The Solo-Founder Playbook: How to Run a $1M ARR SaaS With One Person

Building got a whole lot easier and selling just got harder. 10 people can build the same thing at the same time. The customer is only going to buy one of those 10. And then with all the AI automation that's happened on the go-to-market side, there's so much noise that selling actually got a lot harder while building got easier. It's very, very hard to get the right person to just... see you, to just listen to you. You want to build a business that brings you enough income and profitability, and that does not necessarily mean that you need to win the market. Let the VC-backed companies win the market, but you can still have your share and have a lot more profits. If your cost is a few hundred a month, there's nothing stopping you from being around forever. You only need a few customers to basically be breakeven. And then the ambitions are extremely high. That's how we're designing these companies. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode on the ProductBed Podcast. Today we're going to be going through a really fun topic, which is going through how to create a portfolio of one-person companies that have these tiny teams, but they have the ambition to be huge businesses, really be the crown jewel in their market. And so now more than ever with AI tools and everything else is moving so much easier for people to create new technology much faster than ever before. And so it's never actually really been possible where it's like one person can develop. actually market this as well. And so here we have Vincent Zhang, who is just an awesome all-around guy. I've met him at many, many conferences. He is a fantastic speaker as well in all things product-led growth, product-led sales. He's authored the product-led sales book. And recently the CPO at DealFronts did some awesome stuff there. And now he's venturing out on his own doing poolside ventures. He builds these one-person companies that are growing. fast and they just have the ambition to have at least 1 million revenue per employee at the minimum. And so on the side, he also has SaaS on the beach, awesome events, invite only for SaaS founders as well. And every time I talk to him, he's up to something new and exciting. So he's amazing. And you're going to learn a lot on this one. So Vincent, why don't you just share a little bit of like. why this is you're super excited about today like why now because i think a lot of people might be thinking to themselves like you hear the the yc uh typical advice like yeah multiple co-founders the more the better in some cases maybe up to a certain point this really goes against the grain from what a lot of people have been kind of told you should do as a founder yeah definitely was great to be here thank you and i can tell a little bit about my personal history on that fact like on on that specific topic and then also like how that applies to people who might have a different background so as i was quite early in my career already around when i started my studies and like in in the early years of thinking about business i tried to start a few companies already And the first few, they failed and they failed because of issues with co-founders at the time. So not enough commitment from the person I was doing it with or something dragged them into another direction. So we had to stop working on it. And that frustrated me incredibly. So pretty early on, I decided, OK, I cannot be dependent on someone else. I need to be able to do this myself. So I taught myself how to code, even though my background is in business. And I got I mean, I'm not a good coder. By no means you don't want me to build your production system, at least not until recently. But I could build a prototype already in the times where there was no vibe coding. So I could at least get something, get a product to bring it to life and use that to then bring in the right people or to bring in funding, for example. But you can see already with that experience that for me, it's always been about how can I just get going and not get stuck? on finding the right people, I think I will find them along the way. I don't want to be on my own, but I also don't want to have to find the right person before I even know what this thing is going to look like, because these things always evolve a lot. And I might not even know who I need at this point in time. So for me, it was a huge revelation with all these new technologies coming out, tools like Lovable Cursor, where now suddenly, fast forward to today, I'm unstoppable on that front, basically. I have an idea. I can just create it. If I don't know how to do it, I will ask my agent and it will tell me how to do it. So this is really, or do it for me, obviously, but I meant more in terms of infrastructure. Now, if you translate then, if you look at that and what that means for people who may not have been trying these things for two decades already and are thinking like, hey, I've been in my career all this time, but I've always wanted to do something for myself, or maybe I've tried once and it didn't work right away. The big difference right now is that you don't need the money anymore to get to a first product. And that's really true for most products, I would say, that you could think of. How it goes from there, once you have some first edition, that depends on how complex, what market and so on. But the first thing that kind of shows what the experience is that anyone can get to, even if you have no understanding of technology. and what that means is that you don't need to raise a few hundred k anymore to bring in one two engineers and build for one or two years and all that time that you lose in the beginning to even get started to shape the thing like i think you don't need to be stuck there anymore and that means a lot more things