The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here
manidoraisamy.com
manidoraisamy.com
What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks.
That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.
I'm not sure this follows - I find as team size grows, the amount of time spent on synchronization approaches asymptotically to 100%.
Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both.
The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.
I don't understand how anyone who spends a couple hours or more per day coding new functionality couldn't at least double their productivity with LLMs, unless their organisation prohibits LLM usage. Even just limiting the LLM to writing unit tests would still save that much time.
Sometimes I get 1 good line from that. Sometimes I get 30. Usually I get 10 bad lines and have to type a bit more to coax out 8 good ones.
It just looks faster but typing was NEVER the bottleneck for coding.
Where it really flies, though, is building tooling around a well known API. FML if I ever have to write AWS CDK or AWS API calls without an LLM again. You're looking at ages of reading through really bad docs to get it going.
For that, which is a 1% task of convenience for most jobs, I can use most LLM output verbatim. But that's like I said less than 1% of the job, and only then when the core software is done.
Not a substantial productivity multiplier.
> how things are today
Somewhat better than before, but still not a substantial productivity multiplier.
> Don’t you expect things will not improve in the next year?
I expect they'll be marginally better than they are now, but still not a substantial productivity multiplier.
"A huge paradigm shift is just around the corner" is a very popular narrative & it almost never bears out.
If a solopreneur can buy an excavator, the corporate developers will get them too.
I do think it will be easier for very small organizations to compete than it was previously - which is great - but let's not fool ourselves that big companies won't maintain some competitive advantages.
I disagree with the number 100. It is not a reasonable number with respect to current AI capabilities.
If the cost of digging ditches goes down, companies will be apt to dig more ditches. I've seen many projects worth $100k-$500k but they weren't pursued because the cost in salaries was higher.
I don't think companies are generally well run to let go of unnecessary people efficiently. At least one place I've worked at had, by my estimates, $100m salary of unnecessary people employed. It didn't matter, the business has revenues of $100b yearly, so it's a drop in the bucket.
Regardless, one person still costs 1/100 as much as 100 people. Let's say each of the 100 adopts AI and multiplies their productivity by 100. Does their company need its total engineering productivity multiplied by 100? They might settle for let's say 3X and save 97% of the costs by firing 97 people.
(I tend to ignore most of the hype and I'm dubious about that 100X figure, but I'm taking it at face value here for illustrative purposes.)
There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.
In 2018, I wrote about scaling big while staying small using serverless computing (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-s...). But by 2020, instead of leaner teams, we saw more hiring and even bigger orgs—ironically, even at companies selling serverless services.
Why? Because incentives at large companies favor empire-building (prestige from managing big teams) over efficiency. I expect the same inertia with AI: solo devs will fully embrace AI, serverless, and freemium to race ahead, while big teams will adopt AI at a crawl.
I understand you are focused freemium as a goto market strategy with no dedicated sales or marketing team members.
What tools are you displacing (e.g. Excel)?
My co-founder handles support, so he decides what to build next based on customer discussions. If a problem is big enough for a specific segment, we turn it into a separate product.
> What tools are you displacing (e.g., Excel)?
Most SMBs prefer to stay with Google Forms/Sheets rather than switching to a full-fledged CRM like HubSpot. But embedding Google Forms in their website affects their branding. We beautify and enhance Forms into a CRM, so they don’t have to migrate. I wrote about it here: https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...
Sales and marketing is still 90% of the game. The solopreneur still doesn’t have an easy way to get paying customers. Either you sell SaaS into a network of business contacts, or else you try to play the influencer / reddit / SEO game to get early traction.
There are influencers of all sizes, it can scale accordingly (maybe not equally effective for all sizes for all niches, though).
Sales teams are alive and well in this area. I’ve been in GTM for nearly my entire career. I have yet to see a company closing 6+ figure deals on a credit card and without a relationship.
Like for example this:
> Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot
It is not a CRM system and it is far from addressing the needs of users of real CRMs. Of course, an early stage startup or a business with less than 1000 customers can handle leads in Google Forms. But that is a lot to handle.
AI does not replace software engineering. It can enhance productivity on certain types of tasks, but AI is doing terrible job on something that mildly deviates from SO answers. It cannot build something like CRM or anything with rich domain.
It is absolutely possible to go solo today, but it’s not because of AI. Tech founder can just write a lot of good code. Business founder won’t get past outsourced no-code solution.
We’re not trying to build every feature of a traditional CRM. We’re focusing on Google Forms as CRM for SMBs because they already use Forms + Sheets to manage leads. Wrote another post explaining how we use it as a CRM - https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...
