The rise of the one-person unicorn
nothingventured.com
nothingventured.com
ConvertKit is an example of this.
The founder started by selling books and then made a course on how to sell books, got a pretty big audience around that and then started to build ConvertKit. Eventually he figured out who he wanted to market ConvertKit to and his prior audience of people wanting to sell things online was a great match. Naturally a lot of people who bought his books and courses are a great fit for his email service because the whole premise of his course on selling books is around building an email list. The books ended up being a lead generator for his SAAS app.
That's not to take anything away from Nathan's work. At the end of the day he made a very successful and well deserved business but the specific circumstances around it are a bit different than what this blog post makes it out to be. It was a 10 year journey with multiple good ideas at the right time to get to that point. All of it is documented on Nathan's site. I remember reading some of his posts many years ago.
Invariably when you read closer it goes something like this: "So I had this widely successful blog about X and decided to make a product. I posted about it on my blog and got 1000 sign-ups overnight etc".
Roam is another example. Without Conor having the Twitter audience he had and the hype around Roam, specifically on Twitter, they don’t hit $2m+ in rev their first month of turning on pricing.
1. Identify an audience
2. Find them where they are (Reddit, Facebook group, etc) and learn their jargon and actual, real pains
3. Create content to help that audience and build an email list of people who trust you
4. Create a product to solve an identified pain
5. Sell it to your audience
I simplify of course, and did not take the course yet, but from what I gathered that's the gist.
- a true generalist: technical, product, sales, design.
- deep experience in the industry you are gonna serve. Hanging out on Reddit does NOT get you this. You have to have worked in the industry prior on high level roles. It’s what’ll give you credibility to potential buyers.
- design a product and business model that’s niche and painful enough for a large AND expanding TAM.
- there’s has to be sufficient dissatisfaction with incumbents. Customers are craving for better solutions and motivated to find one.
- you can effectively source and work with contractors to fill the gaps in your skills and time.
- the product must have near zero churn. Otherwise the leaky bucket is too much to fill without an actual sales force. This is possible, my business is exactly this.
- you know how to be capital efficient and can product low cash outflow consistently.
- you are not personally in need of an actual income for at least 3 years. Preferably more.
I believe the above are a must for a single bootstrapped founder to create a high growth startup. The optionality it affords you is tremendous and you will stand above the rest.
If you are interested in joining me (we are hiring) - lemme know! fei(at)sourcemedium(dotcom)
It won't return billions but the maths seems sane (I did suggest that there is room globally for a "million startups fund")
Bootstrap to VC is a continuous spectrum as opposed to the black and white decision most would have you believe. There are so many more financing options available to viable businesses than before - startup studios, revenue based financing and many more (eg angel.clearbanc.com)
It should be easier!
Seems to have some customization involved. My industry is largely B2B where we never advertise prices for many reasons. Once we reveal our prices, all our clients would stop working with us.
It seems to be very important for project bidding processes.
It’s also just matter of not having time resource to spend on the website.
Having pricing is more important for cheap monthly products that are alot more self services.
Hence the saying, "The first 20 million is always the hardest!"
I left the Silicon Valley and started to work on waiterio.com while travelling the world. I lived in 10+ countries for 6 months each, I saw the world, met a lot of interesting people and found love.
If you are David and the others are Goliath just don't play the same game they are playing because you are bound to lose. Find out what you are good at and play a completely different game from them.
We don't do sales. 8 years ago Waiterio was just a mobile app and got the customers from the app stores. These days we do a lot of content marketing and i18n.
Are you a founder from a non English speaking country? I'll be extracting my internal tools for content marketing and i18n. Write me here if you would like to give it a try.
The best CEOs I've known are basically sales people, and they all tell me that it's a skill you really can learn, even with a language barrier - I know several Indian tech folks who sell like crazy in the US even as I can barely understand their accents, so it's not an insurmountable barrier, though I do understand that's a bit of a special case since the Indian culture is very keen on teaching negotiation and sales as a life skill and a lot of the dealings end up being with other Indian entrepreneurs.
WHAT WE DO By not doing sales I mean that customers can register and use our product and pay for it without being forced to speak to a human being. We have few transactional flow emails but we do not try to establish a one-to-one relationship with every customer. We offer chat support and email support but that's it. I do contact restaurants on Whatsapp asking them to be alpha users in new products to get feedback. My intention though is more to get feedback rather than make a sale.
I do have an understanding of the strategy of many competitors. Sales are not my forte and I prefer to pursue other strategies where I can outdo my competitors. I've a background in software engineering but I did acquire a lot of marketing skills to have the startup succeed. I do not wish to get in high-touch sales. I'm not good at it and also I don't think it's a good strategy with restaurants which are SMB (small and medium business). The SaaS plans for restaurants range in the 15-100$ and I think is a classic example where nets will catch more customers than spears.
