Ask HN: Solopreneurs, what is your day and week like?
How do you plan your day? And how do you plan your week?
All of this is just to make sure my trajectory is generally correct.
WEEKLY Then, on Sunday I print out a weekly calendar broken out by hours, ~7a-11pm. Not because I intend on working that whole block (yikes), but so that at the end of the week I can see where my time actually went.
DAILY I start each day with an hour of something that has absolutely nothing to do with work or coding. The last two months I've been learning Ableton, and I make myself generate a song snippet every morning. It can be crappy, it just has to be done. Turns out, that time adds up (WHO KNEW) and now I'm pretty decent at Ableton. Before that I spent time on a (rented) piano. If I save it for the end of the day I never do it or I'm too tired to enjoy it, so why give my 'joy/curiosity' the crappiest version of myself?
Then the next ~4-5 hours I dedicate to mentally engaging tasks. "Hard" attention heavy work. 25 minute blocks w/5 minute breaks to stretch, email, text, drink water etc. After each block I write on the hourly calendar what I worked on, both to keep myself focused, but also so that I have a sense of having done -something- besides grind endlessly.
By then it's ~1-2pm. I take a 20m coffee nap (most days) and then give myself the freedom to consider my workday done (if I want), or if I wanna work more, the next ~4-6 hours I do the boring brainless stuff. Minor bugs. UX tweaks. Email templates. Blah blah. A lot of this time ends up being "eaten up" talking to users, but that's fine.
Then at the end of the day I take a glance at my hours and see how I felt about it, and write down, on the back of my Monthly/Sprint calendar what my day actually ended up being about.
I used to work every day, also during the weekend. That's because I'm most efficient just after waking up, both in the morning and in the afternoon after a 30 minutes power nap. You might not be efficient in the morning but in general I recommend everyone to find out when it's the time of day when they are most efficient and work that time every day. Better to work less hours but working every day during the golden hours.
It's important that you love to do your daily work. In my case is coding, I love coding. If you don't love the core work necessary for your startup to succeed you will not be able to keep at it for several years.
I recommend always sleeping those 7-9 hours per night that make you feel full rested. There is no point in overworking now if you will be tired or burnout later.
If you are single and able to move, I recommend becoming a digital nomad and living in cheap/nice places. You can move to Thailand or Colombia or Portugal and pay less for rent and food and fun and all the savings will allow you a longer time to work on your startup. That said, even if you have more time you shouldn't waste it. Try to earn money from your project as soon as possible. In general it will take you 3-10 more times than expected to earn your first dollar. So if you have savings for 1 year you should do plan to earn your first dollar in 1-3 months.
The podcast Startup for the Rest of Us has been invaluable in my journey: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/
on the other hand, aren't tech savvy customers harder to sell to? they are much more selective in what they are buying because they can figure out things themselves. it would have to be something that they don't want to do that they would be willing to pay for.
sounds to me like an uphill battle either way.
yes on the tech-savvy VS non-tech savvy I think there are pros and cons. Of course it also depends on the amount of solutions available to the users. I might be suffering from the "the grass is always greener on the other side"
I try to take a day off every week, but often it's random based on whether friends/wife want to do something fun on a given day.
The only exception is if I'm leading up to a big product launch and need to grind through that "last 10%". In that case switching into hyper planning mode seems to help me a lot. AMA!
When you started your business did you have another job and build your own business on the side? Or were you able to jump straight in?
[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...
I was spending 16+ hours a day on the project up until the launch. I organised myself with a local Gitea (https://gitea.com) installation and creating issues that I assigned to myself. I started off using Kanban within Gitea too, but as it was just me, I ended up preferring to use issues directly. Each day was focussed on making progress on the current issue!
I only launched Plotapi 3 days ago, so time will tell how I end up planning the days/weeks!
I am not from a dataviz background but I do have a question around the decision to use Gitea (other than self-hosted) . Would it be a better use of your time to use something like GitHub or was there something Gitea offers that is so valuable?
Gitea was quite easy to set up, I just had to run the executable from my local server and I was up and running! I've recently become more concerned with hosting my data off-premises, so I use this local Gitea instance when something doesn't need to be public-facing.
I was pleasantly surprised with an unforeseen advantage - speed! I have a few Unity projects that can be on the larger side, but pushing/pulling to them is quick in comparison to GitHub.
My schedule has been pretty much the same over that time: I keep a trello board with backlog/TODO/in progress/done columns, and I try to work around 2 hours each day.
My best hours are in the morning, though I also exercise 3 times a week, so my work schedule is normally:
- Monday evening
- Tuesday morning
- Wednesday evening
- Thursday morning
- Friday off
- Saturday morning
- Sunday morning
Does solo founder mean you're still working solo? If so, that's awesome and good luck with everything.
Indeed, still working solo.
A few months after launch (the MVP), I made some adjustments and below is a rough outline of my schedule
1) Reserve Saturday mornings for writing up articles that I intend to publish on the blog. I might not publish the article then or maybe even soon, but writing the article helps me document whatever issue I came across, worked on, learnt during the week. For example, I recently changed the layout of the landing page and needed a way to do some quick and dirty A/B testing. I have just spent this Saturday morning documenting what I did.
2) Mon - Fri:
Mornings - Use Twitter to find chatter related to my product & niche. Respond/interact with this traffic. Also generally learn stuff about startups/business/technology. I discovered that I have gotten more interaction/leads from responding to others on Twitter than from directly tweeting stuff
Evenings - I already have a roadmap so I try to put in a few hours working systematically through the roadmap.
Prior to covid times, I would usually work 4 to 8 hours every weekend, with longer stretches of time during vacation). The week days would be my full-time job only.
During covid times I was able to claim back some of the commuting time (just like many of us on HN, I was lucky to be able to work from home, and double lucky to have a designated home office) which allowed me to add roughly 1h every day.
As for now, I switched job and I am now working remotely – which allows me to keep the covid schedule: a couple of hours every week day (before starting working, I'm an early riser) and bigger chunks during the weekends.
In the repo, I have a markdown file with bugs and tasks. I update it everyday and reprioritize it ~biweekly. I start the day with the most difficult task, and when I'm tired I just review, refactor, or do minor tunings.
I'd say that having different desks helps. Sometimes I just park somewhere to write or code in a sketchbook.
- Cold emailing
- Building rapport with potential clients
- Checking on my competitors
- Queuing interesting content for social media
- Checking metrics, analytics
- ...And more