[HN Gopher] Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?
___________________________________________________________________
Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?
Author : navaneethpk
Score : 202 points
Date : 2022-10-01 12:23 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nvnt.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nvnt.substack.com)
| mannyv wrote:
| The important point here is that he got funding first, and it
| sounds like at least half a million because he didn't talk about
| begging angels for money or running out of runway.
|
| He was able to hire someone fast.
|
| You won't be this good/lucky.
|
| In the traditional non-traditional startup you need a salesperson
| and engineering to be free, because money. I suppose with dev
| tools you can get rid of the salesperson because you're selling
| tools to individuals? Which is more risk, but if it works then go
| for it.
| mannyv wrote:
| FYI, people believe that dev tools don't make money, but
| atlassian, pagerduty, zendesk, etc show that there is a market.
|
| And most tools kind of suck.
| mannyv wrote:
| As a note, if you're in a startup you have no idea how far
| ahead of most developers you are.
|
| I keep forgetting that most developers throw their stuff over
| the wall to IT and probably don't have a ci pipeline, do IaC,
| , and probably don't deploy their own microservices or
| understand the AWS stack. They probably have a 60% chance
| they use source control instead of just copying folders and
| changing the folder name. They don't do logging or security.
| They scale by buying bigger instances. Docker is their
| current tech boner instead of puppet.
|
| Although pathetic, it is an opportunity.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is true, but most of those devs are in that situation
| because they _want_ to be. They have less than zero
| interest in taking on more. Often these people also value
| job security /stability above advancement/novelty. Many of
| them also do coding only while at work, and if they will
| learn a new skill/tech it will be because their employer is
| paying them to. Often this group will not follow any tech
| news/blogs/anything and isn't even reachable.
|
| In short it's a pretty tough group to market to.
|
| To be clear, I'm not making a value judgment on this. If
| those people are happy with life, that's great! That's
| mostly the point IMHO.
| navaneethpk wrote:
| The part where I begged for funding is another story:
| https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-...
|
| Also the link to HN launch that helped a lot:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408
| e1g wrote:
| It's perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your
| experience was - having a social circle to intro investors,
| inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed
| round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for
| solo founders with negligible traction.
| navaneethpk wrote:
| > having a social circle to intro investors
|
| > with negligible traction
|
| Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN &
| ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on
| GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by
| great open-source founders who were totally strangers at
| the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.
| e1g wrote:
| "GitHub stars", like "the number of downloads", is a weak
| signal, rarely meaningful in traction talks unless
| there's nothing more substantial to discuss. Traction
| indicators for a low-code platform would be revenue,
| number of paid users, number of apps deployed/updated
| with ToolJet, number of different people using ToolJet
| apps, the volume of data captured/processed per week,
| etc.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| for 1.5m, any signal is important to build a story. all
| of the things you list are important, but typically only
| in later stages.
| dnadler wrote:
| FYI, the Tutorial link in the footer of the tooljet site
| seems to be dead: https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/intro
| navaneethpk wrote:
| Thanks for noticing, fixing in some time.
| asim wrote:
| Be careful with advice like this. You don't know if the company
| has yet succeeded. A lot of it is quite logical but at the same
| time many things are an anomaly e.g the tool launched and closed
| fundraising within a short period of time. That's not always how
| it works out. Just because first commit to funding was 3 months
| doesn't mean you'll experience the same thing. I struggled for 4
| years alone on an OSS project before raising funding. Hiring
| people, defining the product and executing was even harder. A
| person's experience only tells you what worked or is working for
| them or lessons they learned, it can't be cookie cutter fitted to
| your own journey.
| navaneethpk wrote:
| Exactly the reason why I wrote the article in a way that it
| just walks through the journey. The outcome of anything is a
| function of the context & timing and hence whatever worked for
| someone at a specific point of time to get to a specific stage
| might not be relevant for everyone.
| dadoge wrote:
| Interesting...maybe we should normalize/de-stigmatize Dev tooling
| companies to have a ceo who is an eng for the first ~ 3 yrs, and
| then hiring a replacement (maybe even some early "vp of product
| person")
|
| There are probably so many good ideas that devs have, but they
| don't have enough interest in being a ceo of a big unicorn
| company, but understand the problem and can get a prototype up
| with no red tape
| Bilal_io wrote:
| > Interesting...maybe we should normalize/de-stigmatize Dev
| tooling companies to have a ceo who is an eng for the first ~ 3
| yrs, and then hiring a replacement (maybe even some early "vp
| of product person")
|
| I wasn't aware there was any stigma there. Considering that
| Gates, Dorsey and Zuckerberg were engineers who wrote code and
| continued to be CEOs of their companies for very long.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| I love the curmudgeonly comment on the blog post:
|
| > A "solo founder" should be too busy with real work to be
| writing articles like this.
