Building serious products as a solo founder
Why solo founders don't just keep up with large companies, they win
I’ve spent over a decade across product design, software development, and product management. The past few years, I’ve advised solo founders on how to build products that survive. I know what works, and what quietly breaks them.
I used to think you needed a co-founder for this. So I went looking for one, and I was serious about it.
It took me about a month to know it wasn’t for me. Constantly justifying myself. Explaining where I wanted to go. Compromising on calls I already knew the answer to. I chose solo instead.
But solo has a real cost and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Nobody to check your thinking. Nobody who cares as much as you do. Every decision is yours, including the bad ones.
That’s the part that changed.
Nobody connected the dots
I believe the best products still come from the same place they always have. A short distance to the user, real autonomy, and the ability to learn fast. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is that building got cheap. Anyone can ship something now. Which means building is no longer the hard part. Judgment is. Knowing what to build, what to cut, and when your idea is wrong.
And that’s where I keep running into a problem. There’s a wave of AI consultants selling tools to founders, and most of them have never had to decide what to build, defend that decision, and then live with it for a year. So all their advice becomes noise. Tools, without the judgment to point them at anything.
I want to change that.
So that’s what I’m doing
I’m building one piece of my own AI workflow every single day for 90 days, and publishing what actually works and what doesn’t. All of it is public. The documentation lives at grimoire.esmeepeters.com, the skills sit in open repos on GitHub, and the product I test everything on is Owly Post, my own open source SaaS.
I’m doing it alongside the founders I work with, so it gets tested somewhere other than my own desk.
No polished framework upfront. Just the work, documented in real time, in a stack that’s moving just as fast, so you can see what holds up and what falls apart.
And you can follow along, we’re figuring this out together. So feel free to share your insights at any time, I’m happy to discuss.
Come along if
You’re running a SaaS on your own, with paying customers, and you’d rather stay small than start managing people.
You want to know what AI actually changes about the way you work, not the hype version.
You’d rather watch someone figure this out in real time than wait for a polished framework two years from now.
You’re about to hire your first developer because things feel slow, and you’re not fully sure that’s the actual fix.
Think of me as your co-founder. Solo, but not alone.