Founder School

Building your own software has gotten dramatically easier in the last year or so. AI completely changed the problem for builders and makers of all stripes. But it did not collapse the amount of time it takes to develop judgment and taste. You can ship a working app in a weekend and still have no idea whether anyone wants it, what to charge, who to tell, or how to find prospects that fit your ICP. In short, building a real business around what you've built remains stubbornly hard.

And there's a problem with the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley too. Advice that works for building a Silicon Valley unicorn and attracting VC money and scaling like crazy with a big team, that advice simply does NOT work for a solo founder bootstrapping a business.

That gap between the difficulty of the task and the lack of resources for solo founders is why I built FounderSchool. It encapsulates everything I've learned over the last 10+ years building my own things and helping other solo founders plan, build, and launch businesses around their own niche software ideas.

So here's what I think a solo founder actually needs:

1. Knowledge. Not a library. The big idea, and the steps to execute it. Most programs sell volume: hours of video, a massive vault of content, 200 templates. What a new solo founder actually needs is narrower. How to choose a market. How to validate demand. How to talk to customers. How to define an MVP. How to price it. How to launch it. How to find the first customers.

2. Speed. You have nights and weekends. Call it 20-30 hours a week if you're lucky and it's the only thing you do outside your day job. That means harnessing daily 1% compounding gains instead of counting on the long uninterrupted stretches you'd have if this were the day job. Anything that takes six months to pay off arrives too late.

3. Low cost. Solo founders are pre-revenue and almost always bootstrapping. A $5k mastermind is priced for people who already made it, and if they've already made it, they probably don't need what the mastermind is selling. Whatever helps you build the thing should cost less than the thing. How does $49 for the first 100 signups sound? Yeah, that sounds about right.

4. Structure. The information is free and out there. But getting to tried-and-true best practices takes a lot of guessing and checking without someone there to tell you "here's how you do this faster and better." The sequence is something you have to piece together too. The pieces aren't secret — validate, build, launch, distribute. What's missing is knowing what order to do them in, and when to stop doing one and start the next.

5. Accountability. Being a solo founder means nobody notices or calls you out when you put the computer away. You become your own worst enemy. This is the least interesting item on the list and probably the one that decides who ships and who ends up with a folder of half-finished repos. Accountability is the reason we have teachers and schools and course syllabuses and textbooks. It's amazing how much accountability comes from just a little external structure and having to talk about your idea with other people.

6. Community. Specifically cohorts, not an evergreen Discord. A big always-on community has people at every possible stage, which means nobody is where you are. A cohort is ten people hitting week three in the same week. Same problems, same time.

7. Mentorship. Structure is really important. But every idea is unique in its own way, with challenges and consequences that are hard to predict or overcome on your own. Mentorship speeds up the learning curve. Solo founders lose more time to those judgment calls than to any technical problem, because the internet will hand you forty different, equally confident answers when what you need is one answer from someone with the wisdom of experience.

   The honest problem is that real mentorship is expensive, which fights directly with low cost. One-on-one at any useful frequency prices out a lot of the people who need it. Group cohort sessions — live brainstorming and sharing — are the compromise. Less 1:1 attention, but you hear ten other people's problems, and half of them are about to be yours.

That's the theory. I'm running the first cohort small and deliberately, because I'd rather have ten of the right people than a hundred of the wrong ones.

Happy to answer any questions about what I'm building or what I've learned along my journey