Building with AI: The Solo Founder Era

When I started my first company in 2012, turning software into a real business usually meant building a team first. At a minimum, you needed two developers and a part-time designer, and enough savings to survive a few months while building and validating your startup.

For most people, that was enough to kill the idea of a tech business before it even started: too much risk, too much money, too many unknowns.

But that's all changed, first with remote work going mainstream, and now with AI. Welcome to the solo founder era. The age of the solopreneur.

It's never been this easy and this fast for a single person, even without a technical background, to build a website or mobile app in a few weekends. It's never been this cheap to publish it for the entire world. No more burning through thousands of dollars just to get started.

And I think it's only going to get easier and cheaper.

1. AI now generates more reliable code than two years ago

Two years ago, founders asked me: "How do I find a technical co-founder?" Now they ask: "How much can I build myself?"

Today, with Claude, Cursor, and Codex, a non-technical founder can build a working prototype. You still need engineers for complex systems, but "complex" means something different now. Just don't go live without a thorough code review, especially for anything high-stakes that could harm people.

And it's not just code. Services like Midjourney, fal.ai, or ChatGPT can generate professional visuals in minutes. Need a voiceover or sound effects? ElevenLabs creates authentic audio that used to require a recording studio. Need a demo video? Runway can help with that too.

A solo founder can now handle far more than before.

2. Infrastructure became more affordable, or even free

In 2012, setting up servers often meant wrestling with Linux configs and deployment pipelines, and a bunch of other voodoo. Today, tools like Claude Code or Codex can guide you through much of it.

Many of the services below offer free tiers that are more than enough for a prototype, and in some cases even an MVP. For example:

• Vercel deploys your frontend in seconds
• Cloudflare Pages hosts your static site
• Supabase gives you a database with auth built-in
• Stripe handles payments
• RevenueCat handles mobile subscriptions
• Resend handles email

The list of platforms and services goes on and on.

For most early-stage products, a "DevOps person" optional now. And you don’t need to build everything from scratch, like payments, because you can ask AI to help integrate your project with existing services.

3. Remote work became the default

Back then, remote work was unusual. You had to justify not being in an office.

Now it's the default, which means:

• You can hire the best person, not the closest person
• You can build partnerships remotely before ever meeting in person
• You don't need a fancy office anymore

This alone keeps costs dramatically lower. Plus, time zones work in your favor: someone on your team can be working while you're sleeping.

Before you think I'm saying "AI solves everything" - I'm not.

After 13 years of building, here's what I know still requires humans:

Understanding what to build. AI can write code. It cannot tell you if anyone wants what you're building. The hardest part of startups was never the code. It was figuring out what problem actually matters.

Selling. No AI is going to hop on a call with your first ten customers and figure out why they're not buying. That's still you.

Persistence through the dark moments. Every startup has a moment (usually many) where everything feels broken. AI won't push through that. You will.

Taste. Knowing what "good" looks like. Knowing when something is 80% done versus truly finished. This is still deeply human.

If I were starting over today

Sometimes I think about what I would do differently if I were starting from zero in 2026.

I wouldn't try to build a big team fast. I'd stay small as long as possible.

I'd use AI aggressively for everything it's good at.

I'd stop obsessing over perfect code. How often does code actually stay the same for more than six months? Libraries and dependencies update, requirements change because competitors ship new features, so you rewrite things anyway. And let's be honest, your code isn't perfect either. AI generates good enough code in most cases, so use it.

After all, customers don't pay for ideal code. They pay for a product that solves their problems.

I'd build only what's absolutely necessary to test my idea. Every feature you add before finding users is a guess. Most guesses are wrong. Ship the smallest thing that could work, then spend the rest of your time figuring out how to get it in front of people who might actually pay for it.

And I'd move faster than I think is comfortable. Because the cost of trying things has dropped so dramatically that the main risk isn't failure - it's moving too slowly while someone else figures it out first.

The bottom line

If you've been thinking about starting something, the barriers have never been lower. Building a business is still hard. Finding customers is still hard. But starting? That part just got easy.

This is the second in a series of posts about what I wish I'd known when I started. The first one, "From Fear to Founding," covers the emotional side of taking the leap. If you're an early-stage founder working through these decisions, I offer free mentoring sessions no pitch, just a conversation about whatever challenge you're facing.