So, the takeaway from the article is: don't co-found with someone technical, hire/outsource them.
Well, I could say: good luck! You either get some half-assed solution or something ( if you oursource ) you don't even asked for, because they didn't understand your business requirements ( because of the language, distance, culture, etc).
Don't fall for this. Really, get yourself a technical co-founder. Amaze him. You can call him in the middle of the night, telling your new idea. Next day, he will already had done dissecting it and have a technical spec ready. Or any other crazy stuff that you want and he will say simply "No". You have no idea how useful is a "No" in a start-up. And so on, and so on...you get the picture.
1. You get what you pay for. A lot of individuals who outsource the development of their "startup idea" end up with a less-than-satisfactory solution because they lacked the capital reasonably necessary to pursue their venture and as a result outsourced to the cheapest developer they could find.
2. Business requirements are a two-way street. Many non-technical folks have a hard time sufficiently describing their business requirements, and even more simply don't have the skill and patience required to work with a technical resource to turn business requirements into functional and technical requirements. You can't blame a technical resource for this shortcoming.
3. In today's market, good developers who are eager to make money generally have no shortage of employment and contracting opportunities. In certain geographic areas of the United States, experienced developers can easily make six figures annually. Outside of the United States, it's not difficult to find freelance developers earning far in excess of the average local wage. Unless you have a personal relationship with a developer and a co-founder relationship grows organically out of that relationship, it's naive to believe that a developer willing to work for you on an equity-only basis is going to be the cream of the crop.
In short, there's a reason there are so many non-technical founders running around like chickens with their heads cut off looking for a technical co-founder: very few good developers want to take your 1 am call so that they can do all the work for free while you sleep.
Getting yourself a technical co-founder is really, really difficult. It takes up a lot of time that is not business-building.
I was very lucky that the contractor I am working with is one of the best developers I have ever worked with. He really feels like part of the company, and knows the product inside out. Of course the weakness is that if I can't afford to pay him any more, there's nothing I can do with the site if I need to fix something etc.
If this person is so critical, why would you not bring them into the fold and make them an employee or co-founder? Because you really are setting yourself up for disaster when they can just walk at anytime.
I've thought about that, but he's an employee at an agency in Russia. I doubt he can afford to work for sweat equity, if I happen to run out of money, and it also might be considered a bit unethical to poach a developer from an agency.
I've done both and I can definitely attest that outsourcing the technical bits of your new startup is beyond tricky. It is however not impossible. The point here is that taking a technical co-founder onboard isn't your only option; it's totally possible for you to get to V1 (by outsourcing technical tasks), generate initial revenue and hiring a developer (with some equity) instead (as an example).
Of course. There is also the third solution. With the vast amount of internet resources (think stackoverflow, etc) it possible for a founder to get to a alpha version 100% on his own. It is cheaper and sometimes more effective, because of missing managing overhead and lack of communication errors.
But in the end, yes, you have to deal with the dillema: hire or take someone on board, share the responsability and the earnings.
The big reason to not have a cofounder is because 100% of a two million dollar business can be life changing. Half of that is more like a feather in your cap.
Paul Graham and VC firms are looking for billion dollar businesses. 5% of such a company shared here and there doesn't matter so much. But those sorts of businesses present shitty expected value to a founder. You want full ownership of a higher probability bet.
My opinion is that it depends on what your startup's value proposition is.
If you're building Groupon, the example's Sampleboard, or any startup where the development work is standard, I'd say the technical cofounder isn't essential.
He/she can prevent contractors from pulling a fast one, but you're being too biased - most contractors will build to specs, probably not as polished or complete, but more than enough for an MVP.
OTOH, if your startup's value proposition depends on leveraging new technologies, or a complex stack, or delivering something where tech is critical, you need the technical founder/cofounder.
I've seen a Groupon clone founded by a lawyer of all things :) and the outsourcing work was shoddy but the first technical hires patched it up.
