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25 Lessons from the First Year of Solo Founders

Julian Weisser

Julian Weisser

— 9 min read
25 Lessons from the First Year of Solo Founders

This year we launched the Solo Founders Program. We believed that building alone was more viable than conventional wisdom suggested.

It turned out we were right but off by an order of magnitude.

Here are some things we learned about solo founding in 2025:

Core Solo Founding Ideas

1. You can do far more solo than most believe.

One SFP founder went from zero to $1M ARR in two months. Another sold to governments and public companies. Both had no team, no salespeople, just them solving a real problem. The assumption that you need a team to do serious work is wrong. You still likely need a team at some point to scale. You don't always need one to start and make significant progress.

2. "Solo, together."

You don't need anyone's permission. You don't need to convince a co-founder that your idea is worth pursuing. You just build. But solo doesn't have to mean isolated. SFP founders stayed close: getting feedback, sharing problems, feeling the pace of others and matching that intensity. Solo should not need to mean alone.

3. The decision to start solo reshapes every decision that follows.

Once you decide to go solo, you're not just skipping a co-founder—you're changing when you hire, how much equity you can offer, how you fundraise, how you build your leadership team. Many of the lessons below exist because that one early decision ripples forward.

4. Solo founding removes layers.

At a typical startup, you have the CEO, then their co-founders, then the team. That middle layer creates complexity. Remove it and something interesting happens: everyone is closer to the founder, decisions move faster, and the people you hire can be compensated far better. Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Wabi and Replika, pointed this out: when you go from three layers (co-founders) to two (solo), the early team forms a tighter bond.

5. Looking for a co-founder can be procrastination.

Sometimes you genuinely need a partner. But sometimes the search is a way to avoid the harder work of just starting. If you've been "looking for a co-founder" for three months, ask yourself: what would you be doing right now if you decided to go alone?

6. Co-founders of convenience are worse than no co-founder.

Several founders tried adding a "co-founder" mainly to satisfy accelerators or investors. It led to ego battles, chaos inside the team, and dead equity. A bad co-founder can kill a company (over two thirds of companies die due to co-founder conflict). If the only reason you're thinking of adding a co-founder is "it will look better," don't.

7. Momentum beats co-founder matching.

You can spend six months "looking for a co-founder" and never actually make progress. Instead, do the opposite: build, talk to customers, ship experiments, and let traction and momentum attract collaborators or a future co-founder. If you have to choose between another month of looking or another month of another month of building and talking to customers, do the latter.

Product and Customers

8. Your product can probably be smaller.

One founder built a chat interface on top of their core product. It seemed like a good idea — many products are adding on chat. But the chat didn't get users to the answers they wanted. It was a distraction from the core product, which was so good that customers happily paid thousands of dollars a month for it. They removed the chat. Things got better.

9. Don't be married to what once was.

An SFP founder was offering both cloud-hosted and self-hosted versions of their product. The cloud option seemed necessary — more accessible, easier to try. But the best customers, the ones most excited to pay and looking for the most differentiated solution, wanted self-hosted and they needed to try that. The cloud option was actually confusing them. Once it was removed, the highest-paying customers got more engaged.

10. In messy domains, run the service before you build the software.

In regulated or complex spaces, several founders didn't start with a big product. They manually ran the workflow as a service, learned every edge case, and only then began productizing. This is especially important for solo founders: it lets you validate demand, understand the real work, and avoid building the wrong thing. Multiple SFP founders have done this to great success in 2025.

11. You can build and sell on the same day.

One founder pivoted from their original idea, built a prototype, walked a block and a half from SFP, and sold it. Same day. The distance between "I have an idea" and "someone paid me for it" can be shorter than you think.

How Solo Founders Work

12. Solo founders should be much more generous with equity.

When you have no co-founders, you own 100% at the start. That changes how you can recruit. The solo founders we worked with gave far more equity to early hires than the industry medians suggest. It's a hiring advantage: you can offer meaningful ownership that co-founded companies can't match.

