So let me get this straight, in this article we have:
- One guy selling shovels (AI “tools”) to clueless people
- Another guy who started and then folded his business in two months
- A chatGPT wrapper (it’s literally called chatPRD)
This is our evidence of the rise of solo million dollar companies? There are surely businesses out there but is AI really the driving reason here?
I’m convinced there is an entire sector of AI now built on scamming clueless people into thinking they can build their own AI B2B SaaS and purchasing tools & “things” without realizing building the product was always the easiest part.
> building the product was always the easiest part
building a product is the easiest part but building a good product that people want to use, pay for and functions without any issues is still as hard as ever.
i consistently see this sentiment online that "building is easy, marketing is hard" but then i see the product and its absolute AI generated slop I wouldnt touch for free
"building the product was always the easiest part."
It is so harsh. It is so painful. It is 100% true. I thought there would be an explosion in new software now that AI makes coding approach free (time or costs). Nope.
Keep an eye on the game modding communities. From my perspective the breadth and depth of individual effort has exploded over the past year or so, lots of big projects for older games too.
For me as introvert, it looks like naive dream about getting big income solo, without dealing with other people and politics and all "jazz". But it turns out there are clients to engage with. Oops. So why not doing business with a few other pals?
I always find the idea that a solo founder + AI being a whole company would be a good thing to be a bit wonky. I'm sure it's very popular in circles that see employees as cost-centers and that would rather not have to deal with taking care of staff (as in, treat them like people), but I just can't see this happening in a serious way.
I 100% believe that it's a formula that may work up to a certain scale as long as the whole operation toes the happy path line, but I wonder what happens when shit hits the fan in any meaningful way. Businesses adopting products is largely about trust, and having a vendor whose bus factor is essentially infinite feels risky unless it's a mundane service that doesn't process any data, that you don't mind being unreliable and that you are comfortable with it becoming unpredictable.
Not only that, but outsourcing so much to LLM providers feels like a recipe for degraded service (of which there is a lot, Anthropic's status page lists about an event every day or two and save for Claude Government, Anthropic is barely hanging on to two nines uptime) to take out the entire business.
Now, as to the two examples that the WSJ cites. Ben Broca's thing is Polsia, which resells agent services so that other entrepreneurs can do their AI-powered solo thing. It came up in news a while back because of how it exposes what the platform is doing to the public in real-time. Every time I look at it, it feels fishy -- right now, it lists ~3000 companies launched today, which may be true but doesn't quite sound right. I'm skeptical of how viable it is as a business, but I'm welcoming being proven wrong there. Until then, it has a strong "buy my sales webinar" vibe.
Troy Johnston's product is also in the same vein, selling consultant services to help entrepreneurs to leverage AI. Again, having an AI-powered business selling the AI-powered business dream isn't exactly that far from the webinar energy of the last one.
I couldn't find much about Samir Ahmad's venture, but seeing how it folded within a few months, it doesn't look like it really took off the ground.
Finally, Claire Vo's product looks like it might be ChatPRD, which looks largely like a wrapper around frontier models writing product documentation - this is what I would expect the whole one-person-startup to be like. Worth noting that they have since hired staff.
In the end, it seems like it's less "AI runs my million-dollar solo venture" and more "AI helps supporting the idea in the early days, but can only go so far and then you hire staff". That last bit is less flashy than WSJ's title work though.
Yes that's true, many classical civilizations saw work as a role for slaves. The ideal for classical elites wasn't to work, it was to have enough slaves that you didn't have to work yourself.
Aristotle in particular writes about this in his defense for the institution of slavery.
I adopted it by growing up poor to immigrant parents who had to work day and night to provide for me the best life they could.
Having goals other than financial well being is a luxury. That doesn't mean it's not attainable or shouldn't be pursued, it just means that as a practical matter one should first get their finances in order, have some means of providing for themselves and their loved ones, and then once that's taken care of they can begin to pursue other meaningful endeavors.
I told this joke at my father's funeral. He grew up poor but he had a different mindset and I think it speaks to his character and what he instilled in me:
"A successful business man from New York goes on vacation in a Mexican seaside town. He takes a walk down to the beach mid morning and sees a fisherman coming in with his catch. 'Wow, those are some beautiful fish. Tell me, what will you do the rest of the day?'
The fisherman replies, 'I will take my fish to the market, go home and take a nap, have lunch, play with my children for a bit, then go into town and drink wine and play music with my friends, and finally go home in the evening and make love to my wife.'
