Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup

As I’ve automated pieces of my businesses, I’ve noticed an interesting trend: nearly anything I try to automate is easier to outsource first, and then automate down the line once the volume warrants it.

The reason for this is that at any given time you’re likely to have, say 30 tasks on your plate, and you should be trying to remove as many as possible from your task list; both one-time and ongoing tasks. Out of 30 tasks you might be able to outsource 6 or 8 of them tomorrow if you spend 2-3 hours today writing up the processes.

Every hour spent writing code is wasted time if that code could be replaced by a human being doing the same task until your product proves itself.

Compare that with automation, which can take a week or more to get each task off your plate since it takes a lot of code to automate a task.

Ideally, by the time I code it up, we’ll have many customers using the platform which means I’ll be working on a product I know is viable, and that’s paying for the time I’m spending to automate it. Agile Development, meet

Had we chosen to automate everything, the worst potential outcome would have been investing 160 hours of time (a huge amount of time for a startup), and then scrapping the whole thing. When you’re working on a small team you can’t afford to throw away that much time.

we came to the realization that we didn’t need to make DotNetInvoice multi-tenant in order to have a hosted version. The other invoicing players are multi-tenant because they coded their invoicing services from scratch, but it’s not the only way to do it. The more we thought about it we realized the benefits to keeping it a single-tenant applicatio

Agile Business.

My VAs have saved me literally hundreds of hours over the past few years.