My mom, who is now 87 years old, has been repeating a phrase a friend told her: “Growing old is not for wimps.”

I’ve been burning out a bit, the last few weeks. It’s harder to concentrate, harder to be productive. I’m tired, but sleeping poorly. There are fewer and fewer tasks between me and launching, but the slower progress is disheartening. But entrepreneurship isn’t for wimps, either.

Single-founder startups rarely succeed

I happened to recommend the Better Ventures site to a friend. I looked at it again, briefly, and saw their “approach” page, where they say that one of the things they look for is “Two co-founders, one  technical. Ideally CEO and CTO.”

And I recall a question on Quora about starting a company with a single founder. The advice was:  Don’t. So I guess it’s appropriate that it’s hard.

Even with multiple founders, getting a startup going is difficult. 90% fail. Even worse, see this article on The Single Founder myth. He finds some exceptional reasons why a single founder might succeed. None of them apply to me, though.

I mostly failed to find partners.

My original plan was to find partners. I failed, for 4 years, mainly because I’m not very social. I’m by no means a recluse. I just rarely made friends at work. People seem to like me- I just don’t really care for small talk, sports or popular culture. So I rarely went to lunch with people. And I have a poor memory for the details in people’s lives. I guess I’m lousy at relationship building.

I actually found a potential partner last summer. He was young, though, and decided he wanted to do something he thought was bigger, and do it as a non-profit.

Then I found partners…

This past January I found two part-time partners. One was to be CTO (chief technical officer). She seemed perfect- she had even managed off-shore teams before. The other is my CMO (chief marketing officer).  I was going to focus on sales. I was going to also help with product design, outline the algorithms we needed, and find vendors for some technologies we needed, but I expected to hand these off to the CTO to finish them. I also had two books to finish, the blog to build up, and the deployment to plan for. It was still a lot of work, but three people seemed to be a solid team.

Things were looking up. This is continued in the next post.