Searching For A Co-Founder Is How You Get A Bad One | 4 VC-Backed Solo Founders

0:00My first company, my co-founder was my dad. is very hard. I did not know about the term leaky bucket before I met him. Even if my Twitter post gets hundreds of thousands of likes, that's not something I should be focusing on. My focus should be towards making an even more valuable product for customers. He taught me everything I should be thinking about from a retention standpoint. It's like having five other co-founders. I wouldn't have been able to do it without these guys. Welcome to a very special episode of the Solar Founders podcast. Now, typically, these are one-on-one conversations, but today we have four guests.

0:32And the reason for that is because we were celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Solo Founders Program, which we launched to bring Solo Founders to San Francisco to build Solo together instead of building Solo alone. And this episode has four guests who are all part of the very first cohort of SFP. You'll get to hear not just about the program, because this isn't meant to be some sort of long-form advertisement for it, but instead about what it's like to be a solo founder getting started in the early days. It's a really revealing conversation. I think that all these founders were really vulnerable and sharing a lot of things that maybe a lot of founders would be uncomfortable to share publicly.

1:07And I think it's a great service to the community. So I hope you enjoy this episode. And without further ado, here's Aldo, Chai, Nemanja, and Dravya. Enjoy. I'd be really curious, Aldo, if you could share, you know, what was going on at the time you joined SFP and you could just sort of talk through that. And then we can talk a little bit about what you're up to today. Transitioning from a previous idea and a previous company to doing something else, thinking I really wanted to move to San Francisco to build something new and very, very ambitious. And I had this initial traction with something in construction, and then we spoke, and I I told you, I don't want to do this anymore.

1:54And I don't know, like I was really trying to find meaning in the next thing I would, I wanted to build. And just having you as a thinking partner just helped me evolve, like, and keep pulling the thread of what I'm doing, on how I find the thing that I'm doing right now. That's cool. And could you share a little bit more to the extent that you're comfortable publicly sharing what you're working on now? And I think the other thing that's really interesting is you are not working on it alone. You're not a solo founder anymore. I think that's actually a really exciting and cool thing to talk about because I think that a lot of people, when they hear about solo founders and what we're doing, they think that we're saying that co-founders are bad.

2:46And in fact, we actually believe the opposite. We believe that great co-founders can be amazing, but that oftentimes people who think that they need a co-founder to get started will ultimately end up with a bad co-founder because they think it's a prerequisite. You, on the other hand, you worked for a long time on various ideas until you found something that you ended up working on. Now you have a co-founder. It's going amazingly. So could you share a little tiny bit about what you're working on? It could be the most vague way because I know that you're mostly under the radar. You don't typically do podcasts or anything like that.

3:16Maybe I went through like four different ideas before getting into this. But right now what we're doing is turning any computer into a data center. That's what we're doing right now. And the story is I was working on something around making any product self-healing and slash an AI product manager. and I realized like this very specific problem around like managing privacy and a lot of context and I just kept pulling the thread and at that moment one of my previous investors reached out he's one of the smartest people I know and he's like hey I'll just join you as your founding engineer and I was like okay this is very cool and we worked for I mean we've been working together for like five years he was my advisor in my previous company um he really helped me like scale the the the tech team there and then we found like our eureka moment in terms of tech and in a very um i don't know if like it's too ambitious to say like we had like a technological breakthrough but i think we are very close to that um and i was like hey so would you like to be more than the founding engineer and just become my co-founder.

4:38We met in person and it's a very, it's a weird relationship in the way that we consider ourselves like artists, producer, not like CEO and CTO. And we just like change that role depending on what's needed for the company. So yeah, that's what I've been up to. Also, you're saying that you don't feel like it's a technological revolution. I think we'll let other people be the judge of that. and I think that they will think it is. But okay, so like, talk about what your impression was when you met these three. They're not the only people. Unfortunately, there are other people from the first cohort of SFP who are not in SF right now.

