Last year when I was visiting my mom in Ibiza I joined a couple of WhatsApp groups to pick up some padel games. Yes, I too have been sucked in, and I love it. Great way to reconnect and meet new people who'd moved to the island. But my goodness was it frustrating. My phone pinging constantly. People looking to set up games. Then scrolling back through fifty messages to figure out if I'd actually joined one or not. Chaos. I left the island thinking about that. When I came back last month I rejoined the groups and same problem. In Spain people love WhatsApp and they love padel. Why isn't there a smoother way to organise games?
I don't work alone because I can't afford a team. I work alone because of nights like last Tuesday. The freedom to follow a thought at midnight without asking anyone's permission, without scheduling a standup, without writing a ticket. That's not a limitation. That's the whole point.
Thirty-eight percent of seven-figure businesses are now run by solopreneurs who replaced traditional hires with AI workflows. That number keeps climbing because the tools are getting absurdly good. But the headline misses the real story. Solo founders aren't just more efficient. They're designing a different kind of life.
When I closed Music Health last year, I had a great team towards the end but not enough money to keep going. The company had raised millions. We did a lot of things right. We also did a lot of things wrong. The biggest issue was the cost of running a team with misaligned founders. The second was the cost of revenue — what it actually costs to operate versus what comes in. The thing that killed it wasn't the market or the product. It was the cost of simply running the business.
Now "running the business" means my time plus tools to automate the rest. I can build faster because I don't need to pass it by anyone. Build, test, decide if I want to pursue it or not. The biggest hurdle now is discipline. Back when I was producing music, I had folders and folders of unfinished songs. I don't intend to have a graveyard of ideas this time around. So I'm ruthless with my process. Time spent on an unsure idea is time lost on one that can already generate revenue.
So now I build what I want, rapidly. PadelCrews is one of those ideas. I play padel three times a week in a country with over 6 million players and the sport's growing at 40% a year globally, and there's still no good way to organise a game on WhatsApp without seventeen messages and someone dropping out at the last minute. WhatsApp has 3.3 billion users. Padel has 35 million players and that number doubles every few years. The coordination problem is massive and nobody (here) has built the obvious solution yet.
That's the part about working alone that nobody talks about. It's not just the efficiency. It's the creative freedom to notice a problem on a Tuesday night and start solving it before Wednesday morning. No approval required. No roadmap to update. Just you and the thing you can't stop thinking about. And the success metric has changed. For me, the first success signal for PadelCrews is my own WhatsApp groups using it. That's achievable within the first week of launching the demo.
If you play padel and you're tired of the WhatsApp chaos, I'd love you to be one of the first to try it. Join the waitlist and help me shape this thing: padelcrews.com
🎵 Underworld — Born Slippy .NUXX The sound of doing something reckless at 2 AM and knowing it's exactly where you're supposed to be.
— Nicc