Single coder/ hacker / founder hustles?
Single coder/ hacker / founder hustles?
I find many posts where single coder/hacker builds a product/service over few months to years. Would like to know how many have gone ahead and made it to larger teams /companies and or at the least survived over many years.
This is important as it points to the reliability of such offerings/services, if one wants to do something more than just trials. This also goes with single founder companies. What's their longevity & trustability?
I was a single founder. Managed to grow it slowly then hire a team, we're currently a team of 10.
Very good to know! What's the product/ app?
Ministry of Testing - https://www.indiehackers.com/product/ministry-of-testing
Do you bootstrapped/self-funded your business?
Why didn't you look for a co-founder?
Yes, bootstrapped. I tried and failed with a cofounder. Also tried and failed then tried again with building a team.
https://clashroyaleapk.net/
Balsamiq was a single founder company. IH has a recent podcast on it.
I'm not sure that I would agree that "it points to the reliability of such offerings".
There are plenty of 1 person projects that have been around for many years, and are excellent sources of revenue for the creator.
Eg: I spend hours every day working in CodeKit. That's supposedly a 1 man project that's been around for years, and it's extremely successful.
Good to know your commitment with CodeKit. But how many such lone ops survive? The objective of my post is to get a handle on the typical experience & the success or survival ratios of teams that have gone bigger vs solo ones.
How many? Hundreds of thousands?
Again -- You seem to be searching for a correlation between headcount and longevity. I know of know statistical study that has established this correlation. And if there is a correlation, it's certainly non-obvious.
You could just as easily say that headcount correlates to shorter company lifespan in the majority of cases as burn-rate is higher. There are no shortage well-staffed companies that go under every day. And there are hundreds of thousands of single creator apps, blogs and SaaS projects that have been around for years.
The premise of your question seems to be that survivability and success equate to team growth. I think that premise is questionable (and even a little antithetical to the entire ethos of this site).
Team growth is great. It's certainly not a goal for everyone though. Having had big teams, small teams and no teams on projects -- I vastly prefer the solo-project that scales. There's nothing better than that, and no more enjoyable format to own/operate.
Obviously there will be a correlation between headcount vs success (revenue) - As team building is inevitable for scale up & meaningful survival. Solopreneurs don't make it very big. You need at least a business dev team or a CEO or ops management etc., Even Whatsapp, Instagram etc that had the highest employee to valuation ratios had decent team sizes (15+)
vs Longevity is a different thing altogether. Your point about ventures failing due to unsustainable headcount is totally valid there.
Solo project that scales (what this number might be is open & very relative - could be 100 or 1000 or 10k or 1M) is good - but that's a subjective call depending on one's predisposition. Some work better in teams.
I think, IH doesn't necessarily vouch or promote solo-successes, only points to the fact that even one who is motivated is good enough by him/her self to make it big. This I believe is the most important aspect.