Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

The major trick, IMHO, is not to grow.<p>While a &quot;normal&quot; startup is focused on growing! growing! growing! a small company should instead think like a physical restaurant:<p>&quot;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&quot;.<p>Then you see you have too many waiters. You cut it to 2.<p>Then you see your meals are too cheap. You increase it a little.<p>Then you see you have little customers. You grow a little.<p>Then you see you have TOO MUCH customers. You stop growing. More costly take-over, increase the cost of the meal, etc.<p>What you NOT MUST DO is grow more than your max capacity.<p>That is it.<p>Size your capacity. Figure a nice profit. Keep it small.

I don&#x27;t manage it all. Something is always slipping and I always feel like I am falling behind.<p>That said, here are some tactics I&#x27;ve used over ~2 years as a solo founder to try to keep it together:<p>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&#x27;s topic of focus. Also forces me to accomplish harder work (marketing&#x2F;sales for me) vs. retreating to what is most comfortable (developing).<p>2. Speaking with other founders &#x2F; leaders in the space I operate. This has been especially helpful as I&#x27;ve struggled with a growth&#x2F;marketing strategy and speaking with others selling adjacent products in the same space has unblocked me many times.<p>3. Keeping realistic expectations that I&#x27;m doing this solo and it will be very difficult at times. Also harder than it seems.<p>4. Keep a founder&#x27;s log to persist notable events and learnings. Useful when feeling particularly overwhelmed as I can revisit how much has been accomplished.

Don&#x27;t nickle and dime yourself on tools that save you time. If there&#x27;s a SaaS offering that can reduce your workload, just pay for it (unless it&#x27;s a truly ridiculous amount).<p>Every so often there&#x27;s a post on HN where a someone lists their income and expenses and the comments are always full of things like &quot;why are you paying $100&#x2F;year for Notion when you can just use org-mode for free?&quot; Don&#x27;t listen to them. Your time is worth more than any reasonable subscription fee.

Unsure if this is healthy - but after 12 years it’s by almost completely compartmentalising my mind, and focusing on one thing at a time. Started that habit as a freelancer and it’s probably saved me from burnout multiple times.<p>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<p>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.

As a first pass, you could try &quot;profiling&quot; how you spend your time, like you would for improving the performance of software.<p>That might be the easiest first pass. Then you can do the bigger things like: &quot;I&#x27;m spending 1&#x2F;4 time managing contractors, and 1&#x2F;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&#x27;t need so much handholding? Or an employee? Or change the nature of the work?&quot; Etc.

If you&#x27;re struggling to the extent that you&#x27;re questioning your sanity, you&#x27;re trying to do too much. There&#x27;s a limit to what a single person can do.<p>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&#x27;s going to be a long journey still.

Finances: Do them monthly. On the first work day of each month, I do my finances. I collect all the receipts, bank account statements etc and send them to my accountant. If there&#x27;s any problem, he lets me know right away. It takes me an hour or two, but it&#x27;s important I don&#x27;t procrastinate on this.<p>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&#x27;s just this thing I do regularly, and at the end of the year it&#x27;s all done already.

Currently I&#x27;m building Plandex[1], a terminal-based AI coding tool, solo (though I hope to build a team around it in the future if I can swing it) and I&#x27;m also running EnvKey[2], a secrets management saas, as a sole operator.<p>You don&#x27;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&#x2F;doing nothing. Making any kind of progress each day, even if it&#x27;s something small, is a win.<p>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&#x27;t compromise on those things unless there&#x27;s literally an emergency (I do my best to build systems in a way that makes emergencies very rare).<p>I also do some more questionable things like work 20 hour marathon all-nighter sessions when I&#x27;m pushing hard to get something done, but then I&#x27;ll follow that up with 12+ hours of sleep the next night and a more relaxed day or two. It&#x27;s just a matter of finding a balance that works for you.<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plandex-ai&#x2F;plandex">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plandex-ai&#x2F;plandex</a><p>2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;envkey.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;envkey.com</a>

This is something I&#x27;ve been struggling with recently. After a few years of adding customers at a fairly slow rate, this year I&#x27;ve already doubled the amount of customers I have. Unfortunately, it still isn&#x27;t enough to hire an employee. I&#x27;ve gone from ramen profitable and doing freelance to fill the gap, to ditching freelancing altogether and working on the application full-time.<p>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.<p>Now, because I have more customers, I get a lot more support and feature requests. I&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>To deal with the feature requests, I&#x27;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&#x27;s going to be painful, like sawing off an infected limb.<p>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&#x27;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.

Sanity is overrated. When I am overwhelmed I cope best when I manage to work on the things that <i>feel</i> most important at the moment. It causes the least cognitive dissonance. Now, the difficult part is to make the things that <i>feel</i> most important roughly congruent with the things that <i>are</i> actually important- that&#x27;s the art. The good news is that it doesn&#x27;t have to perfect.

