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This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success.

Yet, the odds of success are _very_ small... If you have a co-founder... or if you don't have a co-founder.

In other words, it will probably be nothing to do with your co-founder that you end up on the street!

And, while I'm on that subject. DON'T leave your day job when you start your side project. Just keep your day job until you're making enough money with your side project before you leave!

> This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success.

Startups are a game of optimism. The mindset is: in it to win it.

It's totally OK to be visualizing the finish line and your equity turning into a Tesla, house, or yacht. And you're all sharing the success. It's a huge motivator.

> And, while I'm on that subject. DON'T leave your day job when you start your side project. Just keep your day job until you're making enough money with your side project before you leave!

You can't survive in this field on a 4 hour work week.

Let's be a bit more generous and assume we've built a savings with full time job first. What is the other founder bringing to the table while the programmer produces tangibles?

Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work.

You have to go all-in. And a co-founder that's less than 100% is a serious red flag. Why would I want to share ownership with someone who saw this as a side project, when I view it as center of my life?

Get what I mean?

Don't get me wrong I think having a co-founder is often a bad idea. I just don't like any of the reasons you mentioned.

Hmm. Let's see.

1) It’s very hard to convince a cofounder to join an unproven business. And that is going to waste a lot of your time looking for someone. When you could be building your business instead.

2) You likely won’t need to build anything to validate your product if you use duct-taping, wizard of oz, lean startup. And after it's validated, well, just go ahead and build the mvp using the minimal toolset.

3) You can hire someone from a site like Upwork and in many cases they will be a lot cheaper than you are and still pretty good.

4) With frameworks like rails, laravel, bootstrap and a mountain of plugins it's pretty easy to build products that can make money in your spare time (10h week).

> Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work.

If any of those things are grueling for you:

a) Are you sure this is the right game for ya? ;)

b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that?

c) Outsource them!

Edit: If the main reason you want a co-founder is because you don't want to go it alone then you could fix that by joining a site like indi-hackers and talking to other founders as you work on your stuff. Maybe join a mastermind group. Etc.

I think this illustrates a mentality of undervaluing programmers. I think it underestimates how hard and intensive the job is. I think prospective co-founders do this exact thing to programmers.

Why would someone go the extra mile, to work late into the night, for someone who just viewed them as commodities at the lowest bidder? Were any successful startups you can think of built on Upwork? (I think Digg's MVP was on oDesk.)

Creating a sense of authenticity, [1] mindfulness of the product, aesthetic, value is hard to outsource. Unless you have someone sink their teeth in it.

It's just not the trend I've seen at startups.

> b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that?

As for the the library part. Just billing code alone is consuming my life right now. Sure, there's the stripe-python wrapper over the API, and djstripe. Which even goes all the way to create a database parity with Stripe's resources.

Can djstripe handle multiple subscriptions for a customer? Will it automatically propagate plans configured locally so they exist on Stripe's end? Can djstripe recover from inconsistencies between the customer ID in local storage and stripe's remote (a custom intervention would be required). Does it have a flow for handling stripe elements (the widget that accepts billing info), creating a user (if logged out) and accepting the source? I can list more.

Am I to expect an outsourced programmer is going to consider all these cases? Or do I have to wait for customers to drop off?

There are superb libraries, permissively licensed ones. But no one-size-fits-all to give a workflow that looks top notch. A great deal of the skill when programming isn't just data-in/data-out, but gluing and synthesizing the parts cohesively. In this sense, there's a great differentiation from a programmer with less skill, or giving less effort, and someone taking the time to make it fit in.

User's have an expectation of quality, typically based off the "craftsmanship" of other sites they visited. There are competitors, and having stuff like a good UX, somebody in your timezone, immediately accessible, "in the zone" on where your product is / its philosophy, that speaks english to debug things, all help.

[1] It doesn't have to be a household name.

I think we're violently agreeing and also we have somewhat similar side projects (i.e. helping other devs) ;)

I'll say this: it's incredibly hard to have a full-time job and also build out a successful side project. It sounds really nice and rational when you write it out here, but it requires an insane amount of focus and basically shutting out any leftover time. Most people can't do this.

I would suggest surrounding yourself with wealthy people and keeping them updated. When you have enough progress to get them excited about it, ask if they'd come in as an angel investor. Once you get a few of these lined up, you can get enough runway to justify quitting.

The base advice is good: don't quit your job if you don't have 6-12 months of runway first. But also, your job is holding you back from the execution that will be required to build your project and get customers, so try to find a way to bridge your exit.

> it's incredibly hard to have a full-time job and also build out a successful side project

I'm not trying to brag but I've done that twice and I have a 3 year old!

