Let me start from the creator s perspective: I personally don t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).
But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).
Last week Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator) shared his entire Claude Code setup on GitHub and called it "god mode."
He's sleeping 4 hours a night. Running 10 AI workers across 3 projects simultaneously. And openly saying he rebuilt a startup that once took $10M and 10 people. Alone, with agents.
I am a Computer Science student doing research into how solopreneurs and small startups create new apps and what their stack looks like. Particularly, I'm interested in how you handle things like authentication, billing, and permissions/authorization in your apps.
Let me know what you're working on below and how you're going about it -- I'd love to connect for some quick calls to learn about your product and talk about your process in building it!
Since I haven't been able to meet my work goals very well in the last few quarters, I now plan to approach them more systematically and not push myself too hard on work goals, as that ultimately led to problems that made my plan less sustainable.
In a discussion forum with @monatruong_murror , we talked about how AI can help us learn things that aren t naturally familiar to us, like programming.
The biggest challenge was/is: Getting AI to guide you toward a solution, instead of just giving you the answer.
According to @RevenueCat 's State of Subscription Apps 2026 report, "hard paywalls convert 5x better than freemium, but with significantly wider variance."
Day 35 download-to-paid, freemium vs. hard paywall
Does access method impact download-to-paid conversion within 35 days?
