Sadly, they didn’t.

Opens were fine. Some people had clicked through to the extension page. But the download counter barely moved, and I did what any founder does in that moment. I told myself it was late, people would get to it in the morning. Then morning became the next day, and the next day became me manually emailing every person on the list, one by one.

The replies were warm. “I’ll get to it this weekend”. “Looks great, will check it out soon.” But almost none of them did.

That’s when I understood the most expensive lesson I’ve learned as a founder: a waitlist is a list of people who said yes once because saying yes cost them nothing.

A waitlist is not a customer base. The two things look identical from the outside until launch day.

What made this worse was that I had done everything the playbook says. Landing page, ads, the “creator-founder” content loop, keep the waitlist warm So by every external signal I was set up. And it still failed. Not because the product was broken, but because I had spent weeks perfecting the product and almost no time building distribution.

Why the Standard Playbook Was Never Written for You

Most distribution advice was designed for companies with one thing you don’t have yet: an existing customer base. SEO compounds on domain authority you’ve built over years. Social media algorithms reward accounts with established engagement signals. Google Ads makes economic sense when your build cycle is six months and a demand test costs less than the product, but today, you can ship an MVP in two weeks, which means the test takes longer than the thing being tested. Meta ads on a new account with minimal organic traction train the platform to expect ad spend from you without delivering the audience density that makes those ads convert.

Email click-through rates average around 2–3% across industries, which means even a perfectly executed email sequence reaches almost no one on an action basis. None of this is the fault of the channels. They work well for the companies they were built for. They just weren’t built for an early-stage solo founder with a product and a list of politely interested strangers.

The Four-Move Framework That Actually Works At This Stage

After the launch failed, I started paying attention to the founders around me who were getting real traction (not impressive metrics, but actual paying customers) without ad budgets. The patterns were consistent enough that they’ve become my working framework. Each one is something you can run this week.

Move 1: Find the small room and walk into it.

The large platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok operate as attention auctions, and you will lose those auctions to companies with budgets and brand equity. Small rooms don’t work that way. A Substack with 2,000 engaged readers, a Discord server with 80 members, a local Saturday market, a niche Slack community: nobody is bidding for access to these places. So you can simply show up.

The practical version of this: identify one place where your specific customer already gathers and is already paying attention to something. Not a broad category like “LinkedIn” or “Twitter.” One specific corner. One newsletter. One group. One recurring event. And go there. Repeatedly.

Move 2: Lead with a gift, not a pitch.

Every founder I watched get early traction showed up with something to give before they asked for anything. A useful piece of writing. A free workshop. A bag of homemade cookies at a flea market with a one-page note. A resource that the person would forward to a friend.

This isn’t soft advice dressed up as strategy. It’s a hard-edged distribution insight. The mainstream marketing infrastructure is built entirely on extraction: get the click, get the email, capture the conversion. People have developed real callouses against it. They scroll past, they delete, they block. What they haven’t built defenses against is someone who shows up with something genuinely useful and doesn’t immediately ask for anything in return. The first interaction being a gift changes the nature of every interaction that follows.

Move 3: Pick a position that excludes most people on purpose.

The instinct at an early stage is to soften your messaging to appeal to as many people as possible. The founders who broke through did the opposite. Their landing pages made it obvious that you were either the right person or you weren’t. Their writing said things that some readers would disagree with. They had a pointy point of view.

This is actually a structural advantage of being early and small. A company with a marketing team and a brand to protect cannot afford to be polarizing. But you can. Being specific about who you’re for, and honest about who you’re not for, is one of the few moves that’s harder for a larger competitor to replicate than it is for you to execute.

Move 4: Use the unscalable nature of your stage as an advantage.

This was the pattern I missed entirely when I was looking for channels I could switch on and walk away from. The founders who found their first hundred customers weren’t optimizing for scale. They were doing things that only made sense at their specific stage of zero.

A founder of a clothing swap startup stood outside Goodwill stores in San Francisco and handed flyers specifically to women walking out, because that was her customer, and she wasn’t trying to reach a million people, she was trying to reach the next twenty.

Another founder of a healthy snack hosted a yoga session; people came, and the ones who signed up were the right ones.

When I saw these examples, I started driving to (something even flying to) flea markets with cookies to get a chance of a face-to-face conversation but brand founders. And I got them!

Nothing about any of this was scalable. That’s why it worked.

The Honest Starting Point

Main thing I learnt is that distribution is not a channel you select from a dropdown menu. It’s something you build by hand, in rooms that don’t scale, before you have any evidence it’s going to work.

