The benefit of being solo founder

I keep having times in the project where I am glad I don't have a technical co-founder to align with.

"What about a business co-founder? You would just have to align on the business side with him."

But the thing is: So much of the business is tied to the product, and so much of the product is tied to the tech. If I pick the right co-founder, he will understand that very well.

So he should rightfully criticize the tech. And I think this would have been fine for a different project than the one I am building.

I keep making pretty extreme decisions because without this I know I won't be able to ship fast. And I am not talking about decisions where I add technical debts, I am talking about the opposite. Decisions where it's making me slower right now.

Traditionally, this is not advisable to "walk slower to run faster later", because "everything you do might be thrown away".

It's just that I am so convinced of what I am building that I am willing to take the risk. But this doesn't mean I make the architecture more complicated than it needs to be.

Lambdas are actually more complex that containers. Using 5 third-party apps + next.js is more complex than using a monolithic app that owns everything: authentication, file storage, database, static site generation, etc, etc...

There are options that make you more faster the first few weeks, but as soon as you validated the idea you realize it's not sustainable to keep up like that.

And these are the options I don't take right now.

Making these decisions is slower with a co-founder, particularly if he's good. Because he SHOULD really care about these decisions, that's the paradox. I wouldn't want to be with someone who says yes to everything I say, because what it means is that he doesn't really have opinions on how to do things.

At the same time, having someone that has opinions on how to do things can be a curse because you might spend more time aligning with this person.

Or you end up making compromises, or even separating roles. Don't get me started on role separation, that's a whole other topic. I think these days we can do so much more with technology, that it is possible for someone to do it all.

"Why do it all, you need to delegate." It depends on what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for total output, yes. But I am not. I am optimizing for average output per individual. My belief is that it's going to 100X over the next 10 years.

If I am right, it means I can build a 100 people companies alone. But you can't do that if you start separating roles 3 months in the project. Because how you do one thing is how you do everything. Your commit and how you announce this change to your users are part of the same workflow. You need to understand them end to end. You should be in this loop that constitues your business. And if you can't, you have 2 options, you can add humans and create roles, or you can simplify and unify your business and your software development lifecycle so that you can do the same every day and have this thing be enough to build a sustainable business.

And I am going to end on this: "Do the same thing every day until this thing is enough to sustainably grow your business." I think whoever figures this out can build a billion dollar business alone. This quest of finding THE loop, leads to a ruthless prioritization, because if you can't do it every day, it probably means you shouldn't do it.