Let's Debate: How much MRR do you think a solo founder can manage before hiring

Basically what @thomasm1964 said. Personally I am close to hiring and its quite a tough sort of crossroads.

But to talk about automations.

• A good helpdesk with a knowledgebase feature, and canned responses built in, has really helped me scale.
• Ditto for a good CRM which helps you do automated emails and generate reports.
• Documenting software development tasks, like XYZ new feature is really good too. Its easy/normal to skip that if you are the coder. These days I do this and if it looks like a fairly well contained chunk I do outsource development. Even if I do the coding myself, having a clear spec from the outset saves a lot of time later.

I use Freshdesk. And its good. But its not the only game in town for sure.

The answer is clearly over 1MM per year, but this may not necessarily be close to the upper bound:

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-sidekiq

@thomasm1964 hit the nail on the head here.

That said, I know (of) a few solo founders who make $100k+ in profit per month selling physical products.

They leverage aliexpress, FBA and all of those other things I don't know much about .

Sure, there are probably 100s of people involved in the operations of the business, but I'd still say they're solo founders.

Matthew,
I think this can vary a lot from the type of business.
if you have strong partners, you can delay contracting. I use freelancers before, aka Fiverr.com :)

For example, in my business Bybrand https://www.startupcosts.co/bybrand These current software helps me very well.

I do not feel the need to hire anyone yet.

As other said - has nothing to do with MRR. Has more to do with bottlenecks and fatigue.

My guess, having had $0 MRR on all of my projects :)

It depends on the idea, execution, and experience.

If an idea is incredible simple but very useful, there's very little to prevent massive growth. In the most extreme example, I think of an info product that resonates with people. Like writing a self-help book that gets global attention. On the other end, I imagine a complex AI system that requires tons of resources, and free users for years in order to monetize.

I don't worry about this because "the perfect is the enemy of the good." If I focused solely on trying to build the easiest to manage business with the highest potential, I'd probably never release anything :-P

For automation, I can think of 3 areas:

1. Supporting customers (and potential customers) with questions/support.
2. Software features, turning manual actions into built-in tools.
3. Operations, making sure you can scale up easily.

The cool thing is, you can wait until you have customers and a feedback loop rather than trying to anticipate every possible problem.

This comment was deleted 7 years ago