r/Solopreneur

Meaning - you don’t just aspire to be one, or are working towards becoming one, I mean you ARE one. You own a business of one. You are making enough revenue from the business to pay and support yourself.

Do you exist? If so, how are you doing? What is your business at a high-level? You don’t need to be specific. What's going well? What isn't?

I’m not trying to be a jerk, I understand everyone needs to start somewhere. I was there a couple of years ago. This sub just seems to be mostly bots regurgitating the same lines (it’s all about distribution!). If you’re a bot, please discuss your favorite b2b sales motion.

I’m a developer, and AI has completely changed how much I can build alone.

I can research an idea, create a prototype, write the code, and launch much faster than I could a few years ago.

But AI hasn’t solved the hardest part of being a solo builder: distribution.

You can build ten projects instead of two, but if nobody sees them, you have mostly increased the number of invisible projects you produce.

I wanted to solve this by creating an automated system that would build an audience for me.

The experiment was supposed to run for 60 days with a maximum budget of $60. I built the website, analytics, public activity ledger, automation, and an agent responsible for choosing what to do.

The irony is that automating the experiment created even more work.

The AI could write, analyze, and execute. But whenever an important strategic decision appeared, I had to intervene.

It initially wanted to rely mainly on Hacker News. I pushed it to search for more communities, which led to Reddit.

I posted the experiment in three subreddits.

The response wasn’t particularly positive. People challenged the objective, the measurement system, and the claim that the AI was autonomous.

But I finally had something I rarely get from X or LinkedIn without an audience: actual feedback.

That changed my conclusion.

I don’t need an elaborate system pretending to build an audience autonomously. I need access to communities where people already care about the problems I’m exploring.

Reddit provides that.

You can start without followers. If the subject fits the community, people can still see it, criticize it, and help you understand what is wrong.

I’m ending the automated experiment. It consumed too much time for a system that still depended on my ideas and judgment.

But I’m keeping one simple rule from it:

Every project I build will get one honest, community-specific Reddit post.

Not a sales pitch. Not a copied launch announcement. A real account of the problem, what I built, what failed, and what I need to understand.

For other solo builders: which platform has given you useful feedback before you had an audience?

Hi all! Recently, I started a Discord community to help SaaS founders promote their products, and it has over 150 members now.

If you want to show what you're building and get some feedback, share it with us! (see below)

As a solopreneur means you have to do everything, right?

So my gmail now looks like Time Square at the midnight of new year.

But I have to reply most of them(except trash and ads), it almost take all my time, I am scared to open the gmail now.

How did you guys handle it at first?

It’s been 4 months since launching my SaaS firsteyes.ai and I just crossed 40+ paying customers.

It took me a few months to learn some important lessons, and I want to share what worked and what didn’t with you guys.

For context, my SaaS shows how first-time visitors experience a website and highlights where confusion, hesitation, or friction might occur before conversion.

What worked:

1. Reddit: Reddit has been by far our best acquisition channel. Posting honestly about building the product, sharing numbers, asking for feedback and participating in conversations brought in a surprising number of users. The biggest lesson was that Reddit works much better when the post is actually useful or interesting instead of feeling like an advertisement.
2. X: X has also been surprisingly good for getting the product in front of the right people. Founder lessons, product updates, small wins, failures and even random memes have consistently brought attention. The important part was figuring out what people actually cared about instead of just posting about the product every day.
3. Talking to users: Some of the biggest improvements came from simply talking to people who actually used the product. You can spend days guessing what users want, or you can ask them and get the answer in 10 minutes. A lot of our product decisions now come directly from user feedback.
4. Improving the report: firsteyes AI is only useful if the report is actually good. We've spent a lot of time improving the quality of the analysis, making the recommendations more useful and fixing things that confused users. Better product quality also made it much easier to convince new users to pay.
5. Word of mouth: This started happening naturally once the product became better. Users began recommending firsteyes AI to other founders, which is probably one of the best signals you can get as an early-stage SaaS. Someone voluntarily telling another person about your product feels very different from getting a random click.