5:16But it was amazing we could get this group together. What was it like to meet them? Like, do you remember first impressions when you met each of them? Maybe go through. I remember the date. I think, well, not the date specifically. I think it was May 15th. And it was a Thursday. day and I came in late to the cohort because I had some things to fix in Mexico and it was our first group office hours and I was just like very nervous of like who else is in this cohort and I remember the first person I saw was like Philip, he's not here. But then I just, not even like my first impression, I felt the energy of the room when Namanie and Drabia came in.

6:04Let's go. Yeah, I remember seeing Drabia and I was like, this guy is young. This guy is young. He must be like super, super smart, and obviously he is. Then I just like listened to what they had to say in the group office. I was like, damn, like these guys are top talent, and I'm just like an imposter here. That's how I felt. But yeah, the energy was, I don't know man, I just started vibing with them. That's how I can say it. I wanted to match their energy. I remember talking to Chai and thinking, this guy must be top 0.1 % IQ in San Francisco. Oh my god. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that was my first impression.

7:01You know, I'd be really curious what you all have learned from Aldo over, you know, over the year of knowing him now. What are some things that you feel like you've learned that, like, other people would benefit from knowing as well? Like, about building startups, about life? Retention is good. Say more about it. Yeah, like, say more about that, like, what you learned from him about that and how to think about it. Around the same time as Aldo was starting his retention company, Happy Path, was that the final name? There were like 10 different names. Great name by the way. I love it. Our SuperMemmy MCP was just released and it was doing quite well.

7:41He kept saying, dude, look at retention and stuff like that. So he taught me everything I should be thinking about from a retention standpoint, what numbers I should expect like the smile, curve, etc. And that to me was like, really, really helpful. And the learnings are still used every day today. So yeah, I think just to add to that, a lot of what he says is like very much grounded in reality versus like, hype driven, like you could get very like easily carried away by like all the hype and not care about like the fundamentals of building a business and the key would pull you out and like you need to look at it and that that is like really important.

8:23Can you share a little bit more about like if somebody's watching this or listening to this like what that what the how they could actually use that in their life you know what I mean because ultimately I agree with you that's a really important point but like how would you actually sort of like take that and use that or how would you if somebody was listening to this and they wanted to get that advice from you how would you give it to them? Yeah, I think like when everything is going right, like you can take a lot of the other things for granted. Like if you have an insane amount of growth and your retention is just as bad, like you probably can get away with not caring about it.

9:00And eventually when things like don't stay in this good zone, that's when you care about, oh, I wish I would have like cared more about my retention. now this thing would have like sustained for a lot longer and I see like a lot of founders that I speak with they feel like when things are going well they would like just tune up the burn and then not care about anything else I mean I think it's it works but like it just you basically give up a lot of the things like put a lot of the things on the luck and if that like stops being on your side, you just like go tank just as quickly, which is something like a lot of people need to look at, like, you know, things that are not like very, like, exciting to do, just like checking your leaky bucket.

9:52Yeah, actually, like, Aldo has an insane amount of wisdom. I did not know about the term leaky bucket before I met him. So it's like, it was like every time he would say, everyone would just stop talking and listen to whatever he has to say, whether it's about life or startup or product or anything else. And that was also something to learn from. I think everyone in SFP was like that. Yeah. Philip and Ryan, especially. They're not here, but they had... Ryan had the most insane wisdom. He would just go straight to the heart and I would just feel shit for three days and be like, okay, he's right.

10:33I think people need that though. I think it's really, and I think that's also part of like why it's so important to have people together like this. And I think that the aspect of like, well, you're all on your own. You might have some early employees or something, but like functionally when you're starting solo, you don't have the co-founder to have that. So it's kind of really an important aspect of this. Most people think that starting a company without a co-founder is a bad idea. We believe the opposite, that solo founding will become the default way great companies get started. And that's why we built the Solo Founders program, where Solo founders spend three months in San Francisco building Solo together.

11:09Our alumni say it's like having co-founders but getting to make their own decisions. And four cohorts in, we're starting to see just how much Solo founders can accomplish. One secured a formal partnership with a major U.S. government institution just five months after incorporation. Another hit 20 ,000 GitHub stars and 3 million downloads. And a third got 2 million ARR before making a single hire. The demand for the program continues to grow. Our first cohort got 1 ,000 applications for six spots. Our fourth cohort got 4 ,500 for 10. And today, we are officially opening applications for cohort five.

