@founderschoolhq for solo founders trying to bootstrap profitable web apps.
Portland, OR
Joined June 2022
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Here's the entire curriculum of FounderSchool (founderschool.dev). It's everything I've learned about software development in the last 10 years. All written from scratch. Mostly wisdom born of experience (i.e., mistakes). Not a task list. An execution system. No bullshit. No fluff. Waitlist open.
SaaS is dead.
Build yourself the software you want instead.
At work (R&D at a fortune 500 company w/ 15k+ employees), every time a SaaS pitches their product, my first question in the review meeting is, "Why don't we just build this ourselves?"
In the past, there were always good answers to that question. Today, I can't think of any.
If we can point an agent at any website or demo, have it research the broader problem for 72 hours, build the product with a focus on our specific needs, with any extra features we want, AND save a million a year why would we pay for your SaaS?
Scale? It only has to scale to 15,000 employees and a few million customers. We don't have the same scaling problem you do serving 1,000 businesses with 100s of million of customers. Scale is a non-issue.
Reliability? Your 99.9% self-reported uptime is not impressive. We can pay to host an app on a hyperscaler too. And when we do it, we know with certainty whether the uptime number is true or not. Github's official status page reports ~99% uptime. The Missing GitHub Status Page reports 93%. Reliability is a non-issue.
Bugs? You think your SaaS product doesn't have bugs to work out? I've seen bugs in third party products cost our company millions. Everyone is shipping early and often. Including your SaaS. Every piece of software has bugs. But there is a big difference between a bug in your code and a bug in ours. When the bug is in your code, we are at your mercy. Maybe you put it into Jira immediately. Are you going to bypass sprint planning? You won't have a fix for two weeks. Maybe you'll fail to reproduce and blame our code. Maybe it is our code. Maybe its an interplay. Since you don't have our code and we don't have your code, how are we going to figure that out? If it's all our code, an employee can fix it in an hour. If we need to, we can throw ten engineers with agents in a call until it's reproduced, the fix is merged, and it's validated. Bugs are a non-issue.
Bandwidth? Agents are nearly autonomous now. They don't need to be babysat. I can spin up a project and let an agent run for 50 hours, have it build a PowerPoint and walk into a demo with leadership blind. If anything breaks, "I'm still working on that." Things always break in demos. Nobody cares. If leadership proposes a feature, the answer is, "Yeah, great idea, I can add that." Because I can. Bandwidth is a non-issue.
Maintenance? We have so much prior art, inputs and outputs, we can benchmark anything. We have autonomous PR systems built on top of in-app feedback SDKs so even the non-dev users can contribute to every app or service. Even our analytics systems are tied to automated PRs. Maintenance is a non-issue.
Support? It doesn't matter how much we're paying a month for your platinum level enterprise support when our point of contact has to fetch the one dev who already went home for every non-trivial incident. The incident is never trivial. We already checked the top 10 things it could be because that was faster than asking you. Support is a non-issue.
Expertise? Agentic research. We can build anything. Expertise is a non-issue.
Cost? The cost of intelligence has gone down 100x every year. You're still charging 2022 prices. You should be charging closer to your electricity costs. Cost is a non-issue.
At this point, the only reason we don't switch off existing services is that transitioning 15,000 employees to something else is a pain in the butt. It would be a pain in the butt even with a perfect bug-free, infinitely scalable, perfectly-reliable clone.
Your new SaaS doesn't have that moat.
But it does give me an idea for a product to build.
Will Hawkins π retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Rough day for @Railway users. And on the same day as #php2shell no less. Afraid we're in for a lot more of these in the near future. Buckle up.
Will Hawkins π retweeted
stop selling to indiehackers
build software for companies already making money
a successful startup/company is not interested in vibe coding everything; they want stuff to work
they don't mind paying saas prices for things that add value
indiehackers will spend days replacing software to save $50/m (and that is totally fine)
yes a lot of internal tooling will be vibe coded, but there is so much opportunity right now to build software that just works and within an agent stack
i am a really big fan of building things in house (especially with ai now) but we are growing fast and we have no time to waste; we are not trying to save a few hundred $ a month
everything is moving faster, growing startups don't want to waste any time
When the godfather of @Linux and git says βuse AIβ, seems wise to listen.
This is not an argument for slop. Just that AI is a legit tool in the toolbox π§° .
Will Hawkins π retweeted
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If youβre building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:
β’ Proprietary data
β’ Network effects
β’ A physical component
Indie devs always forget to value the time they spend building something that replaces an $8/mo SaaS.
Software is definitely not dead yet.
"software is dead"
as a buyer and maker of saas i dont see this (yet?)
yes, i could vibe code my own crm, my own cms, ats etc.
but thanks to ai everything is moving faster, that means even wasting a week on making my own ats i would be a week behind
i can also just buy an ats, pay 200-400 a month and not have to deal with all the little details of running an ats (hint its a lot more complex than you think it is)
when you are running a small indie shop chances are that you can just run your crm in excel anyway; same with hiring
once you scale an org you have a lot of other things you have to deal with, meaning that vibe coding or even maintaining these tools becomes a nightmare (don't get me wrong, you can do this!)
imagine onboarding a sales team to your vibe coded crm, that will not be fun
but there is still a lot we build inhouse (which we probably would not have done 5 years ago)
but its more around giving ourselves an edge, what can we build that helps us improve the business, often its not a different crm but something added to the crm
i think most saas is already aggressively priced, i find ai much more interesting to build on top of these systems not replace them, i want ai to maximise them
This is so true. And so frustrating if youβre a tinkerer.
Will Hawkins π retweeted
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:
Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:
Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!
In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
ASD-STE100 is the way.
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:
Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:
Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!
In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
Will Hawkins π retweeted
Lots of founders are crashing out
A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity.
Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back.
Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound.
Building complex systems that felt extremely productive.
But since then, a lot has happened.
Hereβs some of the themes Iβm seeing:
AI marketing isnβt working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most itβs not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat.
Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. Itβs a new way of working and itβs not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am.
Thereβs a feeling of whatβs the point? Is my productβs next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Canβt AI do what my business does, better?
SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. Thereβs a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now.
Thereβs far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way.
Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy.
Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues.
There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential
New founders often agonize over choosing a brand and domain name.
But there are some simple rules of thumb that turn this from a weeklong exercise into a morning coffee one.
I built a nifty agent skill for helping narrow down the choices based on a short description.
Comment "domain" if you want me to send you the direct link or have questions about how it work.
It's one of over 60 #claude agent skills I've built specifically tailored to solo, nontechnical, bootstrapped founders.
Here is the complete skill repo: github.com/whawkinsiv/solo-fβ¦
This is a must watch.
It's pencils down, people. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically viable skill for most programmers at most companies. But the future of making software has never been brighter. Don't you dare black pill this beautiful moment! youtu.be/vDjW_dRyKXY?si=6Fsfβ¦
Slop. Why are ai agents so good at producing slop? And why are they so terrible at writing good prose?
I mean, it's probably because they were trained on Reddit (slop in -> slop out), but I'd love to hear a more sophisticated explanation.
Does this sound like you?
Month nine iterating on my fifth vibecoded SaaS.
Still stuck at zero users.
Every launch drives a spike in traffic, then dies off fast.
Well, the answer is simple: launch spikes fade because they bring tire kickers, not people with the problem you're trying to solve.
Your first 100 users will come one conversation at a time.
So go find people posting about the exact pain and talk to them.
Will Hawkins π retweeted
Yet again cosplaying an actual journalist and doing my best to objectively analyze the words of the Oregon gubernatorial candidates β from a startup perspective siliconflorist.com/2026/09/2β¦