What didn't work:

1. LinkedIn: Honestly, LinkedIn has been a complete flop compared to Reddit and X. We tried different types of posts and approaches, but the amount of effort versus actual users was nowhere close to the other channels. Maybe there's a way to make it work, but we haven't found it yet.
2. Trying too many channels: Early on, it was tempting to be everywhere at once, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, SEO, communities, outreach and everything else. It felt productive, but it made it much harder to figure out what was actually working. Once we started doubling down on Reddit and X, things became much simpler.
3. Building features without enough validation: Classic mistake. Sometimes a feature sounds useful because it makes sense in your head, but users don't really care about it. We've wasted time building things that looked good on paper but didn't move the needle. Talking to users before building has saved us from repeating that mistake.
4. Assuming traffic was the answer: More visitors don't automatically mean more customers. At one point it was easy to think the solution was simply getting more people onto the website. Eventually it became clear that getting the right people and making the value obvious mattered much more than simply increasing traffic.

Next steps:

Doing more of what already works instead of constantly searching for the next marketing channel.

More Reddit, more X, more conversations with users and more work on the product.

To all my fellow solo founders: stay consistent, keep trying different things, and when you find something that works, double down on it.

There will be plenty of days when nothing seems to work and you're tempted to question the whole thing. Don't lose patience. Keep learning, keep improving, and keep showing up.

All the best to everyone building something cool 🚀

i keep seeing people recommend getting an accountability partner, and i've tried versions of it myself (coworker and me trading morning photo proof - worked for two weeks, then work got busy and it quietly died)

curious about the people who went further:

• if you had a partner or paid a coach: how did it END? not why you think it ended - literally what happened in the last week. did they ghost, did you, was there a moment
• if you paid: was paying different from the free version? did it actually change whether you showed up
• if it's still alive: what's the thing keeping it alive

asking because everyone talks about starting these but nobody talks about how they end

I started my travel agency focusing almost entirely on flights, but lately I'm questioning whether that's the best use of my time or I need to include tours and activities for clients.
The more trips I plan, the more I notice that flights are okay but not enough. They have lower commissions, while tours and experiences are where both my clients and I seem to get the most value.
For example I recently helped a couple planning a trip to the Dolomites. They originally just wanted flights, but after their request we ended up adding guided hikes and a few local experiences. Those activities became the highlight of their trip, and I earned more from them than I did from the flights.
The thing is that I still piece tours together from different local suppliers, which gets messy. I'm starting to think I need a better way to manage experiences instead of coordinating everything manually.
My people who work in the travel industry do you use one platform for most of your tour inventory, or rely on individual local operators?

Hello, I was working on a mac app. My question is, even after a month of launch, there are hardly any customers, I was wondering as a solopreneur, what do you do to get early customers. I created x, LinkedIn pages for the app l, posting there but nothing really helped. I am new to Reddit so Reddit keep deleting my post if I post about the app in details.

AI gave solo founders a much bigger roadmap. It did not give them more attention.

A single person can now turn a rough idea into landing-page copy, feature specs, support macros, ad concepts, and three working prototypes before lunch. That is useful, but it also makes weak ideas look unusually cheap. Making the draft is cheap. Supporting the decision usually isn't.

For a solo business, every new option creates a maintenance bill. Someone still has to choose the customer, answer the awkward edge case, keep the promise on the pricing page, and decide what gets ignored when two things break at once. AI can estimate and suggest, but it does not carry those tradeoffs through the next six months.

A practical filter is to ask three questions before adding an AI-generated option to the roadmap:

• Would this still be worth doing if it had to be supported manually for six months?
• What current commitment loses time if this moves forward?
• What did a real customer do or say that makes this problem urgent now?

If those answers are vague, more output is probably hiding a missing decision. The useful role for AI is to widen the search, expose alternatives, and make an idea easier to inspect. The founder's job is to use experience, judgment, and taste to make the list smaller again.

For a one-person company, restraint is not the opposite of speed. It is what keeps speed from turning into a pile of promises.

Hi everyone, the solo journey is really starting to creep up. It’s tough not having people who are in the same stage or going through the same thing to speak to. I also find that ALL I think about is my product, my ICP, and how painful the next pivot is going to be.

So I was thinking of creating a fun game or some kind of interactive tool (for free) for other solopreneurs to use to get you through the blues.

Crowdsourcing ideas so if anyone wants anything let me know.

I keep having this dumb problem where someone says reach back out in a few weeks, I make a note somewhere, then 3 weeks later I see their name and have to piece together the whole conversation again. email thread, LinkedIn, random note maybe a calendar thing. none of it is hard by itself it just gets scattered really fast and doesnt help Im not the most focused person.

I started cleaning some of this up recently because I was wasting way too much time figuring out who was actually worth following up with vs who was just sitting there from some old conversation. What are other people doing? And am I the only one finding this difficult..

