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Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

You can have a successful online business with one-person, but there will always be a maximum to the amount of money you can make and it does not scale well.

I ran a 1-person company for the past 3 years (B2B SAAS). I now have 2 other partners in the company to pick up the slack and we will be hiring a few employees next month.

It's difficult to: maintain your current business (IE: new features, bug fixes, customer service) while at the same time, trying to get new business (marketing, new ideas, planning) and also have any kind of life outside the business.

You also won't be able to go on any kind of real vacation and time-off is challenging. I didn't think about these things at 20, but at 30, it's starting to become more and more important.

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Actually, vacation / time off shouldn't be an issue. I've been doing this for 15 years and now my product runs like clockwork. Generally unless I'm doing new dev work, I only have a few support emails per day. As long as I go on vacation somewhere where I can at least have wifi in the evenings and mobile data during the day to occasionally check my email, it's not a problem. Also I regularly take long breaks during the day, or take days off to go on trips somewhere. I think you need to do this otherwise you'll be in danger of burning out.

It also helps to plan for the worst. Right now my slight concern is lack of RAID on my server. However I back up every day to a separate disk on the server (plus offsite downloads every couple of weeks), so in the worst case it will probably just take me an hour or two to get most things up and running on a new server. Obviously not the best thing to happen on vacation though :)

LOL, when I was running my own servers it seemed the only time they would go down was when I was on vacation.

I was going to post something similar - I was able to take 3 months to travel overseas as a 1-person business, and the business didn't collapse or run into any calamities. I always had my laptop and answered customer emails every couple of days.

Maybe it's an issue if you're running a SAAS business. Instead my stuff is consumer downloadable software, so if there was a problem it was usually just a single customer, not my entire customer base at once.

Well my business has SAAS and downloadable software versions. However I've been refining it for 15 years, so it generally runs very smoothly unless I screw something up. I usually don't touch ANYTHING in the 1-week before I go on vacation, just in case I break something.

It's important to refine your process so that you can replace yourself. I know this first hand.. Tough. Good luck!

Excellent points, thanks for the insight. I'm not as far along as you, but already starting to see the same challenges.

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