I thought OPC meant staying solo. Now I’m not so sure.

I used to think the whole point of a one person company was to stay one person.

That was what attracted me to the idea in the first place.

With AI, it suddenly feels possible to do much more without hiring.

You can build products, automate workflows, do research, handle support, and even create your own agents.

I think that was part of the dream for me: becoming a kind of 'super individual', one person capable of building something that used to require a whole team.

But the more solo founders I’ve looked at, the more I’ve noticed something I didn’t expect:

A lot of them don’t actually stay completely solo.

And it’s not the same path for everyone.

Tony Dinh eventually brought in a full-time person and freelancers.

Danny Postma has talked about realizing he probably should have started hiring earlier.

Pieter Levels has stayed extremely lean, while still using some outside help.

That surprised me more than I expected.

Staying solo was almost part of the definition of OPC in my head.

But in reality, founders seem to keep pushing the solo model until different things start becoming difficult.

Sometimes support takes too much time.

Sometimes marketing keeps getting pushed aside.

Sometimes maintenance or technical complexity becomes harder to handle alone.

And sometimes the founder simply becomes the bottleneck.

It made me realize I may have been confusing two different things:

'not needing a traditional organization'

and

'choosing to do everything alone.'

AI clearly makes staying solo possible for much longer and probably for many more people than before.

Some people may stay solo for years, maybe forever.

My husband is actually one example. He writes game-related fiction completely on his own. He doesn’t collaborate with anyone, and he doesn’t even read the comments on his work. For him, being solo isn’t a stage he’s trying to grow out of.

Others may eventually decide that bringing someone in makes more sense.

Maybe the future of OPC isn’t about staying solo at all costs.

Maybe the point is that you can stay solo for as long as it works and only bring someone in when it doesn’t.

For founders who started out wanting to stay solo: what made you bring someone in, or keep going alone?