The Solo Founder Tax
I've been running RunPee as a side project / small business for seventeen years. I'm not a solo founder in the startup sense — there's no VC, no growth-at-all-costs mandate, no ambitions of a Series A. It's a niche app that solves a specific problem and earns enough to justify the ongoing work. But I've run it largely alone for most of its life, and I've had to learn, slowly and sometimes painfully, what that actually means.
What it means, mostly, is that you are everything. Not metaphorically — literally everything. You're the developer, the product manager, the customer support queue, the marketing department (such as it is), the person who renews the domain, the person who fixes the thing that broke on Sunday morning because of an API change you weren't notified about, and the person who reads the reviews in the App Store at 11pm even though you know you shouldn't.
This is what I think of as the solo founder tax. You pay it in time, in context-switching cost, and occasionally in ego — because the person who files the taxes and deals with the App Store guideline violations is the same person who just wrote what they thought was some really elegant code, and it's hard to feel like a craftsman while you're waiting on hold with your payment processor.
The advice I've seen for managing this, over the years, generally falls into two camps:
Camp 1: Systematize everything. Document your processes. Build SOPs. Schedule the boring tasks so they don't interrupt the important tasks. Treat the administrative parts of the business like first-class citizens.
Camp 2: Outsource everything you're not world-class at. Pay someone else to handle support, accounting, whatever you hate. Focus on your zone of genius (this phrase should be retired, but here we are).
Both of these have merit and both of them break down for a side project at RunPee's scale. The revenue doesn't justify outsourcing most things, and over-systematizing a one-person operation creates overhead that costs more than the thing you were trying to avoid.
What I've landed on, after seventeen years of trial and error, is simpler and less satisfying: decide which taxes you're actually willing to pay, and automate or ignore the rest.
Here's what I mean. There are some parts of the solo founder tax that I don't actually mind paying. I like reading support emails. Genuinely — not in a performing-gratitude way, but because after all this time, real messages from real people using the app in real theaters tell me things the analytics never will. Someone writing to say they used RunPee at a 3-hour Marvel movie with their 8-year-old and they were so relieved when the pee timer went off — that's not a burden. That's the whole reason the thing exists.
There are other parts I deeply dislike. I hate dealing with billing and payments. I hate anything that requires me to interface with an App Store policy in writing. I hate the specific task of updating app screenshots when the iOS design language changes, which it does every two years whether you want it to or not.
For the things I hate, I have three options: automate, defer, or eliminate. Automate: if a task can be scripted or scheduled, script it. Defer: if it can be batched into a quarterly session without breaking anything, batch it. Eliminate: if it's a task that exists only because I never decided not to do it, decide not to do it.
The eliminate category is underused by most solo operators, myself included. There are probably six things I'm doing because I started doing them in 2010 and never questioned whether they're still necessary. The answer, for at least some of them, is no.
The thing nobody tells you about running a one-person business for a long time is that sustainability is the product. The app is the visible product. The sustainable operating mode that lets you keep working on it for seventeen years — that's the real thing you built. An elaborate system you'll burn out maintaining isn't sustainable. A chaotic pile of undone tasks isn't sustainable either.
The sweet spot is different for everyone. Mine involves accepting that some things won't get done on schedule, automating the things that feel mechanical, and protecting the parts I actually like — the building, the feature work, the weird edge cases that only come up in specific theaters in specific time zones during premiere weekends.
The tax is real. You pay it. But you get to decide, at least somewhat, what you pay it in.
Someone asked me recently whether I'd recommend building a solo side project, given everything. I said yes, with the caveat that you should go in knowing it's a long game and the game changes significantly at the three-year mark, the seven-year mark, and again around year twelve.
At three years you know if the thing has legs. At seven you're past the point where novelty sustains you. At twelve you're doing it because you've decided to keep doing it, and that's actually a comfortable place to be — it's a choice, clearly a choice, and you're making it with full information.
Year seventeen: still making the choice. Still comfortable with it.