Natalie put a lot of work in to this (and we're suposed to be on holiday!). There's lots of great stuff in here - not just about the overall startup experience, but also advice on talking to press, raising money and building out the company.
I'm currently working on a single-founder startup. And, as with everything there are pros and cons.
So, in one word, Crazy, NO!!.. difficult, yes, but startups are hard anyway..
I'm a software engineer, as well as an MBA (finishing up) so I can do most of the stuff myself which I believe to be a plus.
When I was starting I found finding a co-founder to be a lot more work with nothing to show for, but since I believed in my idea I just decided to get started and do as much as I could.
I'm about to incorporate, am currently in a soft launch mode to get direct customer input and make fixes. I just divide my time between meeting people (customers etc.) and developing, and yes I have a day job (and a new born).
So, my hands are more than full.
Whether I'll be successful or not, I don't know, but the journey has been very rewarding so far.
Similar story here. Find a niche you care about. Look around for the right customers for your product. Do things manually as a test run if applicable. Make your first 10-20k or so. Scale out where needed.
Single founder startups usually can be great lifestyle companies until you decide to raise funding (if you do) as well.
If you're solving a problem you care about while making money at it at the same time, you basically have the ability to do whatever you want.
>Over time he completely re-architected the app to have a UI that is driven entirely from the server and doesn’t need to go through the various app stores to release changes.
So I'm reading this and wondering: this differs from a webapp how exactly?
Our iPhone and Android apps both use native UI components (table views etc) that are defined by data from the server, so we can ship new native-feeling features without compiling a new build.
"An immensely useful lesson to learn is how to correlate all the conflicting advice and apply it to your own situation."
This appears to be the single most important way to get use from YCombinator (or from reading Hacker News). Even if it seems obvious, keeping this advice in mind also helps to avoid posting indignant comments on other startup advice threads.
Reading this brought back a memory for me too, even if just as a bystander. I was lucky to be able to attend dConstruct 2010, it was the most wonderful design conference I’ve been to so far. All the presentations, by the likes of Merlin Mann, John Gruber, and David McCandless, were very inspiring.
It was a one day event and all the talks were held in the same space. At one point, the guys from Lanyrd came on stage and explained how the site worked. They asked all the attendees to tweet to @lanyrd and write that they are attending dConstruct. That way, everyone got automatically added on the Lanyrd site as attendees, with profile and everything. It was an impressive demo.
Until now, I didn’t know that was the event when Lanyrd officially launched, it come across to me like they’d been polishing the app for ages.
Good Story! Your next startup should be one in which someone can easily add text on top of photos in their blog, and then allow readers to easily share those (nuggets of wisdom) photos on Social Media with the click of a button.
Great post, thanks for taking the time to write it up.
I'm curious how the discussions got started with Eventbrite. Were you discussing another kind of partnership first? How close were your existing contacts?
We were introduced to Kevin (their CEO) by YC for advice when we were raising our seed round. We worked a little with their business development team on an API integration project, then got to know their engineering team.
Congrats, a very sweet story. My wife is not interested in tech (though she has a very strong science background...) but working together would be a lot of fun (and stress).
