Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#101

Post by mamcx » Fri, Apr 19, 2024, 6:17 PM UTC

farseer wrote: post #92

mamcx wrote: post #36

The major trick, IMHO, is not to grow. While a "normal" startup is focused on growing! growing! growing! a small company should instead think like a physical restaurant: "I have 10 tables * 4 seats. 4 waiters. Operate Lu-Fri 10 am - 6 pm. I can serve only up to 40 customers max per hour. My income will never be bigger than 40* Average meal. My income needs to be at minimum Costs + 3% profits". Then you see you have t…

This will not work for SaaS in most cases. Someone will copy your idea and with VC money grow more features and customers than you, forcing you into a tighter small niche if not oblivion. Restaurants have a captive market in terms of location and maximum number of competitors in the immediate vicinity. A web startup does not.

I think it could work well (is my case actually).

A lot of SaaS is just a simpler/different take on a big one. For example, mine is way less powerful than Freshbooks/amazon. I still live from it for the last 20 years with less than 100 customers (and a lot of time just less than 50).

Having a niche or just being available to your customers on the phone and solving the issue in the next minutes/hours is enough to keep customers and run your business.

Now, the big issue is that you are growing without the capacity to grow, and then you get a big competitor in your nose and you try to catch it. That is death.

Do not try to catch the bunny. Be the turtle and forget about the race, at all.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#102

Post by random_rabbit » Fri, Apr 19, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

I must be an oddball because working alone honestly feels much more preferred. People add complexity, which scales exponentially with more people. I honestly much more prefer AI workers vs. human workers for this reason. I feel like when I work alone I can focus on things that matter and actually get more and important things done, instead of managing people and their politics. It's also different relating to people as a founder vs. just another employee. If I don't want to engage with someone I can choose not to. Freedom not to talk to people I don't want to is worth every penny.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#103

Post by b20000 » Fri, Apr 19, 2024, 9:04 PM UTC

rickydroll wrote: post #84

JohnFen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, it still isn't enough to hire an employee. A word of experience about having employees: avoid it for as long as you can. Everyone you hire is expensive -- not only in terms of money, but in terms of the additional time they'll take up and hassle involved. My personal rule is "don't hire someone unless you're at imminent risk of losing a bunch of money if you don't".

I wish I had learned this earlier. A couple of years ago, I hired a part-time assistant to handle invoicing and other financial matters, which was a major sanity saver. He noticed a couple of companies getting behind in payments faster than I would have and saved me from some financial potholes.

how did you find your assistant and how do you manage to trust him and what are the first or most important tasks you handed off?

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#104

Post by nine_k » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 12:26 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #42

mamcx wrote: post #36

The major trick, IMHO, is not to grow. While a "normal" startup is focused on growing! growing! growing! a small company should instead think like a physical restaurant: "I have 10 tables * 4 seats. 4 waiters. Operate Lu-Fri 10 am - 6 pm. I can serve only up to 40 customers max per hour. My income will never be bigger than 40* Average meal. My income needs to be at minimum Costs + 3% profits". Then you see you have t…

Wouldn't a real restaurant increase the sitting area, open a second location or increase prices if it had more clients than it could serve?

A bit of anecdata. My wife ran a restaurant for four years, a reasonably successful one: a lot of praise from customers, profitable enough to stay in business, but nothing like hockey-stick growth. If anything, she decreased the number of tables as the fame and revenue grew. She carefully focused on making her place distinct from other restaurants nearby, and in training her personnel.

Her long-time friend also ran a restaurant, for a much longer time, and more well-known in the city. After quite some years, she opened another, at a different part of the city. It struggled for some time, but eventually stabilized as a reasonably profitable place, after, say 6 or 7 years. Several years after that, she started planning to open a third one, and was saying that this would stretch her thin, and she's very reluctant, but the demand was apparently there.

This is exactly the kind of business VCs run away from: inevitable slow growth, no way to put in more money and scale the business to get more revenue. Large companies also often shy away from that. This may be a huge opportunity if you hold it right.

If you can find such a niche that pays you enough for your needs, it's really great because competition is low: few know about it, and of them, even fewer want to overtake you.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#105

Post by rickydroll » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:43 AM UTC

b20000 wrote: post #103

rickydroll wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had learned this earlier. A couple of years ago, I hired a part-time assistant to handle invoicing and other financial matters, which was a major sanity saver. He noticed a couple of companies getting behind in payments faster than I would have and saved me from some financial potholes.

how did you find your assistant and how do you manage to trust him and what are the first or most important tasks you handed off?

I found him through a stroke of luck. My first need was for someone to get the invoices out in time and to nag me to keep my work log up-to-date. I was talking to some people about how to find an assistant, and they pointed me to my current assistant.

How do I trust him? Time and experience. I started with small tasks and expanded them as we developed trust. That and I control all the money.

If you're going to get an assistant, look carefully at your needs. Start with what causes you the most grief, what you hate doing, and what you avoid doing. For me, it's financial paperwork. He now keeps track of all the expenses and invoices and makes sure my accountant gets the data. This year, he can start giving quarterly updates to my accountant so I'm not getting a $$$ surprise on taxes.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#106

Post by newaccount74 » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 3:24 PM UTC

axlee wrote: post #33

lukan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your time is worth more than any reasonable subscription fee. " Sure, but what do I do, if that service just closes tomorrow? Or they change the fee to "unreasonable" (after they gained control of the market). A SaaS would have to be way better than any offline tool, I could use 10 years from now in this shape. But in general yes, don't skimp and loose time, when there is a working alternative.

> Sure, but what do I do, if that service just closes tomorrow? You're far more likely to die tomorrow than Notion to close abruptly tomorrow.

The bliss of inexperience :)

Services shut down all the time. I've been selling indie software for a bit more than a decade, and at least half a dozen services that I was using have either shut down, pivoted, or slowly became crappy enough that I had to move.

Of course, that doesn't mean that you should build everything yourself, that's not practical. But the stuff that I have built myself doesn't suddenly stop working.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#107

Post by elevation » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 8:03 PM UTC

Another helpful exercise: sort your tasks by payoff horizon, from immediate need to long term investments.

Immediate needs like invoices and bill pay, resolving service disruptions and support tickets can be the loudest contenders for your time. Make sure you set aside some time to build tools to address the root cause of your biggest time wasters: automate repeated tasks, build diagnostic tools to speed up support responses, restructure systems to prevent bugs which happen repeatedly. Once you've matured your operations, invest time in documenting them so you can sell the business (or delegate to staff.)

Don't allow short term demands to derail your progress toward accomplishments that will make life better in the long run.