
Ask HN: Becoming a successful solopreneur - biznerd
There are several successful solopreneurs on HN:<p>Patrick McKenzie:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;<p>Dan Grossman<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.awio.com<p>Although they occasionally deal with contractors, they are one man shops. There are benefits and costs to do this.<p>It really limits your &quot;impact&quot; and how much money you can make...however there is a lot less stress involved.<p>Would you want to be a successful solopreneur or do you feel the traditional startup is the right path?
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jasonkester
This is what I do as well, so I'll chime in with a few more upsides.
(Honestly, I haven't yet found any downsides to bootstrapping vs. going the VC
route, so I can't list any).

As a single founder, you get the maximum leverage out of being good at what
you do. The ratio of deadwood at your company is either zero or one, so as
long as you are in fact genuinely good at building things, you can get things
built a lot faster than you'd ever expect to see at a larger company.

You also get maximum control over what you're building. No cramming in dumb
features that don't fit because somebody in marketing decided they might be a
good idea. No stepping on anybody's feelings by cutting a feature they wanted
or abandoning their vision for what the product should do.

And of course you get to play on the whole stack. You get to make the schema
changes for that new feature, as well as the back end, layout, and all the
fiddly javascript bits. And you get to market that feature and handle customer
support for it and play Social Media Coordinator. Racking servers, conference
calls with Fortune 500 CEOs, it's all your job.

Best of all, you get to decide how much of your life this thing is going to
take up. If you're the kind of guy that needs to pour 80 hour weeks into his
baby, sacrifice all his free time, lose his girlfriend, and live 100% for his
business, then cool. You get to be that guy. Or if you're more of a "roll out
of bed at 10am, check HN over coffee, spend a couple hours on a feature then
head out to the mountains because the sun's out" kind of guy, then cool too.
You can be that guy instead.

Whichever path you take, chances are you'll find your way to profitability at
some point. And when you do, those profits all flow directly into your bank
account. Granted, your "impact" might be "limited" in as much as you might
never become a billionaire. But hey, a few hundred grand a year will buy a lot
of beer.

And since it's really hard to set things up in a small SaaS business so that
they consume more than a small fraction of your time once the basic product is
out the door, you'll have lots of free time to contemplate where and how to
consume said beer.

All the best!

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davismwfl
So I can't call myself a solopreneur at this time, but I am a solo-founder
that started as a solopreneur. All the things that are good about being a
solopreneur are pretty compelling, but there are some serious downsides too.

One of the most prominent to me is the lack of ability to have people around
to challenge you, your ideas etc. And for me, being the smartest (or only) guy
in the room is never a way to get the best idea when you have the final say on
said idea. Which for me generally meant I spent more time trying to find
multiple ideas/solutions so I could weigh their options. Having a team around
that could be done in a couple of hours because people think differently, by
yourself its tougher and takes longer if you are honest with yourself.

As a solopreneur you rely on clients more to give you feedback to help
mitigate my last point, and done right that can be super powerful, but if you
get one client that can tip the scale too much by being too much of your
revenue then they can put you out of business quickly. This is simply because
you will feel obligated to keep them happy and so they will be forcing your
hand more than you would like and you keep deluding yourself with I'll do it
this time... With a team even a large client will get more of a balance
because the team is talking to multiple clients, but when its you by yourself
it is harder to manage.

There are a ton of other things I could mention, but no matter, I wouldn't say
being solo vs a team is better or worse, just different with different
challenges and benefits. You just have to weigh them to see what is right for
you. And I would not say that there is less stress being solo, it is just
stress of a different nature, e.g. you aren't responsible for other peoples
income just your own, but you still have all the client and engineering
stresses except they are all on you whether its 3am or 10am.

