Roles for running my company

Even when operating a company with just a single person like I run EmailEngine, it is still important to cover all the different roles that running a company entails. I can't just develop software and ignore everything else, as such a company would surely fail.

I might not have a good answer for every specific role, but I still need to acknowledge that these roles exist, and if I'm not able to fully cover them, then what must I do to compensate?

These are the roles I have defined for my company:

Software Development

There is a 1-person development team, that's me. I don't outsource any development tasks. So, I either build stuff myself or use ready-made open-source components.

IT Operations

EmailEngine is a downloadable software, so there are no services to operate. A simple web app for managing payments and license keys is hosted on a VPS.

Sales

The main sales process is self-serve. Customers discover EmailEngine, sign up and start paying. There are also inbound sales where potential customers approach me before buying.

I advise non-technical persons and persons with special feature requests to consider an alternative instead of going with EmailEngine. This is for me to avoid support burden later on.

While getting more customers is essential, minimizing current and future efforts to serve the customer is also important. Adding additional overhead with each customer does not scale with a one-person team!

Marketing

I have no marketing budget, so I can't use paid ads or any other channel that includes costs. The primary marketing channel for EmailEngine is Engineering as Marketing. I develop and release free, open-source projects and link to EmailEngine from the documentation sites of said free products.

The secondary marketing channel is SEO. This mainly includes releasing relevant blog posts that describe how to use EmailEngine features to tackle specific issues.

Product management

I get some input for my Trello board from customers, but product planning is mostly derived from my initial vision. EmailEngine should not have a gazillion features, one for each customer. Instead, it should only tackle a few hard-to-solve issues.

Customer support

The primary channel is email-based ticketing software. I try to answer urgent issues as fast as possible and deal with anything else once a day. The secondary channel is a public Discord chat channel where I go through pending messages daily.

Customer success

I haven't defined an "official" customer success role for myself. It's more of a continuation of general customer support. If a customer wants to use EmailEngine to handle a specific task that has yet to be covered, I help figure out how to do this and write it up into a documentation page for other customers.

Organizational services

Anything office-related is handled by the co-working office in which I reside. I also have an accountant. I used to do all the accounting myself, but it got too complex for me to handle.