How do you sell, develop a product, support that being the only one aboard?
Guys,
I wonder how you manage all the things being a solo founder. I am the founder of https://pagemtr.com - the amount of work is tremendous, mainly managing the infrastructure, costs, develop new functionalities, manage the existing ones. Additionally customer support and all the things around which like to happen when you don't expect that.
I would like to get focus on customer support and sales but I can't do that 100% (because of the rest of duties) what makes pain inside me.
Do you have any idea or proven way to scale a solo founder to an organization?
Hi Itma,
I think my best advice is to overcome any fear you may have regarding scaling up your business. If you have saved enough money to scale it, like for example, outsource someone else, you can do that by paying them to do the most tedious work so you can focus on what really matters.
You can hire a VA for more administrative tasks, you can hire a project manager (in my business this guys is the lifesaver) who will take most of the things out of your plate.
I founded 8 years ago my agency arctoscreative.com and it was not really easy for me to take that step and pay someone else. I don't know if the following happened to you, but I was afraid of not finding someone to do the same stuff like I do it and it was hard to delegate.
Maybe you can concentrate when you hire one of these roles, on creating recorded tutorials and create some sort of a knowledge base, and teach your employees on autopilot so they speed they learning phase. I applied this too.
For me the best you can do is delegate and hire a project manager for sure.
If you need anything, just hit me up and I'd like to chat with you about it.
Welcome to my world! :-) The most difficult thing in a tech startup is to hire a tech guys. They are expensive and that's the factor I keep the whole work done by myself. Nevertheless I've to start the process of splitting areas of the responsibility into a small blocks. Let's say: Support, IT backend, Accounting etc. And then having the small blocks I can easily delegate it (at least I think that way).
Yes, sure. You can start with small responsibilities. You don't image how much work can take out of plate a Project Manager and a VA. Try it out and find someone willing to take you to the next step.
Let us know how it goes from here!
The free book Getting Real by Basecamp has a lot of good advice on that. I recommend it to every solo founder.
Thanks, definitely I've to read to book (again :) ). Thanks!
What can you automate? Is there stuff you can delegate? How many customers do you have? What's your price?
If you spend a lot of time on infrastructure, can you find a way to spend less time on it?
As for features, do you really need to add them? Is it a deal breaker for your product? Will it improve your bottom line? Because if not, sales will. And with sales, you'll get more money to outsource feature development.
It might just be a matter of optimizing your priorities.
Yeah, actually these are good questions. And this:
probably points out the root problem. Thanks!