10 lessons for solo founders of tech startups
By: Florian Gruenwald
Tags: Startup, Tech, Software Development, GIS, Machine Learning

Starting as a solo founder — it’s possible

What if you have a great idea but no founding team for a startup? Pretty likely if you don’t happen to be at university or are otherwise lucky.

After a year as a solo founder I absolutely believe it’s possible to succeed without others (of course I don’t know if my venture will ultimately make it). As I have learned a lot during the year, I would like to share some of my lessons with you here. My point is, even if a team may be the better setup, don’t let its absence stop you from trying to bring a great idea to life.

Exploring flight data to create an air noise map

Maybe you are in that situation where you have a brilliant idea but no team. If you were like me two years ago you would get over it and stay in your job. I was convinced that it’s not really feasible to found a company by yourself (lack of skills, speed, risk, etc.) and thought I needed to get co-founders first. As I wasn’t able to find the right people willing to take the risk, I was quite frustrated.

About a year ago, a good opportunity arose to leave my job and I finally decided to take the risk to found ruhecheck.de and try to prove myself wrong.

As I’m very happy with the decision so far, I want to encourage others in a similar situation to not wait for the perfect team before starting.

My motivation… Helping people (and myself) finding quiet flats

In my last years moving for education and jobs I’ve had many unproductive days and sleepless nights due to loud surroundings that I hadn’t been aware of. I always thought it would be so helpful if I could easily check the noisiness of a flat without having to go there. Also, I would have liked to see a quietness score directly in the online flat profiles on real estate or hospitality platforms. This would help eliminate the wrong places to live, spend my free-time or go on vacation.

Of course you may be among the people who can relax under any conditions but at least in Germany 20–25% really care and want to avoid loud environments. And some flats are unlivable for almost anyone. A friend recently had to move out of his place because he hadn’t been aware that his street is the main route to a large hospital. Day and night ambulances passed by against which not even sound protected windows helped.

Unfortunately there is no online service to help and personally visiting a location is often not an option. And even then… The nightclub across the street may not be open at the time of visit or the annoying air noise not audible due to a different flight schedule.

So the solution needed to be developed and I felt that this wouldn’t only help me but other noise-affected people as well. As this is a difficult and lengthy problem to solve I thought that I would only be able to do this if I would be able to find a business model to support myself. After more analysis and market research I had enough initial evidence to believe that this may be possible.

This is where I’m at after a year:

I have launched an MVP which is live at ruhecheck.de (currently in German only), got positive user feedback and growing user numbers.

Technically, I’m developing five main components:

A frontend to show noise pollution written in Vue.js with TypeScript

A noise calculation algorithm written in Python using mainly osmnx, geopandas and shapely

A Jupyter Notebook to regularly produce an air noise map based on geopandas and rasterio

A ML model to predict traffic using pandas and scikit-learn

A backend to offer a REST API for noise data which I’m building with Django Rest Framework, to be hosted on Google Cloud Platform

I don’t know yet if this will be commercially viable but at least I’m much closer to proving desirability, feasibility and usability.

This is what I have learned so far:

