
The "Army of One" entrepreneur - anthony_franco
http://swombat.com/2012/1/17/army-of-one-entrepreneur
======
SMrF
In theory I like this concept, in practice it blew up in my face.

After two years and two ideas that failed, (executed poorly, no traction, no
market, trouble in cofounder paradise -- you name it, I've failed it), I
decided to try a different approach: rapid exploration of niche products. In
the course of a year I spun through about one idea per month.

I got remarkably good at (in)validating my ideas. (Hint: write down who you
think your target market is and then pick up the phone. Have a conversation.
Ask if they would pay $X dollars for your product where X is something that
makes you cringe because you think it's too much. If it's worth pursuing they
won't hesitate to say yes. Then tell them if they give you $X right now you'll
start building it for them -- if they ask where to send the check you're
golden, otherwise you need to rethink your assumptions. If you don't know
anyone to call run some ads to a fake landing page, collect emails, then offer
an amazon gift card or something for a 30 minute phone call. I wrote about it
here: [http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/tips-for-talking-
wi...](http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/tips-for-talking-with-
customers/))

I finally landed on something, (and feel free to steal this) -- filtered
google alerts for PR agencies. I had customers using the service and waiting
for a bill. But I never implemented the billing system, I procrastinated it
hard core. It wasn't because I was afraid they wouldn't pay, (they would
have). It was because I was afraid of supporting the project. It was like I
built myself a job I didn't want.

So for me the biggest pitfall of this approach was a total lack of vision
combined with a drive to pivot to product/market fit at all cost meant I
created something I had no passion about whatsoever.

~~~
GotToStartup
Interesting, not to get too off topic here but is there a reason you didn't
use a 3rd party service for billing like Paypal or something? Sounds like you
went 90% of the way and stopped at the last 10.

~~~
SMrF
More like the last 1%. Implementing the billing system would have been
trivial. It was a mental block. I just didn't want to completely commit to the
business I created.

~~~
mike-cardwell
This sounds like something you could have sold. Did you? What happened?

~~~
SMrF
It ended up here: <https://github.com/sfioritto/lookout>

No license but I'll throw a BSD license on there later if anyone wants to use
it.

Update: It's been a while but I think when I left off I was working on a bug
in the Bayes module. The concept was new to me at the time and I was still
wrapping my head around it. Also I'm sure the email parsers are out of date at
this point.

Basically the whole project was an excuse to learn Bayes rule and use Lamson.
Plus people wanted to pay me for it. But once I got the code out, I quickly
lost interested as explained above.

EDIT:

A few emails from people interested. Look here for a little more info:
[http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/welcome-to-my-
delus...](http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/welcome-to-my-delusion/)

After this I learned you need to price it for the entry level PR folks to pay
for it. Honestly I learned so much after this I think your best bet would be
to pick up the phone and chat with PR people to fill in the gaps where I left
off on the blog.

After implementing the billing system I was thinking of pivoting out of the PR
agency market and into small businesses (who do their own monitoring). I was
also looking at ways of gathering alerts without actually using Google Alerts
and blatantly violating their TOS.

------
gizmo
I'm kind of curious how successful swombat is, and if he followed the
strategies he's recommending to others.

What I see a lot is that a lot of startup people give startup advice in order
to draw more attention to themselves and to their products/consulting gigs.
When I see that swombat has two businesses and time on the side to do
consulting, then that's a pretty big red flag.

~~~
swombat
I should really take the consulting thing out. I'm spending 95% of my time on
GrantTree, half a day here or there on Woobius, and no time whatsoever
consulting.

I've invalidated a few ideas via this approach, but right now I do have an
idea that's "sticking ", so I'm following that one for now.

~~~
swombat
I should add that yes, I follow or have followed most of the strategies I talk
about, and when I haven't used them myself, I say so!

My posts are based on direct personal experience. In some cases the "lesson
learnt" may be anecdotal/deeply contextual, but I usually take pains to follow
my own advice in [http://swombat.com/2011/1/20/how-to-write-good-startup-
advic...](http://swombat.com/2011/1/20/how-to-write-good-startup-advice-
articles) and make the context clear so that the reader can decide if this is
useful advice for them.

------
feralchimp
Great post. There's a "swing for the fences" mentality in the SV / startup
community that I think has driven a lot of potential talent away from
entrepreneurship in general.

The idea that entrepreneurship requires immense sacrifice to do well, or to be
"worth doing at all" presupposes a set of romantic values that _just don't_
map well to the relative size and frequency of market opportunities.

My Mac app nets me between $100-200 per month, every month, for noise-floor
incremental time commitment. For anyone obsessed with becoming a Successful
Entrepreneur, that's a 'how dare you even mention it' achievement. But you
would be AMAZED at how an extra $100-200/month can improve a man's happiness
at the end of the day. It's like an anti-aliasing algorithm for all those
little bullshit expenses that, in aggregate, can lead to non-trivial stress.

