Are you a solopreneur? How does it work for you?

In my view, if you're going to do a business on your own, you have to be focused. Between the other parts of life that need some attention, the care-and-feeding of the business, sales, marketing, and promotion, there isn't that much time left for actual development. So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the absolute minimum that provides real value to people. This sounds like what you're doing with your "consulting only, no development" approach to most clients.

In my case, the project I just finished prototyping (yes, this is a plug/request for feedback, although the product is of extremely limited interest to this community) solves a narrow problem in the electricity industry: Energy meter data is passed around in an obscure binary file format (MDEF) that few people can understand, read, or troubleshoot when they receive a broken file from a 3rd party. There's a need for a tool to wrangle this format, and I believe I can do one that's better and cheaper than anything out there, with a modest effort.

As for why I'm a solopreneur: I didn't know any good co-founder candidates, and didn't have a compelling sales pitch. ("Hey - let's quit our jobs, and poke around for a product that we can try to build into a successful business" is a little too honest!) I also didn't want any more of my life to drain away writing vbScript (long, long, long story) and, as the great Peter Gibbons put it: "I don't think I'd like another job".

I'm not philosophically opposed to growing the company, but it will have to be from a "given this problem, I need more people" angle, rather than a "let's enlarge the team, and hope something good happens" view.

P.S. http://www.mlsite.net/meterdoc

"So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the absolute minimum that provides real value to people."

This is very useful advice, it's a good rule to have in mind. I'm actually doing development, but I don't do active promotion of that as I can only do one project at a time, and projects tend to go for months. But as I keep developing on projects, I keep very focused on them and only a little consultancy work and some basic business meetings, sales, etc keep me out of full focus on dev. But I don't think I'm in the minimum yet, so I'll really think in what you said.

I also agree with you in prefering the "given this problem, I need more people" angle, for growing the company.

Thanks a lot for your useful and very interesting! advice, and good luck with your new project!

It's tough. I started my first company on my own, had a sales guy for several years and a few coders on contracts as well, but as a mainly solo gig it's been tough to balance all the tasks you need to do. The tasks that tend to suffer the most are the business and promotion sides of things. It's fortunately been able to stay at a steady pace for a long time on almost no promotion, just word of mouth, but I'm sure with another solid partner it could have gotten a fair bit bigger by now.

I also started a startup solo a couple years ago, and the combination of running my other company by day (splitting my time) and being the only person to do everything certainly factored strongly in its early demise. Got to about 10,000 users but couldn't take it to the next level because there was simply not enough time in one day.

My new startup that's launching any day now (waiting on a couple things like payment processing to be hooked up) is a partnership, and while I'm still splitting my time with my main company and I'm also the only programmer, it's been way better because it's two and not just one of us. After these experiences, I'm now definitely sold on PG's recommendation of having more than one founder. The key still is to find the right co-founder, but I think unless you want to work 16-hour days (which isn't sustainable!) then you need 2+ people involved.

Thank you for your good advice. I already have clients and also word of mouth is working ok for me; I would definitely scale if I found a way to do it without wasting the chance to do with my time what I love: creating, solving, thinking (for my previous business I worked more on the managing side and after a while I found that I was really hating it; at least I know that I hate it if that's the only thing I do: in that case, I feel like I'm wasting my time doing things I don't love all the day).

I'm in the same boat as you, and it's rough. At first I didn't believe in PG's advice for multiple cofounders, but as time goes by I definitely think it's important now.

As a one person shop I can't do much more than consulting, and as a technically minded person I find that I'm not particularly motivated to do the promotion / PR / SEO side of things. I'm on the lookout for a cofounder now but it's hard(er) to pick one up after college and all my friends want stable jobs instead of entrepreneurship.

If it's working for you now then I wouldn't worry about it. I find that getting myself motivated to do the non-technical things was the key to getting more success when going solo.

Thanks a lot for your useful advice. And you are right, hiring promotion / PR / sales people is very, very hard for small companies like this (at least I could never hire anybody for that, and I've been doing business for some years now).

