Just want to add, I followed pretty much the same path with Windmill [1], which is also in the developer tool space, and also open-source. Built everything solo for 5 months. I thought it would be impossible to get into YC, it is not and I was fortunate enough to join YC on the latest batch, on my first try [2].
Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made fundraising much easier. Most importantly, even though I worked in tech in the bay many moons ago, at the time I was very isolated in Paris and thought I understood the startup game but I did not really. Being part of a cohort like YC with like-minded amazing peers, truly felt like I was able to go up to speed on many subjects that would have been out of reach for a solo founder.
If you are a solo technical founder and considering applying to YC, reach out to me, I am more than happy to help.
Very cool, thanks for sharing. Windmill looks well done. I've got a few ideas I'm mulling over in the dev tools space and would consider going the solo technical founder. Will definitely reach out for some advice when the time comes. Out of curiosity, any downsides to use the .dev tld?
I would prefer the windmill.com domain but a cool windmill museum has it. I have not seen any downsides except Google (who owns the .tld) kept refusing to approve our oauth because the approval team was convinced that .dev could only be for testing.
Didn't know where to reply, but your docs say "Tested with apache bench. If we did it wrong, let us know."... generally with lambda as a fair shake from 0 to load use provisioned concurrency, and you can always pre-warm it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/provisioned-con...
But cool otherwise. Is JS the only supported language?
Typescript (deno), Python and Go. Tbh the goal is really not to compete with AWS Lambda on performance as they use microvm with hot http servers, but to show that it's not order of magnitudes slower.
Yeah usually the slow part with Lambda is either them loading your container/runtime... or for a long time the P99 on getting the ENI attached into your VPC for vpc lambdas when they have to get a new worker host. They brought that way down and it used to be P90 of like 100ms but p99.9 of something like 17s. I believe that's basically fixed now.
But yeah if you're showing your comparable or same ballpark the criteria is less crucial. Was mainly just adding addtional data. Good luck on the project. A light framework like this for essentially scripts locally without kube or heavy docker is nice.
I know the original windmill (getwindmill.com) is long outdated and abandoned, but it's still too early to reuse names in the same space, IMHO. At least for us old-timers :)
Good luck with the product, but it took me a while to understand that this has nothing to do with the "original" Windmill (it's waay too similar).
And VCs, but as much as I'd like it to not be the case, the US and the bay area in particular play at another level. The french ecosystem is getting really good at some forms of deep tech, but developer tools is not one of them, yet. The current government and station F have done wonders, we were 8 french startups at YC this year, the most populous of any other EU countries. Things are starting to change in the right direction and french engineers don't lack the drive and talent.
On the other hand, French people/VCs will wonder what can go wrong whereas in the US they look at what can go right. There are enough hurdles to face when trying to build a global tech companies as a solo founder and it can definitely make a difference.
I have spent the last 12 years in the startup ecosystems in US, Europe and Asia.
Europe progressed quite a lot and now can be considered a matured one, however compared to US and sophistication of investors, deal-making and deep-tech it is still a young adult compared to the season 50 years old American veteran with scars and experience.
APAC still a teenager in that sense but with a lot of spotlight.
Different cultures, mentality, support system and also chances of making it in the end. I feel like if you have a possibility to be close to the valley, your chances of making it are probably 50% higher than anywhere else in the world and that route actually makes sense.
Sure but they'll bring you some croissants and half a desk for 3 months for your seed round.
If you're a startup in Europe you can forget about the scale you can experience in the US and you should dedicate someone in your team to apply to every European grant out there to survive.
The successful European founders I know invested the equivalent of a Silicon Valley round of their own money (or friends / family / great contacts from networking) before seeing VCs
This was a great post that actually is undersold by the title. Any aspiring solo founder should read this, as ToolJet’s founder has provided a great roadmap to getting to product market fit - and understanding the trade offs and concessions a solo founder must make. It absolutely matches my own experiences and expertly lays out the growth plan for a software firm that’s bootstrapping and dogfooding off of a single person. Well done Navaneeth.