If that $100/month (and the feeling of delivering value to direct customers)
makes me 5% calmer and happier while I'm hanging out with my wife and son at
night, it's an enormous win.

~~~
kylemathews
I've made the same realization. There's something incredibly satisfying about
having built something that others find helpful. That's where most of the joy
of entrepreneurship comes from. Optimize for reaching that goal first and then
move onto secondary goals like becoming a billionaire or changing the world.

------
edw519
(Slightly off-topic)

I said this on twitter, but just realized that I never said it here ( > 140
chars this time):

Daniel, your blog is great! It has quickly moved on to my "must read" list. I
don't know how you do it every day, between your own thoughts and the curation
of so many others' great content, too.

I may not understand everything and it may not all apply to me, but believe
me, enough of it does. Fellow Hacker Newsers should definitely bookmark you.

I also have a hard time understanding how someone could have such a high
quality daily blog and get much else done. I struggle to post once or twice a
month.

Keep it up. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed and are really appreciated.

~~~
swombat
Thanks! :-)

 _I also have a hard time understanding how someone could have such a high
quality daily blog and get much else done. I struggle to post once or twice a
month._

I'm not quite sure how I do it either! I think there's a certain rhythm that
comes out of writing something every day. It's like the anecdote about the
pottery teacher who asked graded half his class on the weight of the pots...
the more you do, the easier it gets to keep on doing it.

Unfortunately this last week I haven't quite kept to my daily rhythm... but
I've got 2 more articles in the queue now, so the rest of this week is
covered. :-)

Perhaps worth also noting that these days I wake up around 5-6am, and my first
priority is usually to get a blog post written. That might take an hour or
two, then I get on with my day...

------
bignoggins
This pretty much describes exactly what I did. I worked on my idea nights and
weekends for about 6 months (iOS app) before launching. 6 months after that I
was profitable enough to quit my job and do it full time. Instead of going the
typical startup route and seeking funding and hiring people, I decided to
travel the world while building up my startup. After a year of doing this, I'm
making many times what I was at my day job in silicon valley and really
enjoying being my own boss. I think the army of one part-time idea really
resonates with my personality. I like the idea of startups, but I have a
family and am fairly risk averse.

------
davidw
The niche market accessible to one person working part time sounds very much
like what Rob writes in "Start Small, Stay Small", and I think it's a great
concept. In particular, one aspect of it that's good is that it works fine in
"the rest of the world": you don't need to be in Silicon Valley or get VC or
anything else.

That said, I'm not sure about parallelizing the process, that presents some
risks if you're already spread thin.

~~~
swombat
It certainly is, and I've linked to several of Rob Walling
(<http://www.softwarebyrob.com/>) 's posts in the past. Rob is a great example
of a one-man-army type of entrepreneur. I know a few others who are
successfully applying this model.

Re: parallelising, obviously you can only focus on one thing at a time, but
many ideas take time to build out - as in, waiting time. If you've got control
over your time, why not spend that waiting time testing out other ideas? In
practice, I think most people who are still at the validation stage will in
fact parallelise part of the process.

------
brlewis
tl;dr version: People usually do a depth-first search for product-market fit,
but there are good reasons to consider a breadth-first search.

------
sebastianconcpt
I'd not advice this for people that loves their comfort zone nor those who
have a hard time unlearning things.

For the rest, it might be their hope.

If you can be hyperproductive you can do it. But you can't be that productive
if the technology you use doesn't help you to achieve that by design.

In my case I've validated the product's idea with a prototype in ~15 days,
then started to develop the product. Now, it's in full commercial operations
since last august.

Here I've wrote a little about the technology I've chosen:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3467308>

~~~
loceng
I'm glad you brought this up. It can be unhelpful/damaging to tell someone
"this is the way." It could cause cognitive dissonance, confusion, and
conflict for many between one's own previous experiences of what they are
currently capable with and what is being stated they are required to do to be
successful. I go through this very often. The latest being the push that's
going to around, mainly that VCs and incubators perpetuated, that you need to
find technical co-founders. This mainstream idea is promoted because it
reduces the risk for those who will profit/benefit from reduced risk in their
investments. Likewise, people who are, as you call them, hyperproductive, will
probably have more successes from having more experiences and also be the
personality to be vocal of their methods and will have more experience and
success to be vocal about.

------
mcrady
I'm highly skeptical of this iteration idea. I've been through this two times
and it's taken me two years each time to fully prove out the idea.

Any examples of good businesses that have been proven out in a short period of
time?

~~~
swombat
You can't "prove" anything about businesses until they either finally fail or
finally succeed (whatever your definition of failure or success is).

However, you can get a pretty decent idea of how successful an idea will be if
you push it further without spending anything like 2 years on it. Most ideas
that are invalidated after 2 years of the founders working their bollocks off
on the business could have been invalidated much sooner than that.

Ask experienced entrepreneurs (who have built profitable businesses) around
you. I think you'll find that most of them already do this to some extent -
they don't commit fully into an idea until they've tested the waters and found
that this idea is worth committing into.

------
ISeemToBeAVerb
"What's the best strategy to get from having no startup to having one that
provides you with income?"

I would argue that the answer to this question is to enter a market that has
already been verified for you.

In the start-up community there seems to be a huge emphasis on seeking out and
creating new markets and business models. While this is a fantastic thing, it
is in no way a prerequisite for starting a business.

Everyday entrepreneurs the world over start successful businesses in
preexisting markets. If you're a developer looking to start a business, you
don't need to verify a market for mobile application development, you know it
exists. The only barrier is your skill level and ability to attract clients.

I know this stuff is obvious, but I think the notion of validating markets has
become overemphasized in the start-up community. There are plenty of
opportunities where much of that leg work has already been done.