What's your background? Are you in sales?
Glad to take a look at it, shoot me an email!
I decided to close my startup after I woke up from a surgery which had 50% chance of survival because until couple of hours before the surgery I was typing the product strategy to my shareholders in case I die. Then I spent the next whole year winding up my startup in midst of recovery and the whole process still gives me PTSD.
So I decided to go solo, to build what I want and possibly what others need. I've been doing it for past 2 years and I'm happy.
But consistency is the key which is especially hard for some with OCD to build, So I try to put my maximum energy on couple of main products and the rest on fast to fail side projects.
2. Norway is staunchly anti-immigrant for a reason. It has resources and they like to keep it that way. They wont even give visas to foreign grand-parents unless one of the grandparents has died. This happened to my dad's friend. His daughter married to a Norwegian, he couldn't stay more than few weeks at a time with his grandchildren (treated like a tourist). Finally when he died from cancer, wis wife (the grandmother), finally could. This is especially cruel from a country that has trilions of oil money. (The US sytem, while flawed, is very family friendly).
3. Danemark had enough, and it is turning to the right and started doing all kinds of ant-immigration laws.
Denmark's immigrants forced out by government policies: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/06/denmarks-immigrants-for...
Now, the OP, said came to north europe as they are plenty of women. I am warning the OP as he will face some kind of low key discrimination as those countries traditionally have been mono-enthnic nation states, and as a foreigner you will always be treated like an 'other'.
Just giving it the reality on the ground. I know the US gets a lot of flack about racist this, or that, but the reality the US is the least racist country among western countries. Europe is on another level. They discriminate routinely against other europeans.
The main complain in the UK during brexit was about Romanians and Polish plumbers taking the jobs away....
I really understand what you are saying. I think that Racism is everywhere and it is not specific to Northern Europe. During my 7 years in Europe, I have developed some sort of immunity for low key discrimination and I have been lucky enough to build my social circle. So, I don't care right now much.
P.S: I'm white, good-looking and have European look. I think these are also important.
I ran into one of the founders at a party in Santa Cruz in the mid-90's, and laughed with him about the great acronym, and asked if he and his buddy had ever gotten around to buying another Vax. He shushed me and told me never to tell anyone what TGV originally stood for! (Oops.) They must have been in negotiations with Cisco at the time.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tgv-software
>TGV Software, Inc. employs more than 130 people and is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. The company develops, markets and supports TCP/IP internetworking software products which enable connectivity between disparate computer systems over local area, enterprise-wide and global computing networks. TGV's principal product line is marketed under the name of MultiNet. MultiNet for Windows integrates a robust suite of TCP/IP applications including a 32-bit VxD kernel, NFS client, FTP client and server, VT100-320 and TN3270 emulations, network printing, Pronto Mail V2.0 electronic mail, Enhanced Mosaic V2.1 web browser and network diagnostics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SRI_International_spin...
>TGV: Founded in 1988, this company created communications software and simulation software for VAX computers. TGV stood for "Two Guys and a Vax". The company was sold to Cisco Systems in 1996.
> In 2004, Plenty of Fish became a full-time money making business for Markus.[10] He ran the site independently until 2008, when he began hiring other employees at his new Vancouver headquarters.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POF_(dating_website)
It didn't quite hit unicorn status ($1B), as he sold it for "only" $500M.
These posts were deleted shortly after the acquisition but they’re probably still in archive.org etc.
The „modern“ way of development is overcomplicated and not suitable if you are an solo founder, too much time is lost on infrastructure, setup etc. The modern complicated js stack where you need to maybe configure everything for 1-2 days and need to constantly fight webpack is not how you should built an web application as a solo founder.
You should be able to be „live“ in a few minutes. For every language there is a stack enabling this, they are not the most fany ones but get their work done. Take for example laravel with spark (https://spark.laravel.com/), for 99$ you get a login-system with teams and subscription management all-in-one within minutes. And don‘t build a ci pipeline, complex kubernetes cluster or learning a dozen of aws servers. A simple VPS or root server and Laravel Forge (https://forge.laravel.com/) or Ploi (https://ploi.io/) and you are live.
As a solo founder you need to find a way to cut down on non-programming and non-marketing tasks. This means maybe not working with the hottest tech stack of the day but simply using a workhorse solution which lets you get shit done quickly.
I've also made a similar SaaS boilerplate for Node & Vue: https://nodex.wensia.com/
Would you please share your thoughts on it at a quick glance? (in progress: switching to Stripe from Braintree)
So in my opinion all these one-off boilerplates not build on a well-known framework are too much hustle.
