[bachmeier]

I think part of it is that the nature of the work done by a solo founder is very different from that of many HN readers.

It's a matter of scale. "Why use a database? CSV files do everything I need." That's true for many projects but not as much when you have a few TB of data.

Some jobs require you to scale in several dimensions: types of projects/data, number of observations of data like email, number of reference files, and people you interact with. I'm not a solo founder but I've been there too. Once you're managing data that's too large for your brain, you need a system that scales, like GTD. Tools are useful but not at all as important as the system. I've tried a lot of tools, but GTD has been the constant that has (to some extent) kept me from giving in to the stress. You can't understand the scaling issues until you've worked in that type of position, where the stress of managing stuff and dealing with stuff constantly coming at you can overwhelm you.