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by throwaway2a02 1804 days ago
No, you should not. Chances of it working out are probably slim. You probably don't need funding, as many solo founders can attest. Hiring should be done once the business is already generating an income, and should be scaled based on that income.

What happens is that if you do sell your house, (assuming you'll pay rent) things will get a lot more stressful for yourself financially, and this will severely hinder your mental performance and chances of success.

An even better idea would be to get a regular job and bootstrap your business in your spare time, on weekends. Once it takes off, you can quit the job and focus full time in it. Successful startups coming from this kind of environments are way more common than those coming from YOLO, all-in approaches you are thinking of. And this is precisely because of the way the mammal nervous system works. The ability to do creative mental work is severely impacted when under a perceived threat (financial doom in this case).

2 comments

>You probably don't need funding, as many solo founders can attest.

anyone know where I could read for stories like this? I want to motivated by the story of success solo founders

This is an oft repeated trope — here's my issue: I'm B2B, and my clients don't want to hear "get back to you this weekend!"

What then?

Do you think all B2B providers responds to issues and resolve them within an hour or two? Most of them take their sweet time. Don't try to be a people pleaser or a yes man. You will just get taken advantage of.

Set boundaries / expectations ahead of time. Tell them you will acknowledge an issue within 24 hours and provide a solution within 7 days _if_ it's important.

Whatever works for you.

You should reserve the right to outright reject feature requests without providing a convincing reason beyond "it's not within our scope".

1. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPcgEBbNQvw

2. Recognise that you have an opportunity to practice the courage of telling people things that they do not want to hear.

3. Recognise that when you have employees and investors, they'll be relying on you to tell them things they don't want to hear.

4. Recognise that your future self will find it far harder to practice courage if his past self abandoned him to the risk of homelessness.

Pick a product/market that doesn't require such a level of support / contact.

Pick something also that doesn't need constant human hands/duck tape. E.g. if you are web scraping, and someone changes their site HTML structure on 3pm on a Wednesday, then you have to be hands on to fix it.

If you are running an app that is self sufficient - you put the hours in at the weekend to make it robust, it doesn't bother you during the week, most of the time.

In other words, build stuff that ... scales :-)

I've led an engineering team and worked with many vendors. Some while working at a $1bn company and some while working at an early stage startup.

At the $1bn company I would get vendor responses quickly, because we paid for enterprise support. At the scrappy startup I just got used to responses coming a day or so later (especially since I was working with USA vendors while I was based in Taiwan).

If a customer wants a 1-2 hour response time they'll pay much more for it.

Drop them. If some corporate cog thinks having you on a speed dial 27/7 is a good idea, just because they pay, you definitely don't want them as clients. Instead, tell them you are awesome, your product is the hottest shit in town and you work 4 days a week. The language may vary depending on a client, but setting boundaries is part of the game.
Just "business hour" support can take you out of eligibility to (morally) accept a role at another firm.
Morally, maybe, but not practically. You can send emails or answer the phone during your regular job. The odds of you being "caught" are near zero.
I've found the businesses I work with are very happy when I say I can get it to them by Monday. I often say this even when I know it will only take me an hour and it's Tuesday. Haven't had any issues.
If you’re at the point where answering support emails is interfering with your day job, you’re doing pretty well. OP is a long ways off from having this problem.
Find a way to resolve it? You could negotiate or find another job that lets you manage the time you need to run your business. I don't think the options are necessarily limited to either quit employment and go full-time on the business or just working on the business during weekends. There's probably more options.
IndieHackers has turned into a garbage site as of late. The quality has plummeted and it's mostly people just desperately cold emailing thousands of people while making less than $3k a month.

Low key, in most cases those people would be better off selling fake healing crystals on Etsy.

Then it is not something they really really need. ‘This weekend’ is awesome if the problem is very very important.
Figure out how to solve the problems as fast as possible… yeah it’s hard maybe not the thing for you