> Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully

x3

Solo bootstrapper as well, ~20K ARR on one SaaS app about to launch another.

It's clear to me there's money to be made, and yes engineers tend to overweight engineering effort and underweight distribution.

Make something that makes someone's life better, saves or makes them money, and ask a fair amount for it.

That's what I've done and have modest recurring revenue after only 6-8 months or so.

x4, but I'd put an asterisk that tech choice matters in as much as how fast it allows you to go - something like PHP or Rails or Phoenix app with batteries included and deployed by hand on a single Linode instance, beats a fancy new TypeScript GraphQL Kubernetes stack on time-to-market any time of the day.

Honestly all the "fancy new" stuff only gives you benefits at galactic scale compared to what most solo folks will build. You already start well behind the curve being a solo dev, so you lose out on a lot of benefits of orchestration, rapid microservice deployments, etc. That stuff is built for teams, not one person hacking away in their home office on nights and weekends. You get all the bad parts, because they can't be avoided, and none of the good, because you don't have the throughput to take advantage.

My current job has 80 or 90 devs and we have both on-prem k8s, on-prem monolith, and plenty of "cloud-native" AWS stuff. Everything TS, GraphQL, messaging queues, exactly what you'd expect from an organization that size.

My side projects are all .NET MVC apps. Full-page reloads, manual deployments out of Visual Studio, etc. The only excuse for me to go the TS etc. route would be if that was the only thing I knew how to do, and honestly with as much as I've heard from folks like Tony and Pieter, if I was green now and only knew TS, I'd probably be learning PHP and Laravel.

I'm not even sure solo is at a disadvantage here - on the contrary, regular companies are bogged down by a massive tech pit, because of which they can't move fast, and only keep adding to that according to Conway's law.

Imho 90% of 90-developer companies out there could be replaced by 1-2 devs working same hours but more efficiently with a more efficient stack. I'm not even joking!

may i ask what has been your gtm to get early success

Congrats!!