|
| Amazing that they couldn't understand the article's marketing
| value
| didgetmaster wrote:
| A solo founder has many things on their plate, but should never
| pass up an opportunity to raise awareness for their product;
| especially if it has progressed to what they think is MVP
| status. Newsletters, blogs, and sites like HN are great places
| to start 'getting the word out'.
| superzamp wrote:
| And probably clarity of thought value for the author as well,
| I've found that writing is usually the best way to clear your
| thoughts and identify potential remaining blind spots in
| scenarios like this.
| atdrummond wrote:
| This was a great post that actually is undersold by the title.
| Any aspiring solo founder should read this, as ToolJet's founder
| has provided a great roadmap to getting to product market fit -
| and understanding the trade offs and concessions a solo founder
| must make. It absolutely matches my own experiences and expertly
| lays out the growth plan for a software firm that's bootstrapping
| and dogfooding off of a single person. Well done Navaneeth.
|
| Will absolutely keep this in my personal list of articles for
| friends and acquaintances looking to start their own firms.
| navaneethpk wrote:
| Glad that you found the article helpful :)
| [deleted]
| swyx wrote:
| TIL about Tooljet from OP's post: https://www.tooljet.com/
|
| between Retool, Budibase, Superblocks, and Tooljet, i'm confused
| about how to choose. anyone have a good mental map of the low
| code internal tools landscape?
| justinzollars wrote:
| Doesn't matter. You need product market fit and focus on your
| customers.
| blumomo wrote:
| > if someone from the team steps up and adds a lot of value that
| is expected from a co-founder, we will definitely promote the
| person as a co-founder
|
| How can someone get the title of a cofounder of an already (at
| least) 2 years old company which is already set up an running? I
| understand that traditionally this person then represents in
| investor meetings, but why does it need to be a _founder_ title
| of something that was founded long ago?
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Elon Musk
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Some startups now retrofit co-founder title to employees as
| recruiting tactic. Part of the overall title inflation trend I
| presume. I've seen some extreme examples where there are dozens
| of "co-founders" on the roster.
| CalChris wrote:
| Agreed. To me, a co-founder is anyone pre-money. Anyone post-
| money is an employee.
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| I'm a co-founder, with the current CEO and one other guy who
| retired, and have always been on the engineering side of the
| business. at first, the engineering department was me, and
| support. I was super green back then and was pretty lucky to
| be at the right place at the right time and as such, the
| company grew far faster than myself. I have many superiors
| now, which is cool with me as I've continued learning and
| growing professionally by observing them. going from me and 2
| other guys to late series C has been a priceless experience,
| and it's nice to have the title. but oh my, the spam email
| and phone calls I get from having it on my LinkedIn profile
| is beyond annoying. many assumptions are made by companies
| advertising to co-founders, mainly that im C level and
| involved in sales. I struggle to calculate the total cost of
| all the sales guy time spent targeting me but I can safely
| say atleast a low end Lamborghini could have been procured if
| it was all pooled together.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| "Founder" is not a title you can add casually under US law.
|
| It's determined at the time of incorporation and stock
| issuance. QSBS, and other legal structures, do not allow
| transferability of "Founder" to follow-on Investors and
| employees.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I don't think QSBS has anything to do with founder titles
| specifically, but I'd love to be corrected. Anyone who with
| stock that is QSBS eligible gets the exemption, whether they
| are a founder, investor, employee, etc, and it's more about
| the eligibility (ie you paid for the stock, you didn't
| acquire it on a secondary transaction, the business was <50M,
| etc). Whether your title is founder or not doesn't really
| matter.
| navaneethpk wrote:
| I might be wrong here but "Founder" is just a title and it
| has nothing to do with law or investors. Adding another
| "Director"/"Officer" requires some paperwork though.
| bfung wrote:
| You're correct. I'm not a lawyer, but went through doing
| own startup:
|
| It varies in incorporation requirements by state, but most
| only require 2 titles positions - a President and a
| Treasurer (the "Officers")
|
| Adding or removing a Director, as in "Board of Directors",
| requires amendment to the Corporation's bylaws, which
| should state how many seats there are.
