partnership, partnersI believe it is important to find right people to have a successful start-up. A tech start-up! Is it possible to be a one man army?
EDIT 1: I am elaborating on this question more. Let us first focus only information technology startups. Let us consider 3 scenarios in parallel.
One, I develop a mobile phone app. Among the skills I have, coding skills is the best. Followed by that I have limited skills in marketing ,sales etc.
The second scenario is that I am developing a new location-based-search algorithm, again with good coding skills. And decent skills in other fronts.
Thirdly, I am considering an online T-shirt-only sales website. My value-add is that I develop unique customizable designs for the users.
What challenges will I face in each of these scenarios, as a single-(wo)man-entrepreneur. How to outsource/automate and get everything done? Would like to specifically know, how different parts of the whole business should be handled. From sales, marketing, accounting…
I certainly think it is possible to be a successful “solopreneur,” but you have to determine if doing things alone is feasible and sustainable given the tasks required to make your startup work. It can definitely happen, especially in the tech world where some or all operations may be possible to automate or outsource.
In planning things out, you should define all the necessary functions involved for the startup: all the roles and resources involved in implementing the vision, doing the technical work, finding customers and meeting their needs, using analytics to manage and constantly make improvements, doing the accounting and legal work, responding to marketplace changes, etc. You certainly may be able to do all of these on your own, depending on the startup.
In tech especially, you may have numerous sophisticated software, scripting platforms, bot and automation tools, 3rd party services/APIs, and skilled freelancers at your disposal to work with for free or for relatively low cost (certainly cheaper than hiring employees, or splitting equity with co-founders). How amenable will your operations be to automation and outsourcing to 3rd parties? The more they are, they more likely you can stay solo.
If you want the startup to be a thriving bona fide business, rather than a “side hustle” or hobby, I think you’ll eventually have to figure out a system for the business to work without your every little touch (via automation, outsourcing, and/or partners and employees). This way you can focus on making the executive and strategic decisions to ensure that your business thrives in the constantly-evolving marketplace.
I think it is very common to at least get started as a one-man (or woman) show. Maybe to just develop the idea or build a prototype. Or even just to see how it goes.
But in the long term, you should be honest about yourself – your specific abilities, your time, and your desired daily demands/workflow for the months and years to come. Having help at some point may help you stay energized, driven and passionate about the work, which is probably the biggest determining factor for the startup’s success!
You need to rethink what you mean as one man army.
Actually, it is very rare to be expert in all areas: tech, business, design (not to forget the last one).
If you are going to start working with freelancers around, e.g. designers, are you still one man army, or already have you got mercenaries? Do you want to be a general with loyal soldiers or with mercenaries?
Being solopreneur (I haven’t heard it before, but I love that!) means usually being founder. On the other hand, it is quite often.
Just start as you prefer but remember that usually everyone has got one area in which he/she is the expert. If you are skilled engineer, it is just a waste of your time and skills when you need to work on business side or design.
That’s why all startups have got specialized positions like CTO, CFO, COO, etc. You can become CEO, but still then it is more about business trips and handshakes, than coding. I think it will come to you naturally.
I don’t think you can truly be one man/woman army unless you have a “growth cap”. This is the model that some very successful restaurants use; they make one batch of whatever soup. If the batch is sold out, they shut down the store. Come tomorrow.
Having said that, it is usually not a natural life path for a business. That would be a perpetual, linear/logarithmic growth. And growing a business will eventually mean asking for help in things which are not your competitive advantage.
So while you can run all the parts of business by yourself, you can only do it for a certain size of the business. This applies to all of your given scenarios.
Its a fallacy that a software development shop could be run as a solopreneur. Granted that there were great solo inventors in the past (like Dennis Ritchie invented C), but in today’s competitive markets and short-delivery timeframes, its no longer possible. Consider the amount of effort that goes into developing an app or a software:
Analysis and Design: As per my experience in freelancing, most clients themselves don’t know what they want during the initial discussion about the app. At the very least, they will have a lot of problems communicating it to you in a technical manner - you have to be the empathy expert here and make sense of what they are saying and translate it to your technical RDBMS schemas and algorithms.
Coding: App development is no longer the same as it used to be in the olden days, you need to be aware of IDEs like Eclipse/Netbeans, VCS (Version Control Systems) like git and svn, packaging systems like composer, npm, nuget, etc. and also integration services like jenkins and travis-ci. Of course, its possible to create an app without using any of these, but then no one would want that if it takes years to develop instead of days.
Testing: The world of testing has gone through a lot more overhauling during the last two decades. The problem is that today’s user is extremely less tolerant of errors or bugs in a software as he/she can easily find other open source alternatives. Thus, to increase your user base, proper testing effort is a must. You need to use tools like Selenium and PhantomJS to simulate browser experiences of users and find any bugs beforehand, so you should know how to use these tools.
Deployment, Packaging and Looks: You should be aware of deployment tools and protocols like FTP/FileZilla and ssh in order to deploy your app. An app also needs to look professional today, a screen-saver should give a good user experience. So, you should be aware of the graphic tools as well such as GIMP, Inkscape or Photoshop.
Now, coming back to your question, is it possible for a solo programmer to master all these methodologies and tools, so they can do it all themselves? Probably yes, but their life will be extremely stressful as it is very tough and extremely time-consuming for a solo developer to handle all these things alone. Better find like-minded individuals like yourself and create a partnership. Or alternatively, hire salaried professionals in areas that are not your expertise.
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