A lot of people seem to be sold on the group of founders theory of start ups. Jeff Bezos hired programmers to develop Amazon. I would argue that start ups are not about exceptions or rules - it's about getting your product in the customers hands by any means necessary.
I agree, but this only works if you are damn experienced and really know both worlds: business and technical. Read Bezos' biography ( on wikipedia ) and you will know what I mean.
You want someone you can call up at midnight with some half-baked ideas so they will work 4-5 hours getting ready for your feedback in the morning? And working for equity since you'll be lining up investment once the product is ready, right?
Well, Thank God the ideas man is getting his rest, I guess.
As a solo technical founder, I more or less agree with these points. I can color them a little bit from my own experience.
1. Add in maturity. Building a product and selling it is hard. You can be harder, though. this may get easier as you get older? While it's nice to have someone to support you, it is not necessary. You can be a lone wolf and absolutely kill it. It's a mindset.
2 & 3 together. External validation can/should come from outside the day-to-day. 1 person's head is an echo chamber. 2 or 3 people can turn into an even more convincing one. A small council of real customers and a regular small round-table meeting with other entrepreneurs takes care of it.
4. I believe in acquiring the skills yourself. Business and tech problems collapse into a single idea when you have all of the skills yourself (sometimes even just at an "intern" level). For capacity, this is a problem. You usually need more horsepower for bigger problems. I'd adapt this point to focus more on local outsourcing. You should be still be the architect and foreman though. So you should know how to code and mock things up perfectly.
If the tech people don't get it, it is always your fault. You have not explained it correctly or you have the wrong people. The first is more likely if you don't know how to build a web app at all or can't mock it up to the actual UI element detail. Of course, sometimes it is the latter. Just not usually. :)
founder = solo business owner in a smaller niche area. Points also apply to a much larger business I'm starting now.
This writer misses one of the most important issue, which would be under his heading "Validation". Validation isn't (just) internal! It's not that you (necessarily) need convincing your 'idea' is any good.
Validation is external. The fact that two people are both working on something makes 'something' 1000x more real than if some guy is working on it.
There's always going to be information asymmetry between internal and external: the fact is, if there are two people on the inside, that is one of the strongest signals (to people on the outside, who have limited exposure to the low-level progress) that there is something there.
If it's just some guy saying, "Hey I've been building x for the past y" that is a very weak signal.
I might even go as far as saying, "The only time you can afford not to have a cofounder is when you can make it all the way to completed product + substantial revenue without having to convince anyone of anything about the future of your business."
Anyone includes but is not limited to: employees, partners, your parents, your spouse, and, of course - Investors!
If you never need to convince anyone of the future of your project, until it's incorporated, profitable, making payroll - then you might do it alone. But for 99% of us, this does not apply, and a cofounder is one of the best signals around for sharing internal state of validation.
I don't agree. Whether you're a solo founder or have 10 co-founders, you won't succeed if you're building something that no one wants. You can get customer validation regardless of whether you have co-founders or not.
A very familiar scenario for me. As a solo non-technical founder I've so far build my startup using funding via Seedrs (crowd equity funding in the UK) and contractors in the UK and Russia. I got some decent VC interest, but they all say they will only invest if I have a technical co-founder. Hence, I go off spending 50% of my time looking for a co-founder. It's like deciding that within 2 months you need to find your life-partner and get married - similar level of commitment and just as difficult to find - but probably more expensive if you break up!
So I now have someone who I think is good lined up, I just need to persuade him to finally decide to join me now. But then I think - is it right to get a co-founder and give away loads of equity, just to satisfy some VCs? He seems like a really good guy, and I think I would like to work with him, but do I really need a co-founder or is it just for the VCs? The development has worked very well with my contractor so far, managed by myself. Why not just raise some more non-VC money (via Seedrs again) and continue this way?
Please stop posting sales pitches on HN that masquerade for the first 75% as a blog post giving unbiased advice before coming up with the line "and that's where my company comes in".
