In 2014 I started my own web agency. The dream was to manage a team of developers.
Long story short, I opted to sell everything to a partner agency last year, giving up on my dream, for the exact same reasons as the blog post.
Not because business wasn't good. The opposite was true actually, business was booming. We had gone from doing tiny website for small businesses, usually just the standard five pages (Home, About Us, Our Services, Our Team, Contact Us) and continually having to find new clients just to make ends meet, to building a name and reputation and getting into municipal projects, which were most importantly recurring clients. We did really well on the business administration side of things.
But the tech killed me. When I started coding in like 2010, I learned WordPress, so when 2014 rolled around, it was what I knew best, and it was perfect for the small sites we were doing.
Little did I know at the time, but that stack would become permanent for me. WordPress, MySQL, jQuery, served by a WHM/cPanel server.
The problem was that, in order to remain competitive and get clients to sign on the dotted line, we needed to have competitive prices. And competitive price leaves little room for R&D. So we became like a factory, churning out sites all with the same feel, but each and every client was super happy because we actually made killer WordPress admin panels. I became really good at WordPress and making it easy for the client to use.
So a few years go by and as we grow, we start to get bigger and bigger clients with bigger needs. We got hit with scaling problems. How do you scale a WHM server? I don't know the first thing about load balancing, I'm just a WorsPress dev. When those kinds of problems started arising, I started to dislike the job.
I knew the solution to the scaling issues was to use microservices hosted with a proper cloud provider, but I was already been spread too thin between the WordPress work and the business administration to learn Node.
Ultimately, I didn't have time to learn after work (and I didn't want to anyway because I would end up burnt out), and our competitive prices go out the window if suddenly I have to learn new stuff on the clients dime. So the only possibility course of action was using the tech we knew.
I am soooo glad we found a buyer for our business, and I am sooooo glad I got out of that. Anyway I know I began this with "long story short" and now it's a really long story so I'll end it here by saying that the moral of the story is that working with crappy tech was enough to kill my dream of self employment.
And yes we tried to hire people, but that's a whole different story.