are going to come to life and they see the light of day and from there on people will say if they love it or not right and and i think that's that's just such a huge step forward and and that's been i think for most people the biggest inhibitor to get something started Yeah, definitely. It's never been easier, more affordable to kind of go ahead and build that. One thing that I'm sure a lot of people are kind of thinking about is like, hey, that sounds great. You might, like some of our audience as well, they're either SaaS founders, go-to-market leaders, or product folks as well, and they might have an idea or something like that of like, hey, I could try my hand at doing that. And so one thing we discussed before we started recording too is like there is some ideas which you should absolutely pursue and like it will make perfect sense you can scale with this model and then there's others where it's like hey you might require a ton of education you might require like a lot of humans in the loop to to actually make it work could you maybe share a little bit about your criteria for finding that and i also want to hear your end too has been on this one too because you have some like really great thoughts about pursuing red oceans versus undisrupted blue oceans when it comes to market size. But Vincent, I'd love to hear your take too and maybe share that example you shared with me as well about going through your POCUS style app and then you came to that realization. Definitely, yeah. So that's, I think, the thing to emphasize. is that building a company is not just about building the product. Actually, less and less so, I would say. Building a good product is very important, but there's way more that goes into building an incredibly profitable business. And that ties into how do people buy from you? What does the onboarding journey look like, the customer journey in general? And many other questions around pricing, packaging, and so on. So these are really, really important considerations. And the example you're referring to, is well i wrote this book product-led sales and and you know was talking a lot about this with people i figured well why don't i create a tool that helps people do this that made a lot of sense to me so you can check your product signals it can then automatically identify the accounts that tie to these different people that are signing up for your company and then you tie it to your crm and there you can qualify opportunities and get deals going right now that and i actually ended up building quite a bit of it because i like building and it's more like a hobby but it's also comfort zone and as i was getting more and more further down the journey of having this thing ready i started to talk with more people in the market and i started to realize that actually first of all the market for this is very small right so there's only very few companies related in relation to like the total amount of companies out there only very few of them are actually doing product-led sales and looking for tooling to run that And many of them have already built their in-house stuff for that. So that was one part. So if the market's small, then that's already more challenging. And then the second part, which was the more important one, is that the onboarding for this kind of tool is very similar to how you would onboard a customer success tool, right? Like a Tutango or like a Gainsight. And those tools are notoriously hard to implement because you need to get access to so much data to understand what's actually happening in the product. and so you need people you need people to people want an account manager or customer success manager you need to guide them through you need to help them and that's exactly not the kind of organization that i'm trying to build so this is not one where you could say like with product-led sales where you can qualify so far up that closing rates are so high that it's still worth it for example right it's like oh if i'm closing half the deals that get to someone then maybe that this is profitable enough no with this kind of onboarding you're always going to scale linear with the amount of customers that you're bringing in and so i discarded that idea eventually because it was clear that this was going to be a sales-led process with human-led onboarding and it just didn't fit the model of the type of company that that can actually quickly get to this like 1 million or more per employee. I'd love to hear your tick next too, but I just want to double take on that part of the solving the problem. Can it be done completely with the product or is there a lot of other handholding and things that go into that to get people to success? And I think that's a really helpful point where you just, if you look at like, what are you trying to do? What's the big problem you're trying to solve? And what is actually the best way to solve that problem? if you can't say with like a high degree of confidence can this be done with the product and then you know what maybe it's it's not the problem where this could be completely self-serve completely like plg where it's like hey humans add so much of that value if it was like a percentage maybe it's in that case for tatango or something maybe it's 60 like if it was just left people to their own devices of like how to get success you'd have like 40 successful definitely with you on that but i do want to say so i'm as wes mentioned i'm a big proponent of building businesses in red oceans so red oceans meaning that market exists there's competitors already it's kind of like an established budget among the customers so they will search for that kind of product. So you don't have to worry too much about product marketing in order to launch your product. That's definitely important. I do want to say though, and now you brought up customer success tools, I think you reach a certain point where the market has been there for so long that you actually can start doing this kind of stuff. You just have to figure out how. And maybe with something like AI or similar, there's maybe a kind of like paradigm shift you can make. to figure out how do we tackle these competition to actually do a product led motion in a market that before was not very product led. I do want to say that one should never say never, because I think even like, let's take analytics software and customer success software for that matter. I think there's definitely now and with AI, there's a possibility to go into a competitive market and do a paradigm shift and kind of start doing product led growth. That's just a small input to that as well. