I'm sure some of these reasons should actually be carefully considered before deciding to go it alone, but I feel that many of them can be safely ignored given one's appetite for risk. After all, if you aren't willing to take chances, why are you trying your hand at a startup in the first place?
tl;dr - Of the common assertions against being a single founder, which are myth/overblown and which are serious concerns?
Yes, that... or his name is Paul Graham! :)
From investors point of view second founder is social proof of the idea and the first person, a much lower chance of entire team getting hit by a bus, and a demonstrable ability to work in teams. They have no downside in modest increase in the number of founders, unlike the first founder who is slashing his pie in half.
You, too, should worry about social proof. If no one wants to hang out with you, maybe your idea is on the wrong side of crazy, and you are the kind of person unable to tell good ideas from bad ideas. Who knows? The thing is, if you have bad judgement, you likely don't know about it, can't know about it.
I would like to know: How you were able to cover aspects of your projects for which you did not have the skills. Not having the skill for design (for example) has been a double blow for me - I don't know what I don't know, so I can't evaluate the scope of projects, nor determine the best use of money and the timing for bringing in external resources.
0) Not important, just interesting. On the moral side: did you reason going solo as to avoid loosing money/control and generally didn't bother or was it just that you didn't find someone acceptable.
1) For the skills you lacked: did you hire someone or tried to learn the skills and figure out how to lessen the importance of this part of the product.
2) Money wise: did you originally planned to bootstrap or wanted to bring in the investors. And how your reasoning about convincing the investors went.
3) Investors: when you finally met real people with money how you convinced them to trust in you
4) Co-founder: What was the primary reason of parting ways with your co-founder
5) Sum up: do you believe that there are 'single-minded' people and they will be better of not trying to find a co-founder at all. That said, it means such people should reasonably adjust their expectations about the product they can pull off alone.
Thanks!
Motivation is easy for me ... I love what I'm doing. Even on bad days. When it's too much though just do something else, or pick some low hanging fruit and knock out some easy achievements. You might have to just make yourself work sometimes, cause if you leave it too long it'll become another dead project/game/whatever.
Who do you talk to? Users. In my case I was fortunate enough to have lots of users including some really great, accomplished people.
You do have to wear every hat and that can make you uncomfortable but you just have to man up and do it, a cofounder's not going to insulate you from everything you're not good at / not comfortable at.
I would love to read about your experiences!
I spent a few weeks "interviewing" cofounders and working with a few, before choosing one and starting to build a product and applied (and scored an interview) for YC. But during that time I realized that this person was not the person I wanted to start a startup with. Thankfully we didn't get in, and parted ways. Since then, I've decided that having a partner would be awesome but I'm not wasting time looking for someone (especially with the very small pool of people that want to work on wedding startups)... instead focusing on building as fast as possible on my own (product: http://weddinglovely.com, launched and making small bits of revenue).
I'm applying again for YC this round as a single founder, and I would encourage people not to rush out and find last minute cofounders just to apply. Spend time now finding a cofounder, then apply for S12 after a good few months of working together — and if you can't find the right cofounder, then start building yourself (especially if you're not technical).
If a complimentary skillset, alternative perspectives and/or shared workload isn't worth that to you then don't look. However important it may be to an external investor betting on you, you don't need to signal to yourself you're committed enough not to drop startup life in favour of that dream job at Google or pivot towards a "lifestyle business". People looking for cofounders solely to improve their chances of getting into incubators probably ought to reassess their priorities.
Perhaps a cofounder is more useful for startups that want to grow very fast (the type YC likes to invest in). But for the organic/bootstrapped style startups (ie 37Signals / FogCreek) is having a cofounder really necessary? Everyone likes to quote PG on this, but consider the source. His experience is with fast growth, VC funded, shoot for the moon style companies. So it may not necessarily apply to everyone's situation.
I imagine it can feel better to have a cofounder, to feel like you're not in it all alone. But if you want to make something great, there needs to be one person with a vision and the power to make it reality. Nothing really great was ever designed by committee.
