Company of One
What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better--and smarter--solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business. Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis. Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
29mentions
23people
2015–2026years
66% recommend31% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- We are Malcolm and Josh, two engineers who wanted to bootstrap a business after reading the book Company of One. (If you haven't read it, it is a great book about building something sustainable instead of chasing exponential growth.) We never set out to build a Terraform company. We just wanted independence, a lifestyle business, and ended up here.
Terrateam is an open source tool that runs Terraform plans and applies inside pull requests. Think of it as Terraform orchestration designed to handle large monorepos and flexible workflows.
A few years ago we were trying to figure out how to start a company. We did not want VC money. We wanted independence and something sustainable, even if it grew slowly. That was the goal.
We tried a bunch of things first, Package Depot, Curl Bash, and something called "Hosted Atlantis." None of it really worked. But Terraform kept coming back into the picture. Honestly, we were not superfans. Writing HCL all day never excited us. But the orchestration problems around Terraform were unavoidable. Atlantis (the default OSS solution) would choke on monorepos. Terraform Cloud was expensive and rigid. GitHub Actions were brittle. We knew these were real pain points.
So we started building Terrateam. At first it was basically "Atlantis in OCaml" because I like writing OCaml and the type system gave me confidence in big refactors. Looking back, we tried to do too much at once and we did not differentiate clearly. But over time, we have figured it out.
What works well with Terrateam:
Monorepos, thanks to a tag system that lets you target the lowest possible piece of your infrastructure with custom workflows, policies, and access controls. We have teams running Terrateam across enormous repos with tens of thousands of directories, and the tag system keeps runs isolated and manageable Everything runs directly in PRs with no required UI. We think extra dashboards are an unnecessary context switch, although we still provide one when PRs are too constrained We are bootstrapped, for profit, and open source. Most of our competitors are closed source, VC funded, and focused on large enterprise. We are aiming at the mid-market instead. These are the teams that need orchestration, but do not want to spend six figures, talk about it in budget meetings. or divert engineers to build and maintain their own system. Terraform orchestration is important enough to pay for, but not the kind of problem most teams should be building and maintaining themselves.
As for AI, we do not yet know where it fits. Today we believe orchestration is still a human workflow, with people reviewing plans, enforcing policies, and approving changes. Maybe AI augments that in the future, but our focus is on making the fundamentals reliable right now. Infrastructure changes should be intentional.
Getting noticed is still the hardest part. We do not have a big marketing budget. We are not the default open source choice because Atlantis still is. But we have built something that real teams use in production, and we think the engineering and business problems here are interesting enough to be worth sharing.
Repo: https://github.com/terrateamio/terrateam
We would love feedback, especially from others who have tried to bootstrap infra tools, thought about GTM for devtools, or fought Terraform at scale.
- Low stress company, good profit, (I assume) loyal customers, founder works (much?) less than 40h/week and can quit anytime. Sounds like a good life for the founder. I admire that. Like the book "Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing"
- In case you don't already know, the indiehacker community is now quite mature with a few folks sharing their stories and lessons up to a few $M of ARR.
Microconf is also very high quality with great talks out there, a podcast and a slack community. Focused on SAAS software. Rob Walling, the founder, wrote a book recently. Not my area, but I heard good things about it.
I also like the Tropical MBA podcast. They get stories from entrepreneurs outside the shiny bubble (agency owners, Amazon FBA, SEO software, affiliates, etc)
Books that might interest you : Company of one by Paul Jarvis ; Profit First by Mike Michalowicz ;
Other good resources for entrepreneurs: - Seth Godin & Robert Cialdini for marketing - The Mom Test (how to talk to your users) - Made to Stick (how to craft stories and narratives) - $100M offers & $100M leads by Hormozi (currently reading them, it's mainly common concepts put in a simple and actionable way)
- > what's not being said: unless you're rich, it's much better to aim for a small, profitable business within the first 3 months and a low 7 figure exit. If you can't figure out how to do this, work for someone else until you do.
That is basically what the book Company of One says, yes. Zero to Sold is also another good book in the same vein.
- There's a good book I read about this, Company of One. I also recommend The Million Dollar One Person Business. They're both about solo foundership.
- In my experience the post quality has been down-trending for a while, but the podcasts are top-tier. Definitely check it out. I also recommend the books:
- Company of One
- Zero to Sold
- Million Dollar One Person Business
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