The framework above is not complicated, but it requires a specific kind of patience that most founders don’t practice: the patience to do small things deliberately rather than big things hopefully. Pick one room this week. Show up there with something useful, not something you’re selling. Do it four weeks in a row.

That won’t complete your distribution strategy. But it’s the only honest place to start, and it’s the one move that most of your competitors, including the ones with budgets, won’t bother to make.

This essay was written using a tool I’ve been quietly building. It’s for solo founders who want the leverage of AI agents without having to build one from scratch. I’m running a private beta. If that’s you, message me.

Each time, I would find a competitor with more features, more partners, or a glossier landing page. I would convince myself they would win unless I matched them. So I would stop talking to customers and focus on building. New dashboards, new flows, new differentiators that nobody had asked for. The result was always the same: launch timelines dragged, money burned, no new customers, and a product that became harder to explain with every rebuild.

Competitors Are Your Allies

Here is what I wish someone had told me. Competitors at the early stage are not a threat, they are a validation signal. If a second team has independently decided this problem is worth a company, that is information. The question is not how do I beat them. The question is which slice of this market can I own.

Your job at this stage is to find a hundred people and solve their biggest problem perfectly. The pie, the TAM, the other players are not your concern. The unserved slice is. Picking that slice feels less heroic than building for a multi-billion-dollar market, but it is the decision that determines whether you have a company in eighteen months.

How Granola Won In A Saturated Market?

When Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson started building Granola in early 2023, the AI note-taking space was already saturated. Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv, and close to a million more. Walking into a YC pitch with another note-taking app would have gotten you laughed out of the room.

So Pedregal did not try to build a better note-taker. He picked one specific kind of user, and built a product only that user could love.

Specifically: VCs.

The reasoning was structural. VCs do many calls, share notes constantly, and reference those notes weeks later. They love trying new AI tools, have high willingness to pay, and sit on influential networks.

And critically, they did not want a meeting bot showing up in confidential pitches.

That last bit became the wedge. Every other note-taker required a bot to join the call. Granola ran locally on the laptop, transcribed in the background, and never announced itself to the other side. For a VC taking a sensitive call with a founder, that was the difference between a tool they could use and a tool that made their founders uneasy.

The product also reflected a philosophy: if your judgment is valuable, you should not outsource it. You take notes, AI enhances them after, you stay in control. Other tools were trying to replace the human. Granola was augmenting one.

Two decisions: the right ICP, and a clear philosophical wedge. Those two decisions got them their first thousand users, which got them VC adoption, which got them founder adoption, which got them to a $1.5B valuation in three years.

Reframe, Don’t Panic

When I was panicking about competitors at my last company, Shezaar, the answer was not in their product. It was in the twenty-something brand discovery calls I had already done and not yet listened to closely enough. Mid-market activewear brands kept describing the same problem in the same words. Their pain was specific, structural, and not being served by anyone, including the competitor I was busy panicking about. That was the slice. I found it a month later than I should have because I spent those weeks differentiating on features instead of returning to the calls.

So if you are panicking about your product being inferior to your competitors, do not open their landing page again. Open your last ten customer conversations. Read them looking for the shape of a person, not a feature gap. What does this person say in their own words? What do they hate about their current options? Why would your competitor’s product fail them specifically? The wedge is somewhere in those transcripts.

Notice that none of these questions is about your competitor’s product. The product is downstream of their ICP and their wedge. Copying features means copying the output of decisions you do not understand. Picking a different ICP and a different wedge means you are not competing with them at all.

Granola did not beat the competition. It refused to play their game.

What game are you refusing to play?

There are four cards on a table. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. The four cards showing are:

Here’s the rule: If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.

Task: Which card or cards do you need to flip over to check whether the rule is true or false? (You can flip at max 2 cards.)

→ Click here to play the game or scroll to the bottom of this post for the solution.

I can guarantee one thing. Most people will get this wrong. And the reason for it is what nearly killed my startup.

Building In An Echo Chamber

When I started building Shezaar, I needed to validate the idea. So I did what every founder is told to do: I talked to people.

The problem is who I talked to.

I reached out to people who were already conscious consumers. Sustainability managers at brands. Employees in CleanTech firms. People who were already deeply invested in the idea that fashion generates waste and that has to stop. Every single one of them told me, yes, this is a huge issue. Yes, we need a better solution.

But I didn’t ask the hard questions that would disprove my theory. I didn’t wait to confirm whether they had already found a patchworked solution.

On the brands side, I spoke to founders at sustainable fashion brands who were already building solutions to reduce waste. I never talked to brands who didn’t care about sustainability. The brands for whom taking the loss on markdowns wasn’t a big deal.

