Pabs
Morphing strategy for solo founders
Nothing. And everything.
Let me picture the current state of things:
→ 100,000+ new projects start on Lovable every day. 25M+ in a year. (TechCrunch)
→ 30M+ one-person businesses in the US now, 78% of all firms and still growing. (US Census)
→ 25% of Y Combinator's latest batch: codebases 95% AI-generated. (Y Combinator)
→ Dozens of AI tools for founders in one roundup. Not one helps you decide what to build. (OfficeChai)
→ GenAI is the new co-founder: it drove 6% of China's new firms, all small and lean. (Cai et al., 2025)
→ 42% of startups still fail building something nobody needs. (CB Insights)
But let me cut the BS here. Building (and design) software went from months-and-a-team to minutes-and-a-prompt, and the whole industry is racing to make it faster still. Cursor's at $2B ARR, Lovable and Replit are each worth billions. Other ones like Notion or Miro are just throwing AI features like candy.
Every one of those tools answers the same question: how do I build more, faster. How do I build more, no matter what. The token economy.
None of them answer the only one that still costs real money: should I be building this at all? That used to be the job of product strategy supporting market fit, right?
So let me ask you something. The last time you vibecoded something, did any of those tools stop you, make you pause, asked what you were actually building, or who it was for, not just at the beginning, but during the endless nights of debugging?
We build at full speed, thousands of times a day, in directions nobody checked.
The cost of building the wrong thing didn't fall when building got cheap. It rose, because now you ship it before you've had time to question it. And you've already spent the money.
I spent the last year digging into exactly that: what a product decision is worth when execution is basically free, who pays to get it right, and who doesn't.
Is product strategy still relevant for millions of solo founders, when the speed of building gets confused with excitement, and patience runs out? Perhaps PS needs to be transformed as well.
Check my full research in the first comment, with some behind-the-scenes too.
https://pabs.co.nz/research/pilot/the-data
1 Comment
This is a sharp framing.
I think product strategy still matters, but the old version is too slow for the AI-builder market.
Solo founders probably do not need a 40-page strategy deck before building. They need a fast decision filter that interrupts the build loop at the right moments:
Who is this for?
What painful behavior proves demand?
What would make someone pay before the product is polished?
What signal tells me to keep going, cut, or reposition?
That is where the value is now.
The danger is not that people build faster. It is that they can now build past the validation moment before they even notice it.
So product strategy in 2026 probably has to become less like consulting and more like a lightweight operating system for deciding what not to build.
Happy to put a tighter version in writing if useful. The most interesting part is probably how this could turn into a practical product/service for AI-native solo founders, not just a research argument.