11:46We'll select about a dozen founders. I'll work closely with each of them, and we'll invest$100 ,000 in every company. We kick off September 10th. If you're building Solo or you're ready to start, apply at solofounders.com. I'm curious, Chai, is you sort of brought up some of the challenges and things that you faced over building this. You have something now that's really working. And you've also had moments in the journey here where you're pulling the thread. You have various ideas that you've explored. They all have some connection to each other, which I think is really important. and maybe you can share a little bit about how you kind of had this initial idea and before you even got to SFP you had abandoned it and then sort of this this path of kind of pulling the thread since then because I think it's really important for people to like who are listening to know that you know a lot of startups are this this idea of kind of like pulling on something and finding the resonance but I think oftentimes people stop at sort of like the suboptimal place and they could have just kept pulling the thread and find the real the real thing to work on.

12:51Can you speak a little to your experience around that? Yeah, I think like when I decided to start a company, there were like two areas that I was really excited about. Like one was travel and the other was software reliability. And travel, I chose to explore that side first because I already had like some audience built around that. I had like decent distribution. We were getting a couple of hundred thousand views on different social media. And I was like, I can very quickly experiment on a few ideas and see like something works. And that's when I came up with the first idea of building this AI-based email client for travel advisors and people in the hospitality industry.

13:30I tried it for a while. I quickly realized that as much as I loved the space, it was going to be an insanely painful thing to scale. And which is why I started looking at other areas. And then the second thing that I worked on was closer to like what Aldo explored for a while which was can we monitor all these user sessions and like find all these areas where users are struggling and build like basically give suggestions or like build features around that and that basically came from me building this email client a lot of people were using it and I would look at their sessions and they're like okay this could be a product But again, I tried that and I realized that this was again going to be an extremely painful thing to scale.

14:18I think like I saw the science of it that this was going to happen, but like I wasn't like to this day, I'm not fully certain like these ideas are bad or not. Yeah. I just like realized this is not something I wanted to do. I think the session recording thing was definitely too early. yeah i mean i think like after that a couple of people tried raise money and then they all have like pivoted to something else which is so interesting this is this is actually really funny right there are all these things where one person kind of like goes and builds something then a bunch of other people uh go and like copy it or maybe they just come up with it independently and then they ultimately like the person who started the thing actually like did the first version actually moves on and the other people who kind of like maybe didn't have a good idea or they just came up with it independently, they're still at it.

15:08It'll be interesting to see what happens there. Yeah, I think I saw the same things that I experienced happening with that product, and I was like, okay, this is coming to a point where they're going to switch eventually, or they're going to figure it out. So it could go either way. And then in the end, I settled on the software reliability side. I realized that everybody who was attempting it was doing kind of like top-down approach. where they would take their software and think of all the ways their customers could use it or all the ways it could be in all the things that could happen in production, which is such a mental exercise.

15:49There are infinite things that could happen, and your customers will not care about how you want them to use your product. And I was like, okay, what if we flip this thing? You give the software, and then we basically simulate everything that your customer can do and all the production scenarios that can happen, and then that'll just surface all the problems that are there. And I think that was a solution a lot of people found very easy to think about because also it takes away this mental effort of thinking about software reliability and turns it into a compute problem. Then it's up to you. like you can tune up the computer and you get to a reliability standard that you are comfortable with.

16:34And that's what we are working on now. Very cool. I'm curious what people here, you know, similar to the question about Aldo, like what people learn from them. Like what's your experience like being a part of SFP with Chai? Like what have you taken away from it? You guys live together now. And Chai like makes sure the place isn't falling apart. Yeah. And that it's actually staying clean. But beyond that, what else have you learned from being with Chai? Yeah, I mean, for me, it's like all the life learning. He essentially, he's much older than me. So it's like, you know, I learn a lot. That's the best thing about him is he's old.

