Doing what needs to be done as a solo founder
If you zoom out far enough, building a successful company can be reduced to three things:
- Identifying and prioritizing the right things to do
- Cultivating the skills required to do these things well
- Actually doing the things
You wouldn't think it, but #3 is surprisingly challenging. This is especially true if you're a solo founder.
When you don't have a co-founder or a boss to hold you accountable, you're likely to spend all your time on things that are easy and enjoyable, while avoiding things that seem difficult or unpleasant. Even if you know what you should be doing, that doesn't mean you'll have the discipline to start doing it.
What's worse, when you're in this situation, it's easy to lie to yourself. It's easy to say, "Oh I've tried all the best things and they haven't worked," when you know deep down that you're avoiding entire categories of things that might work. This is almost every developer who's building features instead of selling to customers.
Half the battle is getting yourself to do things you know you need to do, instead of constantly putting them off.
I don't have a magic bullet solution here. Perhaps find a co-founder, or an accountability buddy, or a way to be more disciplined on your own. Perhaps choose a business where the things you love doing happen to coincide with the things that most need to be done. Or do what I did, and choose a business where there just isn't much opportunity to give into your biggest temptations.
But even if none of these solutions work for you, just knowing and acknowledging the problem is a big step forward.
Yes, yes, yes!
When I started doing the Sales for Founders course, I just focussed on trying to teach founders #2.
But it was super, super frustrating. Because the participants would be struggling so hard with #1 and #3 that, in a lot of cases, #2 was a waste of time.
So now we/I focus a lot more on points #1 and #3 in the course as well.
We definitely haven't solved this completely yet. The majority of founders I work with are still struggling to focus on what actually needs to be done, and then doing it. It's a constant battle.
But here are some of the things we've tried that have helped a lot so far...
Sorry for the block of text!
This is gold.
This could be a great blogpost on it's own. Thank you!
I find #1 the hardest. There are fractal rabbit holes everywhere and it's easy to be blind to the best things to be done.
Doing a mastermind group the past 8 months has helped a bit, though.
Any specific lessons learned on what makes the mastermind group work well?
and so on?
Thanks in advance!
We spend about an hour once a week on a call. The format is pretty simple. We take turns saying:
The main thing that has made this work for me better than other masterminds is that we all personally know each other or have gotten to know each other. We also meet up every once and a while, go to each other's birthday parties (or toddler's birthday parties!) and have a higher bandwidth connection than people who haven't ever met in person. We're not always in the same city all the time, but we've made it work ok.
The other commonality is that we're all doing niche things on YouTube and we're all charging our audience directly in one way or another instead of going for the big, broad "influencer" / affiliate marketer route.
How many people are in the group? Just curious as I would like to join my own with a similar format, but am not sure how many people should be in it.
4
thanks
Interesting insights, thanks!
I'll second this question! We've just started monthly meetups for Vancouver Indiehackers, and we haven't nailed down what the format should be just yet :)
Well, very well paraphrased :D
Personally, these three steps form a sequence. I just found IH recently which formed my desire to build a software-related business on the side (so that's maybe step #0).
But as you mentioned in your comment, #1 is very hard. For me it is expressed in a constant cycle like this:
finding a problem -> being excited about that problem -> brainstorming a solution for that problem -> researching -> find out about competition -> f@*k it, im still gonna build it -> admiring solution of competition -> being frustrated -> dropping project and continue to think about new problems which hopefully have less mature competition
So identifying this problem is hopefully my first step to overcome the cycle which is pretty hard while being a solo founder.... I hope I can manage that in the future :)
"fractal rabbit holes"
love it
I have an entire fractal swamp going
Excellent post I've been thinking a lot about this recently.
Even though I know I'm building something awesome, it can still feel like a grind especially with no one else to talk to about it with.
I've been wondering if there should be some kind of service/system that matches up accountability partners who are at a similar level of entrepreneurial experience.
I've also been experiencing similar problems that @louisswiss describes, in Nugget. Again I think it might be related to setting up a specific well matched accountability partner that you checkin with once or twice a week.
My biggest fear is that the doing only starts to happen when the founder has reached their rock bottom "fuck this moment" and decided that they will battle through no matter what.
If that is required then I fear that many founders (especially the ones in well paying jobs) will find it almost impossible to keep up the momentum.
@amyhoy Amy Hoy as a post about it: https://stackingthebricks.com/your-fuck-this-moment-changes-everything/
Doing some soul searching recently and definitely find that I stubbornly want to build things first (i.e. things that are easy and enjoyable as an engineer) and talk to people and validate when it's built. Who am I kidding, I rarely even do that after. Funnily enough, I'm attempting to do the inverse now on a new idea that covers point #1 - https://www.prioritise.io/.
"#3 is surprisingly challenging. This is especially true if you're a solo founder."
There's a corollary - even after you have mastered, or think you have mastered, getting stuff done, something can blindside you and a lot of good habits go out the door.
Be wary of the health of your productivity, it's a fragile little orchid and needs the right environment maintained.
Happens to me all the time. New girlfriend, travel, Game of Thrones comes back, I take up a new hobby, one of my friends starts pinging me more often, new initiative at work… all sorts of things pop up and throw a wrench into my habits.
Now, This is real!