The odds of this level of success for a solo bootstrapped founder is much smaller when you don’t raise. If you look at the stats on startup success (exits), funding has a strong positive correlation.
There are good and bad reasons to raise capital and many startups do raise for bad reasons, but that doesn’t mean that funding is inherently bad or should be eliminated as an option.
I don’t see where they say that VC funding should be eliminated, just that this is another option that more people are pursuing.
[0] https://review42.com/resources/what-percentage-of-startups-f...
One person unicorns don't generally exit in the same way, this whole article was about the problems trying to raise for small one person companies.
It's like Harvard grads. Yes, they're a very high calibre and more successful on average, but a lot (not all) of that is selection instead of creation.
Bootstrapped, small, one person companies are still startups, where the odds of success are less than 10%, while venture-backed startups is 20%-30%. [0][1] What non-survivors are excluded from these cohorts?
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578004... [1] https://www.embroker.com/blog/startup-statistics/
The only ones that survive to success are "normal startups" which are not actually normal at all for most businesses around the world.
> Many small businesses start up every month but the failure rate is high. As of 2019, startup failure rates are around 90%. 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year. [0]
Small bootstrapped companies can still exist and succeed against these odds (several are cited in the article), but to make the claim that these odds don’t apply to bootstrapped startups is foolish wishful thinking.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/04091...
The one (major) caveat is that taking on significant funding also means you need to repay all of the amount raised when you sell your company (legally referred to as a 1x liquidation preference).
My main worry for modern day SaaS founders raising giant seed rounds (often $5-10mm) is that after taking that money, you’ve now raised the minimum price you would need to sell the company for you or your employees to financially gain from a sales.
After raising $10mm, if you go and sell for $12mm a year later, the first $10mm goes straight back to your investors, and the left over $2mm goes to whoever owns the shares of the company.
When a startup that raised a $10mm seed goes on to raise a $25mm Series A, the company can no longer sell for less than $35mm (1x liquidation preference to investors).
In other words, we’re seeing a shift of mindset to one of “go big or go home, there’s no middle ground”.
The one exception is sometimes VCs allow founders to take money off the table during large rounds (but of course that often doesn’t trickle down to employees with stock options, etc).
And then there are founders who accept 2x or 3x liquidation preference terms, which double or triple to problem described above.
This is just one of many reasons I favor bootstrapping and reinvesting profits for long-term organic growth rather than short-term VC-fueled hypergrowth.
Most 'indie hacker' founders have 5 - 10+ failed businesses that didn't grow fast enough or just weren't quite right.
The indie hacker scene is pretty different from your typical VC startup where a business is 3 - 5 years minimum, most indie hackers are running on time frames of 1 - 3 months to gain traction.
If I'm able to raise funding, it means that some very smart people think they'll be able to get their money back.
Compare this to just me creating a website vowing to re invent bowing. No one's looked at my business plan. Do I even have a business plan ?
Would you give some random programer 10 million ? Every one of us could probably create a website, but only a select few could create a business ready to receive funding.
Taken to an extreme, the startup could remain a handful of people while benefiting from a much larger team which is not included in the headcount.
"...you basically stitch together a business with partners that are treated as if they’re inside the company."
https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-power-of-virtual-integration-an-....
If you cut out the bloat, planning meetings, etc., you can stand up an MVP pretty quickly while doing the coding yourself.
I think most of the tricks are CSS frameworks, re-using parts of old projects, no-code MVP, outsourcing non-tech things.
Many of the successful indie founders seem to be non-technical business people who give 0 cares about coding something the right way, so they just smash stuff together without a care to get it out the door.
One man army, taking projects in megacorps. I answer to no one.
At what point do you start to answer “to your customers” though?
This sometimes holds me back from rebelling. Exchanging 1 boss for a 100 customers that all have expectations.
The relationship must be strong and you must have a working relationship, can never be caustic. Make sure that you are making the customer shine, always. Be a trusted advisor when you can. Say yes a lot, but setting expectations and saying no is also okay and important.
Risk tolerance and thick skin is key. The financial reward is sky high.
"Instagram launched 10 years ago. By the time it was bought by Facebook in 2012, it only had 13 employees — including founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger."
I left Software Architect / UI position at big corp when management had ordered to use then-hot Angular on large web app. Without investigation, acceptance testing, etc. Just unconditional directive.
I had Sciter[1] prototype at that moment - used as self-teaching tool to understand how browsers work.
Since then I am almost solo (one or two contractors sometimes) on the project. ~10 years of non-disturbed (literally) flight.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/one-year-in-bird-fou...
This might be an extreme one, but the Bird founder appears to have cashed out $44m.
It makes sense for VCs to let founders cash out a bit -- just so you can be comfortable and focus on hyper-growth of the business rather than making short term decisions. I've heard the amounts are usually more like <3M (enough for a house and car or college for kids) and not like the example above. The more the founder cashes out, theoretically the less incentivized they are to grow the company.
