The Selfish Founder
The day Mike Carson built Park.io he did not set out to be at the helm of a big business. We know this because he didn’t go out raising round-after-round of venture capital or hire a PR company to help him share a grandiose vision of dominating his vertical. Despite Mike not showing any ambition to build an empire, today he owns a growing one with an annual turn-over of more than a $1 million dollars, and just one employee — Mike himself. An empire grounded in principles that are quickly becoming why most entrepreneurs build new businesses.
The Selfish Founder is not about bootstrapping or self-funding even-though it brings us a step closer to understanding the concept. Instead it’s about mapping the characteristics of the entrepreneur to the structure and principles of the business.
“MicroSaaS” is a business structure articulated by Tyler Tringas, the founder of Storemapper.com, in his talk on “MicroSaas” as B2B Rocks Conference. According to Tringas “MicroSaaS” is about running a self-funded business with less than 5 employees, within a specific niche and with a focus on profit and sustainability.
What Tyler has done in building a business according to principles derived from his own personal characteristics is become a great example of The Selfish Founder. He has identified who he is and what is important to him and mapped it perfectly with how he conducts business.
Some Key Principles of The Selfish Founder:
- Aligns business with own strengths (Non-technical founders should avoid building technical businesses that they cannot run in an informed fashion)
- Aligns business with own preferences (eg. Introverted founders should avoid businesses that requires pitch-decks and direct sales with clients)
- Aligns business with own objectives (eg. If you want run a business that allows you to spend more time with your children or run a business that takes humans to mars)
For people like Tyler and Mike business is about independence, autonomy, creativity and being able to control your own schedule. For people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg it’s about changing the world. When a mismatch between the founder and the business structure occurs the business will suffer.
For guys like Tyler and Mike the structure of most businesses unfortunately are not designed for the type of freedom they want. Staff, clients, investors (if funded), sales and a number of other tasks would demand too many sacrifices on their behalf in what they are trying to achieve. Similarly a “MicroSaaS” business would be unbearable for someone like Elon Musk trying to build rockets and take humanity to Mars.
Therefor the Selfish Founder is a thoughtful individual that ignores convention and does introspection about who he is and what he wants to achieve. I believe entrepreneurs must innovate the very nature of how they conduct business before their businesses can innovate. Because businesses can only run efficiently if the founder is not hating every second of the journey.
