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Comment by petenixey | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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.

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