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. But I think it depends on mainly one factor. So if this is because of complexity, yes, then the complexity more and more you can work through it the same way you're seeing like AI enabled onboarding happening more and more and it's really powerful. But if it's human complexity, then I still think we'll struggle there. And there's a lot of learning still to be made. I think there's things that are possible. but like can we actually replace a sales rep with ai like we're still learning right like and i'm saying we as like as an industry i guess but if you're looking at this let's take again the onboarding analytics and crm and so on the challenge there is not only like how to figure out the data it's to actually get access to get permission and to be able to you know access all these tools which is like the core of a company in the end and and you know that that requires trust that requires internal kind of approvals and so on and so you're dealing with like multiple decision makers and in that case i think it's still that was the reason why i thought okay okay there's no automating our way through this i definitely agree though that that more and more as people get used to certain tools and use cases even though they might be harder to set up at first once they understand the categories like oh wait this one's way easier to use i don't have to talk with someone that's definitely a big opportunity absolutely and i think there's always the ava strategy when it comes to like rental cars i don't know if you've heard of that there's like hertz is number one avis we're number two we work hard and i was interviewing this other founder philip who runs missive and so they're like biggest competitors front and front is like they've created the markets they they've invested hundreds of millions to kind of like get people educated but like hey here's how to use email like uh together as a team and and different things like that and they're like yeah we'll just rank number one for the number one alternative and we'll actually have a better product and they just kind of created that much more self-serve better product experience and they they built off of that too so there's there's a ton of opportunities there now for the first two apps you're building so meat bot and then data merge as well. So tell me about those ones, like a little bit more about the core problem you decided to solve for the ones that you decided to like, Hey, let's, let's build that out. And yeah, because I think the scope of the problem makes sense when it comes to like, we can't solve everything. If it's going to be completely self-serve. Yeah, no, for sure. So when I explain, for example, what meat bot does, many people might think that, well, why is that? That's not the most interesting company I could think of right away, but I think what matters, and I'll explain that as well, is what unique insight do you have into a market? And I told you before that the market for product-led sales is extremely small. So MeatBot is a scheduling solution comparable in some ways to Calendly. That market is insanely big. That's a huge horizontal market with vertical specializations in there. Hundreds of millions of users there. And the reason why... I decided to enter a saturated market because it's definitely a very red ocean. It's like the number one player is Calendly. A lot of tools that are go-to-market or customer-facing have integrated this as like a commodity feature into their solution. So why would you go into this market? Well, it's because I've built eight of these solutions over the past few years through FunnelFox, which is the company I used to run, and then an agency later that I set up where we built these things for other companies. And so I've seen... this this solution from many different angles and at some point i realized like well there's there's another there's a thing missing here in the market that everyone is bumping into that i think we can provide and it had to do with you know how people are charged for these things so it's a pricing like instead of pricing per user pricing per meeting booked which is something people are more used to coming back to your argument as been from before like people are getting used to something well now previously a few years ago that might have been too complicated like i don't know how this is going to work now. People are very used to credits, usage-based billing, and so on. And if I want scheduling for my entire company, then maybe I don't want to pay the full rate for everyone, even if some people are not using it. So that was one part. And then the other part was to focus heavily on partners on the go-to-market side. So to reach real momentum with this kind of solution, which is, of course, a very product-led solution, right? I share my scheduling link, someone sees my brand, and then... if they see it often enough or if they need a solution then they'll sign up as well right so classic product let motion only works though if you have a lot of users so that's always the bump like