Solo Founders

It's been a year since the Solo Founders Program kicked off. Today, the first cohort sits down to discuss building solo, together.

What a year of building taught them: why retention is growth (the smile curve, and the leaky bucket nobody checks), why free users are a "free trend" and not a business, how to kill a good idea to find the better one, and what a room full of other founders actually gets you. Plus the stories they lived before going solo — including co-founding with your dad at 17.

Topics covered:
  • The prerequisite trap: why searching for a co-founder gets you a bad one
  • Co-founder failure modes: family, close friends, and misaligned incentives
  • Finding a co-founder by building (elevating a first hire)
  • Retention is growth: the smile curve and the leaky bucket
  • Hype signals vs. paying customers — the 10x question
  • Solo, together: what a founder community functionally replaces
Guests: Aldo Del Valle (new company, prev. Happypath), Chai Choudhary (Workers.io), Namanyay Goel (Giga), Dhravya Shah (Supermemory)

What is Solo Founders?

The Solo Founder's Podcast features in-depth interviews with solo founders building remarkable companies. Each week, host Julian Weisser sits down with solo founders who are either operating at serious scale or doing something right now that you need to know about. From Series B and beyond to founders breaking out in real-time, these are the conversations that define what it means to build solo. New episodes every week.