|
| Aside from those titles/roles, all the "C" prefixed titles
| are made up. Usually, one C level person is the President,
| another the treasurer. Co-founders are usually on the board
| of directors. Many times, a single person can be on the
| board, a co-founder, and ceo.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Do you have to give yourself titles everyone else is using? If I
| start a company I would rather have "Captain" or "Masterchief" or
| perhaps just keep the C from CEO and be just a "Chief".
| pitched wrote:
| It's helpful to align titles with the rest of the industry so
| that everyone outside of your small group knows what role you
| play without a long explanation. Custom or non-standard titles
| is like mixing code styles in the same file. So much fun when
| you're doing it but such a huge pain when the next person comes
| in.
| shaburn wrote:
| So early on CEO is going to be selling customers and employees
| 80+% of the time but every Founder will need to. So why not
| delegate that to someone much better than you when you truly need
| the extra help. If you are not a killer technical founder, than
| what chance do you have in the market, as you've already signaled
| you're not the best sales person by not defaulting to the CEO
| role. Thus I'd argue you have little choice.
| mgaunard wrote:
| You should look for both a CTO and a COO.
|
| Whatever you cannot find a person for, you do yourself.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| C1O
| intelVISA wrote:
| #1 is too true, it's a nightmare to try find someone suitable &
| non-technical to augment any dev tooling (or similar) venture IME
|
| How did you handle the VC raise or were you entirely
| bootstrapped?
| navaneethpk wrote:
| I've written another article that explains how we raised seed
| round here: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-
| open-source-...
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Good post, very helpful. So it sounds a good approach, or at
| least one, if you can't just quit your job and go full-time
| without some funding is to launch the project/product and go
| straight for a seed round which then gives you the resources
| you need to go full-time. Great to hear this is a plan that
| can work, assuming the project gets enough love.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Thanks :) grats on the succesful launch
| lokimedes wrote:
| Does anyone have similar recommendations regarding sales,
| marketing and other business critical functions? As someone
| contemplating the hard roads of B2B and non-SaaS , I feel a lack
| of basic advice on going from idea to revenue.
| dahart wrote:
| That's a legit & hard question, and my startup experience is in
| consumer SaaS products, but my first thought is: are sales &
| marketing truly critical to your bootstrapping process, if
| you're going B2B? I ask just because I've heard a lot of B2B,
| especially for young companies, happens via referral.
|
| Like the article, one way is to do it yourself until you grow
| and can hire someone into the positions you need. Do you have 1
| customer ready to go who will fund solo development? Do you
| have a team who will jump in if you land a seed round, or will
| you start building solo? This all depends a lot on your funding
| & runway situation.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >do not nitpick - every fight is not worth picking
|
| This is quite valuable. Great article Navaneeth, thanks for
| sharing.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| Just want to add, I followed pretty much the same path with
| Windmill [1], which is also in the developer tool space, and also
| open-source. Built everything solo for 5 months. I thought it
| would be impossible to get into YC, it is not and I was fortunate
| enough to join YC on the latest batch, on my first try [2].
|
| Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many
| orders of magnitude my ambition and made fundraising much easier.
| Most importantly, even though I worked in tech in the bay many
| moons ago, at the time I was very isolated in Paris and thought I
| understood the startup game but I did not really. Being part of a
| cohort like YC with like-minded amazing peers, truly felt like I
| was able to go up to speed on many subjects that would have been
| out of reach for a solo founder.
|
| If you are a solo technical founder and considering applying to
| YC, reach out to me, I am more than happy to help.
|
| [1]: https://windmill.dev
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793
| malux85 wrote:
| Congrats on getting into YC!
|
| I'm the Solo Founder of https://atomictessellator.com, also
| applied to YC this batch
|
| (Actively looking for co-founder), wish me luck!
| mgaunard wrote:
| There are a lot of tech incubators in the Paris area.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| And VCs, but as much as I'd like it to not be the case, the
| US and the bay area in particular play at another level. The
| french ecosystem is getting really good at some forms of deep
| tech, but developer tools is not one of them, yet. The
| current government and station F have done wonders, we were 8
| french startups at YC this year, the most populous of any
| other EU countries. Things are starting to change in the
| right direction and french engineers don't lack the drive and
| talent.
|
| On the other hand, French people/VCs will wonder what can go
| wrong whereas in the US they look at what can go right. There
| are enough hurdles to face when trying to build a global tech
| companies as a solo founder and it can definitely make a
| difference.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Sure but they'll bring you some croissants and half a desk
| for 3 months for your seed round.
|
| If you're a startup in Europe you can forget about the scale
| you can experience in the US and you should dedicate someone
| in your team to apply to every European grant out there to
| survive.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Very cool, thanks for sharing. Windmill looks well done. I've
| got a few ideas I'm mulling over in the dev tools space and
| would consider going the solo technical founder. Will
| definitely reach out for some advice when the time comes. Out
| of curiosity, any downsides to use the .dev tld?