The biggest problem was that we didn't really have a template for making decisions. Up to that point, our only goal had been getting into an accelerator, which we somehow expected to solve all our problems. And I'd already decided that I'd rather lead a startup than get a PhD, so I was very focused on that goal, while they were more focused on schoolwork. So the way decisions were made before the summer was that I'd say "I did some research, and think we should do this" and they'd say "OK." It was very unilateral. Once we started working together full-time, though, that wasn't tenable, and there was a very fine line I had to walk, to provide both autonomy and a sense of direction. And we never could come to an arrangement that made everyone happy.
That's not to say that I would have been more successful as a single founder—I had pretty minimal dev experience at the time—but there's a very good reason that one of the YC application questions is "Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together." If you don't have a good answer for that, my advice is to hold off on doing YC and just figure out something substantial that you can build together.
In my experience the best way is to start alone and actively promote your work to others. Pretty soon people who are serious about working with you will present themselves.
The absolute best way to prevent this is to have customers demanding your product now (or by a certain date). The next best is either to be dependent upon the startup for income, or to have other people pushing (and pulling) you forward (or pushing them, at other times). Not sure which is better.
I've been focused on credibility and positioning. Waiting for the right co-founder. Forming strategic relationships, staffing up and making key investments. Book deal pending, just acquired a software company.
Crush it...
Like in so many things, it's best to minimize the hand-wringing and make a decision based on your personal working style, who's available to join you, and how badly you want to be funded by an entity with a strong bias against solo founders.
Long-term, this kind of emotional stability prevents burn-out. That's important because startups don't die, founders quit.
First, designing and building an app by myself is different than anything else I've done in my career. It's incredibly exhilarating. Also a bit scary. Everything is on me. It can be stressful, but I don't think I could go back to the old way.
Second, when people realize it's just me behind the scenes, they don't take the app as seriously. I don't try to hide it. Kind of similar to how tech bloggers don't take you seriously unless you have funding. (But that's a different topic.)
Third, it's tough to get context or a neutral perspective. You're so close to it that seeing where you go wrong can be difficult. This is why I disagree with point #2 in the post. I worked on an app for a year and didn't realize it was a lost cause. (Dumb, I know.)
By and large, I think the pluses outweigh the minuses. Especially since I had cofounders bail on 4 projects before I went solo.
However, I'm not sure what the odds are for successful single founders. And at least some acquire co-founders (like dropbox).
I find it quite difficult to agree with this statement based on personal experience. For me, it is quite easy to try things to see if they work which often leads to going round in circles until a solution becomes obvious. I found that when working with other people, it is a lot easier to put ideas out there and you usually get the weak points shown to you right away. Also, having said that, I am also finding that the most of my dev activity on my current project involves stripping out functionality that simply turned out to be unnecessary or half baked. I feel that having a co-founder would be great help in avoiding some of the unnecessary work in first place.
I'm a few years out of university and have moved around a lot. Most of my trusted friends now days are non technical which makes my candidate pool near empty. I agree completely that getting on board with someone you don't know well is a bad idea.
It seems to me that all the rules placed around how you must have a team to get funded is restricting startups to the realm of college/uni students and there's probably a lot of opportunities being missed.
Eh I kind of disagree about this.
I ended up working on a project through a friend of a friend. A guy was doing some work on his own and needed some pro-bono help for his project. We have very different personalities but our skills complemented one another perfectly. We ended up moving out to the Bay Area together to work on our own projects. A year later, we've meshed extremely well given some tough circumstances.
There's absolutely no way we would've met back in Uni, as we frequented different circles.
A lot also depends on the type of product. E.g. for a consumer oriented startup with a tech-enabled (not tech-centric) product, the immediate big challenge (assuming business model has been established) is often sales & other "businessy" challenges.
Co-founding is like getting married, except without the sex.
i agree with your post that you should not rush or force yourself to find a co-founder. for those sole founders, i recommend attending mixers to meet people with similar interests and approaching people without the intent of finding a co-founder. make true friendships instead; your co-founders/life partners will follow.
