I'm a solo entrepreneur. I've tried to hire dozens of people, but nobody seems to be able to contribute beyond what I'm paying them. Maybe it's because I'm a terrible manager, or I've got skewed expectations, but I don't care - I'm done with teamwork!
How I work
I've got some 30+ clients I'm managing. Combined they're bringing me in low 5 digits monthly recurring revenue. About 5% of my revenue goes to paying for expenses, and I'm paying about 4.5% in tax and health insurance. The rest goes straight into my pocket. Today I've got roughly 4 times as much "salary" as I would have had if I had a "normal job", and it's increasing with about 30% every month.
When one of my clients has an issue, or wants a feature, I ALT+TAB into my IDE, and I fix it - Usually in 5 minutes. Sometimes I work straight in production, depending upon the complexity of the job - Implying 5 minutes after they've sent me an email, I'm replying with; "DONE!" And it's already deployed into production for them! Some times when I don't have the time to deal with it immediately, I write up a task at ClickUp, which is about the only "project infrastructure overhead app" I'm actually using.
For my customers this is "magic", and I'm able to move the platform forward in a way that seems like "supernatural" for everybody having had some experience with me.
If I had a team
If I was to do things the way everybody else are doing things, and hire a team, I'd end up with the following team ...
- Program Manager
- Scrum Master
- Kubernetes Engineer
- Frontend Developer
- Backend Developer
Each of these would require some $4,000 per month in salary, implying I'd have zero money left after I was done paying their salaries. If I had the above team, the process of moving my platform forward would be as follows.
- Customer contacts me about a bug or feature
- I create a use case and I send it to my program manager
- He puts it in his backlog and talks about it in his next grooming session
- The item is put into a sprint and assigned at least one, sometimes two developers, each having to orchestrate and collaborate on the same feature, waiting for each other to finish their part of the work, before the work is done
I have now taken a 5 minute job, and turned it into a 4 week job, where instead of spending 5 minutes on the job, 5 different people have spent in total about 25 hours on the thing. From 5 minutes to 25 hours implies the cost of implementing the thing has grown by 300x. Now implementing a simple feature costs me 30,000% more than if I simply did it myself.
Teamwork is retarded!
My platform
Maybe you're thinking "yeah, this works with smaller projects, but no serious project was ever built without a team." Well, let me tell you about my platform.
- It's a low-code and no-code platform
- I created my own programming language to be able to pull it through
- 100% of its middleware code is implemented in my programming language
- I can use it to deliver apps in seconds that others will sometimes need months to deliver
- It's got 8,700 commits towards its GitHub repository, 99.9% of these commits are mine
- It consists of 45 projects, one of being its frontend, which has about 50,000 lines of code
- Its middleware has about 27,500 lines of code
- The core of the project has about 35,000 lines of code
I have seen Fortune 500 companies with less code and fewer commits in their "core platform". So it's not a "toy project" by any stretch of the meaning of the word.
It's also currently used by some of the largest companies in the world, such as one US company having annual revenue of 3 billion dollars. In addition it's in use for some roughly 50 to 100 companies, even though I've got only 30 clients. The reason is because I've got partners reselling my platform to their clients. You can check out the platform below ...
In addition it's got better documentation than every single project I've ever worked on in my professional life. It's even got an AI chatbot completely automating customer support - Which is kind of funny considering I'm the only guy actually using it.
And it was created by one man. In fact, I don't know any ways to even implement something such as the above with "a team". If I had a team, the project would have failed a looooooong time ago!
If you're interested in seeing what products I can build with it, you can find my website below.
And yes, before you ask, I also created the website myself - 100% "by hand", using my own platform.
Teamwork is retarded! Maybe you think there's gonna come a joke, but there's no joke coming! Teamwork is a mediocrity guarantee, and the only thing you accomplish with it is the big ball of mud and spaghetti. And when people tell me "I need to scale", I simply laugh out loud, and I show them my Stripe account, and how it's increasing by 30% in MRR every single month - For then to tell them to go fuck themselves.
Admittedly, August was a particularly good month for me, and I don't usually increase my MRR by 117%, typically it's more like 30% - But below you can see the increase in revenue in August compared to the previous month.
If you use 1,000 PE, the company will technically be a Unicorn in about 6 months if my financial projections continues. Implying that I single handedly built a billion dollar company. Of course, it's a meaningless exercise because I wouldn't want to sell it ever. That would just result in all my clients getting inferior products and services, and besides, no investment company would ever buy a company with a single employee for a billion dollars - But the math holds up ...
Now please explain to me "how I need venture capital to scale to grow" after looking at the above figure ...
Teamwork is retarded!
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