AYUSH CHATURVEDI

The Solo Founder Playbook

 Copyright © 2022 by Ayush Chaturvedi

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the
publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or
distribute it by any other means without permission.

First edition

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy.

Find out more at reedsy.com
 Contents

Introduction 1
Step 1. Start then Learn 6
Step 2. Identify and Solve Problems 10
Step 3. Iterate and Pivot 13
Step 4. Share your journey - Build In Public 17
Step 5. Keep Going (Or not!) 20
Conclusion 22
 Introduction

Most startups fail, but all founders succeed(in the long

run!)
Building a startup is hard.
90% of them don’t find success, but the lessons that founders
learn in the process of starting up are valuable.
These lessons often lead them to start other profitable
businesses and do high-impact work.
And most of all, grow and learn at a rapid pace.

1
 THE SOLO FOUNDER PLAYBOOK

There are common patterns that keep coming back when

we study the success of solo founders and Indie Hackers.
This playbook is a collection of these common patterns.
By definition, the term “solo founder” means a single person
starting a business. But this playbook can also be applied to
small scrappy teams of 2 or 3 founders.
The playbook is divided into 6 parts:

• Constraints and Superpowers

• Start then Learn
• Identify and Solve Problems
• Iterate and Pivot

2
 INTRODUCTION

• Share your Journey

• Keep Going

The first thing we should talk about are key constraints of being
a solo founder

Constraints and Superpowers

Constraints -

• Limited capital - This is your biggest constraint as a solo

founder.
• Venture Capital may not an option for a few reasons:
• No access to a VC network.
• Want to work for yourself, have the freedom to build what
you want.
• Don’t have a concrete idea yet.

You will be mostly self-funded or bootstrapped.

• Limited capital means not enough resources to hire

developers or run ads.
• Skillset - As a solo founder you will have 1 or 2 primary
skills, and will have to learn or outsource other skills
needed in a business. Examples:
• Developers need to learn Marketing.
• Marketers need to learn Development or No Code tools.
• Or both have to find contractors or co-founders with
complementary skills.
3
 THE SOLO FOUNDER PLAYBOOK

But with these constraints, solo founders also enjoy a few

superpowers:

• Ability to take fast decisions - Because you’re accountable

to only yourself, you can take fast decisions and pivot when
needed.
• Play the long game - You don’t have the pressure to grow
fast. Once you have a profitable business model, you can
stick around and grow with substance. Not go after growth
at all costs.
• Find niches within niches - You can double down on
small niches at the start. Because the business just needs
to sustain you or a small team you can solve problems for
a small market. You won’t face competition from larger
players because such small markets don’t move the needle
for them.
• And because you are not venture-funded, you don’t have
the pressure of capturing an entire market. You don’t have
to become a billion-dollar company. That’s a relief!

12 startups in 12 months | Constraint = Superpower

An artificial constraint that you can put on yourself

is doing something like a “12 startups in 12 months”
challenge.
Force yourself to build and ship a product in 30 days. And
do it 12 times a year.
This constraint can turn into a superpower because it
will help you build a habit of shipping, and it will also help
you get eyeballs on your projects.
This challenge immensely helped people like Pieter Levels,
4
 INTRODUCTION

Jon Yongfook, and Andrey Azimov. Their breakout startups

were conceived during the 12 startups challenge.
Nathan Barry did a public challenge where to build a prof-
itable web app in 6 months, back in 2012. Today that web app
is ConvertKit and doing almost $30M ARR.
Now let’s go to the first step of the playbook - Start then
Learn.

5
 Step 1. Start then Learn

Go to this tweet

This is the exact opposite of traditional business advice. But

it’s far more effective.

6
 STEP 1. START THEN LEARN

• Your best ideas and learning will come after you start building
something, it can be anything.
• It can be anything really, doesn’t have to be a groundbreak-
ing product. It just has to be something that YOU build.

How to get your 1st idea?

• Scratch your own itch - Note down your daily workflows,

see what problems you face, and try to build solutions to
those problems.
• Rebuild your favorite app - You love using an app, it may
be very complicated, build a simpler version of it.
• Help people around you - Speak to 5 people around you,
ask them about their daily workflow and the problems they
face. Try to solve the one that’s most interesting to you.
• Help people online - Go to Reddit, Quora, Twitter,
Facebook groups. People are sharing their troubles and
challenges every day there. Figure out which problems
look interesting to you and try to solve them.

Build the most barebones solution you can with your

current capabilities.
Don’t worry about questions like “which tech stack should I
choose?”
Listen to Arvid -

7
 THE SOLO FOUNDER PLAYBOOK

Go to this tweet

If you are a non-technical founder:

• Don’t start learning to code to solve this problem.

• Try No-Code tools and see if they can work.
• Or see if the problem can be solved with content - A “How-
to” article or a video. Or a curated newsletter.
• You will find that many problems can be solved with good
content. High-quality information is hard to find on the

8
 STEP 1. START THEN LEARN

internet, with increasing noise, the value of curation is

going up.