So every conversation, I walked away feeling validated. I had “done my research.” I had “talked to the market.” But what I had actually done was test my hypothesis by only talking to people who would say yes.

That cost me months.

This is called confirmation bias. The tendency to seek out information that supports what you already think and ignore information that challenges it.

More Delusion Than Required

Being slightly delusional as a founder is required. But there is such a thing as too much delusion.

When I was talking to my early users, fellow founders, advisors, investors, a lot of people warned me about the say-do gap in sustainable fashion. Consumers say they care about sustainability. They say they’ll pay more for it. And then they don’t.

I saw the research, I spoke to the people that failed, basically I heard it all. And I thought: that’s a real problem, but it won’t apply to what I’m building. I tried to actively prove to myself why I would have a different outcome.

Then the platform launched and reality showed up. The people who told me they'd use it didn't use it the way I expected. The engagement patterns I projected didn't materialize. The urgency I assumed consumers would feel about a better way to buy past-season inventory simply wasn't there.

That cost me money.

This is optimism bias. The belief that negative outcomes that happen to other people won't happen to you. Not because you have evidence, but because you are optimistic.

The Struggle To Let Go

Conviction is an absolute must as a founder. But choosing to ignore the signals in the name of conviction is what kills companies.

I spent months building an MVP for the consumer side of Shezaar. A platform where conscious consumers could discover and purchase past-season inventory from brands that would otherwise discard it. The interface, the user flows, the brand onboarding process. All of it designed for a B2C model.

Then the signals started coming in that B2B was the better path. Brands didn’t want another consumer-facing channel. And consumers did not want another platform. The data pointed toward B2B. The conversations pointed toward B2B. The logic pointed toward B2B.

But I couldn’t let go of what I’d already built. So I doubled down. More time, more iteration, more patience, more marketing.

It didn’t need more time. It needed to be abandoned. And every week I spent doubling down was a week I wasn’t spending on the thing that might have actually worked.

This is the sunk cost fallacy. The more you've invested in something, the harder it becomes to walk away, even when walking away is clearly the right move.

Who Checks Your Biases If You Are The Only One In The Room?

In a co-founding team, your biases get challenged because someone else is looking at the same data and asking different questions. Solo founders don’t have that. Every assumption gets a free pass unless you deliberately build a system to challenge it. And biases don’t just go unchecked. They compound. One bad assumption feeds the next, and by the time you realize it, you’ve been building in the wrong direction for months.

A Harvard Business School study found that the same cognitive biases that give founders early advantages (optimism that lets you start, conviction that lets you persist) become serious liabilities when they go unchallenged. And introducing even one structured “devil’s advocate” can cut decision-making errors significantly.

The best founders aren’t the ones without bias. They’re the ones who’ve learned to assume it’s always there.

The Bias Check

I haven't figured out how to be unbiased all the time. But I have a system that helps me keep it in check.

Step 1: Write Down Your Biases

You can't fight what you can't see. Before any major decision, ask yourself three questions:

Am I testing this, or am I confirming it? If every conversation, every data point, every piece of feedback agrees with you, that's not validation. That's an echo chamber. Figure out who you have not talked to. What would the person who thinks this is a terrible idea say? Seek those people out.

What would have to be true for this to fail? Not "could this fail?" but "what specific thing would make this not work?" Be concrete.

What have I already invested that’s making it hard to walk away? Name it out loud. Time. Money. Code. Ego. The version of yourself you’ve been telling people about. When you can name the sunk cost, it loses some of its grip on you. Not all of it. But some.

Step 2: Find A Devil's Advocate

Build one relationship where the explicit job is to disagree with you. Not a cheerleader. Someone who challenges you. Tell them: "Your job is to argue with me. If I sound too confident, push back. If I only have confirming evidence, point that out." This is the closest a solo founder gets to the natural friction a co-founder provides.

Step 3: Reframe Your Questions

Based on your answers from Step 1, frame your discovery questions to challenge your biases. Make them as open-ended as possible. Not "Do you think this is a good idea?" but "What would stop you from using this?" Not "Would you pay for this?" but "Walk me through how you currently solve this problem and what you spend on it." The goal is to design questions that make it easy for someone to tell you something you don't want to hear.

The Answer To The Card Puzzle

The correct cards to flip are A and 7. Only about 10% of people get this right.

Why A? It’s a vowel. The rule says vowels must have even numbers on the back. You need to check.

Why 7? This is the one most people miss. If there’s a vowel on the back of 7 (an odd number), the rule is broken. You have to look for what would disprove the rule, not just confirm it.

