
Being a Solo Founder: Pros, Cons, Tips and Tricks (2017) - doppp
https://baremetrics.com/blog/startup-solo-founder
======
superflit
I am the SOLO Tech/coder guy for a startup. The other part is the salespeople
only.

The worst thing is not having anyone to bounce ideas and discuss.

"Should we do multi-tenant?" "Terraform + ansible, or Container?"

"Chef, puppet, ansible?"

Is my code good? or just "enough"? Am I good or lucky?

When you have a team it is easier to answer these questions.

~~~
kesor
Can always get a consultant for a few hours to hash ideas with

------
Blake_Emigro
There are so many internal battles that you have; paralysis by analysis, over-
optimization, learn/build versus buy, impostor syndrome, waiting too long to
do xyz, and on and on. Then you have those days where you get stuck on
something and wonder if anyone even cares about or notices what you do. But,
would you have it any other way?

------
mrskitch
Loneliness is a big issue for sure. When I started browserless, it was very
much that way. In all honesty when I open sourced the project it helped quite
a bit, and it’s nice to hear both good and bad feedback versus wondering if
folks like it.

That said, I think I’d make the same decision again. I like being the decision
maker and feeling the weight of those decisions. And like Josh says, you can
move so incredibly quick when an idea does surface.

~~~
throw03172019
Browserless is great! Thanks for a great product - Keep it up!

Disclosure: Paying customer :)

------
adventured
I've been an entrepreneur non-stop for about 20 years. 15 of those as a solo-
founder, across a few different start-ups.

I'll echo the common ones: some loneliness (the sense of being in an
exhausting fight against terrible odds by yourself); and not having a co-
founder confidant to bounce ideas off of and to interrupt your bad ideas or
occasional bouts of doubt & skepticism.

You can certainly find people to bounce ideas off of, however, two serious
issues will routinely impede that: the occasional need for various degrees of
privacy on internal development matters, and deep contextual knowledge of
exactly what you're doing. Very few people on the outside are going to
understand what you're doing well enough to provide super valuable opinions.

I've spent ~18 months working full-time on a new start-up alone. It was
supposed to take half that time, of course. It's the most important work I've
ever done by far and it's the last thing I intend to ever build as an
entrepreneur. I would have enjoyed having a co-founder on this project,
however, realistically few people would be able to go along with something
this time consuming and risky (no salary for two years). Sometimes it's just
going to be all on you and you have to want it badly enough to persevere.

It's a fascinating situation in the non-VC start-up land these days (that is
to say, I'm intentionally not raising VC, I need max control to see it through
long-term; a VC would fuck it up by prioritizing profit as the prime motive
and their get-big-too-fast mantra). For a good engineer to join me for two
years to do this, they might have to forsake $300,000 to $400,000 or more in
total compensation. Or you have to take a dilution & control smack to the face
up front and go raise a million dollars in VC. In my opinion, having watched
the industry closely since the mid 1990s, the huge financial trade-off for
engineers in doing non-VC start-ups is an epic problem that dissuades a lot of
people (for good, sane reason). It's a simple equation: you're an engineer in
a top five tech city, are you going to sacrifice a million dollars (possibly a
lot more in SV) in total compensation across three to five years to do a
thing, if that's what it takes? That's a monster risk to take, particularly if
you're still in prime earnings years.

That equation also enables me and others to do things many other people won't
or can't dare to try, they won't eat the shit necessary to do it, or can't
rationally take on the risk. It weeds out some competition.

~~~
alixanderwang
If you’re open to sharing, what are you building?

~~~
adventured
Sure. It's a new type of knowledge service (broadly in the Wikipedia, Quora,
Britannica, Answers.com, wikiHow, Genius, et al. segment).

Like most people I strongly dislike what has happened to the Web. I love the
Web, I grew up on the Web, I'll never stop being in love with it (particularly
what it once was, and still can be - it's a choice that we get to make in how
we build). This service is Web only. It's built to be super fast, so it uses
no bloated frameworks. It uses no trackers. It uses no traditional analytics
services. It doesn't require piles of personal info and I don't want to know
who you are. It has no social media (no social login or buttons or trackers or
accounts). The typical large content page weighs in at around 20-40kb in size
and loads in 150-200ms with 8 requests, no cookies, 7kb of script, 4kb of css
(I can push that further, but it's tight enough for now). There will be no
images on the entire service (SEO punishment inbound) other than a small text
logo. No ads. No pop-ups. No dark patterns like hiding content. It doesn't
require users / readers to use JavaScript. All content is Creative Commons
licensed.