I literally quit my accounting job to build a web app, even drove uber weekends for rent. Unlikely I did shut it down last week, you know 10k visitors, ~900 signups, but zero revenue. my honest post mortem(you know it’s like a letter of mistakes I did myself), i might have spent 95% of my time making the thing, fixing bugs and 5% telling anyone it exists.
So my question would be for solo builders, how do you actually split building vs marketing? and did you ever pay for tools or people to take marketing off your plate — did it actually work? I am asking these questions because my next build might be in this exact space, but this time i’m talking to people before building anything.

my side project is basically done at this point. it's an ai chief of staff type tool, been building it nights and weekends alongside my day job as a software engineer.

and now i'm stuck on the part i genuinely didn't prepare for: getting anyone to actually see it. i have no existing audience, no newsletter, no following anywhere. building felt hard but at least i knew what to do each day. marketing feels like throwing things at a wall with no feedback loop.

for the solopreneurs here who got past this stage, what actually worked? not the generic 'post on reddit and twitter' answer, i mean the real sequence, what you did first, second, third, and what you'd skip if you started over.

I started building products and then i shifted into building systems. Then those very systems started changing how i think.

I dont have a technical co-founder, engineering team. i started out with a problem.

Over the past few months i built Aevron, a multi-agent AI cognitive infrastructure system. i have currently have 50+ users. Then i built a end to end automated trading system and then i built Whozin, a group decision platform. It is still under development. Building all these have made me learn things i would not have otherwise be able to learn.

Turning vague intent into working architecture

Every single product starts with basic. "I want thinking to connect and evolve.", "I want stocks to be analysed automatically." The real work begins with questions like what data does this need, what should the system remember, what triggers what, what happens when something fails? You learn to translate intent → logic → architecture → behaviour. That translation is the actual skill and reading about product development never forces you to do it.

Converting human judgment into decision logic

Everyone says basic things or vague idea but systems need something precise. The trading setup made this unavoidable, intuition needed to become signals, conditions, rules, decisions. Most people who say they understand markets cannot do this translation. I needed to this. That gap between what you know and what you can actually encode is very important and needs to be precise.

Thinking in state, not just inputs and outputs

The biggest shift is when, useful systems are not stateless. History and context matters more than we think. What the system already knows matters. What has gone stale matters. Aevron deals with continuity of thought. Whozin deals with evolving group preferences. The trading system deals with changing market conditions. Three completely different products but built with the same underlying principle. The present only makes sense when the system understands what came before it.

Designing coordination between parts

Once a system becomes complex, intelligence becomes distributed. One component retrieves. Another analyses. Another validates. Another decides what happens next. Sometimes a human enters the loop. That forces thinking about ownership, handoffs, dependencies, sequencing, failure points, recovery. This kind of thinking only becomes obvious after something actually breaks and costs you something.

Knowing where AI should and should not make decisions

Not everything should be probabilistic and needs to be automated. Some problems need reasoning. Some need hard rules. Some need human judgment. The real skill is not to use AI but it is defining the boundary between AI judgment, deterministic logic, and human control.

Debugging systems instead of symptoms

When an output is wrong, the failure is usually upstream, bad data, wrong context, broken handoff, a weak assumption, or several of these interacting at once. Building taught me to trace failures backwards through the system instead of fixing whatever looks broken on the surface. I developed a habit of making a corrective action plan for all the possible failure modes so even the failures happen, the systems already have a plan.

Becoming precise about intent

The larger a system becomes, the more expensive ambiguity gets. "Make this smarter" means nothing. You need to know what exactly should happen, under what conditions, what should never happen, what does success actually look like. That precision has changed how I think about problems more than anything else, inside and outside product work.

I built everything on the basis of context and connectivity. The system becomes intelligent when it understands not just what something is but what came before it, what surrounds it, what it connects to, and what should happen next.

Anyone else gone through something similar building solo? Curious what skills surprised you most.

I’ve been doing this with a few service business owners recently and it’s been way more interesting than I expected.

Most people tell me they need more clients, and the first instinct is usually to find a bigger lead list or send more cold emails.

I think that’s backwards.

A video editor selling $1,000 projects, an automation consultant selling $5k implementations, and someone selling $20k corporate training should have completely different outbound strategies. The deal size changes who you should target, how much research is worth doing, which person inside the company matters, and what needs to be happening in that business for them to actually care right now.

So if you’re a solopreneur, consultant, freelancer or small agency, comment:

what you sell
average deal/project size
who you usually sell to

I’ll map the first segment I’d test, the decision-maker I’d go after, and 3–5 buying signals I’d look for before contacting anyone.

