Thanks for sharing! I have spent a lot of time as a solo founder and I’ve spent time as a co-founder. I thought it might be helpful to contrast my experiences.
As a solo founder I found that the highs were muted and the lows were amplified. This likely won’t be true for everyone but this was very true for me.
As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so many things that need to be done. Being able to divide and conquer is a great feeling.
I’ve read that statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder. This idea can really get in your head if your having a rough week.
As a co-founder you might sometimes feel like you are carrying all of the weight and others are benefiting more from your hard work. Don’t worry, the next time you get sick they will carry on for you. It goes both ways. Not everyone will put out the same effort every day but hopefully it averages out.
Personally I’m a very social person even though I sometimes feel like an introvert. Just because you can live life alone doesn’t mean it is the best choice for everyone. Now that I’m married and have a daughter I can’t imagine how lonely I would be if I had to go back to experiencing life alone. Similarly, working with people who you care about to some degree can be a great reward and motivator.
Everyone is different and solo founders can be successful. For me, having experienced both, I will find a friend to join me on my journies from now on.
> As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so many things that need to be done.
As a solo founder myself. Here's how to solve that problem. If you pre-launch speak to potential customers. If you are post-launch, speak to your customers.
Those who are in the weeds and touch your application/competitors application on a daily basis are the ones who will give the best and most important feedback and from there you will know what to work on.
"Statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder" is true in the sense that accelerators like YC have this as a selection criterion.
I'd be curious to see if this is true without the selection effect.
It’s difficult to know. Knowledge of such a study can get internalized into a founders psyche and become self fulfilling. And they are the type to do so (both seeking out this kind of report and being impacted by it).
Solo founder is such a loaded term. Every freelancer, dropshipper, consultant is also a solo-founder. it's just not as glamorous as building a venture backed product.
There's lots of bullshit on both sides. "Building a venture-backed product" these days often means "being a full-time salesperson peddling grossly overvalued equity by trying to schmooze people who don't understand the underlying tech because that's the only way for the existing investors to exit".
How do you find the "right" co-founder? Or it doesn't really matter as long as you trust them and they are good enough? I have had some folks in my network offer to join as "co-founders" but it's been tricky to figure out if I should just go for it because "co-founders are awesome".
That’s a great question. I don’t think there is one perfect answer. However I would suggest that you find someone whom you’ve worked with at some point so you know if you work together well. If you don’t have previous experience working with a potential co-founder then I would suggest you try hiring them for a short project to get a sense. Or even better start something new with them so you’re both equally invested and if it doesn’t work out then you still have your original project.
Thanks - it's been tricky to say "no" and it feels weird to ask them to do a trial before. I think it depends on them as they might feel they are not "good enough" and it requires a certain level of maturity to realize trials are good for both of us.
After running a thing by myself for nearly ten years, I would say the most important factor is anxiety management. People experience anxiety very differently, so it's hard to give advice, but without some way of dealing with and reducing this stress it is not possible to run a solo business for a sustained period of time.
Some examples of what can make you anxious working solo:
* A "lumpy" income stream that is hard to model or predict
* The feeling of being on call 24/7
* Having to make a large capital outlay or hire an expensive professional like a lawyer
* Seeing a well-funded competitor appear and start hiring
Anxiety is an odd meta-problem in that if you worry about it, you just make it worse, but some strategy for long-term coping is necessary.
I remember after leaving a full-time job for the company we started in 2005 being really freaked out by the idea that I didn't really ever have vacations or sick days or any kind of paid time off, since it was all coming out of my pocket. It was a freaky feeling.
We'd have weekly partner calls, and we'd get to the part where we'd run through the pipeline and cash flow situation, and I'd hold the phone away from my face so I wouldn't hear any of it, which did not overly endear me to my partners.
