For the past few years, I’ve been releasing goods on my own, but I haven’t yet found any success.Recently, I’ve witnessed a lot of instances where independent hackers have achieved success by cooperating on a single project.
What say you? Should I look for a co-founder who can handle marketing so that I can focus entirely on developing new products?
Indeed. Finding someone you can work well with is not an easy task. YC has numerous excellent tutorials on YouTube that covered how to identify co-founders, expectations, and other related topics. Since you might collaborate with this person for years, take it seriously. And I sincerely hope you do.
Personal experience: A few months ago, my boyfriend and I started a site where we offered Instagram and TikTok services for sale. My colleague identified a good source of traffic at first, then when that source ran out of steam, I found another. As the initiative has progressed, we have encouraged and supported one another. Some people may feel otherwise, but I think having a partner or co-founder is necessary.
You need a critical eye and someone with whom you can discuss and bounce ideas off of. When you work alone, most of the time you are left with just your thoughts and no reality check.
Since I have no experience with marketing, I think it would be best to go with a co-founder.
However, I believe I should do better because finding a decent co-founder is incredibly difficult, and if I rely solely on it, I could end up wasting a lot of time.
I’m currently studying marketing step-by-step with the goal of being a fully independent, self-sufficient founder who is unstoppable.
That relies on you and your abilities.
Before creating anything, you have to discover potential clients and be at ease conversing with them.
Once you identify a potential client’s pain point, you construct, and when you start providing value, don’t be scared to ask for payment.
If that’s not possible, look for a co-founder.
Many developers are thinking along these lines:
First, they will “validate” the app.
They create a “MVP.”
They receive funding, sell the MVP, etc.
Given that the majority of the labor mentioned above is marketing, the co-founder’s role in marketing may make sense if you are one of those engineers. In some scenarios, though, it makes more sense to have a second technical co-founder.
You cannot, under any circumstances, presume that steps 1-3 apply to the world at large or to your particular endeavors. This is especially true if you don’t anticipate doing much business with venture capital.
What people often refer to as “marketing” (which represents 90% of a product’s potential) is actually what running a business is all about. It’s primarily about having deep, domain-specific knowledge that you can only gain by being immersed in a particular industry for some time.
If you’re already part of an industry, finding ways to deliver your solution to the market and distributing it will feel so intuitive that it won’t seem like “marketing” at all. It’s better to choose an industry where you already have a lot of specialized knowledge and then create a solution—rather than building a solution first and trying to add marketing afterward.
Alternatively, team up with someone who has this industry edge while you handle the technical side.
Another effective strategy is solving your own problems. You know your audience (yourself), understand what a good solution looks like, and know the best ways to reach people who share that pain point. In other words, leverage your domain-specific knowledge to your advantage.