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!
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?
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.
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 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.
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!