Also: to this day, neither Jeremy nor Dave can call me on the phone without me having a small panic attack (a post-traumatic reaction to several business dramas we had); it's almost exactly the feeling you get when a family member calls at 1AM. Jeremy I understand, because we still work together, but Dave called me a few months ago, and I freaked right the fuck out.
Yeah this seems like the big important entrepreneurial essay someone needs to write. It's a much bigger deal than most of the advice you get about starting a company.
I am a solo founder and anxiety begins to be a major problem for me (starts to result in observable real-life issues like insomnia). I've just realized that I need to find a way to deal with it, or there could be trouble ahead.
Stress and anxiety are there even if your business is doing "well" (as in, profitable and growing). There is always more work than you can handle, you are always afraid of a bigger competitor ruining things for you, and you always worry that customers will suddenly start churning one day.
I've been looking for a group of solo-entrepreneurs to exchange experiences. This article resonated with me. It's helpful to even know that others experience the same problems.
I cannot upvote this enough. I've found that exercise helps; both from being healthier but also because I'm so tired I sleep through the night instead of waking up and being unable to get back to sleep.
While running I focus on form as a way of meditation. Eventually my mind will wander onto other topics; being unable to actually put my hands onto a keyword or whiteboard helps.
Actually we are running a Whatsapp group for solo-entrepreneurs. We have video-calls from time to time and share milestones or problems.
I won't share the group link here, as it would probably overwhelm us. But if you do want to join, drop me a short email to group868@vlx.cc introducing your startup and I'll send you the intro document.
The constant stress can definitely wear someone down if they don't have any proper outlets.
I had clear skin my entire life until I started to develop severe cystic acne as a 32 year old adult (after about 6 months of non-stop work into my startup). Once I started dialing things back, my skin got way better.
I’m dealing with this right now. There just needs to be a single anxious thought and I’ll be crippled with the fear of failure - what if it doesn’t workout, what if this, what if that - and consequently my productivity gets destroyed.
How did it go with the competitor? Look on the bright side, at least a partner didn't steal your IP and go on to compete. I have seen that happen to at least 3 people I know fairly well irl.
Sometimes I think bookmarking in pointless. I have way too many ~10k and to find the right one I go back to googling. Now If I had a way to capture my entire browsing history it would be interesting I guess.
I ran my company successfully as a single founder for 5 years, till one day I was told I would become a quadriplegic & I had to close my company as there's no other executive to take care of it.
I had Facebook Fb Start accelerated product with 2,50,000 customers , any company expressing interest in acquiring my product wanted me to work for them; which wasn't possible as I was recovering from surgery.
Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company.
I used to despise YCombinator's co-founder requirement, now I advice everyone to get a co-founder before they start their operations.
Good point. I think any single founder should bear this in mind.
Note that depending on scale and industry, you can design around this to an extent. My company largely runs automatically. I mostly work on growing it. I have a contract programmer and support rep who handle stuff. Requires very little day to day input from me.
Don't get me wrong. If I became quadrapeligic, things would gradually break. But depending on time required away, I could have someone come and take input from me on some decisions, stop some functions, etc
I got this from the 4 hour workweek, which is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to make a solo business based on systems.
I do know the system works incidentally: there have been periods where for 1-2 months I did almost nothing. Just coming out of one due to a concussion that knocked me out of work. The business grew nonetheless, though I have a backlog of some things to take care of.
So, if you are starting a solo business, you have a bus factor of 1. You should consider the design of it, and what happens if you become unable to work on it.
Of course, this bars you from some industries or business models.
> of course, this bars you from some industries or business models.
Not just that, there are numerous other variables. e.g. The environment,I started my company in India when there was no definition for a startup, so my startup was no different than a Billion dollar corporation from the eyes of the government.
So, as a single founder I spent much of my initial years trying to learn all compliances & adhering to them(there are dozen new ones every month); while the product development went un-interrupted through the developers (whom I personally trained) & via automated systems.
Startups in a better environment had a competitive advantage of having to focus only on their company's growth even when being a single founder.