The goal of this step is not to build the final product, it’s just
to get into the habit of building and dealing with interesting
problems every day.

Once you do that, you can start to look towards solving real
problems that people will pay money for.

9
 Step 2. Identify and Solve Problems

The process of building will throw up problems that you

could have never encountered otherwise.

• For example, if you’re building a mobile app, you may find

that there aren’t any efficient ways to test mobile apps.
• Or if you’re building a newsletter, you will find that there
are no good ways to promote and grow newsletters.
• These problems you face now will be closer to real
business problems that people face. Problems that they
would pay money to be solved for them.
• They can be the seeds of a sustainable business.
• But before you jump into writing code, you need to
figure out if users are willing to pay money to solve
this problem.
• One way to find that out is to manually solve the problem
for the user.
• Before using computing power, use human power. Do
it as a freelancer.

(Example:
If your idea is a software tool that lets bloggers turn their articles
into newsletters and sends them out.
10
 STEP 2. IDENTIFY AND SOLVE PROBLEMS

Then you can offer that service to bloggers as a freelancer, do it

manually for them.
And see if people are willing to pay money for it or not. No need to
code up a complicated tool that interfaces with multiple other tools
in the blogger’s journey. If you can find 10 people willing to pay
money for such a solution, then you have some validation, and can
start thinking of a software solution.)

• Not all businesses have to be SaaS businesses. In fact,

SaaS is one of the hardest business models to crack.
• You can start with a service or agency business, do large
chunks of work manually, and automate only the repetitive
parts.
• This also aligns with Nathan Barry’s framework - Ladders
of Wealth Creation.

11
 THE SOLO FOUNDER PLAYBOOK

(If the service/agency business works, you can turn parts of it into a
SaaS. That’s what Molly Wolchansky did with The Agent Nest.)

• You can find people to reach out in online communities on

Reddit or Facebook Groups, or even Twitter.
• Find where they hang out and start reaching out to them
via DMs or comments.
• Once you start reaching out to people offering them
help you will start to learn what solutions they are
willing to pay money for.
• And what problems they are willing to live with.

You don’t necessarily have to avoid software, if you can set up a

software solution quickly, then go for it.
The goal of this step is to get used to reaching out
to people with solutions, asking them for money, and
identifying real problems worth solving.
Do it manually, or with code, but learn to do it fast and often.
Once you have that, you can move to the next step: Iterate
and Pivot.

12
 Step 3. Iterate and Pivot

Your first idea will not be your last idea. Even your 100th idea
may not be your final idea that takes off as a business.

• A sustainable business has many moving parts, and to get

everything right, you will have to keep iterating and
even pivot on your ideas a few times.
• Once you have some initial validation on the problem that
you want to solve, you can start building the actual product.
• But even before that, you have to start talking to users.
• Customer conversations are one of the key ways to build
the right product.
• They will help you position your product in a crowded
market, give you the right features to build, and even
give you words you can use in your sales copy.
• There is no shying away from customer conversations. To
get better at them, you can read books like The Mom Test
and Deploy Empathy.
• These books will give you the Do’s and Don’ts of customer
conversations, and even scripts for outreach and inter-
views.
• At this stage the idea is to keep building features, talking to
customers about them, and improving the product based
13
 THE SOLO FOUNDER PLAYBOOK

on those conversations.
• A good tactic at this stage is to start a small private
chat group of your most loyal customers and gather
feedback from them on a day-to-day basis.

These steps will most likely get you some initial revenue.
Congratulations, this was the hardest part.
2 things can happen now:

1. Customers don’t care about your product.

They don’t use it anymore, they realize that it was just a nice-
to-have solution, not a pain killer for them.
Now you can either iterate more, build new features if
customer conversations are still helpful.
Or you might need to pivot to a different solution.
You can even change the product positioning to cater to a
different kind of user.
Example: ConvertKit is an email marketing solution focused only
on creators. This positioning helps it differentiate itself from other
competing email marketing solutions like Mailchimp.
If you are building a CRM solution for dentists, maybe
you can try to reposition it for chiropractors or gym
owners.
Such pivots will give you new ideas for features to build and a
fresh new market to tap into. And have new kinds of customer
conversations.
But if you think even that is not likely to work, then
maybe it’s best to go back to Step 2 and find a new problem
to solve.

14
 STEP 3. ITERATE AND PIVOT

2. Customers love your product !

Customers start talking about it in their circles, start sharing

your product with their friends.
You can use this as social proof, and even start to market your
product based on this validation.
Depending on the type of product and where you find
customers you can invest in marketing via different channels:

1. Google, FB, IG ads.

2. Niche newsletters or social media influencers
3. Reddit, Quora answers, and SEO content.

This is not a full-scale marketing effort.

