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Solopreneurship

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Re: Solopreneurship

#11

Post by john_yaya »

tarey wrote: post #2

Very relaxing read. Thank you. I have just started a similar journey as well. I have passed my bar exam and became a qualified lawyer during the pandemic. To all minds that are sane, the logical thing would be to keep my high paying job and ride out the lockdown recession. Instead, I have left my job, took up a coding bootcamp for 4 months and became a tenant at a co-working space with my laptop, setting myself a 6-m…

That's excellent! Best of luck to you. Though in a sense, you have already succeeded by harnessing your courage and doing something that gives you a sense of meaning and ownership.

Re: Solopreneurship

#12

Post by john_yaya »

smackeyacky wrote: post #8

This sounds wonderful, but as a one man shop its missing something: customers. I am solo at the moment but that still means I'm doing zoom meetings, trying to deliver features to a budget and a deadline, trying to keep on top of the books and cashflow and keeping my system up. Customers aren't that different to having a boss. I do get the freedom to choose how things are done, but once your product ships you are no l…

One interesting bit of advice I've heard for solo founders is, pick an industry to serve that interests you, or at least one where you like the people who work in it. Yes, the customer will always be your "boss" of sorts, but at least it'll be a boss whom you identify with and genuinely want to please.

Re: Solopreneurship

#13

Post by cyberge99 »

I’ve tried this and it failed. I applaud the author if he can make it work, but in my experience I was spread too thin and my customers suffered.

I didn’t make connections, I over marketed and undersold. My failure was an important lesson for me.

I also haven’t given up on entrepreneurship, I’ve learned a lot and I plan on making a comeback.

Re: Solopreneurship

#14

Post by bserge »

Be careful, some people (perhaps even the majority) aren't made for this. Do everything solo and soon enough you may hate everything, everyone, life itself and just wonder why you're even living.

Re: Solopreneurship

#15

Post by alberth »

kfk wrote: post #10

I see this tendency of solo projects a lot in developers. My experience has been quite the opposite, I started to get traction as entrepreneur after accepting the idea that I needed a team. My business sells b2b so maybe it is different, but companies are tired of automated SaaS sales funnels focused on “features”, they want competent people to talk to about their problems that are never just technical ones. I think…

> "I find it hard to believe you can approach b2b solo."

You can, as an independent consultant for hire ... but totally agree - with the exception of consultant, I'd be extremely tough.

Re: Solopreneurship

#16

Post by blacktriangle »

john_yaya wrote: post #12
smackeyacky wrote: post #8

This sounds wonderful, but as a one man shop its missing something: customers. I am solo at the moment but that still means I'm doing zoom meetings, trying to deliver features to a budget and a deadline, trying to keep on top of the books and cashflow and keeping my system up. Customers aren't that different to having a boss. I do get the freedom to choose how things are done, but once your product ships you are no l…

One interesting bit of advice I've heard for solo founders is, pick an industry to serve that interests you, or at least one where you like the people who work in it. Yes, the customer will always be your "boss" of sorts, but at least it'll be a boss whom you identify with and genuinely want to please.

OTOH its really hard to know who you are going to like working with. For example through several iterations of our product we ended up serving HR professionals. Having only been on the receiving end of HR I never would have guessed I would enjoy working with them, but as customers I've found them to be great people to work with who are really just trying to do the best they can with limited resources.

Re: Solopreneurship

#17

Post by nickjj »

I've been a freelance / solowhatever developer for a long time but instead of being an employee you still have a boss. You usually have multiple bosses.

Instead of working 40 hours a week as a W2 employee you work as many hours as you want as a 1099 contractor. That could be 20 hours a week or 80 hours a week, it's your call.

But if you want to have semi-dependable income typically you'll be working pretty long term on-going contracts. That's cases where you might be working 10 hours a week for company A and 15 hours a week for company B for 6+ months or even years. If you drop off the face of the Earth for a month without warning chances are you're going to leave your clients wondering what's going on. That's an illusion of freedom because you still need to let them know you won't be available as often as usual and you'll likely adjust your desired time off to ensure you can fulfil your contract requirements.

There's other forms of freedom tho, like being able to say no which is really nice to be able to do. If some type of contract doesn't fit what you want to do you can say no and find work on something else.

Re: Solopreneurship

#18

Post by chenmike »

kfk wrote: post #10

I see this tendency of solo projects a lot in developers. My experience has been quite the opposite, I started to get traction as entrepreneur after accepting the idea that I needed a team. My business sells b2b so maybe it is different, but companies are tired of automated SaaS sales funnels focused on “features”, they want competent people to talk to about their problems that are never just technical ones. I think…

Not disagreeing that a team might be better for targeting Enterprise SaaS but is the implication that a solo founder can’t learn to talk about other people’s non-technical problems?

Re: Solopreneurship

#19

Post by jonfw »

chenmike wrote: post #18
kfk wrote: post #10

I see this tendency of solo projects a lot in developers. My experience has been quite the opposite, I started to get traction as entrepreneur after accepting the idea that I needed a team. My business sells b2b so maybe it is different, but companies are tired of automated SaaS sales funnels focused on “features”, they want competent people to talk to about their problems that are never just technical ones. I think…

Not disagreeing that a team might be better for targeting Enterprise SaaS but is the implication that a solo founder can’t learn to talk about other people’s non-technical problems?

My experience working on B2B in a bigger company is that enterprise accounts can be extremely demanding. They want you to be engaged while closing the sale and whenever they feel like it for the entirety of the deal.

My clients were the type of folks who didn't want a link to documentation, they wanted me to turn that documentation into a powerpoint and spoon feed it to them.

If you can satisfy these folks and do engineering at the same time good on you

Re: Solopreneurship

#20

Post by coderholic »

I started https://ipinfo.io as a side project, and eventually transitioned to working on it fulltime by myself for a while. I really enjoyed that time, but as things progressed it was a huge relief to bring in other people to help. Offloading support to people that were better suited to dealing with customer issues, and enjoyed doing that more than me. Then offloading design work to someone who can actually do a good job of design. Then getting help optimizing some DB queries. And before you know it we're a team of 17 globally :) I sometimes fondly remember the times that it was just me working in a coffee shop by myself, they were certainly simpler times. But the business would never have been able to get to the stage its at if I was doing this by myself.
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