I've been a "solopreneur" for almost ten years now. It is only in the last few years I have had significant (where I take "significant" to mean an income in the top 10% or so - which isn't a massive amount, but enough to live well).

The important thing I've found is to build assets that have the potential to creative passive (or near-passive) income and then run those in parallel to your more experimental ideas. Ideally, you can then sell off some of those assets when you need more time or more cash to put into other ideas.

On my part, I started a code snippets repository a few years ago. Only took 24 hours to do the first version, then it got another few days work a year on. It made about $800 a month for a couple of years, then I sold it for $30k. Not giant money but that's just one of many projects. I sold another one for a lot more just several months later. Having savings and a passive income that pays all your bills makes it a lot easier to work on the bigger and more experimental projects!

As to the "why".. I as in full-time work for almost a year after leaving school, and it didn't click with me at all. I wanted to run everything. So I became self-employed, and despite earning a pittance for the first few years, it was totally worth it. Besides, none of my friends are technically or academically minded, and I don't know anyone like that who lives nearby, so I'll be dreaming and working on my own for the foreseeable future :)

I should point out, however, that when I reach a point where I need other people to launch larger scale projects, I will happily hire them.. online! Just because you're on your own doesn't mean you do everything alone. You always have to rely on other people and companies, whether it's for your hosting, graphic design, printing, or whatever. If you live in the general economy, you're never as "solo" as you think.

Very interesting reply, indeed! And you are right, you're never alone in the general economy, and there are many professional services you can hire / buy to help you with the work. Thanks a lot for your interesting comments!

Mostly I learn while I go along and probably I'm not doing this for much longer than yourself (1 year now). I have a similar background, as I tried to start a game company before that. That didn't work out because even though we created the game which we had planned, it had taken us too long to finish and it completely failed to sell afterwards. So I started to work as freelancer using at first mostly the technology which I had developed in that company.

I care now a lot that new projects will always improve my tool chain. I think in the long run that's my best chance as a solopreneur. So I try to get projects where I can learn new skills and I make contracts which allow me to use the sources I developed afterwards.

And now I mostly hope I manage to learn fast enough to survive. I learned already a lot about negotiating by now, for example that I will always underestimate project time (even if I know it...) and therefore I really need to demand higher rates than I had originally expected.

Also I have some long-term targets for own products. So I'm not just doing blindly projects, but I care that projects always get me closer to that. Originally I had hoped to find time beside the official projects, but that was not the case so far.

Trying to get a new project while still working on the old is also tricky. I learned by now that I need full concentration for the current task. This means delaying everything that has no connection with my current project by all means until I can spend a full day on the other project. And then I will stay on the other until everything that was accumulated is done even if it needs more than the time I planned for it.

Thanks for your reply. What I found useful whenever I could was setting rates per hour or per time unit (say, month) of development time, in large projects no one can really estimate how much time they will take to finish (for example, these days I'm developing some kind of 2.0 video streaming app for a client, and we're always testing it with people and adding features, thinking of new security measures and so on... we couldn't have written a full requirements doc at the start of this specific project). This protects your budget, but also your client's budget in the end (you don't need to do over-estimations for the costs to be safe).

About parallel projects for products... I have none of them, but I use development work to learn more and more about difficult subjects that would take a long time of research or study to learn well (for example, on an older project I learned some basics of computer vision, etc). In the end that makes my development time more expensive and useful with every project. But maybe I should think in products too.

I'm a one-man shop, with both an online product and an unrelated consultancy.

If potential customers are banging down your door, and you're worried about not having the time to develop all of their software, then you need to raise your rates. At least some (more likely, most) of your customers will stay, and you'll be able to afford working on just one or two interesting software projects at a time.

There are other downsides to a lack of diversification though, like being less able to drop one of your customers if necessary.

Thanks for your advice; I've been raising rates for development but what I'm afraid, is that sometimes I'm very busy with projects for months, and then I just can't work in other projects... And if other clients ask for development at that time I just can't offer them it then. I'm afraid of slowly losing those clients, of course (that's why now I only "offer" consultancy, because then I don't break any clients' expectatives, and now and then I just start development for some months, in a project for some of those clients).

