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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

I like how the title claims to explain how to found a business solo and then does nothing but explain different ways to build your team, why investors care about the team, blah, blah, blah. You aren't explaining how to build a business, you're just taking about different ways to assemble a team.

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I think that you hit it on the head and this is what took me eight years to realise. Growing the business is about building the team.

I always thought it was about great product, great design about moving mountains myself. It took me far, far too long to register that while you need all of those and you can certainly build a business solo, the key to growth is in creating a team. This is true on many, many different levels.

(Edited for consistency)

and this article makes that point pretty well. It might not say it explicitly, but by the end of the article that's the message I got.

I've been guilty myself of looking for the "solo-founder how-to" guide. Like the person above, inevitably I was always disappointed because none of the answers said what I wanted them to say.

Great writeup.

Growing and building are different things. You're conflating them. A lot of solo entrepreneurs want to build a small lifestyle business, not a team, they don't want to grow it. A lot developers would kill to have a successful app that's just big enough to replace the need to work for someone else, and small enough to not require anyone but him to run it.

You're right in that growth per-se does not of course need a team. What I should have said was high-scale growth.

It is of course possible that to some degree, even high-scale growth can happen without team but I think the most sure-fire route to it is by building an amazing team of talented people.

Sure, an amazing team is great if that's what you seek, but you're still assuming growth is the goal of building a business; I'm trying to say it isn't. Building a biz and growing one are different things, but I see you did edit your original statement to remove the inconsistency, so nevermind I guess.

What's your point? There's a difference between co-founders and employees, and there's a difference between a company with co-founders and employees and a company with a single founder and employees.

My point is that the title suggests that the content of the article explains how to build a business as a solo founder. So I would expect that it talks about things you should do to get your business going overcoming challenges, etc. that are unique to a solo business owner. Just going on about why a team is important and how to build it seems almost the opposite of what the title suggests.

Conventional wisdom is that you have to have cofounders. I was interested in reading an article describing running a business solo. This article did not do that. It basically reads: Don't have cofounders? That's okay, you can hire them. But whatever you do you shouldn't try to run a business by yourself.

That does not explain how to start a business as a solo cofounder. It's basically like writing an article with the title "You can read with terrible vision" and then writing an article about why you shouldn't try to read without getting glasses to improve your terrible vision first.

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