Will absolutely keep this in my personal list of articles for friends and acquaintances looking to start their own firms.
> if someone from the team steps up and adds a lot of value that is expected from a co-founder, we will definitely promote the person as a co-founder
How can someone get the title of a cofounder of an already (at least) 2 years old company which is already set up an running? I understand that traditionally this person then represents in investor meetings, but why does it need to be a _founder_ title of something that was founded long ago?
Some startups now retrofit co-founder title to employees as recruiting tactic. Part of the overall title inflation trend I presume. I’ve seen some extreme examples where there are dozens of “co-founders” on the roster.
I'm a co-founder, with the current CEO and one other guy who retired, and have always been on the engineering side of the business. at first, the engineering department was me, and support. I was super green back then and was pretty lucky to be at the right place at the right time and as such, the company grew far faster than myself. I have many superiors now, which is cool with me as I've continued learning and growing professionally by observing them. going from me and 2 other guys to late series C has been a priceless experience, and it's nice to have the title. but oh my, the spam email and phone calls I get from having it on my LinkedIn profile is beyond annoying. many assumptions are made by companies advertising to co-founders, mainly that im C level and involved in sales. I struggle to calculate the total cost of all the sales guy time spent targeting me but I can safely say atleast a low end Lamborghini could have been procured if it was all pooled together.
How have you found it starting as a co-founder and now having to report to others?
For me personally, I don't think I'd have grown as graciously as you seem to have articulated that you have. I'd like to ha e retained a strong semblance of direction and control in the company as a co-founder.
it has been extremely challenging at times, especially the times where my voice fell upon deaf ears and the wrong direction was taken. ultimately every mistake, your own or otherwise, is a learning experience, and every success is just the same.
for the most part though, I am involved quite a bit in the technical direction we are taking, so i dont feel as if ive been completely pushed out. I've now lived through several leadership
shakeups and kind of glad that the stress of knowing the board could axe me at any time is mostly not on me. my historical knowledge of the system and domain alone is enough to guarantee job security and my compensation remains competitive
given that chances like this are extremely rare, I've committed to riding it out to liquidity or the ship sinks, and learning as much as I can until then.
"Founder" is not a title you can add casually under US law.
It's determined at the time of incorporation and stock issuance. QSBS, and other legal structures, do not allow transferability of "Founder" to follow-on Investors and employees.
I might be wrong here but "Founder" is just a title and it has nothing to do with law or investors. Adding another "Director"/"Officer" requires some paperwork though.
You’re correct. I’m not a lawyer, but went through doing own startup:
It varies in incorporation requirements by state, but most only require 2 titles positions - a President and a Treasurer (the “Officers”)
Adding or removing a Director, as in “Board of Directors”, requires amendment to the Corporation’s bylaws, which should state how many seats there are.
Aside from those titles/roles, all the “C” prefixed titles are made up. Usually, one C level person is the President, another the treasurer. Co-founders are usually on the board of directors. Many times, a single person can be on the board, a co-founder, and ceo.
I don't think QSBS has anything to do with founder titles specifically, but I'd love to be corrected. Anyone who with stock that is QSBS eligible gets the exemption, whether they are a founder, investor, employee, etc, and it's more about the eligibility (ie you paid for the stock, you didn't acquire it on a secondary transaction, the business was <50M, etc). Whether your title is founder or not doesn't really matter.
This is completely untrue and it's very unfortunate that you'd make such an easy to verify false statement with such certainty and reflects very poorly on the overall quality of discussion.
between Retool, Budibase, Superblocks, and Tooljet, i'm confused about how to choose. anyone have a good mental map of the low code internal tools landscape?
A solo founder has many things on their plate, but should never pass up an opportunity to raise awareness for their product; especially if it has progressed to what they think is MVP status. Newsletters, blogs, and sites like HN are great places to start 'getting the word out'.
