Here's the advice I've gotten:
1. Hire a VA for mundane stuff.
2. Hire a coach to fill in your blind spots.
3. Hire the most senior people you can.
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?
#32Unsure if this is healthy - but after 12 years it’s by almost completely compartmentalising my mind, and focusing on one thing at a time. Started that habit as a freelancer and it’s probably saved me from burnout multiple times. These days I feel like my attention is like a lighthouse, I’ll do a half day of finances here - clear my inbox there, a full week on some deadline, etc. its kind of finding a flow. needless t…
What you're describing is the Get Things Done (GTD) method. Have you read the book from David Allen?
With that note, I higly recommend the book to OP!
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#33Don't nickle and dime yourself on tools that save you time. If there's a SaaS offering that can reduce your workload, just pay for it (unless it's a truly ridiculous amount). Every so often there's a post on HN where a someone lists their income and expenses and the comments are always full of things like "why are you paying $100/year for Notion when you can just use org-mode for free?" Don't listen to them. Your tim…
"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.
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#34I have noticed a lot of solopreneurs take proud in doing everything themselves and do not want to hire and expand. Yes, I get it. I once had a lot of employees and it is stressfull with too much responsibility and issues. But, you can have 1 or 2 people. or 5. You don't need to have 10 people, or 100 or 1000. With 1 person you can get 150% more done if you structure it well. Why? That one person can specialize. If yo…
But ... even if you have just 1 or 2 people, you have to manage them. You need to have regular meetings to discuss what's done, what's to be done, you have to plan work for them. Large part of why I'm a solopreneur is because I do not want to manage or be managed. It would be awesome to find someone who just magically does great work without needing any attention. Just brief monthly summaries of high quality contributions, better than I could have done. But I'm not sure how to find someone like that, and I also don't think I could afford them ;-)
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#35Don't do accounting or taxes for your company. There are two ways you can do that.
Or be your own lawyer.
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#36The 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 too many waiters. You cut it to 2.
Then you see your meals are too cheap. You increase it a little.
Then you see you have little customers. You grow a little.
Then you see you have TOO MUCH customers. You stop growing. More costly take-over, increase the cost of the meal, etc.
What you NOT MUST DO is grow more than your max capacity.
That is it.
Size your capacity. Figure a nice profit. Keep it small.
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#37The 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 is an awesome strategy!
I want to print this out and put it above my computer.
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#38I've been working on Temple Tools[1] (CRM for Synagogues) during evenings and weekends while maintaining my day job with no drops in productivity or outcomes (in fact I've performed better) for about 9 months and have gotten a good amount of traction. I was really afraid that it was going to take over my life but I'm very happy with how straightforward things have been. Building a CRM solo has been quite a lift but it's gone quite well.
Here are my tips:
• Get your first customer as early as possible. I know this isn't "new" advice but feedback from one customer was enough to keep my busy patching holes in the product for a good 2 months straight. If I waited and got my first 10 customers all at once I would have drowned
• Separate functions into days of the week as much as possible! I've found this to be critical for not burning out and maintaining high productivity over extended periods (9 months doesn't sound like much, but it's a long time to put in essentially an extra work week). For me Mon is Marketing, Tue-Fri is coding, Sat is marketing and non-urgent customer support, and Sun is coding
• Don't stop exercising. Exercise MORE. I'm a night owl but I transitioned to the "at the gym at 5am" guy, lunchtime run, and Jiujitsu in evenings; and I ended up somehow spending more time plugging away at the keyboard. The mantra "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" really comes to mind.
• Put dates on your calendar for meta-tasks. I have a recurring bi-weekly task to update my finances, a task to do keyword analysis, etc etc. It's too easy for these to slide otherwise
• Creative uses of ChatGPT! I'm using Nylas' free tier and the ChatGPT API to automate triaging my own customer support emails, and texting myself if it's urgent. This lets me have near-zero interruptions during my day job from my side hustle.
• More ChatGPT. If you don't know how to do something, talk to ChatGPT interactively to get "good enough" at it quickly. This could be anything from finance to SEO to cold outbound. You still have to think critically enough to ask good questions like "what am I missing here" or "what's going to bite me in the ass". You absolutely need a paid subscription (I use both ChatGPT4 and Claude)
• Be your own project manager. Do NOT wing it. Sit down every once in a while and list off everything you think you have to do, break it down, triage it, prioritize it, and start burning it down. This includes both product-level tasks and business administration and marketing. This lowers cognitive load so much that you'll find you can actually take work off your mind when you're not working
• Identify opportunities for crunch times and adjust routine. I've rented an office on three separate months while working on this business. It was a fantastic way to break up the routine and get a huge amount of productivity for a short time
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#39You’re a company, so you have to start thinking as one.
You’re not paying a lot for an accountant, you’re investing money that will generate free time and availability for other tasks.
If you don’t enjoy something, don’t do it. Pay someone else to do it. If your company has a net profit at the end of the year, you have budget to offload tasks to others, who enjoy them and are faster at them.
Get a manager. Find a business coach who you can have 1-on-1s with once a month, quarter, week, whatever you need. You need to be able to vent about clients, get constructive feedback, review how you handled specific situations, etc.
And, no, you can’t use your life partner for this.
Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?
#40What do you all have as your actual product? I feel that's the toughest part: having a product that can be easily maintained by one person yet still gain and retain customers.