17:17It's like having like a dad and then I'm like observing the dad. I'm like, oh man, I should also do that. So I started cooking myself. Nice. That's pretty good. And I started reading all of that simple stuff. He taught me the coffee machine and all of that. So it's like a lot of life things I've learned from him. That's why it's nice to have intergenerational. It works the other way around too. I would look at him and I was like, I used to be like that. So I think I should just try to do more of that. I don't know where I lost it. It's interesting. I do think that there is an aspect of when you see other people, you see aspects of yourself in them that maybe you used to have.

17:55or something that you wish you had, and it inspires you in a way, right? So like, and I think that like having that level of, that's why it's nice to have housemates, but it's also, I think, nice to have like people who maybe you don't work directly with, but people that you have this experience of being around. Nemanja, like why don't you talk a little bit about like the context and how this all came to be with you being here? I mean, it was ODF originally that we first met. I don't remember how you heard about ODF, but maybe talk about that really briefly, and then talk about kind of what it's like to have other people around that are kind of like, you know, some people, I think it was maybe Chai originally who described it as like, it's almost like you have co-founders who are working on your own thing.

18:35But I'm curious what your sort of experience has been like, what you've learned from other people, what people have pushed you on. Ryan, Phillip, they aren't here, but maybe you can speak to what they're working on. Ryan is the founder of a company called Credit GPT. Phillip is a founder of a company called DocMost, which is probably the most popular open source sort of wiki, sort of notion documentation software available. It's got over 20 ,000 stars on GitHub, 3 million Docker polls. But can you share a little bit about what the experience has been like and how you actually ended up here? Of course.

19:11Hey, I'm Namanya. I've been programming for a long while now. I think I started when I was a teenager, and I've been creating my own side projects and I had my own startup before this in India. But around the time AI came around, I realized that there's going to be a big change and all of that change is going to be concentrated in San Francisco where the entire wave started from. And of course, the first thing when you try to learn more about startups is you go on Twitter and YouTube and stuff. And that's where I discovered ODF and you and the entire community. Just the amount of resources you have online is incomparable.

19:52And I was fortunate to apply to ODF, the one week program. And I learned a lot there. At that time, I was making a developer tool. I was solving a personal problem I have with using AI agents to write code. And it was a prosumer hobbyist product. It had some legs, it had some traction, but it was definitely not a billion dollar idea. And I think when you called me and you accepted me into the solo founders program, I think I had maybe around 50 or 40 customers. And during the entire program, I was fortunate to learn from all the experienced and cool people here and find out an even bigger problem to solve, make my product even more valuable.

20:35And I trade by learning from everyone's feedback. That's cool. Can you share a little bit more about what people pushed you on? because I think that it's not just about talking about your experience. I'm not trying to have it be about your experience at SFP, but I want it to be more like, these are things that you got pushed on that were really helpful to you and that maybe somebody else is listening or watching who doesn't have somebody who can push them in the same way. So maybe just hearing about it might help them if they're in a similar situation. The emails. Oh, I know. That's too embarrassing.

21:10Come on, you can say it. You can say it back. This is a year ago, so you've grown a lot. I have, I think. But no, I think the biggest thing that I really had to learn in the start was how to find out what is the actual valuable feedback to take and iterate from versus what might be misleading our hype signals. Like, hey, even if my Twitter post gets hundreds or thousands of likes, that's not something I should be focusing on. My focus should be towards customers and making an even more valuable product for customers. In line with that, if I have a free offering and I'm able to generate free users or free hype around it.

21:45Unless I actually convert it to customers, paying customers, I'm not really running a business. I've created maybe a free trend. So distinguishing that and being able to focus on the biggest, most valuable problems that people are willing to pay money for, that's something really important that I learned first from you, Julian, I think during ODF. But then Aldo also stressed that a lot into me because anytime I ask him for any feedback about my idea or my approach, he's like, okay, what is something that people will pay you 10 times more for? This is good. How can you make it 10 times more valuable for the large business?

22:24And having that focus is really important to get your initial startup off the ground. It's really funny because I realized that, as we're all sitting here, that three of you did ODF at one point. Aldo did it quite a while ago, like during the pandemic. During the pandemic, yeah. And then Chai, we worked together on ODF many years ago. And now it's funny because you look at the people who are in SFP today, and they're from all backgrounds. They don't have a connection to ODF. But like the early cohort, because, you know, we didn't have a massive audience beyond ODF. Most people heard about it through ODF.

