From the start you should know — are you creating a company with a team or do you plan on keeping it a one man shop? This is a very personal decision but if you don’t decide up front, adding people to your team will be significantly harder. You’ll have to determine how your team will communicate, how to handle payroll and taxes, how to hire talented people, etc. If you start on your own and don’t plan for these changes, you may catch yourself in a tough spot. Adding people is a big task, and you’ll have to tackle it while keeping the company going. Your day to day flow will change significantly. You need to be prepared for this change, and knowing from day one will give you ample time to prepare.

There are advantages either way, and there’s no wrong decision. When FadingRed started, I was the only one working full time. This lasted for approximately 6 months, then Brittany came on full time. We worked from home for another 12 months before Sara came on and we moved into a dedicated office. We’ve just finished recruiting, and have two more developers who will join us next summer. The last two years have given me a great perspective on what it’s like working in different environments, and I’d like to share a little about each.

Working Solo

The best thing about working on your own is that you can really choose your own schedule. If you want to work from 3 in the afternoon until midnight, there’s no one stoping you. If you’re really working in solitude (no kids around, no pets, etc) you’ll be able to work without interruption as an added bonus. All of this is great, but working whenever you want can easily land you in a workaholic or slacker rut. You’ll want to avoid this type of rut because no matter who you are, you need to have a balance between work and life. You need balance for your health. When your schedule is constantly in flux, you’re throwing off this balance. This may not be an issue if you’re able to define boundaries for yourself.

For me, defining my own schedule was tough. I started working almost immediately after waking up. I’m not necessarily a morning person, but getting email handled right away felt good. What this translated to, though, was that I didn’t really give myself a chance to relax and enjoy a little bit of the day before starting work. On most days, I would stop after I got a good amount done, but sometimes I would find myself working a little past dinner to solve the last problem of the day. Days when I worked longer than I should have affected the next day. The workaholic in me brought out the slacker in me. I’d spend a bit of time the following day catching up on a TV show while working. I’m not nearly as productive while multitasking in this way. This all can become somewhat cyclical.

Now none of this was really bad. I still loved every day of work, but I think that if I had continued working solo that I would have needed to better define a schedule for myself.

At Home

Working from home is great. I had the luxury of working from home when it was just me, as well as when Brittany started working full time for FadingRed. Having zero commute time is wonderful.

I don’t have much to say about working from home that hasn’t already been said. What I do think is important is that you have an office in your home. The reason being that work can feel like it’s taking over your life if you aren’t able to close the door on it when it’s over.

Small Team

A lot changed for me when I was no longer the only one in the room each day. The first thing was that my schedule became more well defined. It was still flexible, but there was definitely more structure. This change was very good for me. I felt like my productivity and focus increased and I had a much better balance between work and life. That last sentence is really important — both my productivity and focus increased. I don’t really know what caused it, but it is definitely related to working with others around you. Maybe subconsciously people feel that they need to be productive if everyone around them is productive. Regardless, this is a very positive side effect of working with others.

The biggest change you’ll experience when switching from working on your own to working with even just one more person is the addition of communication. Communication is great if used effectively, but it’s a burden if done poorly.

Good communication leads to new ideas and improvements to ideas that you really just can’t come up with when it’s one person banging his head against the wall. One way to achieve this is through brainstorming. There’s really a lot to be said for bouncing ideas off of other people before you go ahead with them. You waste less time on bad ideas.

On the other hand, communication can get in the way. Structured communication (aka meetings) are monotonous. The way to avoid this is to just allow communication to be unstructured, but what you’re left with is interruption. Interruption is the arch nemesis of productivity. When one person interrupts another, it’s great for the interrupter; they get the information they need right away. The person who is being interrupted, though, has to switch her focus to address the other person, concentrate to respond meaningfully, and then re-focus on her task. This can be very frustrating and can take a lot out of you mentally. Managing communication effectively is something that many teams struggle with, and it’s because there isn’t a singular solution. The solution will be different for every team and even for different members within the team. Just know this ‚Äî no matter how well you know your co-workers, you will always be working to improve communication.

