Going it alone, it's insanely hard

I've read 2 interviews in the last 2 days from the founders of software companies.

Joel Spolsky was interviewed (for a book), and one section really caught my attention (the bolding is mine).

Don't start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you. If you don't have two people (or I would even say three) that you've convinced to devote their lives to doing this, it's just going to be a different thing. There are a lot of programmers that are very tentative about starting their own companies. There are a lot of working programmers doing something they hate, with some company that they hate, but they need money to pay the mortgage. So they figure, "I'll develop something in my spare time. I'll put in 1 hour every night and 2 hours on the weekends and I'll start selling it by downloads." And you say to them, "Who's your cofounder?" And they say, "My significant other—husband or wife. My cat."

For about a half a second I thought the all-knowing Joel (of whom, I'm a fan) has been following my blog and using my words to destroy my will to continue trying to start my 1-person startup.

I tried working with a friend/partner, but it just didn't work out. And over a year ago, when I stopped working on a big Project Management app (I think it was going to be called Unity) I said,

1 person x 15 hours a week = forever

Yikes! Joel has been reading....

I'm going to launch a beta of Pudding in February of this year. I just checked, I started this blog in May of 2005. The tag line of the blog has changed slightly over the years (gasp! years!), but for as long as I can remember it included this:

This blog chronicles my journey from nothing to my first product launch.

Getting to this point was made possible by the highly productive platform that is Ruby on Rails, and some serious motivation.

3 motivators from the last 22 months

1. Once I say I'm going to accomplish something (and then tell the world about via a blog), I'm frigg'n do it. Even if it means a dramatic shift in focus to accomplish the goal. And the goal is starting a software company. I think that's called self-motivation. (I seem to have a bunch of it. :P )
2. My desire for personal and creative freedom. You can achieve a certain level of "freedom" in certain organizations, but 99.999% of the time you're still working off of someone else's vision. Either due to the culture of the company, or because of the constraints of the "core business". If you work Whole Foods, they probably won't let you grow the company by building what YOU think is a great piece of software.
3. The success stories of others.
   

My personal favorite success story is Ian Landsman, the founder of UserScape. Ian quit his day job and "just did it". By "it" I mean, started a 1-person software company, launched a product, and is now living off of software sales. He's recently "hired" his wife to help with the company. So I guess it's a 2-person software company now. :)

Ian was interviewed recently by Startup Spark. He's got some good advise in the interview, and it's great to read that he's doing well.

1-person startups can succeed. You may not get funding from Y Combinator, but with stories like Ian's. Do you need it?