

Ask HN: How do you deal with being a solo founder? - jpd750

For all <i>solo</i> founders:<p>Im wondering how you all cope with all of the stress, doubt, fears, etc. that many startups cope with (with a cofounder), but as solo founders (I&#x27;m one myself) - we do not have anyone to share the ups&#x2F;downs with.<p>Specifically, I&#x27;m wondering how you deal with:<p>1) everything to do? (Marketing, Sales, Biz Dev, Product Dev, etc, etc)<p>2) Do you have days where you just want to give up completely? How do you cope?
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soloman
I quit my job in early 2013 to do my solo start up. I'm still developing the
product today. I'm not sure if the following story/advice is good, but it
represents my experience and ultimately shows how I managed over my hurdles.

After quitting my job I set all kinds of expectations on myself. None were
reasonable. Every time I had coffee with friends or past colleagues I would
get asked how well I was doing and when I might be complete. From day one I
felt pressure to achieve some milestones and when these questions came up I
inevitably declared unrealistic targets. Worse, after I declared these targets
I would feel like crap as began to realize I was nowhere close to meeting
them. It got to the point where I would just stop working.

At one point, I stopped for 2 full weeks before deciding to face up to the
truth: I obviously wasn't prepared for what I had decided to do. I was
failing...

I then realized that even before I quit my job I had been in the habit of
biting off way more than I could chew. See, these big corporations I had
previously worked for had instilled some really bad habits. They would
intentionally give employees more work than they could actually handle, with
the idea that they were challenging their employees. No big surprise that
every year the performance reviews would tend go the same way. Managers would
identify with all the achievements and show understanding on initial goals
that were not reasonable to begin with. It makes the employee grateful to
manager for the big bonus and also makes the manager out to be a keen observer
with great understanding. Certainly fosters a good relationship. The downside
in all this is that they establish a really bad pattern/behaviour to have
unreasonable goals with reasonable outcomes. I'm not going to get into the
good and bad of the practice suffice to say it didn't help me when switching
to a start-up. In fact it made me feel like shit along the way.

So I decided to stop and made a huge list of all the obligations in my life,
and I mean everything. From family time to shovelling the snow, mowing the
grass, and paying the bills, but more importantly I then prioritized them with
a cost ranking. I discovered something interesting. It turned out the things I
perceived as small or insignificant we're consuming large portions of my
thinking time. While they would only take a very small amount of time to deal
with, they had a big 'nag-effect' until they were done. For example: doing
taxes. I spent months with background thoughts focused on my changed situation
and wondering how optimize any re-situated tax implications. This item was
always way down on my list in importance and should have been much higher had
I understood myself well enough to identify it was costing me more than I
realized.

I continued on by spending the next two months really simplifying my life. I
took my list of 100+ ongoing obligations and reduced it to 10. ONLY 10:
ongoing.

Afterwards, I got back to work and became really productive. These days I make
sure I set small goals with really lofty timelines. I'm pretty sure some
people will find faults in this new practice, as I can see obvious faults
myself, but that's ok. I'm now the happiest I've been in 10 years and I don't
fall into anymore motivational ruts. Week by week I'm consistently happy with
my accomplishments and for the last 5 months or so I've maintained enthusiasm
with almost everything I do.

So I'm not sure if this is helpful, but here's the advice:

Allow some time for understanding who you are and how you best operate. It's
really important to get your head in the right place, before you start and
along the way as you observe problems. Be aware of your thinking patterns and
don't be afraid to make really big changes if that's what is required to get
you there. Only set timelines that are reasonable to accomplish. Review all
timelines/expectations and spend some time trying to call bullshit on them.

------
dangrossman
I've never found running businesses alone particularly stressful. Normal
employment was worse to me.

Everything that can be automated is automated: backups, database cleanup,
lifecycle e-mails, dunning for clients with past-due bills, accounting, bill
payment, etc.

I do all my "checking on" things in the morning (e-mails/tickets, tweaking ad
campaigns, server status and checking for security updates, etc). Afterwards,
I put a few hours into something on my TODO lists which I manage in Trello;
some days I choose to work on a new feature, sometimes on bugs, sometimes on
new marketing or seeking out new partnerships, sometimes I just pick a side
project to work on. Whatever gets done gets done, and some days it gets done
in the afternoon and some days at night.

I don't keep a schedule. I don't stress about how much progress was or wasn't
made on a daily basis. There's no boss _making_ me stress over things, and
I've always managed to move forward anyway without any external motivation. I
only look back on it over the span of months; "that was a productive summer".