13. Unless you hire immediately you have to be multi-threaded.

Sales, marketing, customer success, product, support — you do all of it. The solo founders who struggle were the ones who couldn't context-switch, usually engineers who want to just build. You either learn to move between modes constantly, or you realize solo founding isn't for you.

14. New tools let you parallelize.

While Claude Code generates something, you answer customer emails. While a deploy runs, you reach out to prospects. The founders who use AI well are often switching back and forth in ways that weren't possible before.

15. Start with contractors.

Paul Klein IV built Browserbase starting with contractors. A year and a half later, it's a Series B company. Daniel from Abel Policing recruited his CTO by bringing him on as a contractor first, getting him interested in the problem, then converting him to full-time. This pattern — contract to hire — shows up repeatedly with solo founders. Co-founded companies usually hire full-time from the start because they have multiple people working full time already. Solo founders can be more flexible.

16. You could be going faster. But you need to see what fast looks like.

If you're building alone, you lose the reference point. You see highlight reels on Twitter but not what someone looks like when they're locked in, day after day, shipping constantly. Being around other founders working at high intensity recalibrates your sense of what's possible. That's one of the reasons the cohort model works.

Mindset and Pivots

17. Endurance is transitive.

One SFP founder was an endurance athlete. They took months to land their first customer. It was grinding, discouraging work. But once they did, that customer paid them $10,000 a month and loved the product. The ability to push through long slogs in one domain transfers to startups. If you've done it before — in sports, in school, in anything — you can apply that to founding as well.

18. When things work, they work quickly.

You can feel when an idea is working. Customers respond differently. Conversations are easier. It doesn't mean revenue comes immediately — sales cycles vary — but the signal is there early. The founders who spend too long on dead ends often had never experienced something that is working early on, so they didn't know what to compare it to. This is also why being around other solo founders can help provide perspective.

19. Pivots come from pulling the thread.

The promising pivots we see in SFP are not random. The founder's next idea was almost always connected to the previous one — same customer, adjacent problem, insight from a failed approach. They pulled the thread rather than cutting it. If you're pivoting to something completely unrelated, ask yourself what you learned from the last thing and whether you're actually using that knowledge.

Fundraising

20. Fundraising at the wrong time is a distraction.

When you've made real progress or have a strong story, fundraising is a multiplier. When you don't, it's a drain. You spend weeks in conversations that go nowhere, and you're not building or talking to customers. This is harmful to co-founded companies but even worse for solo founders. Time it right.

21. Good valuations can distract from terrible terms.

One founder got a term sheet where funding was contingent on them securing an O-1 visa before receiving funds — but they needed the funding to qualify for the visa. We found them a better investor with normal terms and a 4x valuation. Another got a $200k check with board observer rights attached. The valuation looked fine. The terms were not. Always read the side letter and never sign anything until you know the entirety of the terms you're agreeing to.

The Reality

22. Solo founding will never look less rational than it does right now.

Solo founders just surpassed 1 in 3 companies started. The cost of intelligence keeps going down and the tools are getting better. It will only become more viable to become a solo founder.

23. Solo founding amplifies emotional volatility, so plan your support.

Multiple solo founders described crying in the middle of the day, or waking up thinking, "What horrible thing is going to happen today?" With no co-founder to lean on, the highs and lows hit harder. The ones who made it put intentional support structures in place — friends, other founders, mentors, or programs like SFP — so they weren't carrying it entirely alone.

24. Highlight reels drain you. Behind the scenes footage motivates.

Polished success stories on Twitter are exhausting. But watching someone at your stage push through a hard week resets your expectations. This is why solo together is better than solo alone — it shows you reality and what's possible when you keep going.

25. Keep Going.

Companies don't usually die from running out of money. They die from running out of hope. Solo founders are more vulnerable to this — there's no co-founder to pull you through the bad weeks. But if customers are responding, keep going. Do not be discouraged if friends or family members wonder why you haven't quit. The founders who make it are often the ones who held on for longer than many feel is reasonable.

If you're exploring building a company on your own, apply to the Solo Founders Program.

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