23:02And we got 1 ,000 applications for the first cohort. And we had six people. And I think they all had some connection in some way or another to ODF, which is really cool, but not at all the case now. I'd be really curious if you could all share just really quickly kind of experiences around co-founders. Like, have you had co-founders before? What was that like? What did you learn from that? It doesn't need to be bad experiences by any means. But I'm curious, like, what people had in terms of those and what they've learned about going solo in contrast to that. So the first company that I started, I had a co-founder.

23:35and it was amazing. I think I knew that person from back in school. We would talk on Facebook. That's how I met him and there were a lot of values that were very aligned with and it all worked out pretty well. And I think, again, as you said, I'm not against co-founders. If somebody like him was available and excited to build what I'm doing right now, I would be open to having them as a co-founder. But I did not. But I've also seen the other side where in one of the companies that I worked with, I think everything was perfect. They had an excellent idea, a great market. They raised a lot of money from tier one investors.

24:22They had a lot of big name customers. And it all fell apart just because they had the bad co-founder. And I do feel to some extent they realize that because eventually their conversations were like, a lot of conversations that I heard felt like they should have had this before they started a company. And it was just too late. And then that ended up like really badly. The company shut down. And that kind of like made me realize when I was working on idea that like you can have everything working out for you but if you have just like a bad person like or not the right person with you like building it, it could all go to waste which is why I was like I'm not going to force it.

25:08It's true. My first company, my co-founder was my dad. so like having a someone of your family in the company is very hard it's very hard I'm not against it but it's it's it's hard if your siblings maybe it's it's it's different when it when it's your dad is it creates a weird power dynamic where I was 17 I was 17 yeah it creates a weird power dynamic where obviously you're not co-founders your family so the company is family business he's the founder of you yeah exactly and there I was like the CTO when he was more like the CEO and the disagreements were just hard. So if you are up to doing a company with someone in your family, you have to separate what's a family issue and what's a business issue.

26:15That would be my first advice. My second advice would be just put everything on paper on who decides what and why and just try to stick to it as long as you can. It was a hard experience because I think the relationship kind of eroded a bit, but it was a successful company. Or it is a successful company because it's still around today. And my second company, I co-founded it with a very dear friend of mine from college. And we even became roommates and we were very, very close. he spoke at my wedding. But then again, power dynamics kind of switch when you're very, very close friends because it's very hard to have hard conversations.

27:06And there's always someone that is a little bit more dominant and there's always someone that is a little bit more passive in terms of just accepting things. And that's pretty, pretty unhealthy. Because again, relationships get eroded by that and when you bring erosion it's easier to crack. So again, same thing. Try to align incentives and try to understand what is the expected outcome for each one of you. That was a very, very, very difficult co-founder split because we co-founded two companies together and on the second one it's where we split it and that's when I remained like solo. So yeah like my learnings there is just understand the incentives, have the hard conversations, don't like shy from them and yeah just try to separate that this is the company and everything that has to be decided is for what's best for the company.

28:16But below that is people, like people like the company. So that's why it's important to understand the people behind it. That's really cool. And I mean, it's also interesting because in this new company, you started it with someone who originally you were working on an idea and they were your first hire. I'm really curious, like as we go into sort of the end of sort of like our conversation as a group, maybe you can share a little bit about sort of what you've learned from that experience of having somebody who you're working with. You had a relationship prior to it and then you elevated from, you know, you're working together as like, this is the first hire to like, this is my co-founder.

28:50I think that's really good. I think that could happen and that could work really well. Can you share a little bit more about that? Especially for people who are starting as solo founders. I think the whole idea is if you start solo, you can make a lot of progress. And then like maybe at some point, you know, you end up having a co-founder and that could be great. So can you share just like a quick reflection on that? Yeah. I remember we spoke about it and what really excited me the most was I was I am still learning a lot from a person that is 20 years older than me that has way more experience that sees that trusts my vision that really excited me.