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Unicorn dreams
a day ago
- Zeke Gabrielse has been working on Keygen for nearly nine years, experiencing slow, linear growth rather than rapid startup success.
- He feels stuck in a cycle of 'unicorn dreams' — wanting faster growth and a bigger payoff — but recognizes Keygen is a 'space elevator,' not a 'rocket ship.'
- After paternity leave, he realized the business runs on autopilot, leaving him bored and guilty, questioning his purpose and self-worth tied to the business.
- He dislikes sales and ads, preferring to write code and help engineers, which has led to organic growth of ~50% year over year.
- He considers selling but finds the multiples too low; instead, he contemplates raising capital to grow the team and accelerate growth, embracing a new challenge.
Trailblazing
a day ago
- Choosing Ruby on Rails in 2025 as a deliberate competitive advantage for a solo founder.
- Avoiding enterprise 'slop' — ugly, slow, bloated software with poor documentation and sales calls.
- Rails enables fast shipping, constant iteration, and focus on product over plumbing through batteries-included design, strong third-party support, and convention over configuration.
- Speed compounds: quick feature implementation, bug fixes in minutes, and rapid iteration keep the founder ahead of competitors.
- Trailblazers set the pace; copycats follow but rarely innovate, and the founder can out-iterate them.
- Deliberate technical and cultural choices keep the business moving forward without unnecessary complexity or distractions.
- Rails is trusted as a framework built on real-world problems, allowing the founder to avoid chasing fads like microservices.
Hitting $125k MRR as a solo founder by doubling down on the right segment
17 days ago
- Jason Zigelbaum built Zigpoll, a survey and customer feedback platform, after identifying a gap in understanding customer behavior in e-commerce.
- He bootstrapped the company solo, without cofounders, funding, or a sales team, reaching $125K MRR (around $1.5M ARR) and doubling revenue annually.
- The initial focus was on e-commerce, but Zigpoll now serves SaaS teams, offering post-purchase, exit-intent, and CRO surveys to capture honest feedback at key moments.
- Key growth channels include the Shopify App Store (about one-third of signups), word-of-mouth from agency operators, and AI tools like ChatGPT (14% of signups).
- A major learning was realizing agency operators were the core segment; un-gating integrations and building for them increased revenue per account by 24% without price hikes.
- Zigelbaum emphasizes listening to customers through structured feedback, acting on patterns quickly, and using qualitative data over waiting for statistical significance.
- His tech stack is JavaScript-based, using Express, Mongo, React, and Redis, and he prioritizes reliable third-party tools to save time and money.
- Future goals include reaching $2M ARR and expanding Zigpoll beyond e-commerce to serve any business needing customer insights, while remaining solo and bootstrapped.
How the first solo-founder unicorn gets built
a month ago
- Firms exist to reduce transaction costs of using the market, per Coase's theory, with growth stopping when internal coordination costs equal market costs.
- The gig economy lowered transaction costs but didn't create solo unicorns because coordination load on founders remained unscalable.
- AI now enables scaling of a single person's coordination capacity, addressing the bottleneck the gig economy couldn't, potentially allowing solo-founder unicorns.
- This shifts Coase's boundary toward individuals, particularly for coordination-heavy, collaboration-light work, but firms persist for asset-specific, trust-based, or regulated tasks.
- The first solo-founder unicorn is predicted within this decade, built around a coordination layer managing contractors and AI agents.

solo founder

Unicorn dreams

Trailblazing

Hitting $125k MRR as a solo founder by doubling down on the right segment

How the first solo-founder unicorn gets built