Office Life

These days I wake up and leave home to go into the office. FadingRed has a small office in downtown Chicago. After working at home for nearly a year and a half, an office is an adjustment. I know a lot of people who work from home and love it. In conversations I’ve had recently, these people kind of wrinkle their faces at the idea of switching back to office life. For me, it’s been great.

My commute is short. I live downtown and walk to work. I no longer have a home office. My work is totally separate. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do, but working all day every day just leads to burn out. Now it’s easier to focus on other interests in the evenings and on the weekends. Work isn’t there peeking out at me from the home office. I still work from home occasionally, so it’s really the best of both worlds.

For me, this is what I imagined from the time that I started. I never thought that working by myself cooped up at home all day would work long term. For others, that might be the right choice.

Plan It Out

These have been my experiences. Whatever you’re thinking, set yourself on the right course on day one. Think about where you see yourself and your company in the future. You don’t need to have a 5 year plan (or even any plan at all). Just an idea. Even small decisions can have a lasting impact. If you think you’ll have a team, imagine them there with you at the beginning. The transition will be easier if you don’t have to change everything all at once.

It’s been a year and a half now since FadingRed became a registered LLC. A year and a half — that’s not very long — you must be a startup, right? No.

The term startup is usually used to describe young companies in technology. In general, startups have relatively small teams and a reputation for being fun, hip companies where people love to work. This is exactly the kind of environment that we’re working to create, so why is this not a startup?

There’s a couple of commonalities that you’ll find with startups. First, they are seeking or have already found someone to invest in their company. Many startups even receive funding before anything has been built; they have an idea that an investor believes in. When more money is needed, an additional percentage of the company can be sold. Because investors are involved, return-on-investment becomes a key part of the business. Investors are hoping for high returns because the company is growing rapidly.

Growth is intriguing because the real goal is for revenue growth. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught watching the number of employees grow and anticipate that revenue will follow. Regardless, once hiring begins, startups add many new team members quickly. I’m not talking hundreds of people, but it’s likely that they may grow from five people to fifty in less than a year. Such fast paced hiring often leads to startups bringing in an executive with experience to help manage.

The first employees who work for a startup are compensated with stock (in addition to their base salary). These employees clock crazy hours because they love what they’re doing. What’s more exciting than working on or having just completed a 1.0 product? Working a little extra at the end of the day or on the weekend is no big deal because it’s so much fun. There’s a culture of energy and excitement!

Everything could change — for better or for worse — in a split second. So much is happening so quickly that it’s hard to control and mold your company into what you really want it to be.

While much of the what’s written above are generalizations, it fits with what comes to mind when a company is described as a startup. There’s too much, though, that just doesn’t fit with what we want our company to be.

For as long as I’ve been developing software for the Mac, developers who either work for themselves or small companies have been referring to themselves as indie developers. This, of course, is short for independent developers. Independent is a great way to describe our company — we think independently about how our company should operate.

We don’t have investors. We don’t work late or on the weekends. We don’t focus our energy on growing rapidly just for the sake of growing. We think outside the box.

When we started, our company didn’t have anything in the bank; we didn’t even have a bank account. A small operational overhead has allowed us to get off the ground without outside funding. For us, this was an ideal starting point. Starting from zero allows you to really understand how much revenue you need to support your business. Our revenues have been good, and we’ve built up to the point of being able expand our team. Expanding makes sense for us now because we have more work than our team can handle. We are growing because we need to grow not because we can.

We don’t work on the weekend because we don’t want to. That’s personal time. No one wants to feel like their entire life was spent working. We plan things out so that nothing critical happens at the end of the week, so there’s nothing to worry about during the weekend. Everyone should relax and enjoy life outside of work, and the weekend is your time.

What we’re building is a place where we love what we do, where everyone who works for our company loves what they do. Decisions are made based on what is best for business and our happiness. We don’t report numbers to investors to determine our success. Our success is based on the quality of what we create.