Dispatches from Month Zero
This is the first building-in-public update for The Solo Stack. I plan to do these regularly — honest snapshots of what's happening, what's working, and what isn't.
The premise is simple: if I'm going to write about solo building with AI, I should be doing it myself and sharing the real experience. Not the highlight reel. The actual process, including the parts that aren't flattering.
What Exists Right Now
As of this post, The Solo Stack is:
- A Ghost publication hosted on Fly.io
- A custom domain (you're reading it on thesolostack.dev)
- SSL certificates auto-renewing via Let's Encrypt
- 10 published posts including this one
- Zero subscribers (we just launched)
- Zero revenue (it's free, for now)
Total infrastructure cost so far: about $3/month for Fly.io hosting. That's it. Ghost is open source. The domain was around $10/year. SSL is free.
The entire thing was stood up in a single day, from domain registration to DNS configuration to first published content. That's not a brag. It's a data point about what's possible when you use the right tools and don't overcomplicate things.
What I'm Testing
The Solo Stack itself is an experiment in several hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Solo builders are an underserved audience. There's plenty of AI content (too much, frankly). There's plenty of entrepreneurship content. But the intersection. Practical, honest content specifically for people building one-person AI-native businesses. Is thin. Most AI content is either too technical or too shallow. Most business content assumes you have a team. I think there's a gap.
Hypothesis 2: Honest content beats polished content. The internet is full of slick, SEO-optimized, engagement-bait content about AI. I'm betting that straightforward writing — sharing what actually works, admitting what doesn't, showing real numbers. Will resonate more with the kind of reader I want to reach. People who build things can smell marketing from a mile away.
Hypothesis 3: AI-assisted content creation can be high quality. I use AI extensively in my writing process. Not to generate articles wholesale, but as a thinking partner and first-draft accelerator. The question I'm testing is whether AI-assisted content can meet the quality bar that discerning readers expect. If it can't, I'll hear about it.
What I'm Worried About
In the spirit of honesty:
Distribution. Great content with no readers is a journal, not a publication. I don't have an existing audience to bootstrap from. Building readership from zero, without paid promotion or social media gimmicks, is genuinely hard. The plan is to rely on the content being good enough to share, but that's a plan that requires patience and possibly some luck.
Consistency. Publishing regularly while also running a business is a classic challenge for solo builders. The content has to compete for time with revenue-generating work. I've set up systems to make writing more efficient, but the judgment, the editing, the "does this actually say something worth reading" evaluation. That's still me, and it takes time.
Staying practical. It's easy to drift into abstract philosophy about AI and work. That stuff is interesting to write but less useful to read. I want every piece to leave the reader with something they can actually do. A framework to apply, a tool to try, a cost to calculate. Maintaining that discipline over dozens of posts is harder than it sounds.
The Numbers (Such as They Are)
I'm going to track and share these metrics in every building-in-public update:
- Subscribers: 0
- Published posts: 10
- Monthly hosting cost: ~$3
- AI costs for content creation: ~$15 (for this initial batch)
- Time invested: ~6 hours (setup + writing + editing)
- Revenue: $0
These numbers will look different in a month. Whether they look better or worse will tell the story more honestly than anything I could write about it.
What's Next
For the next few weeks, the focus is:
- Content cadence: Establishing a sustainable publishing rhythm. Probably 2-3 posts per week to start.
- Distribution experiments: Testing different channels to see where the target audience actually hangs out. Not all channels are equal, and I'd rather find the right one than spray across all of them.
- Reader feedback: If you're reading this and have thoughts. On the content, the format, what you want to see more or less of. I want to hear it. Solo building doesn't mean solo thinking.
The whole point of building in public is accountability. If I write about the economics of solo building and then quietly let this publication die, that says something. If it grows into something useful, that says something too.
Month zero. Everything is ahead. Let's see what happens.