Tips On Being A Solo Founder
It is possible, if you can put your ego aside.
On August 15th, 2013 I pushed my first commit to KillSwitch. In doing so, I had committed to being a solo founder, against all of the best advice I could find.
“Single founder startups are ego-driven death knells for the products they create.” one friend told me.
KillSwitch launched about 2 months ago. I’ve been making incremental improvements ever since but I finally feel like I’ve completed the “M” in MVP. So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to reflect on some of the lessons I learned so that they might help someone else who decides to ignore the common “gospel” and strike out on their own.
Know Your Space Backwards & Forwards
If you’re going to build a product by yourself you need to be damn sure you understand the space it’s going to fit into, and the potential customer you’re trying to reach. You don’t have the luxury of a partner to fill in your knowledge gaps.
I chose the ad management space because I spent the last 5 years working with clients to create ad campaigns. KillSwitch was solving a problem that I would have paid to fix at my agency: pausing client ads when their websites go down. I’m envious of the agency folks that can now walk into a sales meeting and ask if the competitors have a mechanism in place to stop their ads and protect their budgets if the client’s website ever has a problem. Talk about competitive advantage.
Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants
Inevitably, I needed help. As a solo founder, you’re going to have to be far more resourceful than a duo or group. That means making decisions that put you in good company and putting aside your personal tastes. You don’t have to love your stack, but you should love the communities that surround it. For example, I’d rather run OpenBSD than Ubuntu in production, but the availability of documentation for developing, deploying, and debugging on Ubuntu was far too plentiful to ignore. When it came time to make initial design decisions, I decided to largely mirror the framework and stack that my prodigious roommate (and CTO of predictive analytics startup Levers) was using.
When I got really stuck, which of course was more often than I liked, I had a roommate, active IRC channels (#Laravel & #Ubuntu on Freenode), and an active message board (Laravel.io) to ask questions to. This proved invaluable in speeding up the development process and avoiding pitfalls. As a solo founder you have at best half the man hours with which to work with. You have to make every single one count.
Be Your Own Pain In The Ass Co-Founder
Admittedly, my strength is marketing, not coding. In building KillSwitch, I constantly found myself talking to my marketing self from my development self. I was surprised at how easily I was caught up in feature-creep and scope explosions. Since I am bootstrapping this project with the money I make as a consultant in San Francisco, I am highly motivated to answer the following questions every day:
- What’s the absolute shortest path to revenue and users?
- How much success can this code handle before exploding?
- How much new revenue will this feature potentially add?
- How much marketing debt and technical debt can I handle as one person?
Leverage The Hell Out Of Your Marketing
I knew that as just one person, doing all the marketing for a fledgling product was likely going to be more challenging than coding it. As I was developing, I made sure I spent some time thinking of ways to cheaply speak to a lot of people. Right out of the gate I decided to employ a marketing strategy that uses hot topics to demonstrate prowess, but doesn’t offer an opinion. Here’s the first tweet from our account.
Keep Your Head Up
My friends often describe me as someone who lives “on the sunny side of the street.” And it’s true. Even with my sunny disposition, I found that it can be absolutely soul crushing to try and bring something to life. When you’re flying solo, no one is going to tell you it’s alright, and no one is going to be your better half when the chips are down. You have to believe you have the resources, will, and ability to solve the problems that come your way. It doesn’t mean that you’ll always feel this way, but if you generally believe it, it makes sitting down to keep trying on the same problem that took up so much of your life the previous day or week a little less demoralizing.
If you’re thinking of striking out on your own, give it a shot. You can always search for a co-founder later.
