This week's episode is the first of a new format: Solo Talk. Solo Founders Podcast guests have been on a tear ($30M raised, $10M ARR, bootstrapped to 8 figures), so Julian went back through the archive to pull on some threads worth a second look.

Eugenia Kuyda's clip is a good place to start.

Eugenia, the solo founder of Wabi and Replika, grew up as the only child of very young parents and felt lonely throughout her childhood. In her 20’s, she finally found a group of friends who became her family. Then she lost her best friend, and everything fell apart. In 2014, she built one of the first conversational AI products to recreate him so she could keep talking to him. That became Replika.

Julian's framing: “Startups in their best form are very often a type of art, similar to an album or a painting.” What they have in common is a personal story, sometimes the creator's, sometimes a character's, that resonates with people. That's how a personal experience becomes universal.

For solo founders, he says, the temptation when you have a personal experience that informs an idea is to flip immediately into convincing mode: convince a co-founder to join, convince investors to back you, etc. The better move is to skip that and go directly to the people who would actually use the thing. Build resonance with them first. The investors and hires you'd otherwise be chasing become much easier to close once the resonance is already there.

Solo, together.

Kieran