My question after reading this article is, do these solo founders manage to grow their business as large as founding-teams? How many solo founder businesses cross the $50M revenue mark?
That's a lot more achievable. 10X your revenues, then automate everything so that it ticks along in the background with hardly any input.
It gets very good after a while.
And others talk about how they could not achieve that in their wildest dreams, and consider $80/hr "good".
I was recently contacted about a contract proposal, in the USA, and they were offering $50/hr for some quite advanced cryptography work for a BigCorp end customer. I turned it down but it's good to get an idea of the market rate.
Rate expectation seems to vary a great deal depending on which geography and network-bubble people are in.
Hahaha, I wish I could tell my clients that's a fairly reasonable rate! The only situation where that's fairly reasonable is when you're contracting with MegaCorp Inc...
As a solo founder I've been told many times by VCs that they will invest in solo founders but then when you look at their portfolio it tells a misleading story. Most of their solo founders are previous founders or rockstars e.g. someone like Justin Kan.