do you get to that first critical mass so that the wheel starts turning and you can get there with a lot of money possibly but that's hard in a saturated market so how so then in the end what we're focusing on is partnerships and you know there's solutions like nihilis in the market if some people know that where if you're building a product you can add scheduling into your solution with a certain fee structure and that's exactly what we were implementing previously and now we said well actually there's a better way and and that's how we've designed the product so if you're building something you can include our functionality our scheduling functionality basically at no cost so anyone who is like creating something unlovable like in a few clicks they can now have a scheduler for this vertical for that vertical it doesn't really matter and because of our different way of approaching pricing we're not charging for it right so that's like at a high level what how the company is different. We're also focusing a lot more on AI use cases. So it's API first where Calendly or like any scheduling solution wants you to go to the scheduling page to see their brand. We don't mind if you just go straight through the API and we've again optimized the model for that. I gave all these examples so that you can see that sometimes it's like very little tweaks that actually completely change the model. And the way that like it costs time to get this product built, but once you have it, it costs almost nothing to keep it running right and i'm literally talking like a few hundred a month to be in business and what people underestimate is that a lot of the value that a company has comes from just being around long enough and just from people associating your name or your brand with a certain topic so that by the time that they need this they'll think of you and they'll come and so if you can be around like there's always this talk about infinite runway well if your cost is a few hundred a month then if you really love this thing you can keep doing that even if you have a job somewhere right so there's nothing stopping you from being around forever basically unless you you truly think you want to pull the plug on this and so that's how we're designing these companies like the bar of success and initial success is just existence is extremely low like it only need a few customers to basically be break even and then the ambitions are extremely high we want to grow as big as we can but like as long as you can be a real business which means your costs are covered by your income then you know you can basically do whatever you want yeah i like that ends maybe if you could share a little bit more about why some of the bigger companies so like why maybe accountly or some of the other established players in any market should be worried about like some of these like one person companies because the thing you mentioned as well like when it comes to like what are the defensible modes what you just mentioned is is totally that like it's like your cost structure is hundreds of dollars theirs is potentially i don't know like is it a hundred million like what is it it's a lot more and so the the choices you can make whether it's even like how much do you give away for free or some other like potential areas to make partnerships more enticing as well like you can truly lean into that mode and because you do have a very small team you can move very fast And that does allow you to have like some different flexibility when it comes to just how do you pivot quickly? You have that speed. You definitely don't have like the brands. Yes. But like, as you mentioned, like over time, like that can become something over time where you get known for like, okay, that is the API alternative for meeting. Maybe I can add just before that, because that's a big part of what we did with user flow. What you're also seeing Adam Robinson do with RB2B is that we're sharing these highly effective stories using that as the founder-led marketing. And people love that when you talk about revenue, when you talk about how many people you are and really are transparent about these kind of things and also are offering an alternative path to what all the VC-backed companies are doing. And I think building that brand around efficiency and the fact that you're doing this as one person or in Userflow's case, a three person team is something that a lot of people love and want to get behind and that can help kind of boost your brand even further. So I think not only the efficiency or the effectiveness of just being a small team is great, but also the the story is great and and that helps you build a strong brand at least today we'll see in the future if all companies become like this then it might not be as good a story but i mean we all heard about build with for instance which like i think they took it he was one guy took it to 20 million or whatever i can't remember the exact numbers but you know those kind of stories are amazing and it's something when you're building these highly effective low headcount companies you can use today to attract customers for sure and i think there's there's two real factors worth highlighting here the the one is that yes your your cost is lower but i think the bigger advantage is the speed and there's always this talk about like the incumbents always being afraid or like taking mind and taking notice of startups and i think that just got like 10 or maybe even 100 times more dangerous for the incumbent because they they're stuck on all fronts they have existing customers to protect they have existing revenue to protect they have existing teams to protect and who protect themselves and so if they want to make any changes They have to navigate all this and get everyone moving in the same direction. Whereas if you're a one or three people