I’m not a huge fan of the term polymath. It sounds kinda pretentious but sometimes the best word for something is that way. Today I was struck by the wild variety of tasks and skills that it takes to run a business principally on your own. So I wanted to walk through some of disparate aspects of the ‘job’. Hopefully giving someone who is considering going out on their own some good food for thought.

My intention isn’t to scare anyone off, but just to help you understand the inherent complexity of this line of work, and an appreciation for the things other people handle for you in a J-O-B, job.

General Development

• Software engineering
• Bug tracking
• Product Design
• Release planning
• Customer support
• Version Control
• iTunes Connect submission lifecycle

iOS Development

• Objective C, Xcode, Interface Builder
• Device and iOS version management
• Photoshop, PaintCode
• Testing / QA

Server Development

• Ruby on Rails
• Postgres
• Memcached, nginx, redis
• Queueing, sidekiq
• Linux system administration, Backups, Security updates

Operations

• iTunes Connect, contracts, payments,
• Accounting, Taxes and banking.
• Budgeting
• Compliance, Local, State, Federal, Business Licenses
• Benefits / Welness
• General hosting, email, domains, etc

Marketing

• Websites
• ‘Brand’, personal and otherwise
• Photoshop
• Marketing concepts and ideas
• Microeconomics