The title seems odd to me -- the Single Founder? Maybe I'm missing content somewhere, but I was looking for something related to you, as an individual entrepreneur, going it alone.
This would do just as well for me as "The Entrepreneur's Handbook."
This would do just as well for me as "The Entrepreneur's Handbook."
I do include a discussion of taking on a cofounder in the book. Personally, I don't think that having a cofounder is bad per se, but having a bad cofounder is significantly worse than having no cofounder at all. The downside to taking on a cofounder is that your ambitions for what to build need to increase proportionately because now it has to support 2 people, not just one. It's no longer just a matter of getting 2x the work done. Basically everything doubles.
I've been both the single entrepreneur as well as a co-founder. I found that list to be entirely applicable to both scenarios. (Good list, BTW!)
Anyway, just offering some feedback that I thought there would be a greater emphasis on the unique challenges for a solo founder vs. a team.
Indeed, I'm not sure there's a more concrete example of "judging a book by it's cover." :-)
If you look around at that "traditional" startups covered by news or accepted by YC, they don't talk about single founder startups. In my circles (MicroConf, Micropreneur Academy, etc) it's virtually nothing except single founder companies. So there's a misconception that single founder startups aren't possible or don't work.
For VC's and huge scale startups, that may be true. But I know of hundreds of small scale software companies that are doing just fine that would beg to differ. It's a matter of what your goals are and what you want out of life.
The title is meant more to draw attention to the fact that if you're a single founder, this book is for you. That doesn't change the fact that it's useful to small teams or to any software startup. But when you have two people working on something, the discussions tend to be different than the ones you have in your head.
I wrote the book in such a way so as to be that other voice saying the things you would have needed to hear from a cofounder. It's not necessarily about the message itself in many cases, so much as the subtle nuances of how that message is communicated that will make them more understandable and resonate better with a single founder.
In some ways, the title is a marketing strategy too.
^^^ This is so true.
For anyone thinking of bringing on a business partner, I highly recommend the book “The Partnership Charter” — it does an excellent job of taking you through the things you really need to address before you just jump in and get to work.