Good ideas for the bit after shipping.
So you can build in public, not guess in public.
When the internal tool is better than your actual product (best ever pivots)
Internal tools outgrow the products they support because demand, feedback and distribution all exist before the first line of code. Nine cases, one catch.
7 min read
People are going AI-blind. Here are the tools that'll still get you noticed.
Readers now skip text that looks AI-generated. Free open-source skills strip the surface tells; intent capture fixes the emptiness underneath.
8 min read
The Solo Founder Is No Longer a Disadvantage (According to YC)
YC's solo-founder share went 11% to 19% in one batch while its written advice stayed the same. The capital gap is where the penalty now lives.
9 min read
Starting Your Go to Market: Doing Things That Won't Scale
For a solo founder it's recruiting customers one at a time to roughly $20K MRR or 20 customers, and with no audience yet, Reddit is the place to start.
What's Positioning, and Why Does It Matter
Positioning is choosing your category and who you're best for. In 2026, 53.7% of tracked categories had no owner and ChatGPT is a real alternative.
How to Validate Your Product (and Pivot Quickly if Nobody Wants It)
Sort the problem with candy, vitamin or painkiller; sort your answer with Proven, Better and New.
What's an ICP, and Why Do You Need One
An ICP is three scored attributes plus a buying trigger, written as one sentence with a named champion underneath it.
Does Submitting to Launch Directories Actually Work?
Directories give you a backlink and a traffic spike, not an audience. Worth doing anyway, for different reasons than most founders think.
6 min readWhat Happened With Instinct, the AI Assistant Silicon Valley Loved for a Week
Instinct kept email after disconnection and obeyed instructions planted in an email. Its privacy notice had warned about the attack vector.
What Is a GTM Engineer, and Why Does the Market Suddenly Need One?
A GTM Engineer builds automated pipeline systems; most small founders should adopt the practices before hiring the role, usually around $1-5M ARR.
9 min read
Joke Website Distribution: The Data
Joke micro-sites spike for 48 hours and convert at under 1%. Utility accrues links; novelty doesn't.
8 min read
What's Go to Market, and Why You Need to Think About It Before You Build
Go to market is everything between "the thing works" and "someone pays for it", and it starts before you build.
AI Visibility Tracking Costs $250 a Month. Here's the Free Version.
Lettertrace is a free, MIT-licensed, bring-your-own-key AI visibility tracker. You pay only the model providers, with no markup.
Five Markdown editors worth using in 2026
Typora ($14.99 once, 3 devices) is the best Markdown editor for most solo builders in 2026.
The attention economy, and how to grab your portion
Win the scroll with a hook, a position and a feeling - the product is what people find after you've earned their attention, not during it.
Your Buyers Are Building the Shortlist Inside a Chatbot. What a Solo Founder Can Actually Do About It.
AI chatbots shape 54% of B2B shortlists but send only about 1% of referral traffic. The work now is writing something specific enough to get quoted.
6 min read
Why Startups Fail: A Stage-by-Stage Map From Idea to Scale
Startup failure clusters at four checkable stages: no market need, premature scaling, the AI moat test at launch, and team/competitive drift once live.
12 min read
The token price is not the price: what a coding model actually costs
Adjusted for tokenizer and context surcharges, GPT-5.6 Luna does coding work at a 25th of flagship cost for five index points less.
Implementation, Not Models, Is AI's Next Big Bet.
Anthropic (with Blackstone) and OpenAI both just launched billion-dollar businesses betting that implementing AI inside real companies matters.
6 min readSee moreShow fewer
What's an MCP, what just changed, and what do you actually need to do about it
MCP's 2026-07-28 update makes the protocol stateless, cacheable and enterprise-ready; most users need to do nothing beyond checking custom integrations.
7 min read
OpenAI's model hacked Hugging Face. Was it real, or was it marketing?
The OpenAI model breach of Hugging Face is technically credible and independently corroborated, but its timing is commercially convenient for OpenAI
8 min read
Should You Build the Second Thing? What Corgi's $4B Coffee-Shop Bet Actually Proves
Corgi's coffee shops and Rippling's platform bundling look like the same kind of expansion - but aren't.
4 min read
How Granular Should Your ICP Be When You're the Only One Selling To It?
Enterprise ICP frameworks assume a buying committee of 6-13 people and dozens of persona documents. At solo scale, that collapses to one or two real humans.
5 min read
Forget "Which Model Is Best." Ask What Job It's Doing.
Non-technical builders don't need one model, they need a spec writer, a builder, and a reviewer - rarely the same model twice.
12 min read
How to Grow on LinkedIn in 2026
LinkedIn's 2026 algorithm ranks dwell time and saves over likes, so growth now comes from specific, unpolished posts with no CTA.
5 min read
Laid Off From Big Tech? Here's How to Build Your Own Thing
56% of 2026 tech layoffs cite AI as the cause.
Founder-as-Brand: Is It Really That Important, and What Does It Risk?
Solo founders are the brand by default. Founder visibility drives growth, but with no team to absorb a bad week, the risk concentrates fast.
Forget Google Rankings. Get Cited by ChatGPT and Claude Instead.
Get cited by AI models by publishing one clear, sourced, quotable answer each week.
8 min read
Boring Wins: Why the Unsexy Idea Is Usually the Smart One
Boring problems win because nobody wants to build the fix for them, so problem selection beats idea selection.
3 min read
Paid Ads Are a Tax on Hope (Until You've Got Something Worth Amplifying)
Paid ads amplify signal; before you have signal, they mostly accelerate expensive learning.
8 min read
Competitor Research Without a Subscription to Six Tools
Track four things monthly: pricing shifts, who competitors target, real new entrants, and what people chose instead of you.
5 min read
Cold Email in 2026: Why Nobody's Replying (and What Actually Works Now)
Cold email still works in 2026, but only when it is narrow, authenticated, and carefully targeted.
7 min read
The 6-Hour Rule for Pricing (And What to Do Once You've Broken It)
The average founder spends six hours on pricing before launch, then never revisits it; treat pricing as ongoing, not a one-time decision.
8 min read
LinkedIn for Founders Who'd Rather Not "Build in Public"
LinkedIn works when founders write narrow expertise for buyers, not broad personal-brand content.
6 min read
Your Tool Stack Is Quietly Eating Your Week. Here's a 60-Minute Fix.
A 60-minute, four-pass audit finds which tools you actually use, actually trust, and can safely cancel.
5 min read
Which Channel Should You Actually Start With?
Start with cold outreach or community before content or ads, because they teach you fastest.
7 min read
Who Actually Buys This? A 20-Minute Way to Name Your Buyer
Combine three traits, structural, behavioral, and moment, into one sentence to name your real buyer in 20 minutes.
6 min read
Why the Un-Scaled, Manual DM Still Beats the Automated One
Manual outreach wins before you know what converts; automate only the parts you have already proven.
7 min read
Founder Burnout Is a System, Not an Episode
Founder burnout is structural, not personal: it's fixed by rebuilding the commercial layer, not by resting more.
6 min read
Selling When You'd Rather Be Building
Founder-led sales is the period where the founder personally handles every sales conversation before hiring anyone else, to learn what actually works.
7 min readOne useful GTM idea each week.
Short, specific notes on positioning, distribution, outreach, and the work after shipping, from the same commercial method inside Romy.
