How do others in similar situations manage tasks and maintain sanity? Which strategies and tools do you find effective?
How do others in similar situations manage tasks and maintain sanity? Which strategies and tools do you find effective?
41 comments
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.
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.
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/NYCCabdriv...
> ... Our interpretation of these ndings 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
I'd only add (or rephrase other comments to the same effect) that slow growth is not only about staying within your capacity, it's also about learning what you're doing so well that you can systematize your processes for maximum results with as little speculation and risk as possible.
You could call that "being efficient," I guess, but I think I mean it in the macro sense, not looking for nickel and dime efficiencies.
Startups are a kind of lifehack. It's probably easier to serve a million people with 7 engineers than it is to serve 3000 people with one engineer-PM-sales guy. Eventually the guy with the giant company grabs the customers of that little guy or acquires them.
So I think it's very tempting to go large. The trick is finding something with low limits. I call it deep sea ideas. Just go deep enough, outside of shark territory. A shark in the deep sea would implode. Things like specialist CRMs and funnels are classic. But I did diet apps and essential oil apps; VCs won't go near those but the market throws money at it.
A lot of SaaS is just a simpler/different take on a big one. For example, mine is way less powerful than Freshbooks/amazon. I still live from it for the last 20 years with less than 100 customers (and a lot of time just less than 50).
Having a niche or just being available to your customers on the phone and solving the issue in the next minutes/hours is enough to keep customers and run your business.
Now, the big issue is that you are growing without the capacity to grow, and then you get a big competitor in your nose and you try to catch it. That is death.
Do not try to catch the bunny. Be the turtle and forget about the race, at all.
The internet is big enough for multiple players, and niches that are too small for VC money can still be very profitable opportunities for solo entreprenurs.
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.
I want to print this out and put it above my computer.
Her long-time friend also ran a restaurant, for a much longer time, and more well-known in the city. After quite some years, she opened another, at a different part of the city. It struggled for some time, but eventually stabilized as a reasonably profitable place, after, say 6 or 7 years. Several years after that, she started planning to open a third one, and was saying that this would stretch her thin, and she's very reluctant, but the demand was apparently there.
This is exactly the kind of business VCs run away from: inevitable slow growth, no way to put in more money and scale the business to get more revenue. Large companies also often shy away from that. This may be a huge opportunity if you hold it right.
If you can find such a niche that pays you enough for your needs, it's really great because competition is low: few know about it, and of them, even fewer want to overtake you.
There was a great breakfast place near me ran by the guy who owned basically all the commercial real estate on the block - the breakfast place was only open in the mornings 6 days a week and occasionally the owner would come in and serve, it was basically a passion project and he wanted to make enough to pay for it. After 15ish years of running he started hosting popups at night and another 4-5 years after that sold to one of the popups. It was a real restaurant and widely love by those in the know.
You could say El Bulli fits the bill of don't expand, they shut down after a while and converted the space into food research and events center. A little different, but I was trying to think of a more famous "real restaurant".
For this restaurant this adding a new room or a new location in another town.
For a solo founder, this might be when you finally start hiring to free up your time for other tasks.
It's not necessarily never grow. It's about growing on your own terms when you can afford to do so.
You mean the cost increase? I'm afraid I don't understand. Who would you need to justify the cost to, the clients? They don't know anything about your profit margins, and they don't really need any justification.
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 on that week's topic of focus. Also forces me to accomplish harder work (marketing/sales for me) vs. retreating to what is most comfortable (developing).
2. Speaking with other founders / leaders in the space I operate. This has been especially helpful as I've struggled with a growth/marketing strategy and speaking with others selling adjacent products in the same space has unblocked me many times.
3. Keeping realistic expectations that I'm doing this solo and it will be very difficult at times. Also harder than it seems.
4. Keep a founder's log to persist notable events and learnings. Useful when feeling particularly overwhelmed as I can revisit how much has been accomplished.
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.
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.
You're far more likely to die tomorrow than Notion to close abruptly tomorrow.
I checked and the probability of death for an American in their 30s (median American is 37 years old) is under 0.2% in any year. I think there’s a far larger than 1 in 500 chance that Notion goes under or is acquired and cancelled.
Services shut down all the time. I've been selling indie software for a bit more than a decade, and at least half a dozen services that I was using have either shut down, pivoted, or slowly became crappy enough that I had to move.
Of course, that doesn't mean that you should build everything yourself, that's not practical. But the stuff that I have built myself doesn't suddenly stop working.
If Notion announces a shutdown at some point, you can export your content and import it somewhere else. The amount of time it takes to do that later won't be that big of a deal.
But with many SaaS you are lucky if you even get your data out. And then importing it into omething else sadly is very much a big deal in many cases.
Using Notion as an example, your entire workspace can be exported in standard formats.
https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content
It’s not zero effort to migrate, but for a small business migration should be both rare and not so bad.
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.
With that note, I higly recommend the book to OP!
I will say it has some downsides, though - I feel pretty fragmented outside of work.
That might be the easiest first pass. Then you can do the bigger things like: "I'm spending 1/4 time managing contractors, and 1/3 doing planning for which most of that time is due to needing to coordinate and adapt to contractors... So, do I need contractors? I need someone. What about a different contractor setup that doesn't need so much handholding? Or an employee? Or change the nature of the work?" Etc.