I've been a solo founder for some time. By far the toughest thing for me has been the cognitive load.
I don't mean raw time. I generally have enough time to get done what I need to get done. I'm talking about the sheer number of different things I have to think about and pay attention to. It's more about mental clutter and management of it than time management, at least for my own case.
Burnout can be an issue too and can come from cognitive load and also not having as many peers to give support and energy. It's easy to get down and lose motivation.
Overall I'd say: multiple founders with good chemistry > solo founder > multiple founders with bad chemistry or conflict. I always put being a solo founder on a list of weaknesses, but the thing is that everyone and every team/venture has a list of weaknesses and part of succeeding is recognizing yours and trying to work around them.
Strategies I've found include maintaining time/energy boundaries (e.g. not working weekends unless something is on fire), delegating where possible, managing scope creep (I've had problems with this one!), and looking at it as a marathon rather than a sprint and thinking in terms of endurance. Getting exercise, eating healthy, and trying to get enough sleep help too as with anything requiring one to be fit.
I'm a solo-founder too and I agree that cognitive load is the biggest problem, even working less than 40 hours/week.
I've been on this for 4 years and I feel like my personality has changed due to the fact that my brain can't dedicate reasonable resources to anything other than running the business. I used to have several interests (musical instruments, travel, film, photography) and now I can only afford to care about business and family. The only things I can talk about are related to business or child-rearing.
What keeps me going is that I should be able to retire at least 20 years sooner than I would by working a regular 9 to 5 job, so I'll have plenty of time to dedicate to other interests.
I've been working on a project with a couple people that I don't get a lot of value from as co-founders right now because they aren't designers or engineers. They are trying to help us define the set of requirements given their relationships in the industry, but they have not really done product work before. I keep telling myself how valuable they will be once we launch because they will bring customers. Echoed by the author here:
"When you start a project, you always think that finishing and launching your project is the hardest part. However, after the launch you realize that the most difficult part is just ahead."
Any recommendations for how to handle this kind of co-founder situation?
I'm thinking about working with them to define equity incentives on both sides, but I'm short on other ideas for how to make things feel well balanced in the short term given our unbalanced skill sets.
Without much more detail than this, they don't sound like cofounders. If they're waiting until you launch to go 100%, then you're assuming all the risk right now.
Again take with a grain of salt, bc I have no context, but , if there's one you think is clearly the best, that you like working with them, get them to be a cofounder and make them go all in. They can do lots of manual work to validate the idea/product (ie manually do things you'd like your product to do). If there's noone you could see doing this, then their role is probably not going to grow that much when there is a 'product'.
Also: the product will never be done, and framing launch as a binary event doesn't help you (or your potential cofounders). It's all just a continuous spectrum of trying to cover as much scope/utility as possible for your users, and using a product to try to automate that. After 7 years, you'd be shocked how much stuff my sales cofounder does manually that we had framed as a 'required feature for launch'.
You need customers signed up and ready to pay well before you have a product ready to launch. Having a co-founder who is good at outreach, sales, and making connections is honestly more important than having a finished product, so you should give serious weight to having a non-technical co-founder. There is no company without sales!
Note that the below makes big assumptions as to what the situation looks like. I read a lot between the lines, so take the words below with a grain of salt.
I won't sugar coat it: it's a tough situation to be in because you need to fix a potential mistake that was done a while back and doing so, while going in the proper direction of fairness, can be interpreted as unfair by other parties.
First I would have a discussion by putting yourself in the shoes of the company, not your personal shoes, as you have a fiduciary duty to do it. This removes your personal interests from the discussion, as it should, and will make it less personal (as it should too). From that perspective, the company needs to do what's best for itself, and giving away significant equity for little in return doesn't seem to fulfill that duty. I imagine your cofounders also have a fiduciary duty to make decisions that are aligned with the company's interests, even if these decisions aren't the best for themselves. This is a good test for that.
If the contributions of your other co-founders are minimal, then it needs to be reflected in the equity allocation.