The article is clearly biased based on the product and this should be called out immediately.
Please stop creating throwaway account for the sole purpose of outing someone. If you want people to take you seriously - put your karma where your mouth is.
p.s: I don't mean to shoot down your claim by the way
I agree. I think the biggest consideration with this should be the potential opportunity cost (equity, control and the risk of future fall-outs) of taking on co-founders.
And in a similar vein to how I feel about bootstrapping vs external funding, I think if you can be a solo founder until V1, you can leverage that traction in taking on co-founders. That way your hands isn't forced and you don't necessarily have to sacrifice large amounts of equity.
The YC people deal with enough startups to see probabilities. They have data, and they say the odds improve dramatically with cofounders.
This article (mostly) doesn't dispute that, and explores ways to perhaps compensate for the lack of a cofounder and redress those odds a bit. That seems useful as a source of ideas, as long as we keep it in the right category.
It is in a different category from the YC statement, which was based on numbers. YC didn't draw conclusions about cause/effect, they just correlated. That's pretty solid ground. This article puts up several specific possible causes of the cofounder advantage and then possible solutions, which might work, if the cause/effect inference is right. Two layers of inference, based on anecdotal evidence.
The article made me think about the issue in a different way. I thought it was valuable in that way. I'd be really interested to know if people with data have correlated solo startup success with any other factors. Does anyone know of any such attempt?
I've been objectively successful as a single founder over the past few years, so its definitely possible. I've hired, fired, pivoted, and made more money than I made mistakes but I always felt the lack of a cofounder has been holding me back.
There is only so much emotional weight I can offload onto my amazing wife, and although some of the people I've worked with (contractors, clients) have made amazing contributions - technical, business, ideas, and emotional - at the end of the day I can't shake the fact that I'm alone. I bear all the responsibly for my mistakes and all the rewards of my successes, and even though I've been lucky to have more of the latter the emotional toll of the rollercoaster has been tremendous. When your wife or parent tells you you're doing great or that everything will be OK it helps, but the impact is diminished because of course they are going to support you.
My most successful (although not my most profitable) projects have been collaborations with other talented people both technical and nontechnical, and while the author is certainly correct that a cofounder isn't necessary, I would think long and hard doing anything alone.
Do you talk to other founders much? I am a solo founder, but in a co-working space. I can bounce ideas off of or ask for help from many of the other founders there. That makes it feel like it's no big deal that I'm a solo founder.
"But do you really need a co-founder? Even if you’re not technical and you think you need a technical co-founder?"
I relish the day when non-technical co-founders and single founders fall by the wayside and technogeek types learn how to sell themselves. It's largely an introvert/extrovert personality thing, where technologists are convinced they should keep to interacting with computers and not other people -- but it's just not true. There's no reason why they shouldn't do both aspects of work as the technology-side of the business is the one that generates the value and it doesn't make good business sense to share profits with someone who only sells the value you create when you can just do that part yourself.
I have a ton of respect for Adii, but from my experience it is SIGNIFICANTLY harder to do something great without a cofounder.
Sure, if your a cereal entrepreneur like Adii or captain crunch, it's doable, but for most of us who are still trying for our first big breakthrough, we need all the help we can get.
Almost any startup/product needs two things. A good quality product and users. When speed is important it's extremely difficult for one person to do these very different tasks exceptionally well. As a CTO (who isn't overly technical, just enough to build prototypes, PM, and lead the team) I feel completely overwhelmed just thinking about having to do all that our CEO does on the business and growth side.
The typical case is to not do this. If you're capable of doing the development work for what you want to build on your own, it's exhilarating though. As long as you have external validation (paying customers, ensure you talk to people smarter than you on a regular basis,...) it's nice being able to make your own decisions without worrying about friction.It's a double edged sword with the amount of work you need to do, but if you enjoy what you do, for many who would be crazy enough to do this in the first place, it's mostly a non issue.