The business man replies, 'But if you stayed out all day catching fish you could make far more money!'
The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'
'You could buy another boat and hire some of the young men in town to fish for you and then start making an even bigger profit!'
The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'
'You could open a cannery by the dock and process the fish to be packaged and sold to other cities in other markets and make even more money!'
The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'
'You could retire to a small seaside town, do a little fishing in the morning, go home and take a nap, play with your children, play music with your friends, drink some wine, and go home to make love to your wife.'
Yeah it's a nice and pleasant story, assuming you've never actually met or seen the working or living conditions that most of the fisherman in your story actually live in and the terrible toll it takes on their body.
Those fisherman in your story die at a conservative rate of about 30,000 per year [1], and that's just from drowning. There are villages in the very Mexico your joke makes fun of with large populations of paralyzed thirty year olds due to spine injuries or untreatable permanent muscle pain, rates of skin cancer three times higher than indoor workers and eyes wrecked from clouded corneas and cataracts due to years of glare coming off the water.
And that's the physical toll on fishermen, there's also the economic burden of the fact that the guys actually doing the fishing don't own their boats are in an almost perpetual debt to middleman, which is why fisher "men" often also have to include their wives and kids in the occupation to help out... and of course since there's no insurance, if one of them dies the household's income goes to zero that same afternoon.
But yeah man... nice joke... I'm sure it really instilled a great sense of moral character in you.
So let me get this straight, in this article we have:
- One guy selling shovels (AI “tools”) to clueless people
- Another guy who started and then folded his business in two months
- A chatGPT wrapper (it’s literally called chatPRD)
This is our evidence of the rise of solo million dollar companies? There are surely businesses out there but is AI really the driving reason here?
I’m convinced there is an entire sector of AI now built on scamming clueless people into thinking they can build their own AI B2B SaaS and purchasing tools & “things” without realizing building the product was always the easiest part.
> building the product was always the easiest part
building a product is the easiest part but building a good product that people want to use, pay for and functions without any issues is still as hard as ever.
i consistently see this sentiment online that "building is easy, marketing is hard" but then i see the product and its absolute AI generated slop I wouldnt touch for free
"building the product was always the easiest part."
It is so harsh. It is so painful. It is 100% true. I thought there would be an explosion in new software now that AI makes coding approach free (time or costs). Nope.
Keep an eye on the game modding communities. From my perspective the breadth and depth of individual effort has exploded over the past year or so, lots of big projects for older games too.
I do think, there is. But just software, which is only used by the person who vibed it. And which never gets out to a broader public.
Beyond that, you are right.
For me as introvert, it looks like naive dream about getting big income solo, without dealing with other people and politics and all "jazz". But it turns out there are clients to engage with. Oops. So why not doing business with a few other pals?
This smells like it was hallucinated by chatgpt.
Perhaps AI truly is sentient now; the desire to be wanted and necessary is very human.
Or, perhaps it wasn't hallucinated by chatgpt but by the PR team at openai.
Sans paywall: https://archive.is/NIw0Z
I always find the idea that a solo founder + AI being a whole company would be a good thing to be a bit wonky. I'm sure it's very popular in circles that see employees as cost-centers and that would rather not have to deal with taking care of staff (as in, treat them like people), but I just can't see this happening in a serious way.
I 100% believe that it's a formula that may work up to a certain scale as long as the whole operation toes the happy path line, but I wonder what happens when shit hits the fan in any meaningful way. Businesses adopting products is largely about trust, and having a vendor whose bus factor is essentially infinite feels risky unless it's a mundane service that doesn't process any data, that you don't mind being unreliable and that you are comfortable with it becoming unpredictable.
Not only that, but outsourcing so much to LLM providers feels like a recipe for degraded service (of which there is a lot, Anthropic's status page lists about an event every day or two and save for Claude Government, Anthropic is barely hanging on to two nines uptime) to take out the entire business.
Now, as to the two examples that the WSJ cites. Ben Broca's thing is Polsia, which resells agent services so that other entrepreneurs can do their AI-powered solo thing. It came up in news a while back because of how it exposes what the platform is doing to the public in real-time. Every time I look at it, it feels fishy -- right now, it lists ~3000 companies launched today, which may be true but doesn't quite sound right. I'm skeptical of how viable it is as a business, but I'm welcoming being proven wrong there. Until then, it has a strong "buy my sales webinar" vibe.