What does this mean? It’s sponsored content? Or just like a freelance writer?
I recently decided to take a solo project and run with it. The technical promise is real, and I'm excited about my vision for it. Unfortunately in this context, I've spent all 10+ years of my career in scientific computing and big tech - so despite having a few friends in the startup world, most of this is really new to me, and I don't actually know anyone who has gone the solopreneur / micro-startup route.
Any and all tips, tricks, pointers, articles, and advice are welcome - I'm really excited to take this risk, but I'm feeling increasingly clueless about how to handle many of the organizational / non-technical aspects of this process.
Even if there are services like stripe and Auth0, as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all these together to get the basic functionality to actually sell things and integrate it into my product.
Well hopefully it you’re a developer it doesn’t take that long. I just switched a SaaS to Stripe from PayPal last week and it took less than 30 minutes. These SaaS support tools/websites are increasingly easy to use, making time to market for even a solo dev pretty easy.
It just looks like they are offering there services mostly for non-developers (low-code / no-code) and I couldn't find anything about whether they have an API that I can use from my own code to check for registered users and if they paid etc.
EDIT: nevermind, found it: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/3613332/outseta-rest-...
I feel your pain personally, as well, so I built and already have an Ansible script I use to deploy Nodewood.com, but it turns out that Ansible doesn't play well on Windows, so while I'm happy to make it available to customers, I can't really justify making it the default deploy method.
Maybe I am just too close to the technology to appreciate what people are buying.
It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself.
While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online.
In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did!
I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.
There's luck involved of course, but after 10 failed tries you'll get an eye for it. Just an example: there are sub-markets that don't have specialized products, they all use products built for everyone instead that specific niche, like instead of a CRM for everyone niche it down as CRM for mechanics (i'm sure there are many of them, but you get the idea).
the problem with most software engineers is they only know tech. Most of these "niche" businesses are created at the intersection of tech and marketing/design/business
I say the universe is sending you lots of signals.
Most people ignore those signals. The "lucky" ones are simply perceptive.
To give you a concrete example.
There was this app Screenhero that was acquired by Slack in 2017.
There was a HN thread about it and it erupted with people saying "oh no, I'm using this and it'll go away. how awful!".
The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 333 points, 147 comments
Just from that thread you could tell:
* there's an app with obvious business model (monthly pay per user), immune to piracy (everything is mediated by their servers; no account, the app doesn't work) * the functionality was deemed valuable enough by Slack to acquire a startup that barely got off the ground * people love this app
The Universe sent a clear signal.
Hacker News is supposed to be a breeding ground for hackers that are interested in building software businesses.
How many of the people that read the Slack HN acquisition thread fired up Visual Studio or XCode and started building a copy of Screenhero?
Zero. Everyone ignored the signal.
It's even worse than that. I actually made that point in 2017, in that same HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488
I spelled out the obvious opportunity for the tens of thousands of people who must have read that post. It was even the top voted comment.
Everyone ignore the signal.
BTW: "clone Screenhero" opportunity is mostly gone. Not completely but there are at least 2 startups cloning it.
I'm pretty sure it took at least 2 years before they started copying Screenhero (one of the startups is actually by a guy from the original team, I think).
So for at least 2 years there was a clear opportunity to build a multi-million dollar business by a very small team.
Headlime used GPT-3 so you could write a prompt and it would produce copy for your landing page.
It may have been niche, but it would really well and helped rather than having to brainstorm my own.
Source: myself building https://subledger.app
It's absolutely possible to do everything yourself. Most skills relevant to indies have a low "skill ceiling" - ie. it's easy to learn just enough to be dangerous.
Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the “seed” round so to speak. Don’t need anything else, just an ability to ship and iterate fast.
For funded startups this is established area: buy online ads and receive views for your product. How solo can do it efficiently without significant monetary investment into digital marketing?
The reason digital advertising is so popular with VC backed startups is because they need capacity. If you are starting a bootstrapped startups getting a flywheeling going starting with 50 people is fine.
what seem new is all the products around it, like "micro private equity"
Where things typically fall apart is when it comes time for maintenance and support.
>secret
What sort of businesses fit within those constraints? The only ones that come to mind are illegal …
I was born to program and have done it all my life and it’s all I do. I’ve been formally trained and have worked at world leading research institutions. I’ve always been considered a bit of a freak by my peers.
I currently have two direct competitors, both have 100s of developers and are staffed by thousands. Despite starting after them I was able to ship a key feature long before them.
He is reliably getting done in one single day what would take a normal developer 5 months of M-F work.
Also singlehandedly building a $1b business in a niche that he won't talk about...