For five years, I’ve been building on my own. The best part is having control over my time. The hardest part is having to decide how to use all of it.
For the first two years, I had a day job and spent nearly every free hour making things. It was exciting, and I wanted to keep going. But after I became a full-time solo developer, working that way caught up with my health. I had to set a day each week when I would stop working and rest.
That helped, but the shape of the work kept changing. As I started handing more code-writing to AI, my job shifted toward planning projects, choosing what to build, and deciding what to do next. Managing that work was harder than I expected.
Beyond Development
A solo builder has to do more than build. There is marketing, customer support, operations, and all the small decisions that keep a product moving. I used to think of marketing as something I did alongside development. Now I see that I need to become a marketer, too.
That means changing how I spend my week. I’m deliberately trying to spend less time in development mode and more time on marketing and operations. It sounds straightforward, but when the whole day is mine to manage, it is easy to drift back to the work I know best: writing code.
Different Setups for Different Work
My iPhone can help or distract me depending on what I’m doing. The same apps that are useful when I’m sharing a product or talking to users can pull me away from focused development. I wanted a way to set up my phone for the kind of work I had chosen.
I built Stelo so I can make a mode for each kind of work and limit which apps are available in that mode. When I switch modes, my phone changes with me.
Switching on My Terms
I’ve tried focus and blocking apps that made me wish I had more control over when I could switch. As a solo builder, autonomy matters to me. I want to decide when to move from development to marketing, or when to return to operations—not have an app make that decision for me.
So with Stelo, I can switch modes when I choose. I’m also thinking about adding time-based rules in the future to make it easier to protect sleep and rest. For now, the point is to make the choice visible and help me follow through on it.
A Weekly Record
I also wanted to see how much of my week I actually spent in each mode. It’s easy to plan to do more marketing and then look up on Friday and realize I spent most of the week building. A weekly record gives me something concrete to reflect on.
It isn’t a score. It’s a way to compare the week I intended to have with the one I actually had.
Choosing Next Week’s Mode
If you’re building alone, try setting up a few modes for the different roles your product needs from you. Use Stelo to switch between them during the week, then look back: Which mode got most of your time? Did you make enough room for marketing and operations? What would you change next week?
I built Stelo to help me make those switches and notice where my time goes. If that sounds useful, give Stelo a try and see how your week is divided between modes.
