Being a Solo Founder: Pros, Cons, Tips and Tricks (2017)
I&#x27;ve been an entrepreneur non-stop for about 20 years. 15 of those as a solo-founder, across a few different start-ups.<p>I&#x27;ll echo the common ones: some loneliness (the sense of being in an exhausting fight against terrible odds by yourself); and not having a co-founder confidant to bounce ideas off of and to interrupt your bad ideas or occasional bouts of doubt &amp; skepticism.<p>You can certainly find people to bounce ideas off of, however, two serious issues will routinely impede that: the occasional need for various degrees of privacy on internal development matters, and deep contextual knowledge of exactly what you&#x27;re doing. Very few people on the outside are going to understand what you&#x27;re doing well enough to provide super valuable opinions.<p>I&#x27;ve spent ~18 months working full-time on a new start-up alone. It was supposed to take half that time, of course. It&#x27;s the most important work I&#x27;ve ever done by far and it&#x27;s the last thing I intend to ever build as an entrepreneur. I would have enjoyed having a co-founder on this project, however, realistically few people would be able to go along with something this time consuming and risky (no salary for two years). Sometimes it&#x27;s just going to be all on you and you have to want it badly enough to persevere.<p>It&#x27;s a fascinating situation in the non-VC start-up land these days (that is to say, I&#x27;m intentionally not raising VC, I need max control to see it through long-term; a VC would fuck it up by prioritizing profit as the prime motive and their get-big-too-fast mantra). For a good engineer to join me for two years to do this, they might have to forsake $300,000 to $400,000 or more in total compensation. Or you have to take a dilution &amp; control smack to the face up front and go raise a million dollars in VC. In my opinion, having watched the industry closely since the mid 1990s, the huge financial trade-off for engineers in doing non-VC start-ups is an epic problem that dissuades a lot of people (for good, sane reason). It&#x27;s a simple equation: you&#x27;re an engineer in a top five tech city, are you going to sacrifice a million dollars (possibly a lot more in SV) in total compensation across three to five years to do a thing, if that&#x27;s what it takes? That&#x27;s a monster risk to take, particularly if you&#x27;re still in prime earnings years.<p>That equation also enables me and others to do things many other people won&#x27;t or can&#x27;t dare to try, they won&#x27;t eat the shit necessary to do it, or can&#x27;t rationally take on the risk. It weeds out some competition.