The reason traditional VC can't be involved, is because they ultimately
destroy all knowledge services they touch. I've been watching VCs (or private
equity in the case of Answers.com; or giant corporations in the case of eg
Verizon or IAC (eg about.com)) burn them to the ground for two decades now. To
do it properly you have to prioritize what I call the knowledge motive, and
absolutely minimize the profit motive. If you invert that value order, you'll
destroy the service and you must inherently eventually betray the community
that builds it up (this will happen to Stack Exchange; it has already happened
to Quora). So this service is anti-commercialism; there is no business model
going in; there will be no IPO; there is no exit plan; bare threads on
expenses; it has to be run hyper thin, hyper optimized against cost and bloat.
Doing that properly also helps keeps me independent. I have a ten year time
frame allocated (including nearly two years into it so far), during which I'll
push it forward and work on it no matter what happens, assuming I don't get
hit by a bus or the equivalent. The ideal may or may not be to convert it to a
charitable non-profit for long-lived purposes, assuming it works of course
(I'm not assuming, I'm just doing it anyway because I want this thing to
exist).

I've messed with building various knowledge services going back a decade. This
hit me like a bolt of lightning back in April of 2018 and I began to flesh it
out. It required a few revisions in concept before full build phase began. I
had to take about three months in there to teach myself some new things I had
to know to be able to build this to operate very inexpensively from day one
and forward (I'm assuming it will never be flush via operations).

I'm probably going to do a Show HN this month or next for it and I'm going to
begin showing it to some long-term Wikipedia editors that I know. Only a few
people have seen it thus far, which breaks a good common rule - in this case I
don't care, I'm not trying to find traditional product market fit, I don't
have to desperately obey such concerns (it's solely my dime and my time), I
built it because I wanted to, it will exist and persist because I want it to.
There's a glorious freedom in that, and it might entirely fall flat initially
or long-term - that's ok, I'm going in assuming the worst in terms of
response; I'll see what kind of response it gets and decide on any
adjustments.

I'm in this for the very long-term and plotted that way from the beginning.
It's another reason typical VCs can't be involved, their horizon is short-term
oriented. They'll destroy you trying to force you to get big fast, and it
won't matter to them if they do it, even if the thing could have succeeded by
growing slower. It's just one of many reasons why knowledge services are the
anti-VC segment. If you ever see a knowledge service take on big VC, you
already know the guaranteed outcome ahead of time: burned to the ground,
forced liquidation for pennies on the dollar, or an exit sale before the VC
runs out to continue funding the bloat taken on during the get-big-too-fast
phase (and then the buyer runs it into the ground or shuts it down, hello
Freebase).

So how will it stay afloat financially if it gains traction? Well, first, it's
static cached text in the front, so it's dirt cheap to run at a very large
scale. Beyond that I have some approaches that I think will work that I'll
experiment with over time - it won't require much financially.

~~~
Unsimplified
I'm interested in hearing more about its general design. I've been thinking
about knowledge theory since 2012 and my current solution is to attach a broad
privately-curated knowledge base (ended up simplifying to a markdown-git repo
for now) on top of a high-tech engineering business for results-driven
credibility/cashflow.

Consider the modern landscape of information.

Wikipedias are exhaustive and generic. Therefore inefficient (full of low-
value ideas, distorted learning curve). Anti-promotion policy against spam
also disrupts linking to great resources. Best for basic descriptions and
factual details.

Search engines are keyword-dependent and unfiltered. Therefore unfollowable
(no idea progression map, ex. index) and requires active trust/relevance/value
filtering (volatile, learning-rate-limited by current skill level). Best for
targeted navigation (ex. find a local bus route) and first-step wide-index
exploration (initial net thrown to catch better keywords/resources).

Forums/Q&A involve waiting for answers within a permitted-QA context.
Therefore slow, not guaranteed, indexed chronologically not logically, usually
brief/incomplete. Best for popcorn-community exploration and immediate needs
for new info.

