I've been building products for 16 years. But it was only in November 2025 that I sat down to try and build something myself, end to end. Not manage a team building it. Not explain my vision to an engineer and hope they got it. Actually build the thing.

The excitement lasted about three hours. I could research an idea, validate the market, map out the structure, all within an afternoon. That part felt like a superpower. Then I opened a no-code platform and tried to turn it into something real. Lovable. Base44. I tried them all. Front end, not bad. Quick iterations, sure. But the moment I needed to think about how data flows, what protections the system needs, how the logic actually works under the hood, everything fell apart. I couldn't finish a single thing. Meanwhile, my feed was full of "vibe coders" claiming they shipped entire products in a weekend, and I'm sitting there unable to connect a form to a database. That was a low point.

I stepped away. Took a few weeks to stop trying to build and start trying to understand. What tools were serious builders actually using? Not the flashy demos on Twitter. The real workflows. It was overwhelming at first, but little by little, I read, I tried things, I broke things, I watched tutorials from people who were clearly much smarter than me, and slowly it started to click.

The thing I've had to learn through all of this, and I'm still learning, is how to take advantage of my own brain instead of letting it be a hindrance. Ideas have always been plentiful. That was never the problem. The problem was that when I couldn't explore an idea to its natural conclusion, when my brain couldn't determine whether something was good or bad, it would just sit there. Unresolved. Distracting me from the things I was supposed to be focused on. For years that was incredibly frustrating. I'd want to commit to one or two projects and my brain would wander off to that other idea hanging around in the corner, pulling at my attention because it hadn't been resolved yet.

One of the biggest personal benefits of today is that I can reach that natural conclusion within an hour. What used to take weeks or months of background distraction now takes an afternoon. If I have a loose idea I can explore it and have a rough prototype by the end of the day. If I have a concrete plan I can map it out properly and build a working version in a week.

Six months later I can build a product from idea to revenue. Alone. I do not write a single line of code. Six months. That's it. That's how fast this is moving.

Let me tell you what that means in practice. Two years ago my company needed to rebuild our app. We scoped it, we discussed it with the engineers, we went through the whole painful process of quotes and timelines. The answer came back. Six months with a team of three engineers, full time. Today, I can build that exact same application in a week. By myself. From $175,000 to about $1,000.

And it's not just me. Mo Gawdat, who has been very outspoken about the dangers of AI, recently shared that he's building a startup with just two engineers. He said this company would have required millions in funding, expensive specialists, and over a year in development not long ago. Three people. Three months. That's where we are now. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted with 70 to 80 percent confidence that the first solo-founder billion-dollar company would arrive by 2026. Sam Altman apparently has a group chat with his tech CEO friends where they're placing bets on when it happens. These aren't internet predictions from random people with newsletters. These are the people building the tools.

My last venture-backed company required money because it required a team. If that company were created today it could have been managed by three people and would only need extra hands when scaling. Even then, the ratio of humans to output is exponentially different from what it was. The old venture playbook said raise money, hire people, spend a year building, launch. The "not so" new playbook says test the idea this week and find out.

That's the big picture. But what does it actually look like on a Tuesday morning when it's just you, a laptop, and an idea?

Having worked with engineers for fifteen years I've picked up how they think, and it's the opposite of how I think as a creative. When I would sit in the studio to make music, I would start with nothing and slowly build, experiment, break, rebuild, explore, subtract until there was something there that felt right. THAT IS THE WORST APPROACH WHEN CODING. It leads to a beloved phrase at every tech company: technical debt. The mess that accumulates when there is no clear end goal.

You don't start with a blank canvas and explore like you would with art. You start at the end. What does the finished product look like? What are all the pieces that need to exist to make that work? Then you cut the puzzle into pieces and build them one at a time. That mindset, combined with AI that can actually execute on specific instructions, is what changed everything for me.

Here's what that looked like in practice. BigMoneyIdeas started as my own idea validator. I wanted a system where I could input my elevator pitch for an idea and get a quick, powerful response telling me whether it was worth exploring further. I know from experience that the best ideas are usually the ones where others say "hmm, that sounds like a bad idea" or "I don't get it." But it's incredibly valuable to have a system that reviews all the areas you might not think of on your own.

