Solo Founders

Building a startup alone can be both exhilarating and overwhelming when you're solo. You wear every hat—from product management to engineering to marketing—and every decision rests on your shoulders. In such a high-stakes environment, you simply can’t afford to scatter your limited time, money, or focus. Having a clear, methodical but aggressive plan is a pillar for maximizing your shot at success. In this guide I will walk out a new way of thinking, one that has been proven and is the foundation of many successful startups today.

Lean Startup

For years, many founders have turned to Lean Startup as their compass, it has been engrained in indiehacker and solo-founder culture. The method emphasizes building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) fast, releasing it, and iterating quickly. While this was a welcome reaction to the old-school “spend years building in a vacuum” model, Lean Startup sometimes pushes you to jump in with both feet too soon, without properly validating core aspects of what makes a product successful. The "just ship until something sticks" paradigm with indiehackers largely originates here. The problem is it often misses how to measure genuine product-market fit (PMF) or whether an MVP is even worth building. It's a shotgun approach.

As a solo founder, these gaps can be especially dangerous—wasted time and money hit you harder. Continued failure can lead to fatigue and just giving up all together.

The New Model

Instead of treating the MVP as the be-all and end-all, we need to embrace a slightly different framework—one that still encourages fast learning but ties every step to a clearly articulated purpose. Each purpose tied directly to validating a critical aspect of determining whether your idea is a winner, for both users and you. The framework we will be using is my own adaption of the Deliberate Startup approach.

I first learned this framework from Sachin Rekhi (built Notejoy & Linkedin Sales Navigator). The reason I love this framework is it recognizes that true PMF doesn’t happen by chance. It uses a systematic loop of four interconnected phases, each essential to shaping (and reshaping) your idea to maximize success:

1. Define
   Here, you articulate your idea. We use a PMF narrative. Don't worry, it's light and the emphasis on the thinking. You specify your hypotheses around the problem you’re solving, the audience you’re targeting, your unique value proposition, potential competitive advantage, a plan for growth, and a viable business model.

2. Validate
   Next, you identify your riskiest hypothesis and choose the best validation techniques—customer interviews, mockups, prototypes, or early MVPs—to validate them. This way, you’re learning quickly before you invest heavily in building something stupid.

3. Measure
   Once you begin acquiring early users, you establish clear metrics (e.g., engagement, retention, or conversion) that indicate you’re on the right track. This is not attention from a Reddit post, it is the metrics that actually matter when it comes to building a successful product. By tracking real data, you’ll know whether you’re inching closer to product-market fit—or missing the mark.

4. Traction
   Finally, you plan how you’ll get and keep your earliest customers. Even if you’re not aiming for explosive growth immediately, you need enough traction to gather meaningful feedback. It’s not just about having a good product; it’s about ensuring we are intentional with it finding its way into users’ hands for real-world validation.

Together, these four steps form an interconnected “PMF loop,” ensuring each phase feeds into the next. At first glance it may feel slow, the reality is it's not when compared to repeated failures or launching blindly month over month. The better you get at product thinking and developing that founder skillset, the more aggressive you can be. In the long-run it’s a much cleaner way of seeking product-market fit—one that addresses the gaps in Lean Startup and current indiehacker thinking.

PMF Narratives

At the heart of this approach sits a PMF narrative—a living, concise document that stitches all your hypotheses and strategy into one coherent story that can be tested. It covers the six most common failure modes of a product and creates a plan of what you need to validate. It's structured as follows:

1. Problem to Solve
   • What It Is: The specific pain point or need in the market you aim to tackle.
   • Why It Matters: If you solve a low-severity or vague problem, you risk building something nobody truly needs. Articulate the magnitude and urgency of the problem.
2. Target Audience
   • What It Is: The core group of users or customers whose lives are impacted by the problem.
   • Why It Matters: Defining a niche first helps you validate assumptions quickly and build passionate early adopters. Over time, you can expand to adjacent markets.
3. Value Proposition
   • What It Is: A concise statement of why someone should use your product, highlighting the benefits they can’t get elsewhere.
   • Why It Matters: A clear value proposition helps users immediately understand how your solution meets their needs in a way that stands out from the competition.
4. Competitive Advantage
   • What It Is: The short-term and long-term ways you will outperform or differentiate from other solutions.
   • Why It Matters: Even if your product is unique now, competitors can catch up. Defining a moat (e.g., brand trust, network effects, switching costs) keeps you ahead for the long haul.
5. Growth Strategy
   • What It Is: Both the short-term tactics (e.g., personal outreach or influencer promotion) to get early users and the long-term, scalable channels (e.g., viral loops, content marketing) for sustainable growth.
6. Business Model
   • What It Is: How you make money (revenue streams, pricing, cost structure) and the underlying assumptions about customer lifetime value, acquisition costs, etc.
   • Why It Matters: Early clarity on revenue ensures you’re not blindly building something that can’t sustain itself. Often this starts with some basic napkin math. Solo founders especially need to validate that they can support continued product development.

This is not some 30-page “business plan” so calm down. It’s a flexible, evolving operating system that helps keep you oriented on what is important. Every successful startup has had a plan or set of hypotheses. They will change and adapt but when new data or insights emerge, you simply update the a few lines in the narrative. The key is in the thinking it forces you to do.

So Now What?

Now that you have a set of hypothesis the fun part begins. Validating the riskiest ones. This is more art than science and I will do a deeper dive on this however, I generally follow a three phase approach.

1. Expert Consultation/Market Research Often I will find experts in the sector or around the problem space and interview them. I am looking for confirmation or refutation of my hypothesis through non-biased questions. I am also downloading and exploring knowledge of the sector, looking for other oppportunities and fleshing out how I think about the idea. I pair this with deep research on the market. This comes through meticulous immersion in subreddits, forums, twitter, or FB groups. Pretty much anywhere potential users hangout.
2. PMF Interviews Conducting good user interviews, I call them mining interviews deserves it's own write-up. It is a skill that takes practice. We are often protective of our idea and seeking affirmation it will work. This is a terrible practice. PMF interviews are a longer interview focused on understanding the user (target audience), how they experience the problem my idea solves (gaps/severity), and the way they currently are solving it (alternatives/competition).
3. Built Tests/MVP At this point point or if I have been unable to validate/invalidate some of my riskier hypotheses I am looking to build. This comes in many shapes, the MVP, being the last. It could be fake door ads, could be a waitlist, could be a manual version of the product. It all depends on what hypothesis I am testing and the insight I am trying to extract. The MVP and it's slicing will be a different section but I cannot repeat enough, if you have been unable to validate the majority of your hypotheses, at least partially without building an MVP, something is seriously wrong. As a reminder, every step of the way, if my thinking changes it is updated in the narrative. If a few interviews reveal new insights then they are reflected in the doc. It lives and breathes with me.

Going Solo

While, you may have fewer resources as a solo founder, you also have an unmatched ability to pivot quickly. You don’t have to wrangle multiple co-founders or large teams when you learn something that prompts a strategy shift. The PMF narrative supercharges that agility by preventing you from pivoting aimlessly or chasing dumb side-quests for dopamine hits on Twitter.

• Purposeful Pivots
  You only shift direction when new data invalidates an assumption in your narrative. This keeps your changes grounded in some reality vs. guesswork.

• Speedy Execution
  Without layers of bureaucracy, you can test and iterate in days rather than weeks. Sure the narrative takes an hour or two of diligent thinking but it ensures you can then move fast in the right direction.

• Unified Focus
  Your narrative is a single source of truth, you can always ask yourself is this core to validating my idea. If it's not on the doc... it's a no from me dawg.

Deliberate Leap

Ultimately, the Deliberate Startup is uncomfortable. You will have to start talking to users, thinking through positioning, and doing some math. It forces you to do things you may not have reps at but that's just tough luck. If you thought being a founder or building a successful product was all building you probably aren't going to make it. Embrace that balance, and you’ll be far better positioned to turn your idea into something that resonates deeply with the market—and, ultimately makes you rich.