You’ve built the prototype.
You’ve shown it to friends.
They said it was cool.
That was three months ago.
Since then you’ve redesigned the landing page twice, added features nobody asked for, and spent an entire weekend choosing between Stripe and Polar. The project is better than ever. It’s also still on your laptop.
This is the gap no one talks about: the distance between working and shipped. Between “I could charge for this” and actually charging for it. The tools have never been easier. The decision-making has never been harder.
Big tech solves this with process, standups, sprints, PMs who won’t let things drift. You don’t have that. You have Tuesday afternoon and a browser with 48 tabs open.
This guide is the operating system for that reality.
Inside: the decision frameworks that replace the team you don’t have. How to scope ruthlessly. How to validate before you build (and what “validation” actually means when you’re a market of one testing for a market of thousands). The specific ways AI tools fail solo builders, and the workarounds that aren’t obvious until you’ve burned a week on them.
Stop tinkering with “vibes”
Start running a one‑person AI company
