Welcome to The Solo Stack

Something is happening that most people haven't noticed yet.

A solo accountant in Ohio is processing more returns than a team of four did three years ago. A one-person design studio in Berlin is winning contracts against agencies with fifteen employees. An independent consultant in Toronto just delivered a market analysis that would have taken a research firm two weeks. She did it in an afternoon.

They're not working harder. They're not superhuman. They're running on a different stack.

AI hasn't just made things faster. It's rewritten the economics of building a business. The fixed costs that used to force you to hire (research, drafting, analysis, customer communication, bookkeeping, content creation) are collapsing toward zero marginal cost. The work still gets done. It just doesn't require a person for every function anymore.

This changes everything about what one person can build.

What The Solo Stack Is

This publication is for people who are building alone, or thinking about it.

Not "solopreneurs" in the lifestyle-brand sense. Not freelancers who just want to work from a beach. Builders. People who see a market, understand a domain, and want to build something real without the overhead of a team they don't need yet. Or maybe ever.

The Solo Stack covers:

• The economics: what AI actually costs, what it replaces, and where the math breaks down
• The workflows: practical systems for turning AI into infrastructure, not just a chatbot you talk to sometimes
• The strategy: how solo builders compete with (and beat) larger competitors
• The honest parts: what doesn't work, what's overhyped, and where human expertise still matters more than any model

This isn't an AI newsletter. There are plenty of those. This is a building newsletter that happens to cover AI because AI is the thing that makes solo building viable at scale.

What This Isn't

No prompt libraries. No "top 10 ChatGPT hacks." No breathless announcements about the latest model release.

If you want to know which model scored 2% higher on a benchmark, there are better places for that. If you want to know how to actually wire AI into a business that makes money and does real work, that's what we're here for.

I'm also not going to pretend I have all the answers. This space is moving fast. Anyone who claims certainty about where things are headed in twelve months is selling something. What I can do is share what's actually working right now, in practice, and be honest about the edges.

Why "Ember"

Because the interesting thing about an ember isn't the spark. It's the persistence. It stays hot long after the initial flame. It's small, it's steady, and under the right conditions, it starts something much bigger.

That's the solo builder story. You don't need to be the biggest fire. You need to be the one that doesn't go out.

What's Coming

I'll be publishing regularly on the economics, strategy, and mechanics of building alone with AI. Every piece will be grounded in real experience. Some will be practical how-tos. Some will be strategic arguments about where the market is heading. Some will be honest building-in-public updates.

Subscribe if that sounds useful. It's free, and you can leave anytime.

Let's build.