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Pros and cons of solo development

johnjeffers.com

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Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#51

Post by xboxnolifes »

johnj-hn wrote: post #39
lelanthran wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: 1. A primary meaning, "Further" means "revenue" (or "profit"). You and your AI together can sit and create a competitor to Windows 11, do the marketing copy, a sales strategy, feature testing etc, but without a team that product isn't going anywhere. 2. A secondary meaning, "Further" means "Stamina". You + AI can create everything above, but without a community (whether paying customers or free users), the prod…

Ok, I see where we diverge now. My project is free and open-source so there's no money at play here. It's a labor of love. I agree with you if you're talking about a for-profit product that you'll probably do better with a team.

Even as a labor of love, the second definition still applies. Once your interest wains, the project dies.

Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#52

Post by the_gipsy »

johnj-hn wrote: post #18
lelanthran wrote: post #14

The rule to remember about solo development: Alone I can go faster, together we can go further! Everything else boils down to this.

Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.

With AI, we can go... somewhere?

Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#53

Post by JamesSwift »

johnj-hn wrote: post #18
lelanthran wrote: post #14

The rule to remember about solo development: Alone I can go faster, together we can go further! Everything else boils down to this.

Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.

No, AI dials up the OPs axiom to 11. Heavily leveraging AI for dev is going to accelerate you as a solo dev but you will hit serious friction trying to scale to more than the individual.

Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#54

Post by satvikpendem »

lelanthran wrote: post #34
johnj-hn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you talk a little about what "further" means to you?

Sure: 1. A primary meaning, "Further" means "revenue" (or "profit"). You and your AI together can sit and create a competitor to Windows 11, do the marketing copy, a sales strategy, feature testing etc, but without a team that product isn't going anywhere. 2. A secondary meaning, "Further" means "Stamina". You + AI can create everything above, but without a community (whether paying customers or free users), the prod…

Neither of those definitions require a team. There are many solo founders making tons of money, like Pieter Levels, and he has a community too.

Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#55

Post by satvikpendem »

johnj-hn wrote: post #18
lelanthran wrote: post #14

The rule to remember about solo development: Alone I can go faster, together we can go further! Everything else boils down to this.

Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.

I agree. If everyone on my team is just prompting agents, why would I spend money on their salary when I can use that for tokens instead? No one has yet given a good answer for this question when I've asked before.

Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#56

Post by satvikpendem »

ramshanker wrote: post #7

For me the Best Pros is "That one random-internet-comment is a good usability improvement, ask LLM to do the small change and commit immediately." Smaller ideas need not be approved , or held back by schedule pressure from bean counters. Just Do It. :). It's the small corrections which end up polishing the product as good as "professional usability studies".

A team can do the same, it's based on management structure, not the existence of a team.

Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#57

Post by satvikpendem »

johnj-hn wrote: post #17
esafak wrote: post #15

> But... I don't truly know what my users want. There is no telemetry of any kind in Luxury Yacht. I like being able to say that, but it means I have no idea how many people are using it, or how they're using it. I don't know what features are the most important to other people. So add telemetry and a request tracker like https://www.productboard.com/ . This is not a solo vs team thing.

I don't want to add telemetry. And I think this is where the solo vs team thing matters. I can just say "no telemetry" and I don't need to argue with anyone about it. I make the decision and live with the consequence. I don't really need to know how many people use the app. It would be cool to know, but not necessary. If someone wants a feature, or a fix, they can open an issue.

Then that's not really a con if you refuse to fix the problem you yourself mentioned. It's like saying, I'm not getting enough iron in my diet, and someone suggests eating foods with more iron, and then saying I don't want to. Okay, then don't bring it up in the first place.

Re: Pros and cons of solo development

#60

Post by efromvt »

skydhash wrote: post #49
efromvt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have a backend, then it's all telemetry, right? And backend logs don't capture a lot of the UX side of things - how a call got triggered, from where, etc (which yeah you can start to instrument, but then that's telemetry).

I would say: Never solve problems for people you don’t know. First solve for yourself. Then solve for people in your community. Someone reaching out with a suggestion is more valuable than bazillion of analytics.

Very much in agreement with this but especially on the UX side I find that 'what is intuitive to me' is not universal because you come with a bunch of contextual priors you can't clear. I wish there was more tooling focused on how to use tools to expand customer empathy past what you can directly experience; that's an inherently audience-limiting approach.

(I admire PMs that can cross that chasm; it's also why they're often bad at infra tooling, because you can just short-circuit the empathy).

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