I've been running a solo dev business for a while now and I keep seeing these "my $50k/month tech stack" posts where someone lists 47 tools with affiliate links and acts like Notion is the reason they're successful.
That's not this post.
This is the stuff I actually use. The unsexy, boring, "I can't believe I'm admitting this" stuff.
I didn't budget for the first eight months
Yeah. Eight months. I just kind of... vibed with my finances. Checked my bank account when I felt brave. Looked away when I didn't.
Turns out "vibing" is not a financial strategy.
The thing that actually fixed it was dumber than you'd think. I grabbed a monthly budget planner template and started filling it in on the first of every month. Takes maybe 20 minutes. I don't do anything sophisticated with it — I just write down what came in, what went out, and whether the difference is a positive number.
That's it. That's the whole system.
But knowing the number — even when it's bad — changed how I made decisions. I stopped buying tools "just in case." I stopped paying for annual plans on stuff I used twice. I cancelled three subscriptions in the first month because seeing them written down next to my actual revenue made me physically uncomfortable.
Cold outreach is terrible and I do it anyway
I hate cold emails. Genuinely. Every time I send one I feel like I'm bothering someone and I spend 20 minutes rewording a single sentence that nobody will read anyway.
But here's what happened when I stopped sending them: nothing. Literally nothing happened. No clients. No partnerships. No inbound. Turns out when you're small, nobody's looking for you.
So I went back to it. I keep a set of cold email templates that I rotate through. Not because they're magic — there are no magic emails — but because having a starting point means I actually send the thing instead of staring at a blank compose window for 40 minutes and then going back to coding.
My response rate is still bad. Like, maybe 8-12%? But 8% of something is better than 100% of nothing, which is what I was getting before.
Content is a job and I treat it like one
I used to post "when I felt inspired." Shockingly, I felt inspired about once every six weeks, usually at 2am, and the post was always either way too long or completely incoherent.
Now I use a content calendar. Not a complex editorial system — just a grid that tells me what I'm supposed to post and where. Monday is a short technical thing. Wednesday is whatever I'm working on. Friday is either a link roundup or nothing because honestly sometimes I just don't have it in me on a Friday.
The calendar doesn't make the content good. It makes the content exist. Which, at this stage, is more important.
Look, I still forget basic git commands
I've been writing code for years and I still google "git rebase vs merge" at least once a month. I keep a set of dev cheat sheets pinned in my workspace — Python, Git, Docker, SQL — and honestly I reference the Docker one more than I'd like to admit. Something about port mapping syntax just refuses to stick in my brain.
This isn't a productivity hack. It's a coping mechanism. But it saves me the context-switching that comes from opening a browser tab "just to check one thing" and then ending up on Reddit for 35 minutes.
The actual point
None of this is impressive. Nobody's going to write a TechCrunch article about a guy who uses a spreadsheet to track his money and a template to send emails.
But the gap between "solo dev with ideas" and "solo dev who makes money" isn't filled by the right SaaS tool. It's filled by boring, repeatable processes that you actually follow through on. The budget gets filled in because it takes 20 minutes, not because it's exciting. The emails get sent because there's a template, not because I woke up feeling confident.
If you're running something solo and it still feels chaotic, maybe you don't need another tool. Maybe you need a spreadsheet and the discipline to open it on the first of the month.
I put most of the templates I use up on my Gumroad if you want to grab them. They're free or pay-what-you-want. They're not going to change your life. But they might save you from vibing your way through another quarter of not knowing where your money went.
Top comments (0)