I do development for one week and marketing and documentation for one week

I know the advice is to find a co-founder. But what if you can’t find a co-founder? Yes, having a co-founder is great. But there are companies that are founded by solo-founders who went on to become billion or million dollar companies.

But what if you are just getting started, you are working on a side-project that one day hopefully turn out to be a profitable venture? You have to be the founder, developer, marketer, all those roles at the same time?

Recently I read a blog post by BannerBear founder about his journey to his $10k MRR. There is mentioned about developing for one week, and working on marketing and documentation for the another week. And repeating this cycle.

This was something new to me, I mean I used to do these things in parallel, develop, document, market at the same time. So since this was new, I decided to give this a try, and I have been doing it for one month, and I thought this is a good time to reflect on it.

Developing for one week

I’m working on a web app with set of tools that help educators, and students. So the first week about this was developing. I the solution, I didn’t think about marketing, documentation and SEO. I focused only on development and making an MVP.

I develop everything on my development server, do the testing, the fix bugs. At the end of each development week cycle, I build what I have done and push it to the production server from the development server.

M&D for one week

I focused my second week completely on marketing and documentation. I set up a Facebook, Twitter pages and a YouTube channels.

I showed my product to some of my friends to get some feedback and help me to find some bugs.

I also did documentation, and also wrote some blog posts, tutorials on how to use the tool that I’m developing.

I only fixed if there were some critical bugs that needed urgent fixing. I left everything else for the development week.

At the same time I planned for what I’m going to do for the upcoming development week. Features I’m going to add, bug fixing I’m going to do, and also spent some time in learning technologies that might be needed for the upcoming features.

What’re the benefits I see in this method

Less stress

Yes, I feel less stress when I do one week of development and one week on M&D. Because when I try to develop every day I feel as if I’m not being productive or I feel stressed to push the next feature, fix a minor bug, even when there are not many people using my software.

Now I don’t feel the rush do things, I can think for one whole week what I’m going to develop.

More time to focus

Now that I have separated my work I feel as I’m more focused on what I should do during that day.

When doing developing and marketing and documentation and everything together I felt if as I was less focused on that I should do, and I end up being less productive, and more stress.

I usually write documentation to future features and tools that I expect to develop, and when I come to the development week I have a guide on what I should develop and I can do the developing based on that.

I’m going to continue this development and M&D cycle for another month to see if it’s going to be productive or not. But during first month of trying this method, I feel that it is a good method that suits me.

I feel this method is good specially if you’re a solo founder working on a side project all by yourself. But if you have a co-founder or a team, then you have people to do the marketing and development for you.

Are there anyone else who’s doing the same thing? Please leave it in the comments.