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

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

#11

Post by bllchmbrs »

anned20 wrote: post #2

For the finance and managing contractors, I use Kimai [0]. It can track your time, manage your customers, projects, your team, expenses and even generate your invoices. I only use it for tracking time, managing customers and projects and generating invoices. My full finances are stored in Notion 1, this is because I can access that anywhere, and I can use the built-in table functions to calculate my VAT and tax. When…

Confusing pricing for Kimai. Start for free for hosted but I can't find the pricing anywhere on the website but I found a blog post about how it's no longer free. Do you pay for it and try to host it?

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

#13

Post by neilv »

As a first pass, you could try "profiling" how you spend your time, like you would for improving the performance of software.

That might be the easiest first pass. Then you can do the bigger things like: "I'm spending 1/4 time managing contractors, and 1/3 doing planning for which most of that time is due to needing to coordinate and adapt to contractors... So, do I need contractors? I need someone. What about a different contractor setup that doesn't need so much handholding? Or an employee? Or change the nature of the work?" Etc.

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

#14

Post by anned20 »

bllchmbrs wrote: post #11
anned20 wrote: post #2

For the finance and managing contractors, I use Kimai [0]. It can track your time, manage your customers, projects, your team, expenses and even generate your invoices. I only use it for tracking time, managing customers and projects and generating invoices. My full finances are stored in Notion 1, this is because I can access that anywhere, and I can use the built-in table functions to calculate my VAT and tax. When…

Confusing pricing for Kimai. Start for free for hosted but I can't find the pricing anywhere on the website but I found a blog post about how it's no longer free. Do you pay for it and try to host it?

I self-host it. But you can also use the SaaS version. The pricing for that can be found here: https://www.kimai.cloud/pricing

Currently, this is:

Standard €2.99 Annual €35.88 per user

    Project time-tracking
    Billable and non-billable hours
    Invoicing
    Data export
    Audit logs
    Industry-specific translations
    Personal Support
Professional €3.99 Annual €47.88 per user Most popular

    All the features of "Standard"
    Overtime account
    Public holiday, vacation, sick leave
    Expense tracking
    Custom fields
    Task planning
    Daily backups for download
    Single Sign-On with SAML
    Custom domain with SSL
    Access restriction via IP
    Annual plan: less bookkeeping

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

#15

Post by cheshireoctopus »

I don't manage it all. Something is always slipping and I always feel like I am falling behind.

That said, here are some tactics I've used over ~2 years as a solo founder to try to keep it together:

1. Focus weeks on certain functions - ie work on developing features for one week and then switch to marketing tasks the next. Admittedly harder than it seems, but when actually followed, find I make considerable progress on that week's topic of focus. Also forces me to accomplish harder work (marketing/sales for me) vs. retreating to what is most comfortable (developing).

2. Speaking with other founders / leaders in the space I operate. This has been especially helpful as I've struggled with a growth/marketing strategy and speaking with others selling adjacent products in the same space has unblocked me many times.

3. Keeping realistic expectations that I'm doing this solo and it will be very difficult at times. Also harder than it seems.

4. Keep a founder's log to persist notable events and learnings. Useful when feeling particularly overwhelmed as I can revisit how much has been accomplished.

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

#18

Post by ugur2nd »

ugur2nd wrote: post #16

You have to delegate. It can be a human or a robot. For example, make stock and use tools for social media content. Use IFTTT, Zapier, Make or n8n. Hire a freelance assistant etc.

Instead of saving money, don't stop using paid tools! Today I'm getting the top package on the automation tool IFTTT, and my mind is at ease. I'm kicking myself that I wish I hadn't saved money earlier. Using tools that save time and energy increases lifespan. :)

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

#19

Post by swatcoder »

If you have funds for contractors, have you considered applying some towards an assistant?

People in our field readily think of hiring help for design, development, etc but there's a lot of value in having somebody who can just take administrative (or personal!) distractions off your plate and they're often much cheaper than technical professionals. And they're far more versatile than many productized "tools"

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

#20

Post by rich_sasha »

Not a founder, but a good piece of advice I read is to hire a remote PA. They can be cheap, and can help stay on top of things.

For me staying organised is the worst. It takes time and effort, can be very boring, the upsides are kind of invisible, downsides can be cataclysmic. Mostly you want to do the interesting bits of being a solopreneur...

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