company, you just decide it and you go. There's no need for all these delays. So you can make way more decisions and get way more results on that front. That in itself is nothing new. It's just so much faster now. And if you are looking at companies that are like, let's say a few hundred employees, let's say 10 million or more in revenue. they're all kind of in this position. Their board has told them to do AI, right? And they're running pilots left and right that are also failing left and right because they're not sure what exactly to do. And they're decentralizing the implementation in many cases, but that's actually not how you reshape an organization if you have to rethink your processes. So take these co-pilot things like, okay, now your team has co-pilot. Great. You're like, let's say, let's be optimistic 10 to 20 percent more productive right the teams that you're competing with that are now more and more coming to market they don't have that team that you just made more efficient they they're they're like a hundred percent more efficient than you were before so that's something like this is not a linear problem and that's why like our brains struggle to comprehend it but there's a cliff here like where like these small companies they're becoming more and more relevant slowly they're not that relevant yet because like they're still growing they're capturing market share and and mind share but there is a moment where like their brands become well known enough that suddenly these companies will need to adapt in ways that they can't anymore so i do think if you are a bigger company you need to be moving you can't change everything overnight and probably you shouldn't but but if you're not making like real like real changes instead of just pilots then you know there is a moment where it is too late i think i don't want to use the word lifestyle business because i don't think that's what you want to build but but you want to build a business that brings you enough income and profitability and that does not necessarily mean that you need to win the market let the vc-backed companies win the market but you can still have your share and and have a lot more profits i think that's how we thought about it at user flow and how i i guess you also think about it with your companies winston is really we don't need to win the market we just need to get our share 100 and that's what i meant when i said like a low bar for success like people might think like oh well you're not ambitious enough like no that low bar just means we're alive right where we can be around forever we we are not going out of business anytime soon And then what you can do is you don't need to be the most popular tool in the market. Like already very early on in my career, I was with a startup where we had like a browser extension for e-commerce and we were not a well-known brand. Actually, nobody knew our brand because we were always white labeled or SDK into something that already existed. But we were seven people doing over 10 million in revenue. Right. So so we didn't mind like that was all good. So that that's exactly the kind of attitude that you want in that case. If you want everyone to know you. in some cases plg can get you there but in many cases it's going to be very expensive and that might just not be actually the motion you want to run if you're also optimizing for efficiency like there's you know that there's certain revenue that you may not want right there there's like certain revenue a sales team could get you that may just not be profitable so do you want that part of the market like questionable like i i don't at this point in time and i think one thing too like it could still definitely be the obvious choice for somebody like what you're mentioning with meat bot it's like hey it's very specific like if for platforms or other people that want to plug and play and use this i think it could easily be best in class the best option for that for people that want that and kelly is going to overlook that because they want the dominant play in the market but that does not mean you are like back to the winning versus losing it's like you can still win a really meaningful portion of the market for that specific piece or that icp that definitely makes sense and i do want to just go back to the very beginning when we were talking a bit about one piece like where can this really work exceptionally well and i do think if we go back to if it's one person there is different tools which have like virality kind of baked in perfect example we had marie from tally forms on podcast as well and like they have a very small team as well i think it's like three or five people but they're at like four mil there are and that is the by nature like the kind of product where it's like it's viral hey fill up my form powered by tally and so they also lean into that with their small team they have very like one of the most generous free plans and their pricing is disruptive like if you compare it to type form and so it's like type form is not going to really change their pricing that much because if they did like you said you got to protect the current revenue you do have uh and at that scale it's it's not an easy like yeah let's let's lose you know 50 million dollars on this little endeavor and experiment no they're they're not going to do that so i think there is that like there's pockets of uh value to be disrupted in each of these like one person startups which is which is fantastic now where they kind of like second half of this too i would love to dig into the the skill sets you need to really do this well because i think there's like people might come out of this and be like yeah yeah i'm gung-ho here let me power up lovable or cursor and get started but what are some of the skill sets you've built to be able to to do this because anybody is like