The goal is to figure out your average customer acquisition
cost.
(CAC = How much money does it take to get every new customer.)
And how does that amount stack up against the lifetime
value of each customer?
(LTV = The total money the customer will spend on your product
from the day they start to the day they leave)
These numbers will be useful in identifying which parts
of the business you need to work on.
If the LTV is low, that means customers are churning, you
need to improve the product before you do any more marketing.
Find ways to keep the customers you have before bringing in
any new ones. Keep iterating.
If the CAC is high that means the offer isn’t appealing enough,
you need to tune your marketing efforts - the channels, the copy,
the targeting. Review every aspect of your marketing funnel.
If the CAC is low, and the LTV is high then look at their
15
 THE SOLO FOUNDER PLAYBOOK

ratio.
Generally, you should aim for an LTV/CAC ratio of 3:1.
Anything lower would mean that you’re losing money. Be-
cause you also have to consider operating costs for each
customer.
Operating costs would include server costs, tools you are
paying for, and also your own salary!
But if LTV/CAC is greater than 3, then congratulations!
You’ve just created a money-making machine - Where
you put in $1 and it spits out more than $1.
This is the definition of a sustainable business, some people
would even call this product-market fit.
You can now start looking for ways to scale the business:

• Make a more intentional marketing effort.

• Redo the code, optimize it to handle more traffic.
• Maybe hire contractors with complementary skills.
• Or even try to find a co-founder.

16
 Step 4. Share your journey - Build In
Public

This is more a meta step that you can start right from the
beginning.
But even if you don’t start then, you should start now because
now you have lessons worth sharing.
You’ve been in the trenches, you know shit that someone
starting out doesn’t know.
What you share can be valuable to someone just 2 steps behind
you. So start sharing your lessons in public.
Either on Twitter or in a newsletter or through both.

• AJ from Carrd added his Twitter account at the bottom of

the page of every project he did. Over time he’s accrued a
loyal audience. (more about AJ)
• Andrey Azimov did the 12 startups challenge and had
a single mailing list throughout, he would post product
updates, personal challenges, and lessons. Over time he
built a loyal audience that helped him grow and sell his
most profitable project - Sheet2Site. (more about Andrey)

17
 THE SOLO FOUNDER PLAYBOOK

Join communities

Apart from this, you can also join founder communities on

Slack or Discord.
You will get a more intimate view of what other solo founders
struggle with, and how they deal with unique challenges every
day.
The relationships you build like this will outlast your current
business.

• Indie Hackers is a great open community to join for solo

founders. The content and connections there would help
you immensely in your journey.
• You can join the #BuildInPublic community on Twitter.
• You can join subreddits like r/startups and r/SaaS.
• You will find many startup slack communities on slofile.
• You can even join paid communities and co-working clubs
like WeekendClub.
• If your target audience is other startup founders then you
would have touched these communities in step 1 or 2
already.

Again, this step can be performed right from the start.

The audience, friends, acquaintances you make by shar-
ing your journey openly are invaluable.
They would be around you even when you start your next
business or pivot the current one to something else.

18
STEP 4. SHARE YOUR JOURNEY - BUILD IN PUBLIC

19
 Step 5. Keep Going (Or not!)

This is the harsh truth of any business, you have to keep going.
If you haven’t found a product that works, then go back to
step 2 and iterate on other interesting problems to solve.
But if you have found a sustainable business model, and it’s
growing well, then you will still have to make strong efforts for
a couple of reasons:

• Growth will plateau - Every marketing channel gets

saturated eventually, and you have to search for new ones.
(*Andrew Chen calls this the law of shitty clickthroughs*)
• Competitors will come up - As you find success, other peo-
ple will emulate your business, either with more features
or at a lesser price. So you have to keep making efforts to
differentiate your product and maintain customer loyalty.

A few steps you can take at this stage to make life easier for
yourself:

• Hire help - outsource, automate, delegate anything that’s

not your core strength.

20
 STEP 5. KEEP GOING (OR NOT!)

• Get VC Funding - By this point, it will be easier for you

to get Venture Capital, the business is proven, and if with
more money it can grow big, then VCs will love it.

• Get Acquired - Merge yourself into a larger business, you

will have a boss, but there will be less pressure compared
to running the entire business yourself. (Makerpad got
acquired by Zapier)

• Sell the business - Use platforms like Microacquire to find

potential buyers.

• There are some people who like to build new stuff, and
there are others who like to scale and operationalize
businesses.
•
• If you’re not the 2nd kind, it makes sense to sell the business
and start afresh with a new idea. (That’s what Andrey Azimov
did with Sheet2Site)

21
 Conclusion

These are common patterns observed in most success stories

of Solo founders and Indie Hackers.
Your journey might differ a bit from this playbook, but it
can be a good framework to think about as you build a solo
business.
It can really valuable if you’re starting from scratch. In that
sense, step 1 is perhaps the most important. Stop waiting for
the right idea to strike, start building right away, follow the
playbook, and eventually, you will find success.
As I said at the top - Most startups fail, but all founders
succeed!
Thanks!

PS: No business plans were harmed during the making of

this playbook

22