Title: An ex coworker (we are&#x2F;were SWEs at Google) quit his job at the beginning of the year and started a solo SaaS solving a small and interesting niche b2b problem with generative AI, and his revenues are already $500k YTD (mostly profits, his hosting and marketing expenses are minimal). I am close to him and he showed me his Stripe account. No cofounders, no investors. Just himself, by design.<p>What an amazing dream, not having to deal with coworkers&#x2F;managers&#x2F;meetings&#x2F;scrum&#x2F;stand ups&#x2F;reporting&#x2F;RTO&#x2F;etc. He spends his days doing programming, some customer support, self marketing on niche forums and subreddits, and thinking about the next idea.<p>It is truly my ideal life. I have had these thoughts for years, and every time I suppress them thinking “the grass is always greener, you’re a highly paid FAANG engineer, shut up and milk it”, but they just keep coming up in my head and I can’t shake off the feeling that I’m wasting my time in corporate America. It’s not even about the money, I am (currently) making more than my friend, it’s about the freedom. It would still be worth it even if it resulted in a 10x paycut for me.<p>How do I get an idea to start? I do not have any niche skills, I’m your typical run-of-the-mill backend developer with no particular expertise. Lately I’ve been learning the theoretical aspect of ML, and find it fascinating.<p>A couple other notes to hopefully prevent some of the most common responses:<p>- I am not afraid of hard work: I have worked in 80h a week hedge funds, and in no way I think of a solo business as “working less”. I am ready for it to take a large portion of my time and mental energy.<p>- I am fine with taking risk: I have worked in several early stage startups as an early employee, taking on many hats compared to my SWE role. I’ve done tech marketing, customer support, sales engineering, etc.<p>- I am in a financially stable position: I have multiple decades of living expenses because I aggressively saved up and invested in liquid assets ($4.5M in Vanguard index funds), no kids to support and no debt
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