And probably clarity of thought value for the author as well, I've found that writing is usually the best way to clear your thoughts and identify potential remaining blind spots in scenarios like this.
The important point here is that he got funding first, and it sounds like at least half a million because he didn't talk about begging angels for money or running out of runway.
He was able to hire someone fast.
You won't be this good/lucky.
In the traditional non-traditional startup you need a salesperson and engineering to be free, because money. I suppose with dev tools you can get rid of the salesperson because you're selling tools to individuals? Which is more risk, but if it works then go for it.
It’s perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your experience was - having a social circle to intro investors, inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for solo founders with negligible traction.
Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.
"GitHub stars", like "the number of downloads", is a weak signal, rarely meaningful in traction talks unless there's nothing more substantial to discuss. Traction indicators for a low-code platform would be revenue, number of paid users, number of apps deployed/updated with ToolJet, number of different people using ToolJet apps, the volume of data captured/processed per week, etc.
Interesting that you used ProductHunt. I looked at their site and couldn't figure out if anyone actually paid attention to it. I suppose for tech journalists and investors it's a better place to find interesting stuff than PR newswire?
But that market size overall is small, and the number of players is large.
The entire dev tools market is consistently estimated at around 5 billion right now, and only 11-12 billion 5 years from now. The CAGR is about 13-14%.
ML, which appeared out of nowhere, is estimated at ~15-20 billion right now, and 100-200 billion in 5 years. The CAGR is ~40% right now.
(The estimates vary on whether they think CAGR slows down or not, etc, hence the variation 5 years from now).
In one of these markets, you need to be a big fish in a small pond, but you'd have to take out established players to do it.
In the other, you at least might stand a chance of building something new that takes over as the market grows 10x.
As a note, if you're in a startup you have no idea how far ahead of most developers you are.
I keep forgetting that most developers throw their stuff over the wall to IT and probably don't have a ci pipeline, do IaC, , and probably don't deploy their own microservices or understand the AWS stack. They probably have a 60% chance they use source control instead of just copying folders and changing the folder name. They don't do logging or security. They scale by buying bigger instances. Docker is their current tech boner instead of puppet.
This is true, but most of those devs are in that situation because they want to be. They have less than zero interest in taking on more. Often these people also value job security/stability above advancement/novelty. Many of them also do coding only while at work, and if they will learn a new skill/tech it will be because their employer is paying them to. Often this group will not follow any tech news/blogs/anything and isn't even reachable.
In short it's a pretty tough group to market to.
To be clear, I'm not making a value judgment on this. If those people are happy with life, that's great! That's mostly the point IMHO.
Be careful with advice like this. You don't know if the company has yet succeeded. A lot of it is quite logical but at the same time many things are an anomaly e.g the tool launched and closed fundraising within a short period of time. That's not always how it works out. Just because first commit to funding was 3 months doesn't mean you'll experience the same thing. I struggled for 4 years alone on an OSS project before raising funding. Hiring people, defining the product and executing was even harder. A person's experience only tells you what worked or is working for them or lessons they learned, it can't be cookie cutter fitted to your own journey.
Exactly the reason why I wrote the article in a way that it just walks through the journey. The outcome of anything is a function of the context & timing and hence whatever worked for someone at a specific point of time to get to a specific stage might not be relevant for everyone.
Do you have to give yourself titles everyone else is using? If I start a company I would rather have "Captain" or "Masterchief" or perhaps just keep the C from CEO and be just a "Chief".
It’s helpful to align titles with the rest of the industry so that everyone outside of your small group knows what role you play without a long explanation. Custom or non-standard titles is like mixing code styles in the same file. So much fun when you’re doing it but such a huge pain when the next person comes in.