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| I would prefer the windmill.com domain but a cool windmill
| museum has it. I have not seen any downsides except Google
| (who owns the .tld) kept refusing to approve our oauth
| because the approval team was convinced that .dev could only
| be for testing.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Good to know. It works well for products like yours.
| bcjordan wrote:
| Off-topic but have to say OSS Pipedream is something I've
| wanted to see for so long. Definitely checking that out!
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| Thanks! and let us know what you think, we are still rapidly
| iterating (to the point where the landing page and video is
| quite obsolete)
| RcrdBrt wrote:
| Hi Ruben!
|
| Great to see Windmill advancements
| kukabynd wrote:
| This is an excellent and pragmatic way of looking at scaling team
| as an engineer. The defragmentation comparison really
| demonstrates this clearly, thank you for sharing this.
| fuzzieozzie wrote:
| [unpopular opinion] If you struggle with this decision then you
| have other problems.
|
| There is no time for Worrying about titles -- I was "Jack of All
| Trades" for 4 years at the company I co-founded before I became
| CEO!
| Etheryte wrote:
| A perhaps not so unpopular opinion is that it would be better
| to read the article before you comment on it. Despite the
| title, the article is not about mulling over what title to call
| yourself.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Perhaps you should read the article before deciding to comment.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| It seems to me that every great tech company needs two things to
| get off the ground. A product that actually works well and
| execution on the business side. Few people have the skills to do
| both of these things well. Apple got started with the two Steves
| (Jobs and Wozniak). One built the first couple of computer
| designs. The other was a sales and marketing genius.
|
| If you have a product that is possible to launch in just a couple
| months, then you might be able to get by as this guy did. If your
| product is much more complicated and takes several years for a
| solo developer to build, then you have to pick the CEO or CTO
| role and go with it.
|
| My own project has been a work in progress for several years now.
| I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite
| lacking. It is a new kind of data management system and it can be
| really tough to raise awareness and get people to try it out.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Link to your project (if it has a site)?
| didgetmaster wrote:
| https://www.Didgets.com Here is a short demo video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScBd-71OLQ
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Neat! I see a market for this; devs who have inherited a
| mess of a project and want a low-stress way of managing
| data.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| People always describe Steve Jobs as a "sales and marketing"
| person but IMO that grossly undersells his value. He was also
| an amazing product visionary, and could bridge the gap between
| sales/marketing and technical.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Yeah. That too!
| navaneethpk wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| >I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite
| lacking.
|
| Can relate to this. What worked well in the case of ToolJet is
| that the product did not require marketing efforts to get the
| initial traction since the project is open-source.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| You need a third thing, which is the ability to "sell" what
| you're doing to some combination of customers/users, investors,
| and people you want to hire.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Absolutely. I have had a few hundred people tell me that they
| think the technology is amazing and can't believe how fast it
| is; but so far only a few paying customers and no investors
| (other than myself) yet. Bootstrapping is hard.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Developers selling to Developers is the exception.
|
| There are many talented Sales/Marketing people. But few who can
| effectively target Developers.
|
| The Authors path of bootstrapping via open source is a known
| tactic/strategy.
|
| Ultimately growth will require directly approaching other
| Developers with a commercial proposal.
| freedomben wrote:
| The importance of this cannot be overstated. Developers are
| extremely difficult to market to if you're not a developer
| yourself. It can be done, but very few sales/marketing people
| will be successful unless they have much experience in it.
| The reason why is that developers break all the rules you
| learn in marketing departments and schools. What works with
| normal people will not just be ineffective on devs but will
| actively repel them.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| As a developer, I take exception to your insinuation that
| developers are not 'normal' people. :)
| hellolemon wrote:
| Getting products to market cost a lot of money. It's hard to do
| organically unless you have your niche well defined.
| awesomegoat_com wrote:
| CEO and CTO sounds like too much work.
|
| I call myself head of research in my own bootstrapped start-up.
| :-)
| remexre wrote:
| Yep, the founder of my company is still the "Vice President of
| Research"!
| bitL wrote:
| CEO all the time. CTO only if you absolutely trust your CEO. But
| as the saying goes, the optimal number of co-founders is an odd
| number and three is too much.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Since a solo founder is a dreamer role, CMPO: Chief Metaphysical
| Officer.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-01 23:00 UTC)