Financial security helps a lot I suppose. I use the profit from one project to
bootstrap the next. The only time I haven't had enough in savings to pay at
least 6 months of expenses was the very beginning -- when I was 18 with $0 and
started college on federal loans. I didn't need loans for very long, as I
started my first businesses back then (ad sales and a subscription web stats
service). I plan on new ventures being profitable from the first customer as
much as possible.

~~~
dkua
What do you use to automate your workflow?

~~~
dangrossman
I'm not sure what you mean by that.

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richsin
Serial Solo Founder here...

Done many solo startups (offline and online) over the years.

1\. Organization & discipline. Set your hours. It reduces stress and the free
time gives you perspective. Even with a team, you probably won't have anyone
to share your ups/downs with. But with a successful startup and/or team, you
will have more time to spend meeting other founders and you must do that for
your own sanity.

2\. I have given up not for days, but months.

Lost, searching for the passion that slowly vanished after days, weeks and
months of a flawed process and lifestyle. No one to speak to. You even start
to feel weird, for lack of better word, around others when you do get out
there.

You must keep your eye on the prize. There is a difference between business
and busy-ness. Don't confuse the two.

Lastly, as a founder, you must take your products to market. It is essential
for an entrepreneur to receive validation (or rejection) from the market. The
less you take your ideas to market to more you will depend on others to fill
those voids, which does you no good in the grand scheme of being a founder.

Best of luck.

~~~
jpd750
Do you have an email?

~~~
FloydB
I'd be surprised if he didn't

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dzink
I have been going for over a year because I simply love what I am building.
DoerHub is designed to help people do more together - to enable serendipity
and power meaningful projects [http://www.doerhub.com](http://www.doerhub.com)
and [http://www.doerhub.com/for/doerhub](http://www.doerhub.com/for/doerhub) .

I've had more ups and downs than I can count - several potential cofounders
who didn't work out, moving solo to the Bay area, trying to survive school in
parallel because it is tremendously helpful to the business, etc.

At the end of the day, I see this as a my masterpiece - every peace of it is
built with love and I am testing the impact of each new component as I go to
make sure I'm heading in the right direction. I start a new piece of
functionality every day and don't go to bed until it's done. When I hit a wall
with coding, I do biz dev or something else. Resting from one to do the other.
I catch myself thinking about DoerHub even when I am supposed to rest - and
solving problems in my head during the most mundane everyday tasks. I have a
long roadmap and the peaces are falling like dominos when I focus (first
release, boosting conversion on homepage, boosting internal engagement, adding
a viral feature, seeing numbers go up or applying scenario B when they don't,
boosting performance, adding another needed component, etc). It feels like a
long game I am conquering one level at a time.

I have met many smart people who had the skills to help, but at the end of the
day, it comes down to persistence and commitment - your ability to bite down
on something and not let go. So many talented people are stuck doing things
just to get by, to get a bigger pay check, to get rich. Unless you love what
you are doing, the people who are using your work will not feel the love in it
either so it becomes a doomed endeavour. That is why I push forward
relentlessly, even as a solo founder, I love what I am doing and the users can
see that.

I need a co-founder and when someone comes along who wants to join me and has
the skills I simply ask that they build one of the next pieces on the roadmap
independently. You can't be a co-founder unless you are capable of carrying a
piece of the business forward on your own. If they take too long or give up
midway, we've saved each other a lot of time and can remain friends. In the
mean time, I just keep on trucking. Crafting DoerHub with love and watching
users benefit from my work daily. I will be doing this for years to come, and
somewhere along the way I will find someone who wants to do it with me and is
just as stubborn. Probably one of DoerHub's users (which is why I only promote
the site within groups of amazing doers).

~~~
jpd750
Any response to: 2) Do you have days where you just want to give up
completely? How do you cope?

------
kordless
Stress comes with startups, so I wouldn't say I'm more or less stressed out
now doing a solo than I was when I did it with cofounders. There's something
to knowing I'm on the hook for all of it - it keeps you honest to your
intentions, if that makes any sense. You can only blame yourself if it fails,
so stop fucking around! <\--- this is what I tell myself most days! :)

I'm fortunate to have a rather wide range of skills that include marketing and
software development. I'm probably innately better at the marketing stuff, but
I've become a much better coder since I switched to solo mode. I suck at
graphics design, but I have a few close friends that do that for a living so I
can get around it by contracting it out to them. I'm also awesome at PM work,
and basically do it live as I'm coding. Keeping projects simple is a
requirement. You don't have a lot of time to go down a technical rabbit hole,
so don't over scope.

If you find yourself thinking you need to do sales and BD at this point in the
game, you should probably do a level set. Get people using your product first,
then worry about how you'll sell lots of it later. Given it's a good idea,
it's likely it will sell itself via the marketing work you do. Get a sales guy
later when you know you can increase sales conversions. I can't really say how
to solve the marketing problem other than just being yourself and being honest
with your users. Someone who listens well usually makes a good marketer.
Listen to your users.

You can cheat at marketing by observing what similar offerings do for
marketing. A Twitter account, simple blog and a few visits a month to a meetup
scene or demo day during lunch at some cool company will do wonders for your
moral.

There are certainly days when I get frustrated. I spent the better part of
Monday trying to get mod_wsgi serving up a Flask application for a piece of my
current project. I thought I was going to lose it, so I stopped and went for
an hour long bike ride. I figured out the issue when I got back and was able
to start writing code shortly after.

Best of luck to you! I'm convinced that solo is the way to go. If there are
others in the Bay interested in hanging out and talking about it over coffee
or drinks, I'd be down with it!

