Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team.
So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.
I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)
So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.
Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.
I think there's a certain type of engineer that actively prefers working in a small team where you can make an outsized impact and wear many hats. I'm one of them lol.
I wonder if you could bring on just one really good dev who matches that description vs scaling up to a larger team. In many cases, a very small team of A+ players can beat a large team of B players.
Although it sounds like you're saying marketing/distribution may have played a larger role in your trajectory? In hindsight, do you think focusing your team-building efforts on the marketing side would have been a better strategy?
speleding|7 months ago
So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.
I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)
So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.
Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.
scubakid|7 months ago
I wonder if you could bring on just one really good dev who matches that description vs scaling up to a larger team. In many cases, a very small team of A+ players can beat a large team of B players.
Although it sounds like you're saying marketing/distribution may have played a larger role in your trajectory? In hindsight, do you think focusing your team-building efforts on the marketing side would have been a better strategy?