Solo founding is the startup world's least discussed path and one of its most common ones. Most people who build a product and sell it to their first 100 customers do it alone. They just don't make it onto the conference keynote.
Chris Webb built SoloStack in total obscurity for 14 months. No Twitter presence. No newsletter. No podcast. Just a product, a landing page, and cold outreach to people who fit his ICP. By the time anyone noticed, he had $400K ARR and no debt.
What the solo founders in this edition have in common isn't stubbornness — it's clarity. Without a co-founder to debate decisions, they were forced to develop a faster, more autonomous decision-making process. That muscle becomes an unfair advantage.
The tradeoffs are real. Loneliness is real. The risk of blind spots is real. But so is the speed of movement, the ownership of vision, and the absence of co-founder conflict — which research shows is the single most common cause of early startup death.
This edition is for the one building alone in a room somewhere, wondering if that's the right way to do it. Our answer: it depends. But it's worked more often than the culture admits.
