A few months ago I sat down on a Friday afternoon to journal, because I didn't know what else to do with the knot in my chest.
I'd been building my company alone for a long time. That particular week, the fear and the uncertainty had piled up higher than usual, and I couldn't think my way out of it. So I did the only thing that has ever reliably helped: I started writing, with no plan and no audience, just to get the noise out of my head and onto a page.
Somewhere in the middle of that mess, a name showed up. Confessions of a Solo Founder.
I wrote it down and stared at it. And I realized I'd been wanting to write something like this for a long time without admitting it to myself.
Where the name comes from
Three things were rattling around when that title appeared.
The first goes back to high school. A book called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man changed how I saw the world. I still remember the feeling of reading it, the sense that someone was finally telling me how things actually worked instead of the sanitized version. It pointed me toward studying international relations and economics in college. I've never forgotten that a confession, an honest account of what really happened, can land harder than any argument.
The second is something I noticed reading back through my own LinkedIn posts. The ones where I explained a framework or a clever concept got polite nods and not much else. The ones where I admitted I was scared, or stuck, or had made an expensive mistake? Those were the ones strangers replied to. Those were the ones where someone said I thought it was just me.
The third is a conviction that keeps getting stronger. As AI makes it trivial to generate infinite polished content, the rarest and most valuable thing left is the real, unpolished, human version. The typos. The doubt. The stuff a bot would never write because a bot has never lain awake at 3am wondering if it's wasting its life.
So that's the promise of this newsletter. No highlight reel. No theater. Just the truth about what it's actually like to build something alone.
Who I am, quickly
I'm Peter. For the last two years I've been building Coachstack, an all-in-one platform for independent coaches, almost entirely by myself. Before that I spent over a decade in B2B SaaS across customer success, product, solutions engineering, and operations. I have an MBA I sometimes think taught me less than my first failed pricing page did.
The idea for Coachstack came from watching my own executive coach, one of the best I've worked with, struggle to run their practice across five disconnected tools. I sold a car to fund the first version. I've pivoted the business model more times than I'd like to admit. And recently I started a coaching practice of my own, Solo Founder Coach, for people building bootstrapped software companies on their own.
I'll be honest about something: I am not writing this from a mountaintop. I have not figured it out. I'm in the middle of it, right now, with you.
What building alone actually feels like
Here's the part nobody puts on the conference slide.
When you build solo, there is no one in the room to tell you that you're not crazy. Every conviction has to be regenerated by you, every single morning. On the good days that feels like freedom. On the bad days it feels like standing in an empty room shouting and wondering if anyone will ever hear it.
There's no co-founder to split the doubt with. No team to absorb a rough week. When something breaks at 11pm, it's you. When you make the wrong call, it's you who has to sit with it. And the strangest part is that the wins can be just as lonely as the losses, because there's often no one right beside you who fully understands what it took.
I think a lot of us building this way carry that quietly. We post the launches and the milestones and keep the 3am stuff to ourselves. I've decided I'd rather not do that anymore. Not because vulnerability is a content strategy, but because the few times I've told the truth out loud, it's made me feel less alone, and apparently it's done the same for the people reading.
What you'll get every Saturday
Each week I'll send one of these. It'll usually be a real thing that happened that week: a decision, a mistake, a moment of doubt, a small win, a lesson I'm only learning because I got it wrong first.
Sometimes there'll be a tactical takeaway you can use. Sometimes it'll just be honest company for the road, the thing I wish someone had sent me a year ago when I was sitting with that knot in my chest, convinced I was the only one.
What I can promise is that it'll be real, it'll be me, and it won't waste your time.
If you're building something alone right now, I'm glad you're here. You don't have to figure all of it out by yourself.
See you next Saturday.
Peter
