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A comment on Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better.

Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by ActsJuvenile on Thursday August 13, 2020 @07:12PM (#24150851)
Seems like the dataset behind this article is for founders who have built businesses with $5K MRR and above. $60K revenue (and $20K profit @ 33% margin) is a fairly low bar, so it is not surprising to see solo founders create 2.5X more businesses that clear this bar.

My question after reading this article is, do these solo founders manage to grow their business as large as founding-teams? How many solo founder businesses cross the $50M revenue mark?

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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by jasonkester on Friday August 14, 2020 @04:07AM (#24155182)
Ah, but $50M/year isn't the goal of a single player business. It's more like $200k/year, from a few hours effort per week.

That's a lot more achievable. 10X your revenues, then automate everything so that it ticks along in the background with hardly any input.

It gets very good after a while.

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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by shiftpgdn on Thursday August 13, 2020 @07:39PM (#24151225)
On what planet is $240k/yr net profit for a boot strapped business a "low bar."
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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by jdminhbg on Thursday August 13, 2020 @07:49PM (#24151365)
The $20k profit number was already multiplied by 12, it's not the monthly number.
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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by fouc on Thursday August 13, 2020 @08:02PM (#24151500)
A developer working as a contractor and charging his clients a fairly reasonable rate of $120/hr could make that.
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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by shiftpgdn on Thursday August 13, 2020 @09:52PM (#24152293)
If you have ever contracted at any length you would know that $120/hr is hard earned and usually has not insignificant time on the back end in so far as negotiating the deal, keeping it going, etc.
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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by jlokier on Friday August 14, 2020 @07:06AM (#24156392)
Here on HN I've occasionally seen people talk about $150/hr as a "low" contracting rate.

And others talk about how they could not achieve that in their wildest dreams, and consider $80/hr "good".

I was recently contacted about a contract proposal, in the USA, and they were offering $50/hr for some quite advanced cryptography work for a BigCorp end customer. I turned it down but it's good to get an idea of the market rate.

Rate expectation seems to vary a great deal depending on which geography and network-bubble people are in.

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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by bavell on Friday August 14, 2020 @01:08AM (#24153812)
> ...fairly reasonable rate of $120/hr

Hahaha, I wish I could tell my clients that's a fairly reasonable rate! The only situation where that's fairly reasonable is when you're contracting with MegaCorp Inc...

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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by threeseed on Thursday August 13, 2020 @10:25PM (#24152499)
It would be good to correlate that question with "what percentage of solo founders successfully raise". Because that would affect how many cross the $50M revenue mark as well.

As a solo founder I've been told many times by VCs that they will invest in solo founders but then when you look at their portfolio it tells a misleading story. Most of their solo founders are previous founders or rockstars e.g. someone like Justin Kan.

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Re:Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better by noychery on Friday August 14, 2020 @08:44AM (#24157138)
Author of the article here. Agreed with your point. I personally advocate for getting a hands-on advisor (https://www.growthclub.online/post/advice-for-solo-founders) and at least for us in GrowthClub it helped to raise funding from 2 angels. Not yet sure about VCs.
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