10 lessons as a solo founder

Love your idea. This sounds exaggerated and is part of most startup manuals but being by myself, I realized how important it really is. As a solo founder there is no one else to push you when you’re not motivated. All drive needs to come from you and this only works if you really want to succeed. Also, I believe you need an emotional attachment to your work. As you won’t know for a long time whether this may succeed you would otherwise be too quickly stopped by discouraging data or other ideas. For me, fighting against noise pollution is very satisfying because I believe it will help others avoid locations where they would not feel well. Even if I fail commercially, I would still consider this a big success. Plan financially. If you’re working on an innovative topic, you will likely not make money for a while and you don’t know how long you have to survive without an investor. As all progress comes from you, worrying about money will likely distract you and slow you down. Before I started, I had planned my financial situation for the coming years and knew how much time I could live without profit. So I don’t need to think about the topic and can fully focus on the business. Pace yourself. Whilst it’s great to move fast you need to figure out your limits. You will likely drive the venture for many years to come so you can’t spend all your energy on the first sprint. You need to find a way of working that’s sustainable. In my case, if I work too much, I just feel unwell and get very slow. Pushing myself to continue leads to bad code and little output. For me, it’s much better to take breaks (sport or an afternoon nap helps) and keep the evenings free. Life is more fun like this also. Get advisors. Complicated decisions need to be considered from different viewpoints which you can’t do well alone. Luckily, truly crucial decisions don’t happen so often, so you can counterbalance the lack of co-founders by having regular discussions with advisors. When I started, I knew I wasn’t an expert in all the domains I needed to cover and worried about making unwise decisions. So I asked a few friends I highly respect to support me. This means every week I have at least one scheduled call to get feedback and discuss my most consequential questions. It even feels a bit like being in a team. Be prepared to do everything. Whatever task comes up is for you. True, you can outsource a few topics such as tax and legal but even there you need to have a sufficient understanding to be able to choose and evaluate whomever you hire. And everything relating to your core product should be done inside the company. When I started, I had done some JavaScript and Python. However, through the evolution of my venture, I realized that I needed to build an API to offer high quality noisiness checks and thus required a Backend for which I needed to learn Django. Street noise depends on road traffic for which there is no comprehensive and high quality dataset openly available. So I needed to build a Machine Learning model to get precise results. And Air Noise maps are outdated and not sufficiently detailed for my purpose so I had to create better ones. All of this I could not have outsourced so I needed to acquire the know-how to do it. Focus. Even more than in a small team, you cannot do everything. Whatever is not core to your success, Product Market Fit, you must ignore or you will get stuck. For example, an important noise source are construction sites. Unfortunately, there is no open dataset or API available which could tell me their location and duration. So I wrote a crawler which takes the information from different websites and writes them all into a Firebase. It would be very helpful to have this as an automated cron job every two weeks so I could ignore the topic and know to always have up-to-date data. However, this would be quite a bit of effort so I’m currently just executing a local Jupyter Notebook, save the output as JSON and then overwrite the Firebase with the latest construction sites around every quarter. This is definitely not ideal but currently good enough. With more capacity I can then improve this. Prioritize your time above everything. This connects to the last point. As you’re by yourself, time is likely your scarcest resource. Think about how you use it as efficiently as possible. Automate things when you can (and the payoff of doing so is positive) and, if you can, rather pay for something than build it yourself (Of course don’t discount future time costs when making decisions so do care about code quality to keep a maintainable code base). For instance, I decided to host my infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform and to not set it up myself. This is more expensive but much faster and less error-prone. Learn what you need to but not more. It will happen all the time that you don’t know something. In that case, think about whether it’s a one-time-only problem or whether it’s likely to reoccur. If it’s a one time thing, it’s generally fine to copy-past a solution you find online. If not you should invest into understanding it better. In case it’s just a small point, e.g. how to make a function do what you want, at least try to understand how it works so you don’t have to research this again and your understanding of the language improves. Sometimes it’s a larger topic, i.e. a library (e.g. Pandas) or framework (e.g. Django) that becomes very important to your project. In that case, I find it’s still the most efficient way to spend some time learning its mechanics before proceeding. As I’m currently implementing an API and didn’t understand the topic well, I completed a course on the Django Rest Framework to help me get this right. Take vacations. When you’re by yourself and very motivated there’s a big temptation to just keep going. Whilst you should go on holidays to avoid burn-out, you should even take longer breaks to increase your productivity. Why? Out of the thick of things, the bigger picture becomes clearer and you will have ideas that you wouldn’t have had in a workday. I had the idea for a better sound propagation model hiking in Greece, a topic I had been trying to figure out for weeks before. Expect to learn a lot but don’t expect to be successful. Success in a startup is unlikely. As a solo founder your chances are probably even lower. However, doing everything by yourself gives you a unique chance to learn and to prove you’re able to make it through hard challenges. This will make you much more employable in case your venture doesn’t work out. Even as a co-founder joining someone else’s team if that’s the path you choose to take. I’m quite confident that I will find an interesting role in good company in case I’m not successful. This helps me to relax and in turn probably increases my chances that it doesn’t happen.

I hope I could motivate you to not wait for the ideal co-founder but take the leap and start your own venture. If you want to know more, I’m always happy to answer messages.

In case you find fighting against noise pollution inspiring and don’t have your own idea, let me know. Even if I’m not dependent on a co-founder, working on the vision in a team is still what I eventually want to do so I’d be happy to hear from you.