To reiterate, this really is the happiest I've been.
The initial few months were not smooth (as indicated by the article). Mostly because was an expectation mismatch with respect to how comfortable I believed/was made to believe life would be for an "ex-FAANG engineer" starting up.
Also, the loneliness I felt was more about not having someone to rant to about roadblocks or share small achievements with. This was something I had taken for granted at work.
I wrote down this essay now after I felt that I was in a comfortable place, and that there were learnings that could possibly benefit someone going through a similar journey.
> a zombie startup
That's definitely the case now, and will be for a few more months. I've never been a fan of "ship fast, apologize later". So while it's less exciting to work on a product that's not live, it's something I'm okay with.
But thanks for your thoughts, I can see where you are coming from.
1. I'm scratching my own itch. I wanted a privacy friendly alternative to Google Photos to store and organize my memories, I couldn't find any that were as convenient, so I'm building one.
2. I have a clear path towards a public release, so I'm not worried about it being a "zombie" forever. Some projects take longer to see the light of day, and I'm okay with the delayed gratification.
I am always quite surprised that many people think "yea, you always can build a software in a few weeks. If not bah, not good'.
I think SOME softwares requires month if not years of building. Because there are difficult technically. Those complicated softwares can be a game changer in the field, because well, the technical entry is so hard. So let's see more those softwares like perhaps future BIG success. Not just future 'obvious failures'.
I think this makes sence.
My issue really is with taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything. I see the authors comment that he's not a fan of ship fast and apologise later but surely you can put a beta out there even if it's just for feedback from the indie hackers and hacker news communities.
As the existing photo organizers to increasingly creepy things - face recognition I do think there might be a market but how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out? Right now it's just a theory.
So I spent the first couple of months chasing an on-premise alternative to photo storage[1]. Then I realized that the product was difficult to sell, and required a substantial investment of capital so I pivoted to an E2EE alternative on the cloud. I also spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to raise investment, which I regret at this point.
> how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out?
If things don't go terribly wrong, the project should be up for beta testing in early October.
[1]: https://orma.in
I'd lead with "Share your family's photos, access them everywhere you want them" rather the rather conspiratorial "corporations cannot be trusted". At least if you want to appeal to families. But what do I know!
I pay $99/year for Mylio which does importing, syncing & basic editing between devices, but my goodness it's slow - the only saving grace is that it's faster than Lightroom. Mylio doesn't really trade on privacy despite the impressive self-hosted cloud sync, and it doesn't trade on sharing between family members despite that being quite useful! If you want to see a very similar product, check out their forums and their very vocal customer base.
I'm also working on a solo startup (accounting) and I feel a lot of your pain - I've got 2 kids and it's mega-slow trying to work about 10hrs/week, but I'd echo what a few other people said here: however painful it feels, spend 50% of your time marketing and testing to make sure you're building the right thing. I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now, but it's valuable to a few users who are giving me feedback.
Good luck and keep in touch with HN :)
Mylio looks really cool, thanks for sharing!
> spend 50% of your time marketing
As a thin-skinned introvert, marketing doesn't come naturally to me. But yes, I've been trying to internalize this and in fact this blog post was a step towards putting myself out there.
> I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now
That's fantastic! I hope things work out the way you want them to. :)
I have a bunch of happy beta users that had previously tried and given up on Mylio. You're certainly welcome to try it out!
https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/
If your question is from an engineering perspective, I'd say ~65% of my working hours were spent in writing and rewriting code.
I'm 9 months in to having given up my job and have taken on some consulting work. Time will tell if the business grows or if I go freelance/employee.
I'm living in day by day land now rather than fantasy land.
Though an extremely tough market to crack, something drop box realised early on and moved out of photo business
It shouldn’t feel hard or even lonely to be a solo founder. There’s so many people you will have to interact with that are not your co-founder. There’s so many people you can share your feelings with that are not your co-founder. And having a co-founder is no guarantee you won’t be lonely; a technical co-founder spends most his time heads down coding and a sales co-founder spends most his time out making deals. Occasionally you may have meetings about customer feedback and high level strategies but that’s about it; the intent of the relationship is not to spend weekends hiking or riding bikes together or other social activities. If you are feeling lonely the source of that must be coming from other aspects of your life.
Most of the time the loneliness a founder feels comes from the fact that almost no one that matters is enthusiastic about their idea, or at least not enough to pay for it. It creates a mentality that it’s you against a world that just doesn’t understand what you have to “offer”.
I hope he will realize this before too much time has been wasted.
Give this an upvote if you agree.
*edit: I wanted to elaborate on why this is a zombie startup in case people think I threw this out too casually. He calls his product a friendly privacy oriented photo organizer. First off, drop the word friendly, that’s a meaningless word when describing apps and usually just a way to say an application has some decent UX, which is expected by default anyway. Second, “privacy oriented” is a red flag unless your startup is deliberately targeting people who have something they feel they need to hide. This will do nothing to move the needle for most mass market consumers who already consume tons of products without any regard to privacy. A lot of your marketing will have to rely on first making people paranoid so they seek out a privacy focused product, which is kind of scummy. Third, what you’re left with is essentially a photo organizer, whose novelty is questionable in a world that has no lack of photo organization. There’s no way this will be a successful business at this rate. Sorry if you think otherwise, but feel free to justify why.