“Almost every week I get somebody tweeting at me saying, I don't understand why this is free. How can I pay for it? That's a really great PMF signal.”
Paul Bakaus is the solo founder of Renaissance Geek, backed by a16z. His first product, Impeccable, is a free, open-source skill that makes coding agents good at design. It has over 50,000 stars on GitHub, and we use it every day at Solo Founders.
He's been building for the web since he was a teenager. He was one of the early developers of jQuery, a tool that went on to power a huge share of the world's websites. Then he sold a game-engine startup to Zynga and spent years at Google working on Chrome.
Giving Impeccable away was deliberate. When Paul started posting about AI and design, nobody was listening. He had thousands of followers from earlier in his career, but his new tweets got zero impressions. So he stopped trying to win the algorithm, made the most useful thing he could, and gave it away.
Paul and Julian also get into why the scarcest skill in the AI era is knowing what to cut, why Steve Jobs was the greatest editor, and more.
Listen now on the Solo Founders Podcast:
Solo, together.
Kieran
P.S. Applications are now open for the Solo Founders Program. 3 months in SF: “solo, together” + 1:1 support + $100K
