Solo Success Stories Edition #3

Featuring: Ben Kellie

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Feb 16, 2024

Hi there! 👋 My name’s David - I’m a writer and solopreneur from Northern Ireland. In this publication, you’ll find a growing archive of resources (created by myself and a collection of valued guests) for those hoping to become - or grow as - solopreneurs. While you’re here, you should also check out:

My other publication,How to Write for a Living
This course I created (included in my paid plan)

Thanks for stopping by! Now, back to the article.

Happy Friday, and welcome back to Solo Success Stories! Each week, I’ll feature a fellow solopreneur with an instructive story to share about how the pursuit of solo business success has shaped their life so far.

So without further ado, let’s hear from

Ben Kellie

Straight out of grad school, I somehow earned a job at SpaceX as an engineer in the Launch & Test department. The work was hard, the stakes were high, and the pressure was immense. Over the course of two years we raised a launch site out of the ruins of an old launch pad on California's central coast.

But after serving as Lead Engineer in the field for the first launch, I quit. The issue was that I had no control -- not over my time, not over my location, and in the process, I'd lost control of my ability to regulate stress.

I quit, but a couple of months later they came to me and hired me back as a contractor! This felt like a huge win.

Instead of being salary, I'd now be compensated hourly for my work. Finally, I thought, my time would be valued. Though I didn't realize it at the time, this was my first step toward solopreneurship.

I worked for nearly a year in that role, bouncing between hotels in Louisiana and Florida, taking last-second work trips to Belgium and the Bahamas that showed me the airport, some work site, and not much else.

The money was good, but for the value I was providing leading the first design, build, and operation of the company's rocket landing barges, being paid purely hourly didn't feel quite right.

Eventually, they asked me to either return to salary or take a hike. I took the hike. I moved home to Alaska and fumbled around with different business ideas. My dad had owned a small air cargo company in my youth that delivered critical supplies to Western Alaska, and I was trying to reconnect to that energy of purpose.

Meanwhile, though, my friends from the space industry kept calling. Some of them were still with SpaceX, but many more had gone on to other rocket startups. And they all needed help.

I used the existing LLC that I'd already setup for a drone company I'd been fumbling with. It felt odd to send invoices from an Alaskan drone company to major space companies around the country, but I realized that it signaled a major pent-up demand.

I changed the name of the company and was officially a real solopreneur.

However, the work started to mount. I didn't have a system for managing demand or scaling processes yet, and so just as quickly as I became a solopreneur I hired some young engineers and an operations manager. That transformed me into a traditional entrepreneur.

Similar to my time on the barge, we largely traded time for money, though we successfully put bounds on the time we were willing to give. Overall, we found a healthy balance between effort and rest. Over a few short years, the company grew and around the time I sold it we had 30 employees.

That was spring 2021, and I left that company just last June. I have been on a sabbatical for the past eight months, working on whatever might be next.

I am firmly in the phase of "unglamorous starts" where I am again running experiments to see what will stick, while also coaching hardware startup founders, designing their prototypes to meet critical milestones, and packaging lessons together from the last decade together into a scalable toolkit. I suspect they'll become a course at some point to help people bootstrap their hardware companies, but I'm still tinkering with it.

Crucially, I am also collaborating with a bunch of other solopreneurs from my network, banding together on bigger jobs that take more effort and plugging critical skills gaps on teams.

Here are some things that have felt true for me over this decade-plus run:

Trading time for money is great, but it's not the best approach.
- A lot of the work I have done, and still do, has been trading time for money. But the longer-term goal should always be trading value for money. This means packaging services, skills, and products. Don't only think about the time it will take, think about the total value you're delivering.
Solopreneurship can be lonely, hungry work.
- Build a network of people doing both adjacent and unrelated work. What does that mean? If you're a designer, find other designers you can collab with. In short, turn competitors into collaborators. But also find spaces that need design and spend time cultivating those relationships. You might find a niche.
- Make sure to reach out and check on people without expectation of work. Build real relationships. I have solved a lot of client problems for "free" over the years. Inevitably they call back when the challenges get bigger.
Many great solopreneurs aren't really doing it all themselves.
- They have bookkeepers, lawyers, assistants, and sometimes even one or two critical employees. You can be the face of the brand, but don't feel like you have to lift everything on your own.
Building assets is crucial.
- Similar to trading value for money, building assets like courses, IP, real property, and other tools is crucial. It might even be your Substack! You never know when markets will change, demand will drop for your new offering, or demand will rise for an old service. Assets help us diversify income streams to ride those ups and downs and changes in fortune.

I don't know if I'll remain solely a solopreneur. I love working with others and building big things usually takes a team. But I know for sure, it'll remain the foundation of everything I do going forward and always be something I can come back to.

List of links from the article:

Thanks Ben!

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