Quote:
Originally Posted by bip!
@ FW - I am just getting the first tastes of that isolating aspect of it. Agreed that having other bodies around would be beneficial. I went through a bunch of founding courses, meetups, etc - there are groups that started companies together having never worked together before. At first I thought that was crazy to do, but one thing they get is other people eager to create a company. Sure some will fail because of dynamics but they certainly won’t fail for the reasons a solo founder could (i.e. all infinity of decisions are solely yours.. no one catches awful ideas, no motivation support, so on)
yeah and the often unspoken danger of being alone is one that I've fallen into, which is that you end up falling into a comfortable groove. Probably more of an issue in a professional services business vs selling a product and it's 1st world problems to some degree because it's not 'failing' and is still providing a good income, but the challenge of keeping your mind and your time open to new ideas & forcing yourself out of your groove to consider/chase/commit to them is very real.
I had the opportunity to join with somebody in a very similar position to me about 18 months in. I didn't because a) I'd just started getting traction and I overestimated the value of this and my ability to keep growing/underestimated the all round value of the partner as outlined above and b) I was worried about the dangers of something not working out and it proving too difficult to pull away from.
but I think the smarter thing to do would have been to really investigate it with him and also have detailed grown up conversations & agreements about 'what do we do if it doesn't work out & how do we extricate ourselves from it in a fair & amicable way'
I think if I'd done that, the rewards would have exceeded the risks