I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars".
The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals.
Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).
I left my job last year, after over a decade leading design and UX for iOS at Google, to pursue building a bootstrapped solopreneur startup, and the speed at which I've been able to build things out has been wild.
There are entire domains that would have taken weeks or months for me to learn the ins-and-outs of the tech, that Claude has been able to knock out in a matter of minutes. It's like I have two full time junior engineers working with me at all times (with a similar amount of coaching + guidance required), and for $20/month. These are gains of easily 2x-10x productivity and I already consider myself to be fairly productive as a design engineer.
I also started a solopreneur gig building apps.
I have my doubts
I'm not involved in either side of this part of the business. Doesn't this read as "smarter spam"? Does that result in long-term customers?
Perhaps I'm just not aware of just how down-and-dirty the top of the funnel is?
My emotional response is: If you don't value _my_ time (as the customer), why should I consider your product?
Service:
1. pay-by-use
2. subscription
Software:
1. open-source with paid new feature development
2. sales (on app stores)
Physical products:
1: Resell from China in West
2. Develop new from China/anywhere and sell globally. Let big sites like Amazon and Walmart do the marketing and fulfillment.
It is, except that the result is almost immediate and almost for free.
After 25 years of never once thinking of one, I doubt that's going to change.
However I actually think the argument works for things that aren’t actually businesses and don’t really have competition.
If for example you want to build an online encyclopedia about an obscure niche topic, or dialogue for an indie game, or do any number of other otherwise tedious and resource -heavy tasks, you can now do that with AI tools. This is what excites me the most about AI - not the prospect of outcompeting another business, but of making giant creative projects dramatically more feasible.
Is there _anyone_ that would jump ship to yet another SaaS just because it's "AI enabled"? Obviously it's all the rage for VCs right now, but I can't imagine switching to some other product simply because it has AI and mine doesn't.
There’s a product our marketing and copy writing teams use to write content and manage content and they were using the same tool successfully for years and recently switched to a different one because it had really good copy re-write AI and also caught grammatical errors really well.
I forgot the name of the product in question but this is one example I can think of
I think it's anyway not a strong reason to leave or stay, at this point. It's still "yet another technology", and I'd be surprised if it turned out to influence any decision in this regard.
Curious if anybody has non-anectodal data
I have however been getting some friends asking me how to disable all the AI crap in Windows and Google. It could very well just be my specific circle, but I think people are slowly starting to push back against all the AI enshittification to the great chagrin of all the VCs hyping it up
> First, the internet killed the need for sales teams
This is simply not true. Sales teams are absolutely still needed and continue to provide lots of value, especially in b2b.
> Then, serverless computing eliminated IT teams
I'm honestly left scratching my head here. This is not true at all!
> And now, AI is breaking the last barrier—software development itself.
...
AI makes devs more productive but the need for moats still applies and competition will be worse not better. Distribution and defensibility is key
I thought, hmm, now that’s interesting. But then the breathless leaps of faith comes quickly
> Now, imagine what will happen in a couple of years—AI will be writing code, optimizing infrastructure, and even debugging itself. An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team.
> This kind of disruption was previously limited to narrow consumer products like WhatsApp, where a 20-member team built a product that led to a $19 billion exit. But now, the same thing is happening in business applications that requires breadth
Umm, not so fast, AI will not enable a couple of guys to write a robust production grade kernel in a couple of weeks or months, unless that kernel is simply a fork of Linux with some cosmetic tweaks. I always wonder, do the people making these sorts of pronouncements actually understand software? Have they built software of any significant size and depth?
And then:
> First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online).
Sales teams have not been killed simply because distribution has moved online, although kind of sales people you need, and what they do, has certainly changed.
I really thought it would be meaningful article but it just disappointed me :(
The need for IA Programmer will be x10 too.
> Take our own experience: Neartail competes with Shopify and Square, and it’s built by one person. Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot—built by one person.
Would like it better if claims like this were backed up by numbers.
Then the same thing with cloud. Big data. Bitcoin. VR. Ethereum. Web3. NFTs.
I mean AI is cool and it helps with some stuff. And it's also not going to be this epic panacea where rogue coders turn into the best entrepreneur they can be. To throw out such takes is just short sighted hype.
Oh my sweet summer child.
AI also assists with the use of CPU-efficient programming languages, e.g. Rust, Zig, etc. where one doesn't need a cluster of workers for a trivial service, where a single instance can be sufficient.