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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

So bootstrappers are on the rise now?

Yes and it's going mainstream. Starting a company is so cheap and fast now that it doesn't even take a team of 2 or 3 anymore. A single person can do it.

There are so many benefits to solo-founding, it's not even funny. Without co-founders, there's no delay in getting started. There's no drama. The development cycle is fast and the code can be remarkably clean. Personally, I make changes to my production code all the time because the whole thing is in my head and I know what effect my changes will have. (And if I screw something up, I know how to fix it in minutes, not hours.) With a team, that's simply not possible.

Investors are going to wake up to this reality soon and accelerators will trip over each other to claim to be the "accelerator of solo founders".

Corollary to this, MBAs and other non-tech types are screwed in the years to come. Engineers won't need them anymore. 1. Make a product. 2. Get some baseline traction. 3. Join an accelerator or raise a seed round, if you need it. 4. Hire the founding team. 5. Profit.

One small problem: co-founders make you stronger. You are your own single point of failure. For many customers that makes you a no-go zone.

"Co-founders make you stronger" is a questionable generalization. Cofounders add a lot of things, both positive and negative, and as long as you and (each of) your cofounder(s) have vital skills/resources that are unique in the group, you now have multiple "single points of failure."

Yes, cofounders can contribute bandwidth, skills, connections, and all sorts of other positive things. They can also contribute friction, disagreement, and various other negative things. It's not a cut and dry benefit.

Reminds me of remote working. Some people claim it's bad, some people claim it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. There's pros and cons to each. People build successful companies with both methodologies.

Co-founders make you stronger, co-founders make you weaker. There are plenty of examples of both. There are examples for every narrative. There are no absolutes in startup success.

As a solo-founder, I've never run into a customer that cared how many people were involved in my company. Once you get to the point that things look professional, most just assume you aren't running the company out of your apartment. Maybe this matters more for sales-intensive B2B startups though.

If you are selling anything mission critical like infrastructure, being a one-man shop with nobody to provide support when you get a bad bout of diarrhea is a no go.

But honestly... is it?

In my experience, if you have a good brand image and a track record, people just assume you have contingency plans, lots of funding and/or a second programmer on staff.

Cofounders with good relationship > sole founder >> cofounders with poor relationship or other issues.

Yes, absolutely.

In retrospect the second comparison is more like >>>>>>!!!!!!!

Founder conflicts are death.

Not always, been there, done that. But they can definitely rob you of momentum when you need it most.

Along these lines, are there any accelerators/funds willing to fund a solo founder? If not, this seems like a good opportunity for a company which can quantify the risk of solo founders.

They never stopped. The number of bootstrappers dwarfs the number of funded companies, they tend to score lower but they score more frequently. They also don't get press unless they're acquired by some company.

Lots of money changing hands (investment, blow-up, acquisition) is what gets you press.

This talk by DHH explains why I prefer to bootstrap a company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0CDX...

The main point being, that if you start off by selling a product (rather than getting people to sign up for a free product and then monetizing later) and can get a fraction of the people to sign up then you are in profit. Further, if you own 100% of the company, you are profitable much faster so you don't need to grow as large.

Ex: $30/month * 500 users = $15,000 a month. If that was a bootstrapped business with just a solo founder...$$$

> Further, if you own 100% of the company, you are profitable much faster so you don't need to grow as large.

Can you explain how 100% ownership translates into earlier profitability?

Fewer founders means fewer people with expenses that the business needs to support (even if those expenses are the bare minimum: food, shelter, etc).

Of course, I think what that assumes is that one person could launch a product as quickly as a team. It's easy to imagine a product being complex enough that a team could launch it before a solo founder would.

But ignoring that.. it's clearly faster/easier to build a business to support a single person than multiple people.

But you could sell shares to non-founders. That way you have the same path to profitability but none of the extra costs.

I guess not earlier profitability but earlier "riches" because there is only one person taking from the pie.

Of course the reason people add confounders/employees and take VC funding is because it makes the total pie easier to grow in many cases.

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