What were the first steps you took? When did you take these steps, and why?
Any lessons learnt along the way?
Sorry for all the questions. There is an abundance of "how-to" growth stories on co-founded and / or funded startups scaling successfully, but surprisingly little on solo-founded and bootstrapped companies.
Any insight would be appreciated - thanks!
Some of the successful indie solo founders I know do one-two weeks of coding and then one-two weeks of marketing, until they had enough revenue and "busy-ness" to offload one of those two things. It's wise to offload to freelancers/contractors initially (upwork.com and weworkremotely.com are good for that).
Hiring the first full-time employee, again deriving from what you want to offload, and slowly growing the team from there depends on market demand and whether you're bootstrapping (slow but steady) or funded (fast but risky) as well as your own vision.
Essentially, what-ever scale you have in mind, the idea of running a business is to offload/delegate as much of regular tasks to specialized individuals, who are ideally better at that work than you, so that you have more time and energy at hand to think, plan, and enjoy the rewards of money and freedom.
That early stage biweekly split of focus between coding and marketing makes a lot of sense.
As to the first hire (and the delegation of duties that follows), it would be interesting to hear the different experiences of coding-strong founders delegating the marketing function, versus marketing-strong founders delegating the coding function.
For example, as a coding-strong founder, I find the idea of delegating the marketing function easy to digest, whereas the idea of delegating the coding scares me a little! ^_^
Fundamentally I understand that “letting go” is a critical component to successful delegation.
Wish I could read some honest biographies of solo founders and their experience with this hurdle.