Why not D? The rule says nothing about consonants. Whatever’s on the back doesn’t matter.

Why not 4? This is the most common mistake. People flip 4 because it “matches” the rule. But the rule doesn’t say “all even numbers must have vowels on the back.” A consonant behind the 4 wouldn’t break anything.

Most people pick A and 4. They look for evidence that supports the rule. Almost no one picks 7, the card that could actually break it.

That’s confirmation bias. We look for proof that we’re right. We almost never look for proof that we’re wrong.

Your brain wants to be right. As a founder, your job is to want to be wrong. Or at least, to be willing to find out.

This is part of the A to Z of Building Solo. 26 lessons from my experience as a solo, non-technical founder. No playbooks. No borrowed wisdom. Just what I learned the hard way building Shezaar. New letters drop every Friday.

I was sitting in a Zoom waiting room, less than a minute from pitching in front of a panel of VCs and founders. I was nervous, of course. But more than that, I was confused.

This was my first pitch competition. I’d talked to a lot of founders and VCs to prepare. The advice I kept getting was: “Be authentic.” Just be yourself, tell your story, and it will land.

And in that moment, less than a minute from pitching, I had a million questions going through my head. What does authentic even mean? How authentic am I supposed to be? If someone asks about the hard stuff, should I share all of it or give a polished business answer? Should I admit what I don’t know?

I had no idea what expectation of authenticity people had, or where the line was between “refreshingly real” and “this person clearly isn’t ready.”

I did not win that competition. But I’ve spent a lot of time since then figuring out what “being authentic” actually looks like in practice. Through pitches, brand calls, cold emails, internal meetings, and every awkward networking event in between.

Starting from the truth

Authenticity isn’t the same as transparency. You don’t owe everyone the full picture. But the picture you do show has to be real.

In the early days of building Shezaar, whenever someone asked me why I wanted to build it, I gave them what I thought was a smart answer. I usually said something like “I want to play a part in reducing fashion’s waste.” That was true, but it didn’t tell my why. It sounded like a mission statement, not a reason. Which probably made it sound very disingenuous.

Until one day I just told someone the actual story.

I was standing in a warehouse in Peru, at a social enterprise that collected and redistributed used clothing. I saw the heaps of clothes they had, and this was just what had arrived that week. The director shared how they faced an impossible choice: accept new donations and figure out what to do with them, or reject donations and scramble for inventory when you’re in need.

That is when I decided that the burden of the fashion industry’s waste should not land on the shoulders of those trying to do better. We needed to solve this at the brand level.

When I told that story, the people in front of me actually listened. Not because I’d decided to “be myself” but because I was specific enough that they could picture it. They felt my pain and my passion, and that was authentic.

How much is too much?

But finding my story was only half the problem. The harder question was how much of myself to share, and when.

In one of her articles on personal branding, Wes Kao, co-founder of Maven, wrote something that stuck with me:

“I don’t know if I believe there’s one true way to be ‘authentic.’ We can be different versions of ourselves in different settings, in different contexts, with different people.”

As a solo founder, you are every department. But you get to choose which version of yourself shows up in which room.

I didn’t walk into brand partnership calls and tell them “I’m a solo founder and I’m figuring this out as I go.” Not because it wasn’t true. It was. But because it wasn’t relevant to what they needed to know. They needed to know that I could move their dead inventory. And I could.

But on a call with a potential advisor, I did share that I was building alone and figuring out my go-to-market. Because in that room, with that person, that honesty was useful. It gave them the context they needed to actually help me.

Same facts. Different rooms.

What I wish someone had told me

If I could sit down with you the way I wish someone had sat down with me, I’d say one thing: find your anchor.

This is your why. Not the polished version. The real one. The specific moment that made you unable to not build this thing. Practice saying it until you can do it in 30 seconds without thinking. When everything else feels performed, when you’re nervous or underprepared or caught off guard, this anchor is the one thing that will always be true. That’s your north star.

But I’ll be honest, knowing this didn’t fix everything for me overnight. I still walked into calls unsure of how much to share. I still sent cold emails that sounded like a press release. I still over-explained at networking events and walked away cringing.

Understanding what authenticity means is the easy part. Actually being authentic, consistently, when you’re tired or underprepared or talking to someone who intimidates you, that’s a skill. And like any skill, it takes a process and a bit of practice.

It took me months of bad calls and awkward conversations to build a system that made authenticity feel natural instead of forced. So, on Tuesday, I’m sharing the exact playbook: the self-audit that changed how I understood my own communication style and the three questions I ask before every single call.