Building in public. One person, AI-native, every industry. Writing about what actually works when you stop hiring and start building.
strategy
The most dangerous moment in a solo build isn't the technical challenge. It's Tuesday night, the core feature works, and you think: one more thing. On a team, this impulse runs into friction. A product manager pushes back. A sprint boundary intervenes. A coworker asks whether
infrastructure
Every solo project I run has the same problem at some point: the deploy process is whatever I remember it being. SSH in, pull the latest code, restart the service, hope nothing broke. It works until it doesn't, and it doesn't at the worst possible time.
strategy
A solo builder writes a script to pull weekly revenue numbers from Stripe and format them into a spreadsheet. It saves 20 minutes a week. Useful, obviously. Worth writing. But it changes nothing fundamental about how the business operates. Then they write a second script. This one reads that same
tool-review
Nginx makes you configure SSL yourself. Caddy does it automatically, for every domain, with zero lines of certificate configuration. That difference sounds small until you've spent an afternoon debugging expired certs at 2 AM. If you're self-hosting anything on your own hardware, Caddy is the web
strategy
Every tool you add to your stack is a commitment. Not a one-time cost, but a recurring one: updates, configuration drift, mental overhead, another login, another tab, another monthly charge. Over the past year of building solo, I've added dozens of tools. But the more interesting list is
tool-review
WordPress powers 43% of the web. That number gets cited in every CMS comparison as if popularity were a recommendation. It's not. Popularity is inertia. And for a solo builder choosing a publishing platform in 2026, inertia is the enemy of a clean stack. Ghost handles blogging, newsletters,
strategy
Most solo builders get pricing backwards. They look at what competitors charge, knock off 20%, and try to make up the difference in volume. This feels safe. It is the single fastest way to burn out and go broke at the same time. The math on solo pricing is unforgiving,
ai
Most prompt engineering advice is written for people asking chatbots questions. "Act as an expert." "Think step by step." "Be thorough and careful." These phrases do approximately nothing when you're trying to get an LLM to classify 10,000 support tickets, extract
strategy
A client has never told me "I wish you had more people." What they've told me, in various phrasings over several years, is "I wish I knew what was happening without having to ask." That distinction matters more than most solo builders realize. Clients
tool-review
I used to run Spotlight for search, Rectangle for window management, Flycut for clipboard history, TextExpander for snippets, and a handful of Automator workflows for scripts. Raycast replaced all five. It's free. That's not a marketing claim. I uninstalled four apps in the same week I
strategy
I spent six weeks building a billing system. Custom invoicing, usage tracking, payment processing, dunning emails. It was clean, well-tested, and exactly what I needed. It was also the single worst allocation of time in my entire solo practice. Stripe Billing does all of it. $0 upfront. 0.7% per
ai
Most conversations about local AI models stay stuck on the same demo: install Ollama, run a chatbot, ask it to write a poem. That's a tech demo, not a tool. The interesting part starts when you stop chatting with local models and start routing work through them. Local