Solo Founders #5: Docmost turns one, MagicSchool makes waves at ISTE, and how top VCs evaluate solos

Hey Solo Founders,

Happy 4th!

A couple fun things this week: an update on a Solo Founders Program startup with insane momentum, a peek at how an anonymous top VC evaluates solo founders, and a new “Ask a Solo Founder” segment.

Together, we’re reshaping the story of solo founders — thanks for being part of it.

Let’s dive in!

Docmost celebrates its first birthday — 1M Docker Downloads, 16K GitHub Stars, and enterprise customers

One year ago, Solo Founders Program’s Philip Okugbe launched Docmost — an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Notion and Confluence. There was incredible excitement from the start - Docmost’s announcement post made it to the front page of Hacker News and r/selfhosted. Since then, the early momentum has snowballed into:

• 1 million Docker downloads

• 16,000+ GitHub stars

• 33 version releases

• 34 open source contributors

• A YouTube feature with 188K views

The numbers speak for themselves — people love Docmost, and this month the company saw a massive spike in revenue as it onboards its first major customers to its newly launched self-hosted enterprise plans.

Philip is the kind of solo founder you want to see win. He grew up in Nigeria, fixing fuel and gas generators after school. At 13, he taught himself how to code on a Nokia phone. Since then, he has shipped projects such as @GetVideoBot, a Twitter video downloader with 750K followers, and RapidSave (u/savevideo), its Reddit counterpart, which more than 40 million people have used.

Philip won’t brag, so we will: he’s a quiet, humble, and ambitious builder who’s become a friend to all in Solo Founders Program.

Congrats again, Philip! We can’t wait to see what you accomplish in year 2! 🎉

Timelapse MagicSchool Makes Waves — 5 Million Educators and a $45M Series B

We generally say that conferences are a distraction unless they’re where your customers are — then they can be goldmines.

In 2023, MagicSchool debuted at the world’s biggest edtech gathering with a folding table, a few balloons, and a bunch of excited early adopters. Two years later, the company’s booth is packed with teachers and administrators standing shoulder to shoulder.

MagicSchool has earned the buzz. The company has helped millions of teachers reclaim precious hours to spend more time with students and their parents by using AI tools that generate lesson plans, worksheets, and handle admin work.

Driving it all is Adeel Khan — a former teacher and founding principal of a top-performing public high school who’s now building solo. After years in the classroom, he launched MagicSchool after building a prototype over a weekend.

Three months of rapid growth secured a seed round to fight teacher burnout despite most investors continuing to be dismissive of the market. It’s an important reminder that customers understand before investors.

Two years later, and the momentum never stopped — MagicSchool has become the fastest-growing edtech startup of all time. They currently serve 5 million educators across 160 countries, reach nearly every U.S. school district, and have secured a $45M Series B investment led by Valor Equity Partners.

Adeel’s story is a reminder that when a solo founder solves their own pain points and keeps shipping, the crowds compound.

A Top VC’s Take on Solo Founders

Investor interest in solo founders is surging, and the efforts of this community are a significant reason why. Case in point: Two more solos in the Solo Founders Program just raised this week!

Some top VCs have quietly backed solos for years, while others are starting to come around (e.g., see Tim Draper’s recent post).

Our founder, Julian, recently caught up with a GP at a tier-one firm, and here’s what he had to share:

• He says that the most successful companies in his firm’s portfolio were driven by a single protagonist who may have handed out a co-founder title after the company matured, rather than at the beginning when it’s most expensive to do so.

• He thinks investors will develop a taste for certain archetypes of solo founders. This VC’s ideal profile is a product leader engineer who can evolve into the business seat, though others may prefer a domain expert with the network to drive early enterprise sales.

• He’s skeptical that anyone can build a durable $1 billion company truly alone. He believes that startups with these aspirations will still need to build a core team of about ten and hire aggressively once the product gains traction.

This conversation is just one data point, but it offers a telling glimpse into how top VCs are sizing up solo founders today.

Ask a Solo Founder 🤝

Stuck on something only a fellow solo founder would understand?

1. Hit reply to this email and ask your question — balancing product and sales, raising your first round, landing early customers, etc.

2. We’ll send them to our SFP cohort (acceptance rate < 1%) and share a few of their answers in the next issue.

Signing off. Solo, together. Always.

— Julian, Kieran, and the SFP team

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