On being a solo founder with social anxiety

This is a brief story about my last few months, when I founded a startup by accident; and hopefully a good piece of advice for solo founders anywhere, and founders struggling with the lows of running a startup.

tl;dr:

• Don’t do it alone.
• Startups are hard.
• Seek professional help if feeling depressed or anxious.
• Reply to any incubator offers you receive. Seriously.

The start of everything

It all begun 14 months ago, when I released a game called Hacker Experience, an online hacking simulation game. It took me almost three years to build it and it was my very first hobby/project. Looking back, it’s a poorly designed piece of software, but we all have to start somewhere.

Anyway, right after the launch Hacker Experience was featured on sites like Hacker News and Product Hunt, and it got an impressive amount of users. If I recall correctly, we reached 30,000 users in two weeks. That’s a lot (at least for me, a young and confuse programmer).

When I realized the amount of users we had, I panicked. I was already tired of working on that specific project, and then all of a sudden I was receiving a myriad of messages, e-mails, forum threads. As a programmer, I never thought about the fact that I would have to deal directly with users. The whole process of developing the game was fun. Talking to people wasn’t.

Two days after the launch, I decided to sell the game. Not because I was interested at the money, but because I knew I couldn’t handle the pressure of working with people. I knew I couldn’t provide the support my users deserved, and I loathed myself for this.

In the end, the game was not sold. I couldn’t let go of my “baby”, even though I received tempting offers. I’d spent so much time working on it that it felt like a son for me. Today we are almost reaching the 500,000 users mark, but I still got the same problem. And I still fell really bad about it.

A quick word about social anxiety, shyness and introversion

People often use the words “introvert” and “shy” interchangeably. They are not, even though they overlap in many parts. This post makes a good job explaining the differences, so I won’t get in details here.

Social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, is an anxiety disorder in which a person has an excessive and unreasonable fear of social situations. Anxiety (intense nervousness) and self-consciousness arise from a fear of being closely watched, judged and criticized by others. — http://wb.md/1FfE7Aa

Basically, you know you have social anxiety when it starts impairing with your daily life. I can’t eat in public places, go alone to the mall, or listen to music on speakers, for example. Most recently, I dropped out of college, in part because of my workload but mainly because of not being able to attend classes on a regular basis.

Substance abuse, specially alcohol, is common among people with SAD. Another common comorbidity is depression.

Founding a startup, by accident

A few months after the launch I got a break and started working on something else. Around January, talking to a friend, we were wondering how a modern hacking game would be. With an OS-like UI, windows, dark/matrix-like maps, CLI, mobile app integration… That guy just got me excited again.

After a day, I start writing the game “manifesto”, a document with all the new things we could implement on a new version. I gathered a few friends which I knew for a long time either from the Internet or from college and could work with me on a modern release of Hacker Experience. Here is our official announcement. I’m obviously the drunk guy holding a fox.

The first version of the game was a hobby. It was never meant to generate money and it didn’t have any sort of proper monetization. (Ads? Really?)

All of a sudden, I’m staring at ~8 friends working with me, helping me with development, game design, interfaces, design, quality assurance… and I had to pay them. Where this money would come from? Am I going to earn it back? I had always read entrepreneurship resources, and now the acronym “ROI” had any meaning.

So I decided to deal with HE2 as if it was the product of a startup. I read Eric Ries and Paul Graham, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. I created a marketing strategy and a sales strategy. Then I wrote a business plan. I talked to an accountant and got incorporated. I studied american Law.

But to be honest, I hated it all. I don’t have a business background, I don’t like planning how a company should work and I hate dealing with finances, legal issues, HR, PR…

As you might have noticed, I’m a technical founder. Actually, I’m just a programmer and hobbyist sysadmin. I know how choosing the wrong tool/framework/language can ruin the product, while getting it right can make your job much easier. I have the skills to build a great product, not a great company.

I am a technician, but I have technique only inside technique. — AC/FP

No man is an island

It didn’t take much time for me to become overwhelmed by the business management tasks I had to deal with. It took me months to reply my accountant’s e-mail, for instance. I failed to answer back my lawyer. I failed to keep a proper communication with my team. And I kept failing with my users.

I got used to grabbing a drink and saying “I’ll drink just this one, so I can loosen up and talk to the people that are waiting for my messages”. Most times I failed, got drunk, bottle emptied, felt guilty, and e-mails went unanswered.

Worst part of all, I had so many things to do that I couldn’t work on the product itself. I couldn’t develop because I knew I had to answer that message, or send that document to someone.

I got depressed. All I could do all day long was sleep. The whole project got delayed for months because I missed to achieve basic things.

Working at a startup is definitely not easy. I like it because I have the opportunity to work with what I love, and actually do things that matter. If I were at a big company I would be just “one more”, “disposable” employee. This article tells what startups are really like. It’s well worth the read.

It was pretty clear for me that I needed someone to play the role of CEO. I needed a co-founder. Someone to help me cope with the ups and downs, and to deal with business stuff. Set the company vision. Be the public figure of the company.

Both technical and business stuff can be accomplished by the same person, but I don’t recommend anyone going down that road. Working on a startup is hard even for mentally healthy people. Kudos to those who managed to survive it, or are still struggling with it. In any way, share that role with someone.

Ideally, both co-founders would have some overlap in functions, so they both know how the product and the company is going. But having completely separated technical and non-technical founders is still much better than doing it all alone.

The disorder of lost opportunities

About a month ago I received an invitation to join an incubator in Europe, along with my team. I had sent them an e-mail telling about our startup a few days before.

This offer was specially important for us because Brazil has become a toxic environment for startups. The country is under heavy political and financial crisis. Law, taxes and interest does not help either. And our money is gone.

I never answered it.

Conclusion

Social Anxiety is not “being too shy”. It’s a mental disorder, and there are treatments (other than alcohol). If you are feeling anxious or depressed, seek professional help as soon as possible. This is a very serious issue and should not be treated with “workarounds” or “tricks”. After all, it’s you who is being tricked.

And here is an advice: college is a great place to meet potential founders. Within the 3 years I’ve been there I met awesome people and it’s quite easy to find out those who are actually entrepreneurs, not computer scientists.

If you want you can drop me a line or share similar life events at $firstname<at>hackerexperience.com. I might not answer you, but I’ll definitely read :)