackers who've tried doing a startup for years without the benefit of the Valley, put them together in a room, and try to do new projects together. But if you're going to do that, you might as well take some people who apply as a group and have some experience working with each other already, versus a bunch of people used to doing things on their own and their own way.
And the bigger question would be, why would solo founders want to work on a different project, anyway? And if they were to do the same project they're already working on, where would they get a founder or employee, or would they be willing to?
I guess that's where Startup School comes in--to put a bunch of people interested in starting up together in one room, in Silicon Valley, with VC's presenting, to show them that there are definitely others out there who they could work together with, regardless of their luck finding such people back home, and that Silicon Valley is as nice to live in as it is famed for new technology.
Could you tell us some technical details about the project? What did you use to make it? How the website handles the huge increase in traffic during football season? I'd be interested to know about any technical information you would be willing to share.
Congratulations Dude, I picture you in Cancun with a margarita now, but hope you have the chance to answer: How much of your success do you think is thanks to good SEO?