~~~
adventured
> Forums/Q&A involve waiting for answers within a permitted-QA context.

The question primes the brain for the answer. You can use that socratic lead
structure without going with a traditional Q&A wait-and-pray approach (ala
Stack Exchange, Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, and so on). It does require a
specific system design though. You can induce and control the Q&As around a
topic, you don't need to wait. Doing it intentionally and rigidly, in some
cases leads to a far superior system, as opposed to the chaos and quality
problems of junk filled Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers or Answers.com. In the
history of the Web only one major traditional Q&A site has ever gotten it
really right over time, that's Stack Exchange (and we'll see yet if their
commercial interests don't erode what they accomplished, as the VCs demand
their exit). The track record is abysmal because most Q&A sites are beholden
to an inherently bad approach: relying heavily (and allowing) on large volumes
of people with no specialization or passion for a subject to ask & answer
questions (so you get a lot of low quality drive-by answers that have to be
moderated away or tolerated). It's the equivalent of walking into McDonald's
and expecting a five star experience, and then being surprised when it's not
(when it was obvious all along exactly what was going to happen, only one
outcome was possible). wikiHow, as one example, has persisted (while nearly
all other how-to sites have died off in the age of Google Penguin/Panda/etc)
at a modestly sound quality for so long, because they set the hows, rather
than just waiting around for junk how-to questions to be asked and answered in
a mediocre fashion by low quality drive-by contributors; and they accept a
lower level of commercialism and volume. wikiHow worked because they do hows
in a similar way conceptually to how Wikipedia does topic pages (it's all
rather preordained down a strict funnel, instead of wild flailing). You can do
the same thing in other ways in the Q&A segment.

Not to mention of course in most cases a site's desperation for ad clicks and
page views causes them to intentionally allow volumes of low quality trash to
populate their Q&A systems (what Quora turned to as it became obvious they
couldn't fulfill their valuation otherwise), instead of aggressively pursuing
only quality. Quality in the knowledge space is very slow, it takes enormous
amounts of time and requires aggressive, consistent, persistent moderation. It
takes a long time to build a high quality knowledge culture that self-
reinforces, self-protects.

I don't personally believe all questions have merit, quite the opposite. This
is another core flaw to the typical Q&A site. Few questions - in the grand
scheme of all likely human-generated questions - have much wide merit.
Numerous low value Q&A sites have overwhelmingly demonstrated that to be true
over time. It's millions of people walking by, spitting on the sidewalk, and
calling it art.

> Therefore slow, not guaranteed, indexed chronologically not logically

Slow is ok. Very few things of great value are built quickly, that's true
today, and it has been true throughout history.

Guaranteed you can heavily influence, by adding source requirements and
restricting contribution (stepped barriers to contribution, and site-culture
acting as an enforcer). I use a system that adds more friction to contribution
than Wikipedia for example (I don't directly compete with them, I'm not
building another encyclopedia), however there are aspects to my system that
play to that approach better than it would on Wikipedia, so it evens out. You
also want to build a culture that regulates low quality contributions,
including brief / incomplete; you can do some of that technically, however you
ultimately need a human culture involved at the center, I believe it'll still
be another few decades at least before AI can do it effectively enough top to
bottom.

