Is there a limit to how far you can go alone?
Being that I continue to build, market, and grow my company while solo (revenues going up every month), I'd say I both came very far as one person and still have much more to go before I hit the end. Don't let imaginary limits discourage you. :)
The wedding industry is all about sucking people dry of their $$$, and if you can do a bunch of useful services for a flat $80, that'd make many folks very happy!
He blogs here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/
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I've just started to ramp up on doing a SaaS/blogging about the process. It can be pretty overwhelming if its your first go 'round.
I've run into many limitations that have prevented me from offering products, service plans and sales strategies that would've been profitable but required more employees. I could hire, but I enjoy what I do, and switching from what I do to hiring and managing sales/support/ops teams is a totally different job I wouldn't enjoy so much.
Keep up the good work!
Since June 2012 I've been working on a new project, solo again putting in a few hours here and there as I can which should be ready to launch hopefully in another week. That project is still in stealth mode until it's unveiled though. I was hoping it could have been completed much quicker but you know how these things turn out. Though the TMR business' hardware and software can work anywhere in the world the marketing for it has been aimed at Australians so hence all our customers are aussies. The new project will be aimed primarily at Americans so that should be an interesting learning curve.
As for bottlenecks, by far the biggest hurdle with Track My Ride has been the marketing. As a programmer by trade when I first started out I had no idea how to market the system and mostly it's been a case of throw a lot of $ and see what sticks. Having a co-founder with marketing know how would have helped a lot. That being said though revenues and sales are still increasing each month so as a solo venture it's turned out pretty well so far.
I've usually brought in early employees for large equity, contractors to help me with specific things that I'm not good at.
All my companies have generated revenues and have become operationally cash flow positive. However, my companies haven't scaled for two reasons: a. When the going gets tough- I'm alone and its depressing b. There's not as much cross fertilization/validation/push back on ideas as there should be.
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I do this full time. My goal was to make an app that achieves 10 million downloads. It looks like it should hit that mark sometime this year. Another goal was to make enough money to buy a house. Assuming all goes well, that should be possible in a couple of years.
- Was it something that people naturally search for?
- What types of marketing/advertising did you do?
- Do any of the other apps help supplement income?
Then it grew slowly over the next 8 months. I continued to add song packs and improve the app. I did some marketing on FB, https://www.facebook.com/tinypiano including a raffle where I gave away $50 iTunes GCs to generate more "likes."
In November, I also got a big bump due to Apple's iPad mini launch & piano commercial (Heart & Soul).
In December, I actually made about as much money as I made the rest of the year. Download #s were high, and AdMob/iAd eCPMs were also at their peak. It was a good month.
Relative to Tiny Piano, my 5 other apps are failures.... Collectively, they make about $50 a day. And that's probably because people who like Tiny Piano search for & download my other apps.
Here's an old blog post with some numbers: http://blog.squarepoet.com/post/35196629175/tiny-piano-sales... While my daily revenue is now below the $3K I cited in my post... it's still good enough to pay me an engineering salary every month.
I am definitely seeing the 'end' of the cap where I simply can't put more time into it. So far I have held up really well though, and I implement most of if not all the changes that people want to see (if I feel they are a good fit, that is).
But yes, my traffic is growing every day with more and more users, and adding new features is starting to get somewhat daunting as my code base grows.
As far as marketing, accounting, programming, etc I do it all, with the occasional help from a friend when it is too much.
Highly recommended though :) My site is my baby, and the goal when I made it wasnt to make lots of cash... it was to make a LARGE site that everyone uses. ever since I was a kid I wanted to create a massive site with thousands of users, and so far my dream has become a reality. it is a very good feeling.
To your question, absolutely there are many bottlenecks and limitations. If you are married and have kids then intensify these 2 factors by a magnitude of 10 maybe, at least in my case, especially if you have a day job that consumes most of your time. Also, you might get stuck some simple stuff that would drain your energy and offset the timelines. Some of the mundane tasks would make you go crazy (imagine coming up with 26 different email templates for the emails that go out...that's mundane). A few ideas where I wasn't 100% sure and felt a cofounder would be someone who would have came in handy on those instances.
On top of all these hurdles, after you launch, you have to do product support along with marketing and getting the word out about your product. Mailchimp campaigns, analyzing Analytic points, testing to make sure things are not broken and a whole lot would keep you on your toes. I feel I can only for that far along but I'm determined to make it to the pole.
I believe the reward is after we sort through all of these hurdles...I can proudly say that "this is me, this is what I've built, all by myself" (Seth Godin's quote except the "all by myself" part).
I built the software for RunOrg (http://runorg.com) on my own --- private social networks for non-profits as a service --- but my co-founder's business development skills have been invaluable in getting our current 60k members.
As a side-effect, I also built and open-sourced a web framework for OCaml (http://ohm-framework.com).
I'm definitely feeling the stretch on my resources, though : there are so many feature requests and so little time to build everything I'd like to build.
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-bootstrapp...
My own solo project / side business is http://www.edit-room.com/ I've done all the design and development, and the business setup to be able to accept credit cards as well. I've learned so much in the past 2 years, and I wouldn't change doing it for anything.
Even if you can just do a little bit every day, just start doing research or sketching out things on paper.
Only way to do it is to get started.
(I won't be sticking ads on it or anything lame like that - just thought it'd be a nice thing to exist).
Note: as of 8pm GMT, it's empty because I didn't want to harvest links from this thread without goodwill - but submissions are open, so please do get stuck in.
Also searching for a movie based on actor would help.
When I searched for Scarface, I got 3 hits. Mousing-over I was able to see the year of movie, but maybe a picture next to the hits would help.
Looking at the list: http://sweetsoundtrack.com/Movies/scarface-1983 Maybe you could add a link to lyrics?
And finally, it might be good to have a little song-preview next to each song, so that if user isn't sure by the name, they can listen to a part of it. (not sure if there are legal issues with this)
It's been pretty good so far. WCFStorm (the WCF client) is fairly well known and WcfStorm.Rest is now starting to get some sales.
http://www.solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown/index.php
A social network combining YouTube and Google Earth. I plan to launch within 30 days. So you can get as far as launch.
Originally it was developed for a final thesis about agile project management. Launched in September last year, totally bootstrapped and already have paying customers.