The Skills Needed to be a Solo Founder

However, I chose not to pursue this idea immediately since I was in the final year of med school at the time and had a lot of important exams coming up in 2019 and 2020. In this scenario, we advise looking for mentors able to support you with their expertise and experience. These can be independent advisors or investors who provide not only money but also know-how. From a business perspective, we’re an agile software team crafting and launching fully-fledged web and mobile apps for clients worldwide. But in our geeky day-to-day life, we’re a bunch of friends fully committed to our passions.

While everyone understands the overall goals and objectives, the visionary is the one with the stars in their eyes, the one who sees into the future. They have that unique ability to articulate that dream to others. To convince the skeptics among the customers, market, and investors, and inspire the rest of the team. I’m not sure if B2C businesses have unique requirements. I do think community and brand building are a lot more important in B2C. Treating your customers like they’re an extension of your team is a useful tactic. Nowadays, I use customer feedback for forward-thinking roadmap planning .

How to Build a Deck

After all, if people will use the bare-bones version of your product, investors can envision what you can do with development and marketing budgets. Even when you share a vision with your co-founder, chances are strong that you’ll have some disagreements about how The 3 Biggest Challenges Of Being A Solo Founder to get there. Those disagreements can slow decision-making because, instead of acting, you’ll spend time trying to persuade one another that your idea is better. Even though co-founder conflict is a leading cause of startup failure, most founders take the risk.

As you categorize your list, it will become smaller and more manageable. Remember our second principle; a good system with perfect trust is better than a perfect system with no trust. In other words, spend less time making things look nice and spend more time building a habit to use for your single source of truth. Building a business together can’t happen without sharing similar values and goals. https://www.wave-accounting.net/ What’s important is communicating your vision ahead of time and making sure you’re on the same page. Same goes for commitment – look for a co-founder that’s fully dedicated to building a company with you, instead of working on ten different project on the side. We leveraged AngelList to find smart, creative people who truly believe in the product, which moved the business to the next level.

Insufficient business planning

The feedback is really helpful to spot the bigger problem areas and opportunity areas. I find that customer feedback is most valuable for trend-spotting and to inform bigger-picture decisions. This January 27th, for 2022’s first Relay AMA, we are really looking forward to hosting Podia’s founder and CEO, Spencer Fry. Next steps are testing our products with as many businesses as possible and to keep getting great customer feedback. I joined SPICESPACE because I wanted to find a nice space to work, leave the house and have a good excuse to get some fresh air everyday.

• That was the case for Emma Guo from Offsyte and her co-founder Jonathan Como.
• There are countless stories of co-founders butting heads and fighting over all the decisions.
• I was rejected by more than 60 angels and VCs before landing my first check — from someone who’d already said no 25 times.
• Although the project was abandoned a year later, some of its employees went on to work on Tinder.

Make sure you choose your hacker carefully because the product starts and stops with them. Whatever your business is, you need someone who lives and breathes the product. Bear in mind, that does not mean that the hustler is replaceable.

Post-Incorporation Checklist: 9 Steps After You Incorporate Your Startup

They will help you position your product in a crowded market, give you the right features to build, and even give you words you can use in your sales copy. Customer conversations are one of the key ways to build the right product. The goal of this step is to get used to reaching out to people with solutions, asking them for money, and identifying real problems worth solving. For example, if you’re building a mobile app, you may find that there aren’t any efficient ways to test mobile apps. This is the exact opposite of traditional business advice.

Find out which are the most effective and low-cost channels to reach your target audience. This is why jumping on complex technical solutions right from the start is not ideal. Try sticking to simple solutions that meet very specific needs. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the search for product-market fit has two variables you can play with.