So I started writing out every metric I wanted to measure, every area the system needed to validate. I approached it like an artist. I explored. I kept adding. Version one had a prompt that was 6,000 words long. After a week of testing I got a notification that my rent payment hadn't gone through. When I checked my account there was a lot less money than I expected. I'd spent USD 2,000 on API costs running my prompt. The cost of generating each report was about $3-10 and I ran a lot of them. Gulp.

That was the wake up call. I went back and approached it like an engineer. Start at the end. What is the output I actually need? Strip out everything that doesn't serve that. Today BigMoneyIdeas is refined, simpler but more powerful. It gives me really great feedback on an idea and lets me explore the playbook. Total cost to check an idea: $0.50. My morning coffee costs the same as validating 6 business ideas. FUCK.

But here's the part that nobody talks about. The biggest barrier to building is not the technology. It's not the skills. It's not even the money.

It's fear.

For years I've had people come to me with ideas, looking for validation. And most of the time my response was the same. Focus less on the idea, focus on the execution. The person with a shit idea and excellent execution will always have a greater chance of success than the person with the best idea and poor execution. Poor execution usually means one of two things. Either you don't know what to do, or you stop the moment it gets hard. But before execution even enters the picture, most people never get past the starting line. They keep their ideas to themselves. They say "it's just a silly idea" or "it's probably not worth anything" and they move on with their day while the idea slowly dies.

A good friend pitched me their idea last year. It was a great idea. Complicated because it required a few moving pieces, but if done right it would be very valuable very quickly. It would have provided them with more income than any paying job could ever do. So why didn't they do it? "What if it doesn't work?" That was their blocker. The fear of failing. Not the market, not the technology, not the competition. Just the fear. They continue in their day job wondering "what if."

That fear of being wrong, of wasting time, of looking stupid in front of people whose opinions shouldn't even matter, kills more good ideas than bad markets ever will.

That's exactly why I built BigMoneyIdeas. To give people an easy way to test an idea. Anonymously. No pitch deck. No committee. No judgment. Just an honest assessment of whether it has legs, and then the support to turn it into something real. I use it daily. Give it a go for yourself at bigmoneyideas.ai. It's fun.

Now I'd be lying if I told you this was all upside.

Building alone is lonely. There's no team to brainstorm with, no different perspectives, no sparring ideas back and forth until something clicks. You make every decision yourself and nobody tells you when you're wrong.

I remember the first time I thought V1 was ready. I sent it to 5 friends and went to bed. Next morning, zero interactions. I messaged all 5. They all said the same thing. "It didn't work." Showed me an error. I had focused on the product working based on how I interacted with it, not how others would. The fix was simple but I would never have spotted it on my own. Embarrassing? Sure. Deal breaker? Absolutely not. But it's a pattern I keep catching myself in. When you build alone, you test alone, and you have blind spots you don't even know are there until someone else walks into them.

For me the downside is still minor compared to the upside. I'm in control of my day and sometimes that means working 16 hours and the next day keeping my computer closed. It can be very stressful but I know no different. I've been self-employed since I was 16. I feel like I have more control now than I ever did.

The solo founder playbook has changed forever. Not because the tools are perfect. Not because building alone is easy. But because the distance between having an idea and finding out if it works has collapsed to almost nothing. For years the only way to test whether your idea was any good was to spend months and thousands of dollars building it. Now you can find out in a weekend. That doesn't guarantee success. But it guarantees speed. And speed changes everything because the faster you learn what doesn't work, the faster you get to what does.

I've done it both ways. Raised venture capital, built teams, spent years on products that didn't survive. And I've built products in a week that are live right now, generating value, with no investment and no team. Both paths taught me something. But one of them is available to everyone.

If I think back to how frustrated I felt in November. A founder and tech builder with 15 years experience and I couldn't even build a simple prototype. It reminds me of when I started running. I could barely make it through 3KM. Out of breath and in pain. Recently I ran 18KM and by the end of it I felt like running more. Same skill set. Same legs. Just persistence and incremental improvement, compounding over time.

There's a scene in the season 3 finale of The Bear where Thomas Keller, the real Thomas Keller, is teaching a young Carmy how to truss a chicken on his first day at the French Laundry. He's calm. He's patient. And he tells him something I think about constantly. That your legacy starts today. That the goal is simple. Come to work every day and do a little better than you did the day before. Just a little. A modicum of effort. And if you do that every day, ten years from now you'll have a considerable sum.

That's all this is. Every day, a little better.