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Comment by jensneuse | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this writeup, I can relate 100%, especially the part on the supportive spouse. I've built WunderGraph (https://wundergraph.com/) as a solo-dev for multiple years until I reached a similar point like you. It's weird to say, but my wife kind of accepted that I'd work on weekends between 1-3 pm when the kids sleep. What helped me get out of this "solo-time-drain-thing" was to find the right Co-Founders to help me. I've found a really nice guy to help me with Marketing, and another one who helped me develop the Product. "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, find a team." I hope you can find some way of financing so that you can push through this wall. For me, it was working a full time job and building WunderGraph at night and on the weekends, but it's making you age quickly. I wish you the best for your future.

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Having a supportive spouse probably does wonders for mental health. After 5 years in a relationship I decided to spin up my own business and learned about something I didn't know about significant other - she didn't recognise working for oneself as a legitimate work. For her I was "pissing away" my and her time and I should look for a second job if I wanted to make more money. I managed two years of constant berating, being laughed at and threatened. In the hindsight I wish I had ended the relationship the first time she demonstrated the lack of support. My project would have taken less time to get it to MVP and my mental health wouldn't be in a state it was. After my project started making money she was of course sorry and wanted to get back together. But I am not sure if I ever would want to be with someone else, this is not the first time I have been burned, but first time it hurt so bad. I feel so much better alone.

I know exactly where you're coming from. My family didn't understand or like what I did for a long time. For them, I've wasted my time on what wasn't really "work", because I didn't get a salary. I'm from Germany, you're expected to have a job here. Being an Entrepreneur seems wrong. Luckily, my wife was very supportive. But there are also limits. Let's say that everyone around me had to suffer to some degree so that I was able to pull this off.

> Let's say that everyone around me had to suffer to some degree so that I was able to pull this off.

Even solo entrepreneurship isn't really "solo". Takes a village to raise a {business|baby}.

> working a full time job and building WunderGraph at night and on the weekends

this is actually a terrible advice, although i'm glad it worked out for you!

this type of side-hustling can quickly turn into losing your startup or your job (or both)

better approach is to save some money, leave for a year and become profitable from day 1

profitability will decrease your chances of failure dramatically

I actually lost my job. I'd also advise against replicating what I did, but it was my only option really. I'm not born rich, single income dad, paying off the house. I wasn't able to afford to "leave for a year". It's also a timing thing. The right time to do WunderGraph is now, not in two years. So I had to decide to give up a dream or work through this and risk my job. Luckily, I've found the right people to help me and first customers at exactly the right time. But trust me, WunderGraph was at tables-takes for a long time.

This is really the one challenge in Germany: High fixed costs and high taxes making it hard to sock away seed money yourself.

> profitability will decrease your chances of failure dramatically

This kinda feels like saying a small loan of a million dollars increases your chances dramatically.

The challenge is in getting to that point.

this is why you should focus on a business offer from get-go and start making money from launch

majority of us cannot afford to retire at home for years not making any income

> become profitable from day 1

"just make some money" is not good advice. It trivialises the entire problem and even worse, it's the core problem of everyone in this space. This reasoning is dismissive of their struggle and doesn't help them move towards where they need to be. There is absolutely no good reason to treat other people like that.

i didn't mean to say that

i'm suggesting to try to make money as soon as you can, else you'll just drown like many others

I agree with this. What most developers, like me, love to think is that you can do "one more feature" and they will come, or another refactor, or anything. But I've learned this lesson. Building a startup us very little about coding, and more about all the other things that make up a business. What's your value proposition? How do you sell? How do you acquire users? etc... In the end, I've wasted way too much time on the things that didn't make a difference, but I think I've learned from this.

> better approach is to save some money, leave for a year and become profitable from day 1

In many Western economies, the level of taxation is designed to prevent you from doing that. It would take many years to save enough money to sustain yourself for a year without changing your commitments much. So either way you are in a bad position. I mean it's possible if you don't have a family, share a flat with others so your bills are low and so on, but you may end up just as burnt living in such environment.

I am currently building Caido (https://caido.io) without funding and the best decision we ever made was to build it as a team. The second decision that I made differently from my first attempt at a startup was to drop all my freelance contracts and only focus on that project. You need a lot of mental space to build a business and I found I almost burned myself out when I tried to build it while working on other projects. Last decision was to move back to my parent's place to cut cost and live frugally for the year (<300$/month). Not possible for a lot of people, but I don't think it would have been possible otherwise since I don't have savings.

Same as the author we tried to get funding and mostly failed. In the end I think it is for the best as I am not a fan of the growth at all cost, I much prefer to build a smaller sustainable business if that is still possible. One thing that I wish we had is a more experienced person in the team since we burned time and money for stuff we didn't know better (small tear when I see my lawyer bill). It is a great experience otherwise, I just hope it will go somewhere.

A good team is worth its weight in gold.

This is great advice, also take the time to find people that are passionate about what your are doing.

You have some typos on the homepage that may turn some people off.

"WunderGraph let's your access all your systems through a single pane of glass."

Lets* You*

thank you, fixing =)

Where did you find your co-founders?

The marketing guy, I found on YC Startup School Co-Founder Match (https://www.startupschool.org/), the Developer was creating GraphQL Open Source projects that were related to what I was building, so I've got in touch with them.

I can definitely recommend Startup School, it helped me build a lot of useful connections.

How did you determine how to split equity?

Edit: I'm not looking for actual %s, just the factors involved.

Would like to know as well. This is tricky, as all your assets are probably intellectual property and hard to put a price tag on. Also some people have a hard time accepting that they are eligible for a smaller piece of the cake than you are.

Random thought on this: I do not personally believe the owner of the idea is worth more than 10% of equity. They have to be contributing something to get more. It may be capital, it may be sales but it has to be something.

I dream to start a company where I am able to steer almost every decision and the company shares automatically reduce my ownership over X years until a kind of coop forms and most employees have enough equity as a group to control the company. Give away control to put the right incentives on hiring. Also none of this 1 year cliff vesting nonsense. If you are willing to join a startup I am willing to give you equity immediately.

>none of this 1 year cliff vesting nonsense

It is foolish to give immediate equity to a new hire who hasn't proven themselves as a good worker and good fit.

And they do not have to be there for a long time to start providing immense value.

Totally agree, feels really naive.

You know you've got the right equity split when everybody thinks it's fair and the team can focus 100% on execution. Factors can be time spent on the project, experience, who "owns" what, connections, etc... But in the end, if you have to discuss this topic too much with someone, you know it's not going to work. If the Co-Founders cannot easily come to the same result, their mindset doesn't align well enough, which can be a risk for the whole operation. So, I'd advise against haggling too much, for both sides. Also, I'd suggest to discuss this topic very early on. Don't waste time if you don't know their expectations are in the same ballpark as yours. If you get the right people to commit helping you, I'd rather give them more equity, when the other option is to keep doing this on my own forever. Ideally, you can all "start" at the same time and split equity equally, but the reality is that you don't have all the stars aligned on day one.

a cofounder and I used this system for a previous company: https://slicingpie.com/ It worked pretty well for us, but we were also pretty well tuned to each others expectations in advance.

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