Top 5 Mistakes I Made as a Solopreneur in 2025

1. Infrastructure Is the Invisible Elephant 🐘

When I started my solopreneur journey, I thought I understood infrastructure. After all, I have spent ~16 years in corporate environments. CI/CD, servers, logs, monitoring — none of these were new words to me.

What was new was how invisible infrastructure becomes when you are alone — until it suddenly isn't.

I built many applications over a year. Most failed. A few survived. Looking back, I see a very consistent pattern from day one: my infrastructure mindset lagged behind my product excitement.

And infrastructure doesn't complain immediately. It waits. Then it makes you dance.

What I Mean by "Infrastructure"

For me, infrastructure slowly expanded from "where does my app run?" to a much larger set of questions:

• Do I really need CI/CD right now?
• If yes, which tools — and why?
• Cloud vs on-prem VM?
• Managed services or bare-metal-like control?
• How does code move from: commit → lint → test → build → CI → CD → server
• Do I care about tests today, or will Future-Me care a lot more?

Early on, I treated these as optional decisions. Turns out, they quietly decide how chaotic your daily life becomes.

Software Infrastructure: The Things You Don't See (Until 2 AM)

This one humbled me the most.

I've spent embarrassing hours digging into Docker containers because of:

• memory leaks
• missing logs
• exceptions swallowed somewhere deep inside the stack

Some patterns that hurt before they helped:

• Massive files (yes, 9K+ lines in a single file — more than once)
• No shared utilities → copy-paste logic everywhere
• Logging added after something broke
• No clear way to understand user behavior
• Re-inventing tools instead of using boring, proven ones

I still have not extensively used every better tool out there — Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma, Sentry, PostHog, etc. But I consciously shifted from "I'll build this myself" to "what's reliable and boring?".

That shift alone saved me weeks.

Process Infrastructure: The Part I Completely Ignored

This wasn't about tools. This was about discipline — or the lack of it.

Some learnings came the hard way:

• Files over ~500 lines become emotional debt
• Zero tests today = regression festival tomorrow
• CI pipelines that keep changing are stress multipliers
• CD pipelines that don't consider future infra choices box you in fast

When CI/CD breaks at midnight, it's not a "dev problem". It's a process problem that you postponed.

Once I started treating process as infrastructure — my nights became quieter.

Hardware Infrastructure: Overkill Is Also a Problem

Cloud gives you options. Too many options.

Some platforms were:

• too overwhelming for my project size
• too steep in learning curve
• too abstracted
• or too bare-bones

Eventually, my decision criteria became simple (and very personal):

• Cost (always)
• Community
• Integration ease with my software & process setup
• How fast I can debug when something breaks

Sometimes that meant a managed service. Sometimes a boring VM with my own base config.

No ideology. Just fit.

The Pattern I Finally Understood

After enough trial, error, and refactoring, one pattern became clear:

You write code (software) You follow repeatable steps (process) You deploy on infra you understand (hardware)

→ Life becomes calmer. Not perfect. Just calmer.

Infrastructure doesn't need to be fancy. It needs to be intentional.

Ignore the elephant, and it will decide your schedule. Acknowledge it early, and it quietly stays in the corner.

What This Post Is (and Isn't)

This isn't advice. It's a snapshot of mistakes I personally made — repeatedly — before learning to respect the invisible parts of building alone.

If you are a solopreneur, chances are:

• you have danced with this elephant already
• or you are about to

Either way, you're not alone 🙂