How to Bootstrap a Startup to $9M ARR.
Yasser Elsaid's (solo founder of Chatbase) guide to sales, pricing, content, margin analysis, and more for startups.
Kieran Ryan
Resources
Your Customers Say It Better
Your customers can describe your product better than you. The best founders I know relay their customers' voice instead of pitching their products. Instead of vague statements like "customers are begging us for this product" or "we haven't spent a dollar on marketing -
Profiles
Building solo with Anjan Katta
“Daylight is me finding my own identity.” Solo Founder Playbook — Anjan Katta Edition Last week, Anjan Katta, Founder & CEO of Daylight, joined us for dinner at the SFP house. He spoke candidly about the brutal difficulty of building Daylight — solo founder, consumer hardware, deep tech during COVID — but also
Resources
Reasons to Have a Co-Founder (instead of going solo)
There’s a strong case for solo founders as the default path, but there are good reasons to have a co-founder. My goal is to articulate the less obvious ones.
Profiles
One step closer to a lifespan‐extension drug for dogs & Enterprise Sales Reality Check
Loyal’s STAY clinical trial is now fully enrolled with 1,300+ dogs across 72 vet clinics. Solo Founder Spotlight - Celine Halioua (Loyal) This milestone is huge. STAY — a double‑blinded, placebo‑controlled study — is a pivotal step toward developing what could become the first FDA‑approved lifespan‑extension
Resources
MagicSchool Makes Waves at ISTE & How Top VCs Evaluate Solo Founders
MagicSchool Makes Waves — 5 Million Educators and a $45M Series B We generally say that conferences are a distraction unless they’re where your customers are — then they can be goldmines. In 2023, MagicSchool debuted at the world’s biggest edtech gathering with a folding table, a few balloons, and
Resources
GTM lessons from Founding Sales & The 20% close-rate pricing rule
Validate, Monetize, Repeat. Peter Kazanjy, author of Founding Sales, on taking your startup from first validation to repeatable revenue. Peter Kazanjy is a repeat founder who taught himself sales by doing it. He founded TalentBin, a talent search engine and recruiting CRM, and later sold the company to Monster Worldwide.
Profiles
The $80M sale of Base44 & Early teammates as a solo founder
Solo founder → 6 months → $80M sale to Wix Solo founder Maor Shlomo just sold his new company, Base44, to Wix for $80M — only six months after he wrote the first lines of code on a post–reserve–duty backpacking trip - and without a dollar of external funding. Shlomo isn’
Resources
Ex-Scale AI engineer's Cursor hack & Unfiltered fundraising advice
“Don’t let AI guess what good code looks like — show it explicitly.” Insights drawn from Namanyay’s (SFP S25) deep dive into an ex-Scale AI engineer's “gold-standard” files workflow. Namanyay’s newest Cursor teardown reveals a dead-simple way to stop wrestling with messy AI output: gold-standard files.
News
$50M Wander Series B & Dinner Wisdom with David Phillips
“Candidly speaking, Wander is my soul, but as a company” John Andrew and the Wander team just closed a $50M Series B, co-led by Fifth Wall and QED Investors. Another big win for solo founders — congrats, John Andrew and team! What’s Wander? Think Airbnb-style vacation homes with the consistent