Indexing order can be influenced and dictated by editors into a logical
structure, although this buckles under duress on the standard messy high
volume Q&A sites with millions of people spitting on the sidewalk. Those are
too disorganized, unstructured for that bottling / silo approach to work. The
typical Q&A site is a landfill; landfills are mostly filled with high volumes
of low value trash, you don't want to go in there and try to logically order
it; it's a large amount of effort for a small payoff because the content isn't
very valuable (does this rotten banana peel go before that one). You have to
narrow the Q&As in topic, quality and volume, on the basis that not every
question matters. If you believe every question & answer matters as a site,
you end up as Yahoo Answers or Answers.com (ie worthless in the end).

~~~
Unsimplified
Agreed. I wouldn't want to waste my time reading or organizing trash info.
Focusing on high quality info makes sense. Time is limited so we better make
and live using efficient systems. Without the clickbait adpalooza value
inversion from typical VCs or a high burn rate.

I wonder how far you are in crafting the specific user experience. I create an
account with my email/username/password then... I choose a topic to enter? Can
anyone add a topic (reddit)? Or admin controlled topics (4chan)? No default
topic isolation (hackernews)? Can questions be tagged with multiple topics
(robotics, business)? How many sections do I see on the pretopic/posttopic
pages (chrono index, logical-curated index, valuable-computed index)? Are
normal questions excluded from primary sections (lesswrong)? What can
curators/moderators do? How do I become a curator/moderator?

You are right about quality answers requiring passionate experts. And they
like it when their great answers STICK. Data persistence (no "erasure after X
days"). Higher positional visibility on the question page. Well formed
question/tags complementing answer text for on-site/off-site SEO. Natural
index that leads guidance-seeking novices/journeymen to learning-curved
versatile-valuable answers without additional searching/questioning.
Popularity of the infosite itself.

2 key points of consideration. 1. Learn from what existing platforms did right
and wrong (stack exchange) and make sure you are sufficiently innovating. 2.
Determine your platform design direction/niche by simulating concrete examples
(agriculture, Q: tutorials for starting a smallscale commercial
fruit/vegetable farm?). I would like to hear your thoughts on how you
currently want the site/curation to process/organize that example question.

~~~
adventured
> I wonder how far you are in crafting the specific user experience.

In terms of launch to the public? 96% complete user experience. A few days of
work at this point. In terms of the grand scheme of things, difficult to guess
how user interaction & input will alter everything over the coming years.

> And they like it when their great answers STICK. Data persistence (no
> "erasure after X days").

Contributions are persistent based on their quality. They can be replaced by
higher quality content, or removed based on spam / abuse and similar.
Otherwise, quality contributions never expire and never lose their value (they
don't vanish a billion pages deep, never to be seen again).

> Can questions be tagged with multiple topics (robotics, business)?

Tags are evil (in my opinion) outside of very specific platform types and
should largely be avoided. It's an extra distraction, extra friction, extra
layer of complexity, extra effort. All negative for the majority of
contributors. It can work ok on a site like Stackoverflow, where you have a
highly technical audience that will happily nerd out with tags. Less technical
persons (most people) will hate dealing with tags. If you can do a thing
without tags, it's almost always better to do it without.

> How many sections do I see on the pretopic/posttopic pages (chrono index,
> logical-curated index, valuable-computed index)?

Logical curated indexing. Sections (content sections or areas, like
categories, I assume) are intentionally avoided for the same reason as tags.
I've gone to great effort to avoid complexity. I probably put as much time
into that as anything, it requires a constant vigilance to avoid bloat and
unnecessary 'features.' It's beautiful in its simplicity, hopefully editors
will just get it thanks to that, it functions mostly in an obvious fashion (in
part by limiting what can be done to a very clear, small set of actions;
small, simple actions producing potent combined outcomes over time, that's the
ideal).

> What can curators/moderators do? How do I become a curator/moderator?

Almost anything, in stepped fashion. You join to begin contributing (you can
do _this_ thing initially, but can't do _that_ thing yet), and you contribute
to acquire granular influence over most everything on the site. As you prove
you're not a spammer, a bot, a belligerent asshole, a low quality contributor,
you acquire mod 'rank' that gives you permissions and greater influence on
content. I can pretty easily change the granularity of the whole system, to
adjust as I see how editors impact things, where abuse is happening, or where
I need less friction on contribution.

Ranking up is not automatic, so it can't be gamed in automated fashion (which
would unleash wild abuse). It works on a system from E0 (editor level zero;
read-only punishment) to E5 (me), and starts at E1; editors max out at E4.
Once you're high enough you can upgrade other editors in a limited way, which
is where I begin to delegate outward to the community of editors. I start it,
act as benevolent dictator, try to shepherd a proper self-sustaining culture,
and then hand it off increasingly over time.

It has a discussion system built into to its backbone, that enables editors to
effectively communicate and give feedback to eachother during content
building. It should also further community broadly speaking, including system
feedback. I'm debating whether to eventually add an inbox editor-to-editor
messaging system, I think I might with enough usage (early on it would just be
negative complexity layered on top, one more thing to get in the way); I like
the idea of all communication being viewable by editors on the platform, so
that goes against the inbox concept.