Perhaps an acceptable solution would be to turn these "future founders" into advisors. You can use the Founder Advisor Standard Template as a simple framework to allocate shares vs contributions (see https://fi.co/fast ) - this will keep them engaged, compensated for their current contributions, and also gives the company a way to have a history with them to decide whether it makes sense to turn them into co-founders later or not (whether you want to call it co-founders when that happens is irrelevant).
What's nice about the FAST template is twofold: first, it formalizes the type of work that advisors do (in terms of workload too) and it relates that to a specific percentage of equity, allowing you to map their levels contributions to a more reasonable compensation. Second, it was not engineered by you: you have not written the template so you cannot be accused of influencing it for your benefit.
Lastly, a lot of this depends on how the relationship between the founders is. You may find out that things don't work out as easy as you'd want to, and that's a lesson that's better to have earlier than later. Conversely, you may find out that your cofounders agree and perhaps were a bit uneasy by the unfair allocation.
I were in similar situation. I had two shareholders in company that will bring value in the future - that was the hope. They have some skills that I were missing (I thought). At the end I was alone with my product and was stagnating. I decided to ask them to leave the company as I will re-write the product from scratch and make the product core as open source. They agreed to leave the company. Now, I'm 100% solo. Sometimes it is very hard - you even cant talk to anyone. But I know that I'm going to make everything myself or hire a freelancers for help, but I am not relaying on anyone and I think this helps me stay motivated. Having shareholders (or cofounders) that are not shipping regularly with you is very demotivating in my opinion.
Maybe they can work on writing content marketing articles or documentation, link building, partner outreach, building relationships with potential customers, mapping out growth strategies, handling social media, looking for key opinion leaders, getting key facts that demonstrate your value prop, figuring out good questions for sales scripts, listing requirements for contracts and T&Cs, doing the bookkeeping, looking for subsidies/funding, getting a feel for what competitors are doing and probably a million other things that we as solo founders have to do.
one thing they could and should be doing is enabling those conversations with potential customers right now so you can validate the product/features you're building as well as have them be ready/aware to use your product when you do launch.
Agree with this. Your domain experts should already be inputting into the product and bringing early adopters to the table to help you build the right product. You development for X months whilst they wait for the product to be fully baked is the wrong way to go about it.
This resonated well with me - thank you for the article! I jumped into the fray late last year full time and it's been the most exciting (and nerve-racking) few months of my life. As the author says, I feel like I am learning new things, growing personally (and making mistakes) at 10x the speed! (and I live in Jersey City too)
I would say the hardest part for me is balancing time between building and outreach. It's always concerning to build stuff mindlessly without having a tight user loop, but in the beginning it's really hard to wear multiple hats and figure out how to do both. I wish I had a great co-founder who could handle the outreach and audience part, but that's probably like wishing for a genie.
If anyone invests in crypto or stocks at all, feel free to check them out [0][1] - I am always looking for feedback (I haven't publicly "launched" yet but am close).
Fun fact: everything here is in Python, both frontend and backend.
Correct me if I'm wrong but tkinter is only for Desktop GUI I think. I am talking about the new search engine we are creating at coinquanta.com. That's indeed in Python - it's a bold experiment for us but drastically cuts down our development time. We'll write a blog post about our experience and tech stack soon enough.
On the flip side (to most of the comments here) I've done 2 failed startups as a cofounder and feel that things might have gone better if I just did it solo.
Both of these were with people I knew for a while and initially had good chemistry with - but it ended up going sour over ultimately product/idea differences (both over 3 year stretches). I feel I did most of the work anyway (development work in a deep tech startup) and the sales/business partner basically just walked away with the biggest clients (since they were the face of the company as far as the client was concerned).
The next startup I do, I'll just pay for sales/consulting with cash, rather than cofounder equity.
