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Solopreneurship

flaviocopes.com

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Re: Solopreneurship

#21

Post by ronyfadel »

cyberge99 wrote: post #13

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.

Can you share what you tried to build/sell and failed? Solopreneur here.. it ain't easy, the ride is a rush though and I wouldn't trade it for a full-time job.

Re: Solopreneurship

#22

Post by tarey »

kwere wrote: post #9
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…

Cool, but what opportinity can You grasp other than luck? For me, in my Life (low) luck based opportunity are to shun completely.

I rarely rely on luck (although I do count myself to be very lucky up to this point). I tend to rely on myself very often, and my one principle rule is that I have every expectation that I will have to do everything by myself. Any help that I got would just be a bonus, but it is still very much just myself. This has been what it has been like all my life and I don’t intend to change.

Re: Solopreneurship

#23

Post by axelroze »

bserge wrote: post #14

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.

You might also start spending too much time in studying 19th and 20th century philosophy and truly consider your answer to Camus' most important question. It's not a dream job. Far from it.

Humans are by nature social animals. Working solo is in principle horrible. I used to do it because my pay was 10x (4000 USD vs 400 USD) compared to average salaries in my middle of nowhere country. But when I escaped the rat race I focused much more on things I find meaningful.

Re: Solopreneurship

#24

Post by navd »

This was a nice read, glad everything has worked out for Flavio. Part of why this is possible is that there is a lot more leverage available for those that are solo nowadays. It's an exciting time for sure

Re: Solopreneurship

#25

Post by WA »

axelroze wrote: post #23
bserge wrote: post #14

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.

You might also start spending too much time in studying 19th and 20th century philosophy and truly consider your answer to Camus' most important question. It's not a dream job. Far from it. Humans are by nature social animals. Working solo is in principle horrible. I used to do it because my pay was 10x (4000 USD vs 400 USD) compared to average salaries in my middle of nowhere country. But when I escaped the rat race…

Social life and work life don't have to be the same thing.

I'm a Solopreneur as well. I make a lot of money, but I also work maybe 2-4 hours per day only. If I want a social life, I go to the rock climbing gym in the middle of the day or meet people in the evening.

Once in a while, I Facetime with a friend who is also a Solopreneur.

Re: Solopreneurship

#26

Post by WA »

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…

I guess B2C has some advantages. If you have 10,000 customers, you have no boss, only an obligation to deliver a good product that most/all of them like. One single customer can't make you go broke, just because you don't implement feature X.

Re: Solopreneurship

#27

Post by sombremesa »

dgb23 wrote: post #6
lloydatkinson wrote: post #4

> One day I’m spending 10 hours at my desk writing blog posts for my daily blog schedule. Going for quantity over quality I see.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...

The ceramic anecdote gets thrown around a lot, but it seems like a third approach - where theory is combined with practice and deliberate efforts are made to refine subsequent products after each build - would’ve produced a better quality result than the quantity group.

In fact, isn’t that what a group focused on quality would actually do rather than sit around theorizing? Did this actually happen?

Re: Solopreneurship

#28

Post by kesselvon »

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?

Serving B2B clients requires more time than you'd have as a solopreneur because they require a lot of handholding through the entire lifecycle. Even a small SaaS company can have 5-10 people touching a deal in some form (marketing, sales, sales engineer, etc) before its closed.

Re: Solopreneurship

#29

Post by dgb23 »

sombremesa wrote: post #27
dgb23 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...

The ceramic anecdote gets thrown around a lot, but it seems like a third approach - where theory is combined with practice and deliberate efforts are made to refine subsequent products after each build - would’ve produced a better quality result than the quantity group. In fact, isn’t that what a group focused on quality would actually do rather than sit around theorizing? Did this actually happen?

Right! Practice can get you very far, until it doesn't, this is when theory comes in to give you perspective and provides new approaches to try and practice.

It's not one way or the other, but there is perhaps a tendency to overestimate one and underestimate the other, especially in relation to ability. I for example have the tendency to feel as if I get something when I read theory, when in fact I need deliberate practice to really get it. For me, doing means understanding. Others might overestimate what they know because they are so good at what they do (in the way they do it) etc. It's psychological traps and Dunning Kruger Effects all over the place!

Re: Solopreneurship

#30

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

coderholic wrote: post #20

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…

Any tips on hiring as a solopreneur? Where do you start and what do you tell them?
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