I’m building Sumora around this exact problem, so disclosure there. The idea is basically to make outbound less “here are 5,000 people matching some filters” and more “here are the 40 companies where something is happening that gives you an actual reason to reach out.”

If one of the strategies I map looks useful, I’m happy to build the full outbound plan for you too.

Maybe this isn't the right channel to debate this but i'm going to ask anyways. I have been working this past year and a half developing an app and I'm seeing now that as I'm getting closer to launch that I just can't do it all. I am a solopreneur not out of desire but necessity. I have a feeling a lot of people on this subreddit are in this same siuation. my question for all of you is this

**If given the opportunity to bring on help as a partner/investor, would you take it in exchange for giving up part of your ownership or is solo ownership your motivation?**

The reason I ask is I'm only 1 person and there's only so many hours in a day. I feel like giving up some of the company (because I can't hire them without company income) it an option and If the company fails to grow, it's because I can't get to market quickly enough. I'm not an expert in everything it takes to run a business. There far more qualified people than me who have done this time and time again. so it leaves me pondering if i should try to grown by myself and struggle because of my lack of experience/knowledge/time in going to market or give up some of the company if i can convince others to joine me. I feel I have a good product. it's almost built but the slog from a PoC to a paid SaaS is real and I need to figure out how to bridge that gap.

Do you think a product is dead if the user has to give READ permissions to their email.
any tips to over come this?

my product is simple -- it summarizes ALL the emails one receives from their children's school or sport teams (or other activities).

to do this, they need to give read access to gmail.

will they do it???
how do i make it appealing?

I’m curious if other developers have gone through this same process.

I’ve been building a sports prediction app called Take the Bet. It’s a free-to-play sports prediction/simulated betting game — no real-money gambling.

While I’ve been waiting for my developers to get everything finalized and for Apple approval, I keep finding myself adding functions, changing things and trying to make the app better even though we technically haven’t launched yet.

We were rejected last week for a couple of relatively minor issues. One was a missing screenshot. The other involved the login/join process. We had prepopulated username and password fields, but the user still had to physically touch each field before the Join button would work. That has now been fixed and we resubmitted.

We’re already approved and live on Google Play, but I haven’t really promoted the app yet because I want the iOS version available before I start pushing user acquisition. A large portion of the people I expect to reach are iPhone users.

Now I’m in this strange period where every day I wait, I see something else I want to improve or add.

Has anyone else gone through this before their first real launch? At some point do you just have to stop improving it, get it approved and live, and start learning from actual users?

If anyone wants to take a look, it’s called Take the Bet and I do have it available through TestFlight.

Any suggestions, App Review experiences, or general input from people who have been through a first iOS launch would be greatly appreciated.

I built Perswift, a social media scheduling/cross-posting tool (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube). I know I'm nowhere near first to market internationally. Buffer, Later, Hootsuite, a dozen others already own that space. So instead of competing globally, I decided to go local market, Indonesia only, for now.

I got a small batch of users through organic content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Threads. No ads, no paid distribution. But here's where I'm stuck: almost everyone who signs up uses the product once, and then never came back. Churned, basically, before they ever became a habit.

I tried emailing them (via Resend) to ask what happened, what didn't work for them, what would've made them stick around. Sent it out, and so far: nothing.

Some context that might matter:

• Pricing: free to sign up, everyone gets a monthly free credit allowance. Credits get consumed per post (e.g. posting one piece of content to TikTok + Instagram + YouTube costs 3 credits (1 per platform)). There's also an in-app store to top up credits.
• Revenue: $0 so far. Nobody's topped up, nobody's paid.
• Market: Indonesia specifically. Smaller, price-sensitive, and I'm very aware willingness-to-pay here is a real obstacle compared to a global market.

So I'm genuinely stuck between a few options and would rather ask people who've actually been through this than guess or ask AI for these kind of thing 😂

1. Do I keep pushing for feedback from users who already churned, or is that a dead end? should I just find new users to talk to instead?
2. Is silence on a feedback ask itself a signal (e.g. "this didn't matter enough to them to reply"), or is that reading too much into a small sample and a single email?
3. Given zero revenue and a one-and-done usage pattern, would you push harder on distribution/marketing to get more shots at this, or is that premature when I haven't figured out why the first batch didn't stick?

Would appreciate any honest takes, including "this doesn't sound salvageable, here's why" if that's genuinely what you see.