Advantages of Being Solo

I titled this blog Solo Programmer because for the last several years I’ve been on my own. My big successful site was something where I wrote 98% of the code and did 90% of the admin work (I did eventually hire some part time admin assistance). So what’s it like being on your own? There are a few advantages.

photo credit: *L*u*z*a*You decide the agenda. I’d keep a running list of projects that I wanted to get done, bugs that required fixes and user suggestions but when it came time to decide what to do next (then and now) it’s all up to me. That means if I didn’t feel like working on a feature at the moment I didn’t have to and if a great new idea springs to mind I can crank it out right away. One interesting tactic (that I’d like to replicate) that I employed was dividing up my work week into different types of work. Mondays I’d focus on SEO, monetization, building partnerships, Tuesday through Thursday I’d work on big features that would often take from several days to several weeks to get done and Fridays I’d crank out a couple minor updates or bug fixes. This allowed me to always have that sense of immediate accomplishment that generating a new feature brings while making sure the long term website and business development wasn’t ignored.

You decide the technology. Programmers are pretty much all geeks by nature who enjoy new technology. When you’re working on a large existing project or even working with a smaller team you’re often limited in introducing new technology either for reasons of backward compatibility or because it’s hard to do a new project in Java when the rest of the team only knows C++. When you’re solo you can pick a new technology because it’s cool and apply it to the next project. There may be costs in longer development time as you pick up new techniques or a new programming language but that stuff keeps it fun and interesting and helps to keep the true geek motivated.

photo credit: Mr.Thomas

Increased efficiency due to lack of communication overhead.One of the great classic books on computer project planning is the Mythical Man Month. The book explains how two programmers can’t necessarily do twice as much work as one and as teams get larger you get increasingly little more productivity out of additional members of the team. This is largely due to the fact that each member of the team needs to spend a certain amount of time communicating with other team members. This overhead typically grows linearly with the size of the team. When you’re solo you don’t have to communicate with other developers and so your programming time can be dedicated entirely to programming. Without the big business overhead of meetings and filling out various forms and reports and communications overhead I’d guess that a solo programmer can generate at least twice the amount of code as a programmer in a typical big office that’s part of a 7 or 8 person team.

You don’t have to take outside funding. There are so many advantages to not having to take outside funding that I can’t even begin to cover them here but that’s not really an option that a most startups have. When you’re solo however it’s much easier to boot strap a company by initially working on it part-time and it becomes much more viable to dedicate yourself to a project much sooner when you don’t have the big overhead that comes with maintaining a staff and offices. One thing we learned in the dot com bubble (the first on in the 90s) is that it’s not really a good thing for a company to go public or take too much funding at an early stage. Besides that fact that so many of the bubble companies spent at a ridiculous rate outside funding for a company that comes too early can put pressure on a company to preform immediately when it would be better for the company to take a long term approach. And the ultimate benefit of bootstrapping a company without outside funding is that when the exit comes all of the proceeds are your.

So there are a few of the benefits of being solo but don’t go thinking that it’s all good. There are a lot of disadvantages to being solo which I will address in a later post.