Solo founders are rare for a reason. If you just hire people to do a job, why would the most talented people work for you? Doesn't make much sense in most cases if the founder has not already a lot of capital. I would say increasing the odds of success is much more valuable than getting a higher payout in the success case (expected value = chance * payout).
On the other hand, it is hard to find the people who have very similar goals.
Talented people are also attracted to working on something they're passionate about and having the freedom to execute on that passion. :)
And not all businesses needs to be set up purely as a vehicle to an exit. Many businesses can instead operate as "lifestyle businesses" and earn great revenues / profits for years to come.
I don't think so. It really depends on the leverage that the sole founder has. If he can bootstrap and has very high Return on Equity, he doesn't need capital. I think the point is really that there is very little reason not to give early employees a good chunk of capital, because it is requirement to work hard. The author of the article bootstrapped a business, but that's not necessarily the same as a high growth startup.
I (the so called "author") also bootstrapped WooThemes successfully to grow to more than 100k+ paying customers, 500k+ users, a team of 33 and 10-figures in revenues. :)
This is a pretty good article, I share a lot of the same sentients, but I'm on the other side of the fence. I"m on the technical side, although I've started making friends who are business minded in the area which has helped out a lot. I think that the right co-founder makes your team progress at more than 2x your normal speed.
My opinion is that it really depends on the individual, especially their motivation and focus. Some people are cut out to be solo founders, most aren't. When I tried working on projects alone, I tended to get distracted easily. Partnering with a finisher has helped me get things done.
I think that this article is "meh," so let's look at it step-by-step:
1. Emotional Support
Author gets emotional support from wife and admits that you will need someone to help you through the shit-storm that is founding a start-up. But most young entrepreneurs don't have spouses. Seems like a co-founder fits the bill here.
2. External Validation
A couple of points: you should listen to your customers, but your customers are a very bad barometer for gauging big company decisions -- sometimes you need to make changes that they won't like. Changes that are good for the company (or changes that help you pivot) but piss off significant portions of your customer base; the customer is not always right. So if customers are a bad source of validation, what about other entrepreneurs? Let's face it: they are busy with their own projects to give you any meaningful feedback. The author's last point is to "write that down" -- seriously? Just get a co-founder.
3. Ideas / Brainstorming
Brainstorming is not merely spit-balling. Author says that "you want to prevent brainstorming ideas and possible solutions that are inherently not viable or even true" -- but who else knows your company as well as a co-founder? I.e. who else could gauge whether or not solutions are viable (or true)?
Let's ignore the shameless plug here (and the fact that using a website for brainstorming seems prima facie silly); I just want to point out that brainstorming outside of your company is worthless. You, quite obviously, need to brainstorm with someone in your company. Might as well make it a co-founder.
4. Skills / Capacity
It seems pretty obvious that you want to do something in the tech arena, you need to be pretty tech-savvy. If you're not tech-savvy, you need to associate yourself with someone that is. There's a good reason investors don't invest in business people. I remember listening to a talk by some of the people at Mint. One of their anecdotes went something like so: "When you go and pitch to a VC, every programmer is +$50mil in valuation, and every suit & tie "business guy" is -$100mil in valuation."
Apart from the intuitive attractiveness of this train of thought, there also has not (ever) been a successful "business guy" with no tech expertise and no technical co-founder doing much of anything in the start-up world.
Finally, let me just say that the people at YC know what they are doing. They rarely accept single-founder start-ups for a very good (and obvious) reason. The lack of technical expertise is also a big red flag. After all, if I've never seen the inside of an engine why would a bank fund an auto-shop I want to build.
Don't fall for this. Really, get yourself a technical co-founder. Amaze him. You can call him in the middle of the night, telling your new idea. Next day, he will already had done dissecting it and have a technical spec ready. Or any other crazy stuff that you want and he will say simply "No". You have no idea how useful is a "No" in a start-up. And so on, and so on...you get the picture.
PS. I am using a neutral "he" here.