For the finance and managing contractors, I use Kimai [0]. It can track your time, manage your customers, projects, your team, expenses and even generate your invoices. I only use it for tracking time, managing customers and projects and generating invoices.<p>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&#x2F;prospect interactions with, but that faded out after a while.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kimai.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kimai.org&#x2F;</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;</a>

Even in a one-person company you don&#x27;t have to do everything alone. You can offload certain things to other people. For example, you can get an accountant to do the finance stuff for you. There might also be tools that you can buy or rent that take away some of the load. There are lots of tools for building websites and payment solutions for example. I am sure there are planning tools as well. And once you have outsourced as much as you can, if you still cannot manage the load, that might be a signal that you need to really grow your company and to hire people, although there is also the possibility to subcontract part of your work if you do not want to commit to that.

The biggest lesson I&#x27;ve learned is to be very clear and honest about what you personally are good at and have the bandwidth to do, outsource the other stuff, and keep your goals in line with your available resources (which are mostly your time and energy).<p>By &quot;outsource the other stuff&quot;, 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&#x27;t have the skills, time, or energy to do well.<p>The most important asset your business has is yourself. Keep that asset in good health, use it wisely, and don&#x27;t abuse it.

I&#x27;m frequently reminded of the adage: &quot;You want to go fast? Go alone. Want to go far? Go with a team.&quot; The team could be people or as others have suggested, tools and processes that reduce your workload.

Only do 1 thing. Find the most important thing and only work on that. For ex: a product feature, sales, or whatever but just only do one thing for at least a week. Then re-evaluate what the most important thing is and do that for the next week.<p>The exception is I do a little customer support every day.

Im 15 ish years in.<p>&gt;&gt; one-person company ... managing contractors.<p>You&#x27;re not a one person company if you have to manage contractors. One of the definitions of being a &quot;contractor&quot; is &quot;independent work&quot;. Get better people who are self starers, or more motivated, or more flexible or...<p>&gt;&gt; planning, development<p>The lie corporate tech tells us is that these things are different jobs. You need to re-learn how to play. You&#x27;re playing with code, and ideas and features. Play has a component that has learning build in.<p>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&#x27;re spending the right effort in the right places.<p>Lastly. You&#x27;re going to work hard, maybe harder than you ever have in your life. Sun up to sun set, and then some. You don&#x27;t get to party, or vacation or socialize. If you want those sorts of things &quot;get a job&quot; if you want to build and own something then you&#x27;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.

You have to delegate. It can be a human or a robot. For example, make stock and use tools for social media content. Use IFTTT, Zapier, Make or n8n. Hire a freelance assistant etc.

I have noticed a lot of solopreneurs take proud in doing everything themselves and do not want to hire and expand. Yes, I get it. I once had a lot of employees and it is stressfull with too much responsibility and issues.<p>But, you can have 1 or 2 people. or 5. You don&#x27;t need to have 10 people, or 100 or 1000.<p>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 :)

If you have funds for contractors, have you considered applying some towards an assistant?<p>People in our field readily think of hiring help for design, development, etc but there&#x27;s <i>a lot</i> of value in having somebody who can just take administrative (or personal!) distractions off your plate and they&#x27;re often much cheaper than technical professionals. And they&#x27;re far more versatile than many productized &quot;tools&quot;

I am going through the same thing myself right now. After eight years of running this small product, I’ve gotten to the point where the revenue hasn’t increased significantly, but the complexity of Admin work has increased exponentially.<p>I plan to make it this year’s theme to simplify. For me that means:<p>- automating or delegating all recurring tasks;<p>- eliminating all processes that have become complex but are not worth it;<p>Eg:<p>- 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;<p>- we gave an affiliate program that isn’t working out great; i plan to cut it;<p>- we have a referral program… same, cut it;<p>- we have a public email address, cut it;<p>- etc.<p>In addition, what’s worked for me so far is day-theming. Mon &amp; 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>P.S. One of the automation tools I use it <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recurrr.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recurrr.com</a> - 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).

Thanks a lot for being open and sharing. You are not alone, and wearing multiple hats is something all one-person companies have in common. The key points that work for me are:<p>- Having a close circle of friends with similar lifestyles&#x2F;journeys. trustful, open exchanges are invaluable, in both directions.<p>- Being clear on your business&#x27;s purpose, means understand why you started it and what compromises you&#x27;re willing to make.<p>- Setting clear goals for both business development and personal life in order to maintain clarity in both areas is essential for balance and progress.<p>As I&#x27;m in a similar situation and work with startup&#x2F;scale-up folks, I&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;startup-business-cockpit.de&#x2F;en.index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;startup-business-cockpit.de&#x2F;en.index.html</a>.<p>Check it out, and if any guidance is needed, feel free to DM me.

