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A review by jtth
Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis
2.0
I finished *Company of One*. This book seems to be a series of affirmations about starting and running a small business online. Its central argument is that small businesses are more nimble and can care more about their customers, and this is both good for profit, good for the psychological wellbeing of the owner, and good for society as a whole. I agree with this.
If you care about this space at all you’ve read almost everything in this book already when you read Jason Fried and DHH’s books. Which you should read. They were making most of these arguments 15 years ago in blog posts and magazine articles. So when, at the end of *Company of One*, the writer says he used to feel like he alone held these values until he embarked on the project of writing the book, I don’t believe him. (The author was a web developer, and every successful web developer in the West has heard of and been influenced by the two aforementioned folks.)
Most of the book seems to be some declaration of a value, like how being small means you can focus more on your existing customers and not on growth or scaling, followed by an example. The examples are where things fall apart for me. He profiles some real charlatans: someone whose webpage pitches how you won’t understand why your customer buys things unless you understand their brain (and pay to ask him and his undergraduate degree in psychology questions about that), someone who created a kind of alternative MBTI-astrology for people in business leadership, and a few people whose method of making money is arranging sponsored content masquerading as personal writing and marketing it all as a personal blog. This is not motivating. More than half of his examples are of people who are just lying about their authority within a domain to people who—while they command lots of capital—don’t know any better.
He also uses a lot of examples from companies that are not mere “companies of one.” Basecamp has 50 employees. Buffer has 72. He puts the behavior of Buffer on a pedestal throughout the book, while the premise of the book is to avoid getting that big in the first place, because being that big means you can’t do the things the book says are valuable about being small. So it all kind of falls apart. While Basecamp can talk a lot about how everyone should aspire to “lifestyle” businesses (e.g., ones that profit in order to afford a certain lifestyle for the owner, and not aspire to much more—note that this includes things like “I want to employ people at a living wage”), they still employ 50 people and make somewhere north of 20MM a year in profit. That is not a mere lifestyle business.
But there were some redeeming qualities, particularly as far as affirmations go. It never hurts me to hear that I should stop focusing on researching a product or planning some feature for something that doesn’t exist yet. I get motivated when I hear—almost independent of the source—that I need to just make and release the thing, that I need to interview potential customers, that I need to quickly get the thing in front of people and iterate. That’s useful and helpful. So the book isn’t worthless.
This book reminds me a lot of *Authority*, which is not a great thing.
If you care about this space at all you’ve read almost everything in this book already when you read Jason Fried and DHH’s books. Which you should read. They were making most of these arguments 15 years ago in blog posts and magazine articles. So when, at the end of *Company of One*, the writer says he used to feel like he alone held these values until he embarked on the project of writing the book, I don’t believe him. (The author was a web developer, and every successful web developer in the West has heard of and been influenced by the two aforementioned folks.)
Most of the book seems to be some declaration of a value, like how being small means you can focus more on your existing customers and not on growth or scaling, followed by an example. The examples are where things fall apart for me. He profiles some real charlatans: someone whose webpage pitches how you won’t understand why your customer buys things unless you understand their brain (and pay to ask him and his undergraduate degree in psychology questions about that), someone who created a kind of alternative MBTI-astrology for people in business leadership, and a few people whose method of making money is arranging sponsored content masquerading as personal writing and marketing it all as a personal blog. This is not motivating. More than half of his examples are of people who are just lying about their authority within a domain to people who—while they command lots of capital—don’t know any better.
He also uses a lot of examples from companies that are not mere “companies of one.” Basecamp has 50 employees. Buffer has 72. He puts the behavior of Buffer on a pedestal throughout the book, while the premise of the book is to avoid getting that big in the first place, because being that big means you can’t do the things the book says are valuable about being small. So it all kind of falls apart. While Basecamp can talk a lot about how everyone should aspire to “lifestyle” businesses (e.g., ones that profit in order to afford a certain lifestyle for the owner, and not aspire to much more—note that this includes things like “I want to employ people at a living wage”), they still employ 50 people and make somewhere north of 20MM a year in profit. That is not a mere lifestyle business.
But there were some redeeming qualities, particularly as far as affirmations go. It never hurts me to hear that I should stop focusing on researching a product or planning some feature for something that doesn’t exist yet. I get motivated when I hear—almost independent of the source—that I need to just make and release the thing, that I need to interview potential customers, that I need to quickly get the thing in front of people and iterate. That’s useful and helpful. So the book isn’t worthless.
This book reminds me a lot of *Authority*, which is not a great thing.