The Rise of the Solo Builder

I didn’t leave Zapier out of frustration. I left because I finally could.

For years, the dream of building your own product came with a hidden cost. You could launch fast, but not free. You could automate, but only through someone else’s platform. You could build—if you were willing to rent your vision.

Tools like Zapier, Airtable, Glide, and Bubble gave us shortcuts. They were helpful. Sometimes even magical. But eventually, they started charging us for something far more costly than a monthly fee: our autonomy.

We gave up ownership for speed. Flexibility for dependency. Vision for convenience.

But something changed.

A New Era Just Opened

We’re entering a new chapter of solo building—one where real intelligence is at our fingertips.

OpenAI changed the game.
Ollama brought it local.
ChatGPT gave us agency.
Toolkits turned prompts into deployable backends.

Today, a solo builder with a clear idea, some clean code, and an AI model can outship a small team.

No middlemen. No bloated UIs. No rented logic.

Just you, the model, and the mission.

Why I Left Middleware Behind

Recently, I built an AI-powered supplement app in 24 hours. It worked. People loved it. It delivered personalized recommendations. It even emailed results automatically.

But when I stepped back, something felt off.

It wasn’t truly mine.

It functioned, but it wasn’t built. It was stacked atop tools I didn’t own, data I couldn’t fully trust, and platforms that could change or vanish overnight.

So I did something I never would have done in my old life.

I deleted it.

Not because it failed—but because I’d evolved.

Then I rebuilt it. On my terms. With my logic. For real.

What We Gain When We Build It Ourselves

• No vendor lock-in
• No usage-based pricing that punishes success
• No waiting for third-party feature support
• Full control of performance, privacy, and flow
• And most importantly—the return of joy in building

We stop renting creativity. We own it again.

The Stackless Stack

The revolution isn’t no-code. It’s just-enough-code.

AI-native tools, clean YAML, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI function calls, Ollama agents—these let us build with just enough to stay sovereign.

No-code got many of us started.
But it’s raw fluency in AI that will let us stay.

This is the age of the stackless stack.

To the Builders Like Me

To the dreamers who learned to write YAML on a Tuesday and shipped by Friday—this is your time.

To the developers who stayed small to stay sovereign—this is your edge.

To the people who said, “I’ll figure it out myself”—this is your moment.

You’re not a user.
You’re not a startup.
You’re a founder—with clarity, courage, and no middleman.

Build it raw.
Build it real.
Build it yours.

Paul Hollen
Solo Founder | AI Strategist | Builder of What Comes Next