> your job is holding you back from the execution that will be required to build your project and get customers

It's true if the fixation is on really complex projects but if you can do a few very important things then anything is possible.

1) Just like creating a tiny abstract function reign in your idea and give it the least amount of surface area possible:

- https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/dont-start-big-start-a-littl...

2) Your enthusiasm half life needs to be long for what you do. That's why it's so much better to focus on something you care about.

- https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/productfounder-fit-your-most...

The third important thing is daily momentum. Never don't do "something" even if it's tiny. You just have to do something every day.

Man I just grab 30 mins or 1 hour and knock out a task any time I can!

To me your comment seems to highlight how important it is to have good safeguards in place when founding (any) company. I’ve seen (and experienced first hand) things go south even when people knew and trusted each other for years/decades for an infinite amount of reasons: people change, you may not know them as well as you think, success/failure puts immense pressure and makes people irrational, etc. etc.

Have basic safeguards in place like backups, paper trials, make sure you have good contracts that cover what happens if one of you leaves, can’t work, doesn’t perform, etc. make sure you have an independent board member further along, etc.

And yet, so many successful companies were started by more than one person.

Caution is advisable, but simply working by yourself isn't for most people. It's quite possible to start working with someone tentatively, and get to know them and trust them as time goes on, as well as to protect yourself and your project legally once it gets further along.

Why is this specific to being a programmer? This applies equally to every start up entrepreneur, from artists to inventor.

And if you only waited until you have a firm financial backing behind you and you alone with nobody to split risk with, we wouldn't have very many start ups.

> And if you only waited until you have a firm financial backing behind you and you alone with nobody to split risk with, we wouldn't have very many start ups.

A programmer doesn't have to wait.

Try to take it from a programmer's perspective:

We already have ideas. There's a huge supply of programmers. One's that'd be happy to write an MVP for that inventor/artist/etc in exchange for 20k. But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, "If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea"

Programmer's get used to it. But at least once per year many of us hear something like, "I have a vision", "I got this idea, psst", because you can guarantee 99% of the time, they're not willing to put any cash into it themselves. What I get is a person bossing me around, while I don't get paid, and I absorb all the risk of their idea.

> This applies equally to every start up entrepreneur, from artists to inventor.

If I take on a co-founder, co-hacker, inventor, what do I get?

What role do they play? The "ideas guy". My above post was based on the assumption they have a 50% split. But since they view themselves as the unique, creative force behind everything, they want 51%. Maybe more.

Now, this co-founder thing would make sense if we laid transparent ground rules up front: while all this comes into formation, am I getting paid while I'm crafting this "vision"?

Programmers are in a unique position when it comes to tech startups. They can bootstrap by themselves. The burden lies on the prospective co-founder to balance that contribution through something more than dictating and having ideas. That usually is them going out and raising a seed or self-funding.

"But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, 'If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea'"

My co-founder and I are both technical. For the first year of our company - as we built and sold things - we were constantly thinking "damn, life would sure be a lot easier if we had a killer idea. We would pay millions for an idea that we could execute on."

It's super important. Everyone has ideas, but most ideas are frankly not that great. Our ideas certainly weren't.

Then we found a better idea, got some traction, etc. Life's good. But if great ideas truly were a dime a dozen, we would've had much more fun in 2016 :)

Furthermore, if you take on a co-founder, here's what you get: one founder can focus on building the product, while the other founder focuses on figuring out what variation of the product is most needed by the outside world. It is very difficult for one person to do both. These require two fairly different skillsets, and both benefit from having technical experience - the former for obvious reasons; the latter because it's much easier to know what's buildable if you've built stuff before.

"Great" ideas are a dime a dozen, at least on paper. No one can do anything about the standards you and your co-founder set for yourself, but there is an abundance of opportunity out there. Almost any source of annoyance can be parlayed into a useful product.

I say "on paper" because no idea is worth anything until it is at least partially implemented, and no concept remains static throughout the implementation process.

And let me further clarify that you don't even need an original idea. Most successful companies are entirely non-groundbreaking, perhaps even blase. Breaking ground is expensive, financially and psychologically. Let someone else break ground and not only will the path already be blazed, but you'll have the record of their experience to inform your choices, and you'll know the pain points that people have with them. (The upside is, any given project is probably far less groundbreaking than it imagines, especially in the kool-aid drenched environs of Silicon Valley).

Think early search engines, many of which leverage or improve upon phonebook-style directories, and Google -- Google came later, and as such, knew that they needed something better than AltaVista et al could offer. Early social networks and Facebook, etc. The list goes on.

There is so much truth to this.

Just because someone is a good programmer doesn’t mean they will be a good partner in a venture.