Process

An interesting aspect of working alone is the way you do it.

The tools and processes that you use make a difference, just like they do for bigger teams or companies.

But you can change and adapt those processes as quickly as you want, without worrying about the unintended effect it might have on someone else.

These are some of the specific ways that I work, and how I run Dropseed.

* marks Dropseed products or internal tools

"Business" stuff $77

• Email addresses Google Apps - $6
• Phone numbers Twilio - $1
• Accounting Quickbooks Online - $70
• Paper (literally) Dropbox iOS scanner - $0

Day to day $5

• Notes and to-dos *Stream - $0
• Reading *Worth Reading - $0
• Fat-marker sketching Concepts ($15 one-time)- $0
• Managing "status" *workhorse, Bitbar - $0
• Password management 1Password - $5
• Remote desktop Screens ($20 one-time) - $0
• Graphic design Figma - $0
• Time tracking Toggl - $0

Billing $0

Use Stripe. Beyond that, here are a few things I do. (Note that you have payment fees on Stripe, like all payment processors. But if you already have some volume going, you can a good chunk of "fee free processing" through things like Product Hunt Founder Club).

• Daily report and handling credit card failure *stripe-report - $0
• Purchase orders Quickbooks Online (see above) - $0
• Enterprise License Agreements

Hosting and app services $407

I've tried a lot of services and spent a lot of money here. These days I keep it as simple and boring as I can, but never rule out a new tool that could make all the difference.

• GitHub GitHub - $12
• Hosting Heroku - $170
• Hosting AWS - (avg. without credits) $100
• Uptime checks *pingding - $0
• Transactional email Mandrill - $20
• Public marketing website Netlify - $0
• Analytics Google Analytics - $0
• Email marketing Mailchimp - $55
• Domains Google Domains - $0
• Error monitoring Sentry - $30
• Logging Papertrail, sometimes - $10

Command line and development process $5

I have a few apps open all day, and iTerm2 and VSCode are two of them.

• Keeping your computer awake caffeinate - $0
• Terminal shortcuts git alias, z, *zc - $0
• Working locally "work" script + tmux - $0
• Navigating projects *p - $0
• Localhost tunnel ngrok - $5
• Managing dependency update PRs *workhorse - $0
• Navigating GitHub *Jump - $0

• Managing local repos *dev-status, *git hubclone - $0
• Diagrams for documentation Excalidraw - $0

Total $494 per month

Questions or ideas? Email me here or find me on Twitter.