It has a community hub system that shows all activity, all content creation,
occurring on the system at that time or in the past. You can scope in on any
given activity and it's all basically permanent record (unless there's
something particularly bad that has to be literally removed, doxing for
example).

> and make sure you are sufficiently innovating

You know what's interesting about the knowledge space right now? These days
it's so barren and filled with piles of rotting corpses (most of which have
been rotting for a decade and barely qualify as functioning services now),
that that issue (make sure you're innovating) isn't something I've spent much
time worrying about. What were the last interesting knowledge platforms? Quora
11 years ago, Stackoverflow 12 years ago. Maybe Genius as well (but it has
contracted back into itself, back to lyrics). Wikipedia is almost old enough
to drink. Few are doing anything in the space. There's no money in it (better
to chase enterprise SaaS or fintech), so VCs aren't very interested (every
decade or so they collectively forget the past mistakes they made and fund a
new round of knowledge landfills they'll run into the ground) - it's a
wonderful time and opportunity because of all of that.

> 2\. Determine your platform design direction/niche by simulating concrete
> examples (agriculture, Q: tutorials for starting a smallscale commercial
> fruit/vegetable farm?). I would like to hear your thoughts on how you
> currently want the site/curation to process/organize that example question.

It doesn't have sections (eg agriculture), it's not a niche service, and it
doesn't do how-to questions or stand-alone question answering. This concept
has never existed before at scale, it's unusual in its approach, and it'll
immediately make sense. I don't know if editors will take to the knowledge
format / approach, we'll see.

Let me frame it better: you don't ask questions on this service. You use
questions.

~~~
Unsimplified
Junk info removed, mediocre info replaced, tags avoided, logically indexed,
curation anti-gaming power-tiered, simplicity focused. I like the principles a
lot.

I assume that "using questions" means something like contributors post pre-
answered questions, hearkening back to the "questions prime the reader for the
knowledge" idea you mentioned earlier. Also was glad to hear you're keeping
design elements flexible to upgrade to whatever works better.

Sounds a bit like hackernews for compact knowledge, and I am curious how you
will handle the contribution rules without sectioning (what kind of info is
allowed) and logical indexing design.

I'd love to take a look and offer my thoughts when you're ready for private
review. It's hard to find people who share a proactive passion for the
progression of knowledge systems. Couldn't find your email on your hackernews
bio, so just email me instead!

~~~
adventured
Your assumption is on the right track. There are ways to use questions, in how
they prepare the reader's brain to receive knowledge, that most services are
entirely oblivious to. I won't pretend my system is a great advancement, it
might fail entirely and accomplish nothing; however, it's absurd how little is
actually being done in the space by the major players. I think it's because
they largely don't care about knowledge and don't have a true knowledge
mission; they're VC businesses playing pretend at it. Quora for example is a
clone of a clone of a clone, there's nothing special about it other than it
has very modest Silicon Valley refinement. It's the 427th Q&A site in terms of
lineage. Their initial one-trick pony was elitism ala FB's Harvard.edu:
getting elite people in tech to jump-start it, which pulled in the next tiers
of contributors (and they all abandoned it accordingly as it went south, as
the elites had no real personal stake in the health of the system; the elites
that used to answer questions & interact moved on to posting selfies and
stories on Instagram, never thinking about Quora again).

You have the traditional Answers.com Q&A format, which was quasi perfected
(maybe as much as possible until AI systems get a lot better) by
Stackoverflow. Little has been done with it, mostly what Stack did was
aggressively fix moderation and focus on high quality content (and keep the
focus there for a long time). You can build a great service just by doing some
of those things right, and sticking to it, of course.

You have the knowledge segment technicians, that focus on obtuse, abstract,
distant, disconnected technical solutions to structuring knowledge. The
semantic Web bullshit (Freebase was a failed product of that) from 10-15 years
ago was largely a stillborn spawn of that realm. You still have an army of
obsessive knowledge technicians messing with similar semantic Web concepts,
having entirely failed to understand the failure of that era and that the
knowledge structure isn't even remotely the most important aspect to getting
to the proper end goal of maximum knowledge distribution & access. Those hyper
technical system efforts almost always die on the lab floor so to speak, and
almost never actually impact or benefit the end users: the billions of readers
out there on the Internet. It's like living in an ivory tower and never
touching the end knowledge consumer. Wikipedia at its heart is a very dumb
encyclopedia in terms of its technical structure, and it has done radically
more for traditional knowledge access & distribution than just about any other
modern service (save Google of course).

