It shouldn’t feel hard or even lonely to be a solo founder. There’s so many people you will have to interact with that are not your co-founder. There’s so many people you can share your feelings with that are not your co-founder. And having a co-founder is no guarantee you won’t be lonely; a technical co-founder spends most his time heads down coding and a sales co-founder spends most his time out making deals. Occasionally you may have meetings about customer feedback and high level strategies but that’s about it; the intent of the relationship is not to spend weekends hiking or riding bikes together or other social activities. If you are feeling lonely the source of that must be coming from other aspects of your life.
Most of the time the loneliness a founder feels comes from the fact that almost no one that matters is enthusiastic about their idea, or at least not enough to pay for it. It creates a mentality that it’s you against a world that just doesn’t understand what you have to “offer”.
I hope he will realize this before too much time has been wasted.
Give this an upvote if you agree.
*edit: I wanted to elaborate on why this is a zombie startup in case people think I threw this out too casually. He calls his product a friendly privacy oriented photo organizer. First off, drop the word friendly, that’s a meaningless word when describing apps and usually just a way to say an application has some decent UX, which is expected by default anyway. Second, “privacy oriented” is a red flag unless your startup is deliberately targeting people who have something they feel they need to hide. This will do nothing to move the needle for most mass market consumers who already consume tons of products without any regard to privacy. A lot of your marketing will have to rely on first making people paranoid so they seek out a privacy focused product, which is kind of scummy. Third, what you’re left with is essentially a photo organizer, whose novelty is questionable in a world that has no lack of photo organization. There’s no way this will be a successful business at this rate. Sorry if you think otherwise, but feel free to justify why.