I think the best thing about running solo is I can control my own timeline and goals. I am working on multiple projects [1][2][3][4]. Every day I write down a short list of what I want to achieve on my note-taking app LogSeq[5], and I try to finish the list. Alternating projects and the nature of work (development&#x2F;research&#x2F;marketing) change my rhythm and keep me learning and feeling energized.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycverify.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycverify.com</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.signalstalk.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.signalstalk.com</a> [3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contentcredentialsapi.studioxolo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contentcredentialsapi.studioxolo.com</a> [4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airexif.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airexif.com</a> [5]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logseq.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logseq.com</a>

Another helpful exercise: sort your tasks by payoff horizon, from immediate need to long term investments.<p>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&#x27;ve matured your operations, invest time in documenting them so you can sell the business (or delegate to staff.)<p>Don&#x27;t allow short term demands to derail your progress toward accomplishments that will make life better in the long run.

You’re a company, so you have to start thinking as one.<p>You’re not paying a lot for an accountant, you’re investing money that will generate free time and availability for other tasks.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And, no, you can’t use your life partner for this.

I managed until I didn&#x27;t, and the admin was what got me in the end - 10 years later I was diagnosed with adhd so I could at least forgive myself for being so absolutely awful with record keeping.<p>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.

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.<p>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...

I assign certain days in a week, (and sometimes hours in a day) to my different personas. I only plan out a few days at a time in advance. I just dump these on my calendar as events. Aside from a few unexpected events (like a bot attack that ruined last week for me), its been working well enough.

Been there as a solo. My advice is be on the constant lookout for the one person that will do all the stuff you are bad at. Find your complement. There’s a reason marriage is ingrained in most cultures. It is too risky and hard and sad to do important things alone.

Best advice I can offer is know your limits and that requires knowing how and when to say &quot;No&quot;. Others have mentioned raising rates, and that works to a degree, but ultimately you have to be able to say &quot;No&quot; when your capacity is maxed out.

What do you all have as your actual product? I feel that&#x27;s the toughest part: having a product that can be easily maintained by one person yet still gain and retain customers.

Hire a C level executive to delegate some of it, if you can afford to? Unless your question is: &quot;How can I do everything myself while being poor&#x2F;bootstrapped?&quot;

I did this for 9 years. You don’t stay sane. You’re working 24&#x2F;7. Best you can do is take vacations and schedule downtime rituals. This is why I no longer do it.

Here&#x27;s the advice I&#x27;ve gotten:<p>1. Hire a VA for mundane stuff.<p>2. Hire a coach to fill in your blind spots.<p>3. Hire the most senior people you can.

Don&#x27;t do accounting or taxes for your company. There are two ways you can do that.

I figure it&#x27;s somewhat easier since you don&#x27;t have to manage employees, no?

Outsource as much as you can and EXERCISE

I must be an oddball because working alone honestly feels much more preferred. People add complexity, which scales exponentially with more people. I honestly much more prefer AI workers vs. human workers for this reason. I feel like when I work alone I can focus on things that matter and actually get more and important things done, instead of managing people and their politics. It&#x27;s also different relating to people as a founder vs. just another employee. If I don&#x27;t want to engage with someone I can choose not to. Freedom not to talk to people I don&#x27;t want to is worth every penny.

I&#x27;ve been working on Temple Tools[1] (CRM for Synagogues) during evenings and weekends while maintaining my day job with no drops in productivity or outcomes (in fact I&#x27;ve performed better) for about 9 months and have gotten a good amount of traction. I was really afraid that it was going to take over my life but I&#x27;m very happy with how straightforward things have been. Building a CRM solo has been quite a lift but it&#x27;s gone quite well.<p>Here are my tips:<p>• Get your first customer as early as possible. I know this isn&#x27;t &quot;new&quot; 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<p>• Separate functions into days of the week as much as possible! I&#x27;ve found this to be critical for not burning out and maintaining high productivity over extended periods (9 months doesn&#x27;t sound like much, but it&#x27;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<p>• Don&#x27;t stop exercising. Exercise MORE. I&#x27;m a night owl but I transitioned to the &quot;at the gym at 5am&quot; guy, lunchtime run, and Jiujitsu in evenings; and I ended up somehow spending <i>more</i> time plugging away at the keyboard. The mantra &quot;the way you do anything is the way you do everything&quot; really comes to mind.<p>• 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&#x27;s too easy for these to slide otherwise<p>• Creative uses of ChatGPT! I&#x27;m using Nylas&#x27; free tier and the ChatGPT API to automate triaging my own customer support emails, and texting myself if it&#x27;s urgent. This lets me have near-zero interruptions during my day job from my side hustle.<p>• More ChatGPT. If you don&#x27;t know how to do something, talk to ChatGPT interactively to get &quot;good enough&quot; 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 &quot;what am I missing here&quot; or &quot;what&#x27;s going to bite me in the ass&quot;. You absolutely need a paid subscription (I use both ChatGPT4 and Claude)<p>• 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&#x27;ll find you can actually take work off your mind when you&#x27;re not working<p>• Identify opportunities for crunch times and adjust routine. I&#x27;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<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;temple-tools.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;temple-tools.com</a>

Keeping away form VCs that &quot;know better&quot; how to monetize my time seems like a proven technique for managing my time. Money I create directly impacts my loved ones.