Comment by akanet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akanet | Hacker News Reader

I run a profitable one-man SaaS business. I think before you seriously consider even bringing someone on, you should think about exactly what you want. If you have 30% of an MVP and a business plan, what are you looking for in a cofounder? Why is bringing them on material to your business?

You mentioned that people don't take you seriously as a one-man operation. This is not my experience when it comes to negotiation of standard contracts - businesses care about the value you create for them. Being a one-man operation has mattered when dealing with acquisition negotiations, but I think optimizing for that now is a bit of cart-before-horse.

Imagine you are pitching to your imaginary board or a potential investor. You want to bring on a cofounder to help you grow X% in Y months by adding Z strategic value. Fill in the blanks and then decide if you actually know anyone like that. When you do all that I think the % of the company to give away questions will become transparent.

Last time, when I met a VC associate, he was excited to hear my pitch, and in the end he asked about my team. When I told him I did everything alone (and doing it parttime), his facial expression changed, and started lecturing me (in a subtle way) about how hard it is to run business alone and part-time. I had a working product and some tractions. The idea was to get money from him, so I can confidently quit my job and working on my product fulltime. Sounds like catch-22 no?

"Team" doesn't have to mean full-on partners, but usually without money you can't get people on board to commit to anything resembling reasonable effort to get things done. Perhaps some things should be outsourced, with you still managing and making decisions, but outsourced to extremely low-cost people, then you'll have the 'team' the VC wants so desperately to see??

Given that you're already doing it, I'm not sure you need a lecture or reminding about how hard it is. It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money (probably harder than just getting your stuff working and bringing in money in the first place).

>> It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money

I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.

"nobody on the internet knows you are a dog" - make your pet dog/cat/hamster a co-founder/imaginary friend. Create a facebook page/github account/stackoverflow account for them so they exist on a cursory Google search. At a later stage after you have done the money grabbing explain that your co-founder didn't really commit much code and you had to let him/her go. Dishonest? Yes, but women that posed as men to get publishing deals or to join the army were dishonest too. In the current scene there is this 'must have cofounder' rule that doesn't entirely make sense. It is mythical man month to a certain extent - if one person spends two years to develop an MVP and get traction that is somehow worthless whereas if a team of two do it in a year that is somehow perfect.

Don't investors do due diligence before wiring money to your bank, even it's just a seed funding?

If you're making up imaginary partners to get someone to give you money when they wouldn't otherwise, you'd be committing fraud. If the investor found out, they could press criminal charges[1] or sue you to get their money back. (They'd be especially likely to do this if they lost money on your company.) Once the case ended up in court, you'd have no way out, since continuing to assert your lie would be perjury (a felony).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud#As_a_criminal_wrong

Part of what they want to believe is that you have the personal network to get good people and the skill to keep them around and believing in your vision. One way you can finesse this is by finding people who will join you instantly when you have money. E.g., "My friend Joe has been helping me with the coding and will come on full time as soon as I can pay him enough to cover his bills."

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