The other person might feel the same way: “in the end I did most of the work of getting actual paying customers, the other cofounder just wrote some code...next time I’ll just hire someone to do the coding”
Not saying you should do things any differently than planned next time, but we coders have an outsized view of our value sometimes. You can pretty easily hire someone to write code if you have the cash. But being able to bring in actual cash for a brand new product (especially one that doesn’t exist yet) is actually pretty rare.
I’m a coder myself, but if I could wave a magic wand and make myself an awesome sales person instead, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’d sit and contemplate that wand for a long time.
Moot point - well obviously the other person would feel differently - who wouldn't?
Although that argument only works if you stereotype things completely. On one side we have a savvy outspoken salesman and on the other a shy introvert coder. And each thinks the other is completely replaceable. Kind of black/white don't you think?
Thats sort of the VC mental model i.e. the mantra that more people in the team makes it more likely that the startup has the entire skillset needed to create a successful business. On the other hand - one of the top reasons for startups failing is cofounder disputes. So difficult to say - are more founders less or more risky? :)
Most serial founders I know are actually pretty good at multiple things - experience and endless pitches will often do that to you.
I think that was my point, though poorly made. Hiring someone to just do that negligible bit of sales and marketing seems a little dismissive, and much harder in practice than someone might think. Better to stick with a cofounder or develop those skills yourself.
> You can pretty easily hire someone to write code if you have the cash
Perhaps if you have quite a gigantic pile of cash. In most cases, trying to outsource your company's core product development is a recipe for very severe disappointment. The technical cofounder's role is to understand absolutely as much about the business as possible, and constantly integrate that evolving knowledge into the product. It's not really a job that stops and there is almost no way to compensate someone by the hour to do it... without a dragon's hoard to start.
Yes, but all that is just as true for the role of actually getting someone to fork over money. Witness the huge graveyard of interesting ideas built by talented engineers who can’t sell or market to save their lives.
> The communication cost of making decisions and shipping something is extremely low.
I'm sure everyone is a little different in this regard, but for me, having someone to make a decision with is something I really cherish. I'm a very optimistic person who dreams big, so having a partner who can poke holes and challenge my decisions has always helped me along the way.
> Do not invest too much time early on designing the perfect pricing model for your product.
As someone on the cusp of launching a side-project/wanna funded startup, I really loved this. I've recently caught myself trying to attain perfection instead of 'ship and adapt', and this is a great manifestation of that to be aware of.
A lot of solid advice. I’m surprised you learned so much in just your first year. It took me way longer for certain things to realize. Thanks for sharing!
In marketplace e-commerce (I'm thinking Etsy or Amazon), gross revenue might include dollars received for goods sold which is passed on to the actual seller since the platform is a market place i.e. teddy bear is sold for $15 of which $14 goes to the seller so net revenue is $1. So if your costs/COGS were $0.50 your gross profit margin on the net revenue was 50% (much higher than the 3% on total revenue).
Other companies do this when they pass through costs such as in outsourced manufacturing.
As a solo founder I found that the highs were muted and the lows were amplified. This likely won’t be true for everyone but this was very true for me.
As a solo founder I often felt like I had no idea if I was working on the right thing because there are so many things that need to be done. Being able to divide and conquer is a great feeling.
I’ve read that statistically your chances of succeeding are higher as a co-founder. This idea can really get in your head if your having a rough week.
As a co-founder you might sometimes feel like you are carrying all of the weight and others are benefiting more from your hard work. Don’t worry, the next time you get sick they will carry on for you. It goes both ways. Not everyone will put out the same effort every day but hopefully it averages out.
Personally I’m a very social person even though I sometimes feel like an introvert. Just because you can live life alone doesn’t mean it is the best choice for everyone. Now that I’m married and have a daughter I can’t imagine how lonely I would be if I had to go back to experiencing life alone. Similarly, working with people who you care about to some degree can be a great reward and motivator.
Everyone is different and solo founders can be successful. For me, having experienced both, I will find a friend to join me on my journies from now on.