21–30 of 107 posts
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 time is worth more than any reasonable subscription fee.
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...
You don't really stay completely sane, but you can get better at it. You have to get used to the feeling that you can never keep up or do enough. You just do the best you can and learn to live with that. The most important thing is not to get overwhelmed or paralyzed and then end up procrastinating/doing nothing. Making any kind of progress each day, even if it's something small, is a win.
For me, developing sustainable routines has been critical. Over time I have developed a routine that includes frequent exercise, family time, socializing, eating healthy, and sleeping enough, and I mostly don't compromise on those things unless there's literally an emergency (I do my best to build systems in a way that makes emergencies very rare).
I also do some more questionable things like work 20 hour marathon all-nighter sessions when I'm pushing hard to get something done, but then I'll follow that up with 12+ hours of sleep the next night and a more relaxed day or two. It's just a matter of finding a balance that works for you.
When I was just starting out, I did that stuff at the end of the year, and it was extremely much work, trying to hunt down receipts for payments made a year ago. Now it's just this thing I do regularly, and at the end of the year it's all done already.
The exception is I do a little customer support every day.
Don'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…
The first mistake I made was not saying no to customers. I ended up putting in basically 3 months of work between two customers adding features that would only benefit them. After that, one of them still wanted more, but I was at the end of my rope at that point and told them no.
Now, because I have more customers, I get a lot more support and feature requests. I've been trying to streamline support by setting up a better system for tracking these tickets as some have been slipping through the cracks. I've also been trying to put as much information in my support documentation as possible. Unfortunately, the feature requests have pulled me away from both of these efforts. There are just SO MANY feature requests.
To deal with the feature requests, I've really had to rethink how my application is built. Some things that should have been easy to implement have taken a lot more effort because of sloppy work I did previously trying to get features out. On the plus side, it has made me grow a lot as a software engineer because I can see how everything has played out over the years and I have a much better idea of why things should be built in a certain way. The downside is there are some systems that work and customers depend on, but to do it the right way would be a gargantuan effort. At some point I want to just get rid of them, but it's going to be painful, like sawing off an infected limb.
Once I get through most of the cruft with that, a lot of the new features that need to be implemented will be a breeze and that will hopefully free up more time for marketing, which I do basically none of. That's really the crux of it though. To hire employees I need more growth, for more growth I need to work on marketing. To work on marketing, I need to spend less time on support and feature requests.
Don'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…
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.
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 to say this works better when your calendar isn’t flooded already
Also I put everything and I mean everything in lists or notion, I’ll put every email to reply to, every feature I need to build every decision I need to remember. The less I’m holding on to the more I can focus without feeling like I’m forgetting something.