Interesting…maybe we should normalize/de-stigmatize Dev tooling companies to have a ceo who is an eng for the first ~ 3 yrs, and then hiring a replacement (maybe even some early “vp of product person”)
There are probably so many good ideas that devs have, but they don’t have enough interest in being a ceo of a big unicorn company, but understand the problem and can get a prototype up with no red tape
> Interesting…maybe we should normalize/de-stigmatize Dev tooling companies to have a ceo who is an eng for the first ~ 3 yrs, and then hiring a replacement (maybe even some early “vp of product person”)
I wasn't aware there was any stigma there. Considering that Gates, Dorsey and Zuckerberg were engineers who wrote code and continued to be CEOs of their companies for very long.
It seems to me that every great tech company needs two things to get off the ground. A product that actually works well and execution on the business side. Few people have the skills to do both of these things well. Apple got started with the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak). One built the first couple of computer designs. The other was a sales and marketing genius.
If you have a product that is possible to launch in just a couple months, then you might be able to get by as this guy did. If your product is much more complicated and takes several years for a solo developer to build, then you have to pick the CEO or CTO role and go with it.
My own project has been a work in progress for several years now. I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite lacking. It is a new kind of data management system and it can be really tough to raise awareness and get people to try it out.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Developers are extremely difficult to market to if you're not a developer yourself. It can be done, but very few sales/marketing people will be successful unless they have much experience in it. The reason why is that developers break all the rules you learn in marketing departments and schools. What works with normal people will not just be ineffective on devs but will actively repel them.
People always describe Steve Jobs as a “sales and marketing” person but IMO that grossly undersells his value. He was also an amazing product visionary, and could bridge the gap between sales/marketing and technical.
>I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite lacking.
Can relate to this. What worked well in the case of ToolJet is that the product did not require marketing efforts to get the initial traction since the project is open-source.
You need a third thing, which is the ability to "sell" what you're doing to some combination of customers/users, investors, and people you want to hire.
Absolutely. I have had a few hundred people tell me that they think the technology is amazing and can't believe how fast it is; but so far only a few paying customers and no investors (other than myself) yet. Bootstrapping is hard.
Does anyone have similar recommendations regarding sales, marketing and other business critical functions?
As someone contemplating the hard roads of B2B and non-SaaS , I feel a lack of basic advice on going from idea to revenue.
That’s a legit & hard question, and my startup experience is in consumer SaaS products, but my first thought is: are sales & marketing truly critical to your bootstrapping process, if you’re going B2B? I ask just because I’ve heard a lot of B2B, especially for young companies, happens via referral.
Like the article, one way is to do it yourself until you grow and can hire someone into the positions you need. Do you have 1 customer ready to go who will fund solo development? Do you have a team who will jump in if you land a seed round, or will you start building solo? This all depends a lot on your funding & runway situation.
A perhaps not so unpopular opinion is that it would be better to read the article before you comment on it. Despite the title, the article is not about mulling over what title to call yourself.
Good post, very helpful. So it sounds a good approach, or at least one, if you can't just quit your job and go full-time without some funding is to launch the project/product and go straight for a seed round which then gives you the resources you need to go full-time. Great to hear this is a plan that can work, assuming the project gets enough love.
So early on CEO is going to be selling customers and employees 80+% of the time but every Founder will need to. So why not delegate that to someone much better than you when you truly need the extra help. If you are not a killer technical founder, than what chance do you have in the market, as you've already signaled you're not the best sales person by not defaulting to the CEO role. Thus I'd argue you have little choice.
This is an excellent and pragmatic way of looking at scaling team as an engineer. The defragmentation comparison really demonstrates this clearly, thank you for sharing this.
CEO all the time. CTO only if you absolutely trust your CEO. But as the saying goes, the optimal number of co-founders is an odd number and three is too much.
Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made fundraising much easier. Most importantly, even though I worked in tech in the bay many moons ago, at the time I was very isolated in Paris and thought I understood the startup game but I did not really. Being part of a cohort like YC with like-minded amazing peers, truly felt like I was able to go up to speed on many subjects that would have been out of reach for a solo founder.
If you are a solo technical founder and considering applying to YC, reach out to me, I am more than happy to help.
[1]: https://windmill.dev
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793