one person like doing all that that's hard i know you've you've run different businesses you've led many different products as well so you over the years have been acquiring a lot of skill sets and i think back to early in my career there was reed hoffman he has this kind of fun quote like he was talking about the early days of his career he was like going through basically a checklist of all the skills he would need to have to be a great business owners like and whenever the opportunity came up for like let's say a sales job or something like that or marketing he would jump in there because he's like I am priming myself to learn on somebody else's dime to be able to do this, to do it well. How do you kind of think about the skill sets? So let me start answering that with another quote from Reid Hoffman in that case. No, no, no. So he has this quote. I don't know the exact words, but it's around like that you, if you should be embarrassed of what you're launching and if you're not, then you launch too late. Right. And I think that was super valuable at the time when it was shared. And I think it's not true anymore today. And it kind of ties into exactly how I would answer your question. So it was true before because it took so much time to build the right things that you want to start learning as soon as possible. And there wasn't that much other software around yet. So it makes sense. Just get it out, see if it works, because this use case is probably not covered yet. Now, in the new world where you can build so easily and where. a lot of the categories already exist and people are expecting a certain level of usability when using a software then it's more and more important that you actually build something really good and if you can build it by yourself then you should also spend the time to make it look exactly the way that you want because that is actually where often the power comes from in really good products is that there's a certain founder vision and they obsess over certain things and you should get that in there that that's your unique point of view that's maybe how your thing is different from something else that does the same because you've thought that through or you have a certain view on that and so it's really important that you get those things in that you don't just go to lovable and you say hey make me a scheduling solution for this and that's like no that's not the point like why is it different and why is there an opportunity for this right now who are you going to sell this to and how will they use it and really understanding that and as you start building it also immediately thinking about okay someone comes to my website and they're getting in here so how does this make sense to them and then we're getting into onboarding and those kind of things like all that fig like attention for detail so you get 80 real quick with with a few prompts but the the other 20 is where you spend most of your time but that's also where you make the difference there's going to be a ton of average mvps on the market because it's so easy to create But there's only going to be the other 20% that's truly opinionated, that's truly well thought through, that maybe ties into the other tools that this user is using because they've understood the journey. So it comes back to that unique insight that I mentioned before. Do you have a certain point of view? And are you leaning into that, first of all, in terms of how it's valuable, but also in terms of why people should buy this from you, why you priced it like this, and in all these cases, being very deliberate about it? and if you do that then you know like the other parts like these these vibe coding tools are not very good yet at creating a good technical infrastructure so you kind of have to still ask it the right questions to make sure it builds it the right way but that's temporary that'll be solved it's a very solvable problem they just haven't gotten to it yet this other part that's not something where ai is going to be very good in the near future because the answers you get are very average if you ask it what's a good business idea it will be a very average idea if you tell it how to sell it it will be a very average way to sell it whereas in all these cases the edge comes from your unique insight and you know coming back to something i'm setting more often it's like building got a whole lot easier and selling just got harder right so like building i when i started my first tech company i thought building was the hard part getting the team together the money and then build it and after like one one and a half years we finally had the thing that we wanted to have and only then did i realize like damn it, the hard part is actually the selling because 10 people can build the same thing at the same time. The customer is only going to buy one of those 10. So there you're in all these dynamics in the market and trying to get share of attention, actually competing with everything and everyone out there. And on the other side, you're in your comfort zone, just building away. Right. So that's why they're so different. And then with all the AI automation that's happened on the go to market side, there's so much noise that selling actually got a lot harder while building got easier. so it's very very hard to get the right person to just see you to just listen to you and therefore the more specific you can be the more well thought through these things are that's really where you can make a difference no definitely and as far as like where you spend your time then uh maybe that's exactly that like it's like hey spend the majority of your time on the go to market side less on the product side is that kind of where your your head's at once you build something that's that's great so yeah i i do I've observed myself having building phases and growing