If you want to stay a one-person company and keep your sanity, do less. Otherwise, figure out how to hire employees. But in this case, it's going to be a long journey still.
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.
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.
1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
2 - https://envkey.com
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.
A word of experience about having employees: avoid it for as long as you can. Everyone you hire is expensive -- not only in terms of money, but in terms of the additional time they'll take up and hassle involved.
My personal rule is "don't hire someone unless you're at imminent risk of losing a bunch of money if you don't".
How do I trust him? Time and experience. I started with small tasks and expanded them as we developed trust. That and I control all the money.
If you're going to get an assistant, look carefully at your needs. Start with what causes you the most grief, what you hate doing, and what you avoid doing. For me, it's financial paperwork. He now keeps track of all the expenses and invoices and makes sure my accountant gets the data. This year, he can start giving quarterly updates to my accountant so I'm not getting a $$$ surprise on taxes.
My full finances are stored in Notion 1, this is because I can access that anywhere, and I can use the built-in table functions to calculate my VAT and tax. When I started, I also used Notion as a CRM that I logged customer/prospect interactions with, but that faded out after a while.
[0]: https://www.kimai.org/
[1]: https://www.notion.so/
Currently, this is:
Standard €2.99 Annual €35.88 per user
Professional €3.99 Annual €47.88 per user Most popularFor example; the finances for each company should be submitted to the national tax department each quarter. I configured the Notion tables to group them by quarter of the year. For each of these quarters, it will automatically configure the income, outgoing and the result.
By "outsource the other stuff", I mean things like hiring a bookkeeping service to keep your books and handle tax reporting all the way through to contracting out those jobs that you don't have the skills, time, or energy to do well.
The most important asset your business has is yourself. Keep that asset in good health, use it wisely, and don't abuse it.
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.
The exception is I do a little customer support every day.
>> one-person company ... managing contractors.
You're not a one person company if you have to manage contractors. One of the definitions of being a "contractor" is "independent work". Get better people who are self starers, or more motivated, or more flexible or...
>> planning, development
The lie corporate tech tells us is that these things are different jobs. You need to re-learn how to play. You're playing with code, and ideas and features. Play has a component that has learning build in.
Learn to separate GROWING your business (development, new features) and running it (customer service, billing, accounting). Track your time into these two buckets and ask yourself if you're spending the right effort in the right places.
Lastly. You're going to work hard, maybe harder than you ever have in your life. Sun up to sun set, and then some. You don't get to party, or vacation or socialize. If you want those sorts of things "get a job" if you want to build and own something then you're going to learn to eat that shit sandwich for a bit. It took me a few years for me to get to a stable place. There are moments where I have to put in the extra time, but they are very infrequent now and mostly include a massive pay day when they happen.
Immediate needs like invoices and bill pay, resolving service disruptions and support tickets can be the loudest contenders for your time. Make sure you set aside some time to build tools to address the root cause of your biggest time wasters: automate repeated tasks, build diagnostic tools to speed up support responses, restructure systems to prevent bugs which happen repeatedly. Once you've matured your operations, invest time in documenting them so you can sell the business (or delegate to staff.)
Don't allow short term demands to derail your progress toward accomplishments that will make life better in the long run.
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 you wanna talk about this just find me on my blog :)
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
People in our field readily think of hiring help for design, development, etc but there's a lot of value in having somebody who can just take administrative (or personal!) distractions off your plate and they're often much cheaper than technical professionals. And they're far more versatile than many productized "tools"
I plan to make it this year’s theme to simplify. For me that means:
- automating or delegating all recurring tasks;
- eliminating all processes that have become complex but are not worth it;
Eg:
- I plan to move from Stripe to Paddle (MoR) because I don’t want to deal with EU taxes anymore; we’ve save me a few hours every month + A few hundred dollars on accounting;
- we gave an affiliate program that isn’t working out great; i plan to cut it;
- we have a referral program… same, cut it;
- we have a public email address, cut it;
- etc.
In addition, what’s worked for me so far is day-theming. Mon & Tue are for admin and management. Wed-Fri are creative - I don’t even open my inbox some days. I checked recently, the world is not on fire.
P.S. One of the automation tools I use it https://recurrr.com - saves me a few hours every month. Not a lot. But enough to have kept it alive for the past 7 years (under a different name).
- Having a close circle of friends with similar lifestyles/journeys. trustful, open exchanges are invaluable, in both directions.
- Being clear on your business's purpose, means understand why you started it and what compromises you're willing to make.
- Setting clear goals for both business development and personal life in order to maintain clarity in both areas is essential for balance and progress.
As I'm in a similar situation and work with startup/scale-up folks, I've created a toolset aimed at addressing the business aspects of these struggles. It seems to solve these types of challenges for the people I work with: https://startup-business-cockpit.de/en.index.html.
Check it out, and if any guidance is needed, feel free to DM me.
[1]: https://www.ycverify.com [2]: https://www.signalstalk.com [3]: https://contentcredentialsapi.studioxolo.com [4]: https://www.airexif.com [5]: https://logseq.com
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.
Back in the day though I used outlook calendar entries as the basis for my billing as I used windows mobile on a motorola flip and had sbs2003 running exchange with a custom app that would read the calendar entries and let me assign to a customer and create an order - once I had a number of orders I could create an invoice and send via email.
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...
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.
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
1 - https://temple-tools.com