I'd say that if you're finding you always have work, or rather, if you have enough work, then you don't need to worry about turning away clients due to being too busy. As a consultant, it's a good thing to have to turn away work.

You should also consider sending clients you turn away to another consultant. The idea is that when you're really busy, you send "overflow" customers to him (or her). And the other consultant would ideally return the favor as necessary.

I have a co-founder, but I'm much more active, so it's more like 80/20. Most of the time I feel 'solo'. As I'm reaching my limit for workload, I'm trying to push more work to part-time contractors including: legal, accounting, and sys-admin type stuff.

Its a huge challenge to cleanly define areas to hand off, and to trust others with them. But I'm convinced its the key to growth.

I work alone for the time being even though I'd rather not, but I'm not a fan of buzzwords, so I'm not sure I'd even answer the question if someone asked me that in person...

I wish it was not a buzzword, but that more people used it. I don't know of any other way to explain what I do, why I do it, and how I do it in just a simpler way than by saying "solopreneur". I'm a little entrepreneur, but not interested in making the company grow if that makes me unhappy, and I'm working solo or with a few people most of the times here, but that's a choice, not just something that happened. That's all what "solopreneur" says in a single word, and that's why I like it.

WTF is "consulting" without development? What are you "consulting" them with? "Buy some computers and hire some programmers"? I can't comprehend your post, I'm sorry.

This responds to a clear need: some clients need to develop a given application, and they have the team to develop it, but they don't know how to solve a specific problem, or what is the best approach for the development (ie, which tools to use, or if their team is incomplete, who to hire, etc). Or they simply have already developed an application and need the solution of a specific point (they need a little research on how to do X, that for some reason their team is not going to do, even if they could). Many times those I consult for, I develop for later too, so it doesn't make a big difference in some cases.

In other words, "provide advice and experience", which is a nice gig if you can get it, because it leverages past experience into easier present work (writing code is harder than telling people what you think they ought to do).

writing code is harder than telling people what you think they ought to do

I do both and I definitely agree. Not only is it harder, there's more responsibility. You have to make something work. If it doesn't get done, or doesn't work, that's your fault. By contrast, if you tell someone what to do and it doesn't work, you can always say "well, they didn't do it right". Which of course is exactly what does get said. It's a moot point, though, because there isn't really much accountability to begin with, and because people tend to blame themselves and hide failures under the rug.

Edit: There's also a perception gap. Writing code is a lot harder than most people think it is. Ultimately, I think that's one of the deeper reasons to make one's own product and sell it rather than be a hired code-writer.

My interest is to keep doing development, not consultancy. But I have to offer a permanent service if I want new clients to contact me both at times I'm busy and when I'm not. I'm trying consultancy as that kind of service, and while I'm not completely sure yet, I think it works for now. 90% of the time I keep developing software for one or other project (but, as I don't offer that as a permanent service, I can choose which projects to work in, and also I can just tell clients "I can't do development now" when I'm just busy with some other project); but I'm always free for consultancy.

Sounds like a good setup to me, actually, because you can get paid for something with a lot of people, and cherry pick what to work on in terms of development, which is indeed much more time consuming.

Maybe not quite as good as having residual income from an actual product, but pretty good just the same.

Of course, having residual income from an actual product would be better... I started my business career with a great product sales failure and since then I stayed at (quite successful) high cost services, even in a product-oriented industry like games :) Some months ago I was starting some product development again but a new big contract came and I just couldn't refuse. Maybe some day I'll go the product way.

Thank you for your interesting comments.

http://searchyc.com/solo

http://searchyc.com/%2522single+founder%2522

That doesn't reply my question (and I already knew most related discussions, I've been here for a long time). I'm asking not how you get over being solo and construct a bigger company, or how you maintain motivation, etc. I'm asking: if there is any of you that is a solopreneur or almost solopreneur by choice (ie, because they are more interested in building than in managing or selling), what can you tell about your specific case? How is your business, how do you avoid business growth separating you from the building process itself?