
The Truth about the Lone Startup Founder - Readmore
http://www.scrapages.com/scraps/show/172
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nonrecursive
Here are a few resources for spiffing up your "artist" and "seller" hats:

=== The Artist ===

. _The Non-Designer's Design Book_ , by Robin Williams. This short, easy read
details four essential design principles that will help you consciously
communicate better visually. It's also available on O'Reilly's safari service.

. _Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence
Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through
Design_. This book will help you build your design vocabulary and better
understand concepts in design that you likely haven't thought of. It will help
you describe the ways in which this page -
<http://www.sandstromdesign.com/nav.html> \- sucks (it lacks external
consistency and it contains interference effects, to begin with). The book has
a great format, describing a topic on one page with visual examples on the
following page. The descriptions are short of enough that you can read them in
about 4 minutes.

. <http://www.hallwaytesting.com> \- this is actually my own site. You can
post your site for usability feedback and give usability feedback. Live
usability tests allow you to get more details, but the users on my site also
give valuable feedback, and it doesn't cost you any money or nearly as much
time. I try to give feedback for as many sites as possible and am usually
pretty thorough about it. Users have told me that the site has helped them a
lot.

=== The Seller ===

. <http://www.marketingexperiments.com> . This site is absolutely the best web
development resource I've found, ever. It contains articles on developing a
unique value proposition, doing competitive analysis on the Internet, and of
course actually marketing your site using PPC, SEO, and other online marketing
techniques. Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned from this site is that
online marketing _is_ online testing.

. _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ , by Dale Carnegie. For a long
time I didn't want to read this book because I thought doing so would make me
a sleaze ball. Instead it's made me a more effective communicator. When you
think about it, honing our skills in most areas involves learning how to
communicate with other humans better. As The Tech Wizard it's essential that
you communicate the purpose of your code. As The Artist it's essential you
communicate the purpose of a site and each of its elements. As The Seller you
must know how to communicate value. Dale Carnegie's book will show you how to
effectively communicate value.

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far33d
Even if you are the perfect seller, artist, and coder, you will still only
have one opinion on everything. You need someone to be right when you are
wrong, and wrong when you are right.

~~~
BitGeek
Yes, and at the end of the day a decision has to be made.

This is where companies get in trouble- the founders have different opinions.
I've seen two companies struggle because founders differed... and I've known
one company where the founder knew what was going on and was clearly in charge
(which there were some founding employees, there was no question of who made
the decisions)... that company succeeded until the VC forced a new CEO who
couldn't make a decision to save his life on us....

More people to spread out the early work is good. Multiple founders can be ok.

But one needs to be in charge.

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doowyah
I want to applaud you for emphasizing the "seller" hat. Marketing and sales
are REALLY tricky for technical people, who seem to believe that the market is
somehow fair...that having a "better" product will naturally result in the
customers abandoning the competition and running to your product. Only in the
idealist's world are buying decisions made based on features and benefits. In
many markets the users of a product or service ARE NOT the same people who
make the decision whether to buy the product the product or service. The users
and the purchasers may have completely different interests. I learned this the
VERY HARD WAY starting a business...sometime better and faster doesn't matter
when your competition has a prestigeous brand or the purchasing decision maker
only cares about price (since the users are a different group...the purchasers
don't really care about making the user's life better).

I would actually separate the "marketing" hat from the "sales" hat. Sales guys
want a list of leads to call or visit. They seldom have ideas about how to
generate leads. Sales guys can get the door slammed in their face or the phone
hung up on them multiple times in a day without needing antidepressants.
Marketing people need to go to the therapist when someone hangs up on them but
they can figure out how to get a list of the right people for your sales guy
to call and they can figure out what word to spend your google adsense budget
on.

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zaidf
I don't think anyone is arguing that lone founder startups can NEVER succeed;
the argument is lone founder startups have a lesser success rate, probably.

And in a game of numbers, it easy to see why YC would want to focus on multi-
partner startups over single when there is no shortage of them.

-Zaid 

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Readmore
I'm not trying to downplay the importance of co-founders so much as try to
show people what they need to be looking for in cofounders as well as what
they need themselves. YC has every right to want multiple founders, but for
someone who doesn't get in, or doesn't apply, this information could help them
know where to focus their time.

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pootytang
I don't think a lone founder needs to be an artist at all. I am planning to
hire someone to make my site shine once I have the functionality where I want
it to be. That probably also applies for selling. If you have a good idea, and
enough drive, why not just hire people instead of giving away equity?

~~~
wensing
What do you mean by functionality? If you think the shiny surface of your
product can be that much of an after-thought (i.e. not considered alongside
the functionality you choose to code), you either have wonderfully abstracted
code (or lots of useless code) (in which case you're delaying it because you
can), or you have a different definition of Artist than I do (in which case
you're delaying it because you've confused design with gloss).

~~~
Readmore
I agree with that. Artist doesn't mean someone to make the logos, it means
some one to design your site and make it pleasing to the users. I've found
that the sooner that happens in the process the better. In fact I'm starting
to lean toward the 37Signals method of making the layout work before it's even
attached to the code. Thinking about how things happen from the user's pov can
really help your final product.

~~~
nonrecursive
I've come to realize that how things happen from the user's pov / what the
user sees IS your product. That's what the user's paying for. The user cares
as much about _what_ your app purports to do as _how_ your app does it. The
_how_ determines whether the user will save more time/money/resources with
your app than without it.

That said, I do agree with original commentor that it's possible to get all
the functionality working (the interface, the AJAX, the domain model) and then
have someone take your visually uninspired HTML+CSS and turn it into something
beautiful. Sometimes that's all a hacker will need, and sometimes a hacker
will need much more.

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vikram
More than the need for different skills. I think as a single founder you have
to be willing to wear all of these hats.

The big assumption that everyone makes with multiple founders is that everyone
contributes and that the founders really know each other. Remember that your
performance is averaged with others, so if the other founders aren't
contributing, you still have the burden of reaching decisions with multiple
people.

I find that with one founder its easier to divide work.

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markrages
I've been reading the "E-Myth," which also describes three roles of the
founder: Technician, Manager, and Entrepreneur. (These roughly corresond to
the roles you outline). The first part of this book is an excellent analysis
of why many startup companies fail. The rest of the book's advice gets worse,
and by the end it is a naked advertisement for the author's seminars and
consulting services.

Get it from the library.

------
dawie
You links at the bottom of the page like FAQ etc is not working. I wonder if
its because you are a lone founder... Jokes, I am a lone founder too.

~~~
Readmore
Hahah, exactly! I just decided to start using my own product even though it's
not completely finished. :)

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webwright
Interesting post!

Obviously, a person can theoretically have all of the skills to pull off a
startup alone (though I can count the number of people I know who are good
coders AND good UI designers on one hand).

The big plus of a co-founder (IMHO) or two is motivation and energy.

Oh, and intelligence. Two good brains are generally more than twice as smart
as one. :-)

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mukund
The author has been bang on target. Its quite possible to be one man army and
still pull off with a great company but it would take time and this lone guy
must work 3 to 5 people's work. Second thing is, having more people who match
the same level of thinking helps hammering out loop holes and building better
products.