~~~
swombat
That's not a bad angle, and in fact to minimise the risk, a services business
may be a good idea. However, services businesses come with their own bundles
of problems, not the least of which being that you're still caught in the
"sell your time for money" trap which stops you from doing other things. It's
better than a job, but not as good as building a product.

I think in all cases where you're building a product, whether it's competing
with existing products (better), or an entirely new thing (worse), there is
some amount of market validation to do. Does anyone _want_ your "accounting
software with this extra feature"? Will anyone care about your "Basecamp but
with a different look"?

Best to validate those before sinking lots of dev effort in them...

------
mise
swombat, what mental framework would you apply when looking at a project and
wondering if it is "the one"?

Or perhaps I should be taking from your post that unless you really are
tackling a problem that takes full time over several years, then your plan
probably should include running multiple businesses/sites at a time.

~~~
swombat
Quick answer as I'm on my phone!

The framework is simple: each of those projects is basically throwing
something on the wall to see if it sticks. Your definition of "it sticks" may
vary, but basically, if you're seeing enthusiastic responses from target
potential customers, in a tangible way that means you're fairly confident that
money will be forthcoming, or even better, if you're seeing money coming in,
then it probably counts as "sticking".

The exact definition depends on the type of business... I'll write a follow up
post to explore that in more detail.

~~~
mise
Thanks, and I'd love to hear more as you mentioned.

For example "money coming in" could be:

* $100/month (ok, we're getting something)

* Or $2,000/month (still not enough to live off, or whatever is less than your living expenses)

* Or $5,000/month (ok, I could live off this)

* Or $10,000/month (from my perspective would be a comfortable income).

I guess one part is one would have to look at the acceleration of the growth.
If it's $800/month after 2 year's work it doesn't sound like you're really on
to "the one".

~~~
swombat
"Success" really depends on way too many factors to come up with a general
formula, as I've argued in this article:

<http://swombat.com/2011/12/23/entrepreneurial-success>

However, I'd say if your business helps you move one rung up the ladder (from
zero to survival, to comfort, and then to wealth) then it's "successful" at
least on the financial level.

In terms of figuring out if the business is "sticking" early on, that can't be
ascribed just to money - it really depends on what you're building. You need
to figure out the core metrics that drive your business and see whether
they're going somewhere good. In some cases, the metrics are money, in others
they might be user growth, or something else!

------
run4yourlives
You've been around here for quite a while, but other than recognize the name,
I knew little about you.

I want to say that I just finished reading your account of the London bombings
- and how close you were that day - and was quite moved. Recognize this coming
from a 5 year infantry vet that often sees stories about "how I was 5 km from
a bombing!" as much ado about nothing.

I'm glad you took the time to share, and I hope that the action helped in your
healing. Cheers.

------
jseims
This is how I work.

As an "army of one" you can be almost as fast as a small team, and you can
execute with much higher conceptual coherence. I.e., you can aim better.

It is important to filter out ideas you're not interested in running, even if
they could make money.

And once you start getting traction, it's important to focus hard on
exploiting it.

Making $1000 per month is harder than scaling that to $100,000 per month (if
the market size is large enough).

~~~
rokhayakebe
_Making $1000 per month is harder than scaling that to $100,000 per month_

Many times over, although it seems like everyday I hear of an affiliate
marketer who is killing it online and I wonder how.

~~~
swombat
_Many times over, although it seems like everyday I hear of an affiliate
marketer who is killing it online and I wonder how._

Having interacted with that world somewhat in the past, I can say that there
are some very rare affiliate marketers who are making a good chunk of cash -
but those are people who have invested a lot of time and energy into building
vast mailing lists of followers who sign up to stuff they recommend.

If you're willing to spend years building such a mailing list, you can make a
few thousands a month jumping between various MLM opportunities. Personally,
I'd find that deeply unsatisfying work.

------
zerostar07
I suppose many here work on multiple projects, in fact is there anyone who
doesn't? It's just that people don't usually brag about their failures (or
non-successes). Personally i start a new project every 2 months, usually minor
ideas or things i couldn't find online. It doesn't take that much time anyway
...

------
AznHisoka
Does this advice apply to those that are working at a dayjob? I find it hard
as it is to focus on 1 idea

~~~
swombat
I think so. You don't need to focus on all your ideas at the same time, you
can take turns with them. The more important take-away is to test multiple
ideas until you find one that actually works, before committing to it.

------
raheemm
Great post swombat! A great followup post would be one on identifying and
testing micro-niches.

