Flying Solo

How to build a high-growth tech startup (all by yourself)

Imagine you enter a palatial bookstore with books scouring all corners. You walk around for hours until, finally, a book catches your eye. It's exactly what you were looking for. Then, something takes you off guard. You drop the book in panic as you realize it has not one but THREE authors. You wipe your eyeglasses and pick up a few more. There it is again. Two, four, even five authors. Aren't books supposed to have a single author? Of course, they are. This scenario is far from the norm. Writing is generally thought of as a singular act.

When it comes to building a startup, however, it's presumed that this requires putting together a team, multiple co-founders, and raising a bunch of cash. I don’t think that always needs to be the case. I would define a startup as any new business with the potential for infinite scale. This doesn't necessarily require a team or a big budget. Maybe ten years ago, it was true that you needed a team, co-founders, and to raise money. But today, many tech startups and digital businesses can easily be built and maintained by a single founder with small budgets yet generate significant revenues and valuations. Significant enough to change your life, that's for sure.

The amount of information available at your fingertips today is wild. With books, courses, youtube, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and more. You can learn anything from coding to marketing to sales, all from the comfort of your living room.

Sometimes you might even choose to keep it this way after you have grown and not hire anyone to scale further. Of course, you would want to leave the professional stuff to the professionals (e.g., legal, accounting, taxes, etc.), but when it comes to building a product, marketing, and scaling it, you can achieve all of this flying solo. So for the introverts out there who prefer embarking upon the journey by themselves, rejoice. You are on the right track.

Entrepreneurship is a lifelong journey of learning and growth. By simply adopting this outlook, you will evolve so much personally that the self-growth itself would be one hell of a reward. If you launch a revenue-generating product, however, you will also have created a valuable asset out of thin air. That's the purest form of creativity.

Let's say we want to build a high-growth tech startup all by ourselves, without any external funding. The journey can be quite similar to a writer setting forth to write a novel.

You will first need an open mind and eagerness to learn. 

You are about to embark on a quest that will change your life. The next few years will consist of rapid self-growth and self-improvement. You are about to embrace the entrepreneur life and learn some impressive skills which will serve you for the rest of your life.