Daniel Crenna

Code Soloist #5: Play your game

As a single developer you need to avoid several problems that larger teams (that’s everyone else) face in order to maximize your chance of success. Narrowing your vision on an achievable business as a soloist, rather than the one you’re thinking of, will feel like someone put a brick on your brake pedal.

You know this tired line from the big blogs and books, and you’ve probably reiterated it yourself at meetups: “scaling is a problem you want to have”.

No you don’t. You’re one talented person with two hands. Scaling will crush you in an afternoon. So will too many customers, even with adequate architecture. So will hunting for funding instead of hitting the command line. So will just about anything that takes more of your attention than you have to spare.

While you’re thinking about that, it’s probably a good idea to put those big picture books in a box. I’ll never knock someone for enjoying the motivation and thrill of a great business book, they’re like candy. But unless you plan on finding a co-founder, or a small team to collaborate with—worthy goals in their own right but out of scope for this blog—they aren’t telling you too many things you can act on. They’re playing a different game.

I suggest this is your game: one thousand customers, thirty dollars a month.

With a thousand customers, chances are if you offload any CPU intensive tasks and storage to commodity services you can run your application on one server. Sure, you can spend a little extra time making sure you’re building software that is aware of the possibility of scaling services horizontally and data vertically, but you won’t have to sweat it unless and until you’re ready.

With a thousand customers, you have your work cut out for you to find these folks and convince them that you’re offering a service they need for the long haul, but it’s not an insurmountable task. With low operating costs you can take more than a year to find all of them and still make a living on your own terms. What more could you ask for at this stage?

I’d even suggest limiting your signups and total capacity to those thousand customers, should you achieve what is already a difficult goal. It’s easy to put up an apology page and ask for emails to join a queue for the next chance at being served by your application. It might even attract the exclusivity that helps you justify enlisting help and bumping up to the next bracket.

The code soloist can earn more than enough doing what they love while delighting a thousand people. You might have a different picture of what enough means to you, but certainly starting from the success of a smaller project that you can handle is a great way to build momentum for a larger effort with all of its greater rewards and risks.

Code Soloist is for single-person software development companies that are trying to start something big with their bare hands. In it, I try to impart whatever I’ve learned, for better or worse, doing the same thing badly.