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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?

#61

Post by martinbaun »

cuu508 wrote: post #34
martinbaun wrote: post #5

I 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 contribu…

Of course you need to manage and it might not be the most fun thing. Same here.

But if you have one person, and you spend 15 minutes a day guiding them and giving them tasks, then they have 7-8 hours to do productive work.

And finding the right people can be hard, but when you finally find the right one it is worth it.

If you wanna talk about it find a time https://martinbaun.com/book

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

#62

Post by wrs »

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…

Another example from another context: I have a friend who became a solo consultant. Specifically, she is great at diagnosing and fixing dysfunctional relationships between executives that can tank productivity for a whole company.

She found herself with too many clients, too much work, not enough sleep, and was frustrated that sometimes people didn’t even listen to her advice. She was happy as a solo practitioner and didn’t want to manage people.

My advice to her was to raise her rates…a lot. (Somehow that hadn’t occurred to her.) Now she’s happy with her time commitment, still well-compensated, and people pay attention because they’re paying more!

Bottom line: don’t assume you have to grow, but you do need to keep searching for the optimum setup for the size you want to be.

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

#63

Post by robotandco »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #23

I'm frequently reminded of the adage: "You want to go fast? Go alone. Want to go far? Go with a team." The team could be people or as others have suggested, tools and processes that reduce your workload.

People = meetings, disagreements, politics, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, coaching, performance reviewing = less time focusing on what actually matters i.e. building and selling = loosing to the competition.

IMO people need to start investing less in building out a team and more in automation. The best solo-founders are going to be those that can effectively product manage AI tools.

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

#64

Post by al_borland »

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…

A co-worker of mine visited French Polynesia a few years ago. He mentioned most of the restaurants simply close up shop when they feel they’ve made enough money for the day. Not great for someone looking to get dinner, but I’m sure it makes life much better and less stressful for the owner and employees. They know to get by they need to make $X/day. If they hit it by 1pm, cool, half day.

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

#65

Post by robotandco »

cheshireoctopus wrote: post #15

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…

#2 resonates. But not only leaders in the space you're building. Talk to leaders who have built one person companies. It's a unique skillset.

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

#66

Post by pfannkuchen »

al_borland wrote: post #64
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…

A co-worker of mine visited French Polynesia a few years ago. He mentioned most of the restaurants simply close up shop when they feel they’ve made enough money for the day. Not great for someone looking to get dinner, but I’m sure it makes life much better and less stressful for the owner and employees. They know to get by they need to make $X/day. If they hit it by 1pm, cool, half day.

Wonder if they also run out of ingredients? Seems like a nice way to simplify operations if you don’t ever end up with waste.

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

#67

Post by neilfrndes »

al_borland wrote: post #64
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…

A co-worker of mine visited French Polynesia a few years ago. He mentioned most of the restaurants simply close up shop when they feel they’ve made enough money for the day. Not great for someone looking to get dinner, but I’m sure it makes life much better and less stressful for the owner and employees. They know to get by they need to make $X/day. If they hit it by 1pm, cool, half day.

This behavior was also observed in New York Cab drivers in the paper LABOR SUPPLY OF NEW YORK CITY CABDRIVERS: ONE DAY AT A TIME

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/NYCCabdriv...

> ... Our interpretation of these Žndings is that cabdrivers (at least inexperi- enced ones): (i) make labor supply decisions “one day at a time” instead of inter- temporally substituting labor and leisure across multiple days, and (ii) set a loose daily income target and quit working once they reach that target

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

#68

Post by Projectiboga »

al_borland wrote: post #64
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…

A co-worker of mine visited French Polynesia a few years ago. He mentioned most of the restaurants simply close up shop when they feel they’ve made enough money for the day. Not great for someone looking to get dinner, but I’m sure it makes life much better and less stressful for the owner and employees. They know to get by they need to make $X/day. If they hit it by 1pm, cool, half day.

That helps the community too as every restaurant has a better chance to hit their own goal. Obviously this only works in a place with a population who all know each other.

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

#69

Post by bodantogat »

I assign certain days in a week, (and sometimes hours in a day) to my different personas. I only plan out a few days at a time in advance. I just dump these on my calendar as events. Aside from a few unexpected events (like a bot attack that ruined last week for me), its been working well enough.

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

#70

Post by riku_iki »

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…

> While a "normal" startup is focused on growing! growing! growing! a small company should instead think like a physical restaurant:

in tech you still can be focused on users/customers/revenue grows but not headcount/process complexity grows, since you are not limited by number of tables like in restaurant.

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