phases. So I have phases where I say, okay, I think the next version of this has all these things. And I'm just going to spend my time now and build this the right way. And this was a big part for me of starting Poolside Ventures was to do it on my terms, to not run out of time, to not ship half-baked products, to just build something that I think this is how it should be. And am I always right? No, definitely not. But at least... At least it doesn't lose because it's missing certain things that I knew all along that it should have been in there. And that's just, in the end, it's a huge time saver because you might spend a week longer building it. That's the timeline you're talking about nowadays. But then it actually really, really works. So once those building phases finished, then I allow myself, for example, from January, latest February onwards. it i have to switch to growth mode and and that means that i'll allocate maybe one day a week to still add new things to build and the other four i just got to be working on like the messaging the website how do people find those like all those kind of things and and that's like you know the more uncharted territory for most companies in terms of how we can truly leverage AI there to be successful I want to add something here because I think it's a great overview of the skills you need I think in the past if we looked before the launch of GPT or what it was three or four I think the any like great technical developer person could actually build a startup right they could build a software company and my co-founder sebastian before he started userflow he he actually did a company called studio one and he was going through all this so so sebastian is like a 100x engineer or whatever you want to call him he's like a fantastic developer so he was building this product but also quickly realized now i built what's good enough now i need to sell it and and he has the capability to to go out and also sell, but it's not something that interests him too much. I think it's interesting now in the new world. I'm not sure we are fully there yet, but I mean, we're getting closer every day. It's going to be the people who are actually maybe interested in go to market who can also build products. The question is then going to be, are they going to be interested in building the products? I think that's going to be one of the big challenges of building one-person companies is really... interest rather than skill. I think today's skill is still going to be a big differentiator. But in the future, I can see it that if I'm either interested in go to market or I'm interested in building product, where should I spend my time and where do I want to spend my time? And that's why I, at least if I was to do a company again, would find somebody who are more interested in the technical part because I'm i i love building products but also know if i build products i it becomes a time sink for me and then i don't do anything else so even though i think in the future and maybe even the past as well it was possible to do one person companies with the right mindset that that i think is going to be a big challenge is really interest and so on i don't know what you think about that some successful some not we started this year with meatbot for example let's take that one And still, once we had it ready, we said, okay, let's now announce it. It was still that slap in the face as soon as you announced it, like, yeah, nobody cares, right? It's like, you just make this big announcement. You get a bunch of likes and so on. And I already told people beforehand, like, who were close. It's like, okay, I'm expecting 10 to 20 signups on day one. Like, that's it. There's nothing more happening there. It was right. I think we had 12. So, you know, that's what, unless you're... releasing something brand new that everyone's been waiting for which is rarely the case uh then not that much happened it is the continuous grind it's the continuous optimizations that and and they keep trying here and there that that always bring in the growth in like 99 out of 100 cases that's how it's been in all the companies i was in it's never easy it's always asymmetric results where like a few things bring in most of the growth and so you got to be aware of that when you start and it is definitely better to have an audience first or to at least somehow figure out how you can reach people or to say like okay i i only need two three customers like let's say partnership approach and then i'm already doing pretty well because those i can chase myself like that that's not a problem like so i think that's one part of the answer just like it's always hard and it's always been hard And I don't think that will change. And on top of that, the new technologies don't provide any new way of distribution. It's not like social. It's not like mobile. There's like no new channel that I can go on that no one's on yet. There's no, apart from GPT apps, which haven't really picked up yet, and MCPs, which is like, I don't know what's happening there. We have them, but to be honest, I don't know who's using them. But, you know, that's supposed to be like in the future, maybe the new ways. the new distribution channels so it's good to monitor them because if you're on them early like this can be like a technical building way to gain distribution and whoever was first on the salesforce app exchange or the slack app store or those kinds they did grow really big and so keeping an eye on that because again building is easy that can help a lot and that can that and things like partnerships and virality in your product and integrations with products that might mention your name on their website because you're the one that integrated with them those are things you can do if you're if you don't feel like picking up the phone or sending emails that that kind