Is a One Person Company (OPC) just another type of Uber driver? | Hacker News Reader

Is a One Person Company (OPC) just another type of Uber driver?

6 pointsBobby_Liu9 comments

No stable salary. No benefits. No employment relationship. The Uberization of white-collar work?

It depends on the skill level. A one person company is called a consultant, basically a person who is willing to do the things in the company that no one wants to do whether they are easy or hard. There is an irony in this. Often the more people don't want to do the thing in question, the more the consultant gets paid.

Agree. A consultant with pricing power is very different from a disguised employee. The line seems to be whether you can set terms, choose clients, and build leverage.

It's common way of an employment in IT in Poland. SII and other big outsourcing companies offer mostly only B2B employment. And this sucks

Yeah, that’s the case I had in mind: B2B in form, employee-like in practice, with more risk pushed onto the individual.

I think if you are building SaaS: specifically, a self-serve SaaS (no sales/demo call), then you can build a scalable 1-person company

But saas is dying, right?

for 1 person making a product, there has never been a better time to make a saas product that can make a living.

but the saas unicorns, or 100 person, 10 person saas company are def. under threat.

Yep. Scalable is the key while Uber driver can't scale up their service.

My solo SaaS just hit $400k ARR after about 15 months, and I've sold 99% of the customers via a sales call. So it can be done, but I have to say, it's pretty grueling. And my sales calls are basically a dream come true: ~50% of them have the customer giving me their card for a trial in less than 10 mins. Another 10-20% sign up within the following few weeks.

Despite the success, I'm trying to pivot to self-serve now, because I'm definitely the biggest growth bottleneck, and I honestly dread every single call.

All that said, I think there's another HUGE reason to do sales calls: you learn a ton. I've talked with hundreds of customers and potential customers over the last year, and I've learned so much about their businesses and the niche, I think it would have been really difficult for me to do this with self-serve from the start.

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