The next great knowledge service will probably not be great because it has a
revolutionary technical underpinning like a more advanced Freebase or similar.
Those efforts will continue to fall flat, because the end reader/consumer does
not care about any of that, it's superfluous to what they want. It's like
great engineers that can't build great products because they don't understand
the user at all and that most people aren't interested in highly technical or
complex solutions (tendency toward over-engineering, having no Steve Jobs-like
taste or touch for product). Freebase and many technical knowledge solutions
put a lot of the technical capabilities in the reader's face in presentation;
the key to eg Google succeeding was that it hid all of its incredible
complexity behind a single input box of ultimate simplicity. The next great
knowledge service will be quasi-dumb in terms of advanced knowledge structure,
more like Wikipedia (and or it will otherwise entirely hide its advanced
technical structure from the reader and appear dumb / simple on the outside).

------
lnsru
I am working alone, but at the end, there are many people with similar
background around. I can discuss technical topics and applications easily. Of
course, co-founder is nice to have. Another engineer at the very beginning and
sales person with domain knowledge when rough prototype is on the table (I am
in hardware business). The biggest issue with being alone is that nobody is
funding single person ventures, bus factor is too high. Though I am not sure,
if hardware ideas are easy to align with venture capital growth mantra in
general. Maybe I will stay relatively small in small niche, that would satisfy
me.

------
amirathi
I agree with everything except,

> Don’t add a co-founder after the fact

Late co-founder makes a lot of practical sense to me.

\- It's less risky for the incoming person to join a small profitable company
instead of joining an idea

\- You broadly know the problem space you will be working in (market,
customers etc.) and the vision/direction of the company. Less likely to have
fallouts a year or two down the line

\- More informed equity negotiation than just splitting it equally

~~~
sokoloff
While I'm not in the camp that says rigidly that a "founder" has to be there
from the very first moment, I would struggle to think of someone as a co-
founder who joined long after the company was formed and only after it was de-
risked all the way to profitability.

That person would be an early employee in my book, not a co-founder.

------
hef19898
That article resonates a lot. Being a solo founder 3 months in, I can agree
with basically all of it. Especially the over thinking and over analyzing
part. You have the idea, got some initial positive market feedback, got a
general direction and plan. But then you have to get _out_ and _actually do
it_. Which is a lot harder alone than I had thought. Not being in SV, there is
less risk of a startup echo chamber so.

What did help a lot so far in my case was to get out and have concrete
discussions with established people in my industry. Luckily I have some great
people I can talk to, and bouncing ideas around with them on how to implement
it and discuss concrete ways going forward to start a partnership really
helped. It also forces you to get get moving.

And as some comment also stated, things tend to take a lot longer when you are
alone than, at least I had, initially planned for.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Good article. I like it when people share from personal experience, as opposed
to theory.

In my case, I've been slowly building something up. It's been taking a lot of
time. I'm fortunate, in not having to rush, and in not having to seek money
from others.

I also have changed direction a few times. I started off, wanting to save the
world, and have had to reduce my scope quite a bit.

I ran head-on into the ageism issue. No one wants to play with an old guy.
Even though my particular mix of skills and experience are almost ideal for a
startup, the grey hair outweighs it by a lot. It's been rather jarring.

So I just gave up trying to work with others, and am doing it myself. No
matter. I have what it takes; it will just take longer.

It's not what I wanted, but it's what I got.

------
hbcondo714
Written in 2017 but certainly still relevant today, especially with his blog
post from last month about almost selling for $5M:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013700)

------
paulie_a
If you are not a great salesperson you are doomed. 8 hours of your day should
be selling. The rest of your day can be focused on tech

~~~
Eikon
Ah yes, the myth of the 15+hours of work a day!

~~~
paulie_a
Not at all just that sales is more important than the shiny tech.

------
1hakr
I'm solo founder making microstartups. My recent one is
[https://visalist.io](https://visalist.io) and it's making $7000 per month. I
built all my microstartups startups to solve my own problems and that I think
is the best indicator for successful product.

