The Many Hats You Need to Wear As a Solopreneur
The Many Hats You Need to Wear As a Solopreneur
business personalities, awesome tools, and golden tips
We, solopreneurs, have a lot of responsibilities. Normally, we don't work with a bunch of specialists, hence the name "solo".
3 Business Personalities
Based on the idea from The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber, I love to think that solopreneurship has 3 business personalities. The technician, the entrepreneur, and the manager.
The Technician
The technician (or engineer) brings the main skill that you sell as a solopreneur.
This is the personality with the fewer hats out of all 3. And usually, your core competence that you sell, or use to build your indie business. As a developreneur, you are a:
Full-Stack Developer
QA engineer
UX & UI Designer
The Entrepreneur
Looks into the future and sets the vision. Focuses on growth and possibilities.
It's this personality that keeps you from stagnating. I wish I could just work in the business as The Technician, but we need to work on our business as well. When you're an entrepreneur, you're a:
CEO or Managing Director
Marketer
Sales
CFO
The Manager
The day-to-day organizer. The one that maintains systems and focuses on results.
The Manager makes sure The Technician does the work they're supposed to do on time and to the best quality. When you're a freelancer or contractor, it's also about accounting and relationships. Your roles as a manager are:
Project Manager (or Product Manager in case of indie)
Account Manager (Customer Success Manager)
HR
AP/AR
You’re a rockstar
I hate the startup-lingo “Rockstar Developer” or “JavaScript Ninja”, etc.
But when you’re a solopreneur, you should really be proud of being able to wear this many hats. This is definitely not easy. And usually, outsourcing isn’t even on the table for several months or even years.
The good news is that this way, you’ve got plenty of time to figure out what you’re good at, what you like to do, and what do you want to outsource. For example, I never thought, that I’d like doing marketing. Now, here I am, writing a newsletter and enjoying it. But I hate administrative tasks, dealing with taxes, documents, etc. So I usually outsource this.
If there’s a function that you’re not good at and/or hate doing, hire someone to do it for you as soon as you can. Let me know in reply if you’re interested in the mechanics of outsourcing.
❓ Weekly Quiz
Last week’s question: Who's the company behind Next.js?
Answer: Vercel.
Curated
👉 4 Developreneur Tools
Pika - Online tool to step up your screenshot game. Easy to use service. Just upload a screenshot or choose a tweet and tweak the size, colors, padding, and other values until you make something eye-pleasing.
Turborepo - I spent almost 40 hours in the past 2 weeks refactoring a codebase from an Nx monorepo to Turbo. This tool slaps! They make it easy to implement multiple packages and workspaces in a single repository without the usual headaches.
Contentlayer - Finally! A tool that converts multiple different data sources into easy-to-code JSON files. Use JS/TS in your code instead of fighting with headless CMS APIs, and markdown parsers. Build faster, generate types, and say goodbye to query langs.
Google I/O Firebase news - The tech conf season has officially started. Just a week after Vercel Ship, Google IO happened and they talked about AI, AI, and a little bit of AI. They also mentioned AI. Oh, and some Firebase updates.
👉 Content to binge
Solopreneur Grind is a weekly newsletter with actionable tips and stories of the daily life of Josh, a Canadian immigration lawyer and tech cofounder. Get your subscription here and get instant access to the first 3 chapters of his ebook “Just Get Started: Key business lessons from 2 businesses, 5 years and 100+ podcast episodes”.
Dan Spratling About Jamstack, The Many Hats, and Burnout ▷ - Last year I made a podcast (well, the only episode lol.) with Dan about his journey from software engineer to building his agency, Skyward Digital. His thoughts are super helpful for freelancers.
26 Part Series of VSCode Golden Tips - Well. VSCode has become the go-to text editor in the past decade. It’s one tool that I use every single day. So it might be worth spending a few hours on optimizing and customizing it to my liking. There’re so many ideas, tips, and tricks in this series.
👉 That’s about it
Thank you so much for reading my email! I’d be glad to hear from you if you have any questions, feedback, or comments.
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Until next time,
David