From co-founder to solo founder, and why I build alone now

I did three projects with co-founders: 21BJ as co-founder, Sp3llbound Studios and Bitzuma as CEO and co-founder. Two I shut down, one I sold. Since September 2025 I build alone: CalAlly first, Startupage a month later, both still running.

This was not an emotional reaction to the projects that failed. It was that I had pinpointed where I lost time, and in my case it was not execution: it was the number of decisions that had to pass through several heads before becoming something verifiable.

The problem was not the team, it was the length of the cycle

With a co-founder every hypothesis has to be explained, discussed and agreed before it can be tested. That is the right cost to pay when the decision is large and irreversible. It is an absurd cost when the decision is small and the market answers in three days.

On the team projects I spent far more hours building consensus than gathering evidence. And consensus is not evidence: two people convinced of the same wrong thing are still two people who are wrong, just more confident about it.

What I worked out is that most of my decisions were small and reversible. For those, the fastest way to know who is right is to publish something and watch what happens. Alone, the cycle between "I have an idea" and "I know if it is wrong" is days. With three people it is weeks, and in those weeks the cost of being wrong grows.

What no team, no round, no agency actually means

It means everything you see in one of my products was decided and made by me, and that when something does not work there is nobody else to attribute it to.

No team. I write the code, do the design, write the copy and talk to the people using what I build. I am not a developer, I am not a marketer, I am not a designer: at each of those things I am worse than someone who only does that one thing. I do all of it anyway, because a product does not come out of a professional box. The advantage is not the saving: it is that user feedback reaches the person who can change the thing, with no intermediate steps to dilute it.

No round. Bootstrapped is not a waiting room for an investor: it is the model. Taking money means taking on a growth expectation and a time horizon that are not mine. With projects that can close in twelve months and others that sell in five, I do not want a structure that makes changing my mind expensive. No investors means no imposed deadlines, no fake growth and no meetings to justify what I am already doing.

No agency. Delegating works when you already know what you want. In the phase where you do not know yet, delegating means paying someone to execute a possibly wrong direction quickly.

What I lost, without sugar coating it

Three things, and they are real.

The pushback. Alone you can sit inside a wrong belief for months with nobody touching it. That is exactly the mistake that cost me two years. My substitute is writing in public: if I know I will have to explain a decision to someone reading, I make it more carefully. It is not as strong as a co-founder contradicting you, but it beats silence.

A ceiling on what you can build. Alone, past a certain complexity you do not get there. This pushed me toward simpler products, which turned out well, but it is a choice with a limit, not a superpower.

Speed in the easy phases. When the direction is clear and it is only execution left, a team is faster. Full stop. The advantage of working alone is entirely in the uncertain phase, not the execution one.

The advantage I did not expect: place stops mattering

Working alone I have no office and no hours to synchronise with anyone. The result is that where I am has stopped being a variable. I work from a mountain, from somewhere on the coast, from a city I do not know, with a backpack and a decent connection.

I do not say that as a lifestyle. I say it because it has a practical effect on the work: when the only constraint is the connection, you stop organising the week around a place and start organising it around what you need to figure out. And the things I do when I am not building, from BJJ to the mountains, are not a break from the work: they train the same head that keeps you on a hard problem for months.

How I work now

Few rules, and I keep them because they come directly from the earlier mistakes.

1. In the first two weeks I look for people who already have the problem and are using something inconvenient to solve it. If I cannot find them, the project does not start.
2. Every bet has a date. If by that date a specific thing has not happened, I close. The date is decided while clear headed, at the start, not once you are already deep in.
3. I measure the return, not the signup. How many people come back the following week is the only number that says whether you built something useful.
4. I publish the process as it happens, including when it goes badly. It is my artificial pushback.
5. No calls and no consulting. Selling my time by the hour is the fastest way to have no time left for the products.

You can see the result on the projects page: two live products, one exit, two shutdowns. All with the same amount of space.

Frequently asked questions

Would you recommend working alone to everyone?

No. It works if your bottleneck is the number of decisions to align. If your bottleneck is a skill you do not have, a co-founder is the right answer and working alone only slows you down.

How do you avoid convincing yourself of wrong things with nobody to push back?

I do not fully manage it, and it is the main risk. The two countermeasures are writing in public and putting an expiry date on every bet, so the alarm goes off even when I do not set it myself.

Would you go back to working in a team?

For a project needing skills I do not have, yes. For a product I can build alone in the phase where I do not yet know whether it makes sense, no.

What lets you do all of this on your own?

A small stack repeated many times, plus AI for the mechanical parts. I wrote about it in my stack for shipping a product.