Troy Johnston's product is also in the same vein, selling consultant services to help entrepreneurs to leverage AI. Again, having an AI-powered business selling the AI-powered business dream isn't exactly that far from the webinar energy of the last one.
I couldn't find much about Samir Ahmad's venture, but seeing how it folded within a few months, it doesn't look like it really took off the ground.
Finally, Claire Vo's product looks like it might be ChatPRD, which looks largely like a wrapper around frontier models writing product documentation - this is what I would expect the whole one-person-startup to be like. Worth noting that they have since hired staff.
In the end, it seems like it's less "AI runs my million-dollar solo venture" and more "AI helps supporting the idea in the early days, but can only go so far and then you hire staff". That last bit is less flashy than WSJ's title work though.
Like spermatozoïdes
Linking to an article from behind the paywall while assuming everyone pays for, what the title of publication is, WSJ, is no good.
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The rise of the deluded class who think being rich is more important than any other goal.
This is a thing for as long as human civilisation exists.
At what scale thiugh? When I was in school kids wanted to be firefighters or astronauts, now they want to be social media influencers
It’s not really though. Plenty of classical civilisations saw wealth chasing and work something to be looked down on
Yes that's true, many classical civilizations saw work as a role for slaves. The ideal for classical elites wasn't to work, it was to have enough slaves that you didn't have to work yourself.
Aristotle in particular writes about this in his defense for the institution of slavery.
In the old age, having money only without power to protect it was asking for trouble.
Exactly zero civilizations large enough to deserve the name had exactly one ideology
Is that why those civilizations ultimately collapsed?
having goals above financial well being is a luxury belief
Where did you adopt this perspective? Was it taught at your school or $religion?
I adopted it by growing up poor to immigrant parents who had to work day and night to provide for me the best life they could.
Having goals other than financial well being is a luxury. That doesn't mean it's not attainable or shouldn't be pursued, it just means that as a practical matter one should first get their finances in order, have some means of providing for themselves and their loved ones, and then once that's taken care of they can begin to pursue other meaningful endeavors.
I told this joke at my father's funeral. He grew up poor but he had a different mindset and I think it speaks to his character and what he instilled in me:
"A successful business man from New York goes on vacation in a Mexican seaside town. He takes a walk down to the beach mid morning and sees a fisherman coming in with his catch. 'Wow, those are some beautiful fish. Tell me, what will you do the rest of the day?'
The fisherman replies, 'I will take my fish to the market, go home and take a nap, have lunch, play with my children for a bit, then go into town and drink wine and play music with my friends, and finally go home in the evening and make love to my wife.'
The business man replies, 'But if you stayed out all day catching fish you could make far more money!'
The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'
'You could buy another boat and hire some of the young men in town to fish for you and then start making an even bigger profit!'
The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'
'You could open a cannery by the dock and process the fish to be packaged and sold to other cities in other markets and make even more money!'
The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'
'You could retire to a small seaside town, do a little fishing in the morning, go home and take a nap, play with your children, play music with your friends, drink some wine, and go home to make love to your wife.'
This sounds great until a businessman arrives with a trawler, takes all of the fish, and buys all of the land in your town.
Yeah it's a nice and pleasant story, assuming you've never actually met or seen the working or living conditions that most of the fisherman in your story actually live in and the terrible toll it takes on their body.
Those fisherman in your story die at a conservative rate of about 30,000 per year [1], and that's just from drowning. There are villages in the very Mexico your joke makes fun of with large populations of paralyzed thirty year olds due to spine injuries or untreatable permanent muscle pain, rates of skin cancer three times higher than indoor workers and eyes wrecked from clouded corneas and cataracts due to years of glare coming off the water.
And that's the physical toll on fishermen, there's also the economic burden of the fact that the guys actually doing the fishing don't own their boats are in an almost perpetual debt to middleman, which is why fisher "men" often also have to include their wives and kids in the occupation to help out... and of course since there's no insurance, if one of them dies the household's income goes to zero that same afternoon.
But yeah man... nice joke... I'm sure it really instilled a great sense of moral character in you.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03085...
It's actually a reposted story, it's not original.
The point of the story is to know the difference between “enough” and a compulsion to achieve that your burden keeps you from enjoying your life.
I hope some day you can appreciate it.
How did you arrive at this conclusion from the article?