How AI Is Rewriting the Solo Founder Playbook
This week everyone's been talking about Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke's memo that went out to his employees.
If you missed it, he embraced AI and encouraged employees to use it (more than that, it's now an expectation from everyone). Not only that, he introduced a new hiring policy, which says they need to justify every new hire that the task couldn't have been done by using AI instead.
As you would expect, the internet went bunkers. Everyone has an opinion. Traditional news outlets called it shameful, others had already projected the end of the traditional workforce.
We might argue about the morale of this decision in a company that generated $8.88B in revenue in 2024, but I want to point out some implications for solo founders, and micro startups with limited resources.
They can benefit from AI more than anyone else. And – agreeing with Tobi on this one – they can start businesses with a lot less effort, initial costs, and field expertise than ever before.
While access to unlimited information shifted the work landscape some decades ago, using AI can enable even more people to get creative and start something on their own.
Because they will never be alone alone.
The number of conversations I have with ChatGPT and his little friends (Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) is already colossal, and only increasing.
They help me in so many aspects, from writing marketing articles, doing market research, designing social media content plans, and helping with rewriting emails to sound more professional.
Copilot helps me write code twice as fast as before (even without vibe coding).
Photoshop's AI helps me design pretty illustrations for social media, removing unwanted objects from images.
There are amazing AI services to clean the voice in video calls and podcasts, to take automatic notes from video calls, and even to train you to speak to others in a more confident way.
And there are so many tools out there that I haven't even tried yet, but could speed things up 10x (think of sales automation software, accounting platforms, lead generation agents).
Traditionally, as a solo founder, you had to learn all these skills from scratch, which is - let's face it - impossible for a single person.
But with the help of these technologies, you can be a marketer, growth hacker, writer, sales rep, and programmer at the same time.
I have no idea, what is the final outcome of AI.
Will it help make the world a better place or will be the doom of humanity 😅?
But I believe right now it's a great opportunity for solo founders to achieve more on their own, which was never possible by a single person before.
[disclaimer: no AI help was involved in writing my opinions 😅]