~~~
jpd750
Would be interested in talking more on email - whats your email?

~~~
kordless
Just Google me! :)

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teleclimber
To cope with doubts and fear I ended up finding a group of entrepreneurs who
held a regular meeting. At each meeting we went around the room and talked
rather openly about the stuff that was on our mind, good and bad. It was very
helpful to me. If you can't find such a group, try to find others like you at
networking events and go to lunch to talk things out. I once met a dude who
was also a solo founder, in a vertical niche like me, used the same
technologies, and even hosted at the same provider! We had some good
conversations.

The "everything to do" is a blessing and a curse. Blessing: you're never in a
meeting. Curse: everything else. I think the key thing here, if you're going
to do everything yourself, is to make a product that isn't too complicated. If
your product requires a tremendous amount of engineering work you should get
help or you'll never get around to marketing. I speak from experience, sadly.

Wanting to give up: there are two things that get me through the days of poor
morale. 1) knowing that if I give up I will have to get a job working for
somebody, and all this glorious freedom of being my own boss will go in the
toilet. 2) The fact that I am working on something with a workable business
model gives me the confidence that it's just a matter of time. My product
helps solve a problem, and people who have that problem are usually prepared
to pay money for a solution. I think morale would be much harder to maintain
if I were trying to build the next consumer-social-sharing app or whatever
where the rewards may or may not come, even if I work well.

~~~
jpd750
Excellent points here - thanks teleclimber.

Especially: finding a 'group' \- been working on this already and have already
gained some value out of it. I can also attest to point #1 of wanting to give
up - i think it pushes me forward as well. Nothing is more satisfying to me
than waking up and thinking "man, I dont have to be told what to do by someone
who doesn't even know themselves - and so what if I work for 12 hours today -
I LOVE what i'm doing" . This is much appreciated - thanks! 2 months in for me
and another 2 decades + more. Thanks!

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phantom_oracle
What all of the guys above have said is brilliant.

I think the key thing you should take away from what they all said (although
all of it is valuable in any case) is that no matter how good or mediocre your
other skills are, you need to be a solid manager.

Finding means and methods of automating tasks and removing some of the flack
or less-productive activities and placing it on another piece of software or
company is what a manager/solo guy will be good at.

I would go even as far as saying that if you think writing the actual code is
a less productive activity, then you should also out-source that. Finding a
solid team or company that can turn your exact product specs will be a means
of automating your dev work onto someone else.

Brilliant question and responses!

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logicman
Yes, there is a lot to manage! I try to use a lot of web tools to automates
tasks for Brightpod.com. I wrote a post on it early 2013. Might be helpful -
[http://sahilparikh.com/post/45667459164/how-we-use-saas-
apps...](http://sahilparikh.com/post/45667459164/how-we-use-saas-apps-to-
power-up-brightpod)

I have realized that exercise is a great stress-buster! Do it daily.

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ScottWhigham
It helps to have a supportive spouse/SO. It helps that my father was a
lifelong entrepreneur and is there for advice/help. It helps to be good at
many different things. It helps to be able to learn to be good at something
very quickly. It helps to be able to learn to figure out "good enough"
quickly.

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alien3d
1\. Ya it's hard. 2\. err unknown ,but sometimes when customer delay payment
and wanted to prolong the contract quite hard.Some cheater also.

Conclusion Be friend with all people not just computer geeks friend.

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elwell
It's better to be a solo founder than a co-founder who feels like a solo
founder.