of keep you in your comfort zone but still get you into growth motions definitely so to recap here if somebody's listening and they're like oh yes i'm fired up i want to do this on my end and build that one person 10 million hour plus company uh what would be your advice to them start like you should it's simple as that so don't quit your job but start right like that's basically it and i've said that before jenny i was around so most companies you don't need to quit your job and and basically put the timer on because that's what you do when you quit your job it's like okay now i have like six months or four months or whatever time it is but you're burning cash and you're not making any right so With the speed at which you can build things now, you really want to do this, spend your weekends, right? It's going to be Christmas soon, like Christmas morning when everyone's asleep. That's when I was writing my book. So you can also write a nap during that time. So if you want this, then just make it happen. And the things that you don't understand about technology, ask. Ask your agent, ask your JetGPT or whatever model you're using, because it can actually answer those questions for you already. It doesn't do everything perfectly, but if you can't show me where you got stuck when you were trying to build it, then I don't think you really want this. The beauty of these white coating tools or whatever you want to call them, there's different variations, is that they are constantly developing. I mean, I tried Lovable, what, six months ago and it kept giving me errors after the first prompt or something. But today, when I try it, it's giving me a fully functioning web interface on the first prompt. And then on the next prompt, it gives me more. So, I mean, they're constantly evolving. So don't be too negative about what you see at first, because this is only going to evolve into something better. I'm very bullish about that. Yeah, that's actually also what comes out of some of this research that, I don't know, MIT and McKinsey and so on have been releasing on separate occasions where. They're saying that the biggest problem right now is that people have tried it once and then they don't for a year. And the cost of that is actually the biggest cost out there, both from a company perspective as well as from your personal development perspective. So, yes, you got to keep trying. If there's something you're running into a lot, then probably everyone is like images not having proper letters. Yeah, that was a thing one year ago. Nowadays, if you use the right model, not a problem anymore. Right. So these things are evolving and there's. There's definitely, if it doesn't do what you want right now, then it might just do it in two or three months from now. Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on. This has been great. I love the focus on finding your own new competitive advantage as a one-person company as well, I think. the insanely profitable side of things make just a lot more options as far as like how you could scale you move fast you can do different pricing modes or free modes as well that definitely enable you to stand out in your category but thanks so much for coming on this has been great yeah thanks for having me and then where can people find out more about you obviously meet.bot you're you're very active on linkedin so we can link to that as well any other places you want people to check you out No, that's all good. We have plans for next year, but for now, just go for LinkedIn and I'll share there as much as I can about the journey that we're on. Awesome. Well, thanks so much.

Most founders believe scaling requires a massive headcount, co-founders, and VC funding. They think success is measured by the size of the team, not the efficiency of the revenue.

In this episode of the ProductLed 100 series, Wes Bush sits down with Vincent Jong (Founder of Poolside Ventures) and Esben Friis-Jensen (Co-Founder of Userflow) to discuss the emerging era of the "One-Person Company" - businesses designed to generate millions in revenue with just a single operator.

Vincent reveals his strategy for building a portfolio of lean, highly profitable SaaS companies like MeetBot. Together with Esben, they break down how AI tools like Lovable and Cursor have removed the technical barrier to entry, why "speed" is the new competitive moat against incumbents like Calendly, and the exact skill sets required to thrive as a solo builder.

Whether you are a developer looking to launch your own venture or a founder trying to maximize efficiency, this episode offers a blueprint for building high-revenue, low-headcount businesses that are built to last forever.

Key Highlights:
01:42: Why Vincent stopped looking for co-founders and started building alone
03:18: The AI Tech Stack: How tools like Lovable and Cursor replace engineering teams
06:22: Why building the product is the easy part (and selling is the hard part)
13:45: Disrupting a Red Ocean: Why MeetBot entered the crowded scheduling market
17:08: The Economics of Infinite Runway: Operating a SaaS for a few hundred dollars a month
20:58: Speed vs. Scale: How one-person teams outmaneuver incumbents
27:54: The "Launch Early" myth vs. the new bar for MVP quality
38:12: Vincent’s advice: Don’t quit your job. Build on weekends

Resources:
📅 MeetBot: The API-first scheduling solution - https://meet.bot
💼 Connect with Vincent Jong on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentjong/
💼 Connect with Wes Bush on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesbush/
💼 Connect with Esben Friis-Jensen on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/esbenfriisjensen/
📝 Blog - https://productled.com/blog/the-solo-founder-playbook-how-to-run-a-1m-arr-saas-with-one-person
🧠 Sign up for the ProductLed Newsletter - https://www.productled.com/newsletter