What I Learned Building a Startup Alone

The idea for Escape started simply. I kept struggling to meet people : not just meet, but genuinely connect. I wanted something that combined events, communities, and real human matching into one place.

In the beginning, the team worked. My co-founder and our tech leads built v1.0 while I focused on the product, the community, and the business. I hosted events, secured partnerships, ran the accelerator programs, managed the interns. We soft-launched in September 2024 and started validating with real users.

Then my co-founder left. The tech leads : experienced developers who I'm grateful for and who are still part of Escape : had limited time to give. The interns rotated out. Friends who'd been helping moved on to their own things.

I was left with a product that worked but wasn't good enough, a vision for what it needed to become, and nobody to build it.

So I taught myself to code.

Not from zero : I understood the concepts, I could read the codebase, I'd been making product decisions alongside the engineers since day one. But going from “I understand how this works” to “I can rebuild this entire platform from scratch” was the steepest learning curve of my life. Flutter, Dart, Node.js, Python, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, AppSync, GraphQL, Next.js, React, TailwindCSS : I learned them all, under pressure, with a live product that real people were using.

Here's what a typical week looks like when you're a solo founder building a full-stack platform:

Monday: Write backend code. Deploy a new Lambda function. Debug a DynamoDB stream that's failing silently. Review CloudWatch alarms from the weekend.

Tuesday: Design screens for a new feature in Figma. Build the Flutter widgets. Test on three different screen sizes. Write the API integration.

Wednesday: Respond to user feedback emails. Fix a bug someone reported. Write copy for the app store listing. Update the website.

Thursday: Meet with a venue owner about hosting an event next week. Create the event listing. Design the promotional graphics. Post about it on social media.

Friday: Work on the Next.js web app. Optimize search indexing for Algolia. Write tests. Plan next week's sprint : alone, since the sprint planning meeting is just me staring at a Notion board.

Saturday: Host an event. Show up early to set up. Greet everyone. Take photos. Make sure the energy is right. Clean up afterward. Go home and collapse.

Sunday: Write this blog post, probably.

That's not a hypothetical schedule. That's most weeks. Before my co-founder left, I was doing the non-coding half of this list. Now I do all of it. The context-switching alone is mentally draining. Going from Dart to TypeScript to Python to writing marketing copy to negotiating with a venue : within the same day : requires a kind of cognitive flexibility that I didn't know I had until I had no choice.

It was 3 AM on a Tuesday, and a payment webhook was failing silently. Transactions were processing, but refund confirmations weren't being sent. Users were getting charged without getting verification. I found it by accident, scrolling through CloudWatch logs because I couldn't sleep anyway. I fixed it at 4 AM. No one else was awake to know it had happened. No one else would have caught it.

That's solo founding. Every bug is yours. Every crash is yours. Every 2 AM decision about whether to ship or wait is yours alone. When I was first learning to code, I had tech leads I could ask. They'd review my code, catch my mistakes, teach me. Now I review myself. I catch my own mistakes. And if I miss one, nobody's there to catch it for me.

The pitch meetings are worse. “So it's just you?” The question always comes. The follow-up is unspoken but clear: Are you enough? My co-founder left. Technical co-founders don't usually leave if the idea is good enough. So either the idea isn't good, or I'm not good. I've had months to think about which one it is. The product speaks for itself now, but that doesn't quiet the voice that whispers on bad days.

The worst part isn't the code, though. It's the silence. I pitch to an investor and they say maybe, and I sit with that maybe for weeks with nobody to actually talk to about it. I make a major architecture decision and wonder if I'm wrong, and there's no one in the trenches with me who understands it deeply enough to reality-check me. I host events and watch people connect and I want to celebrate it and there's nobody there.

Loneliness about solving loneliness. There's an irony that isn't lost on me. I'm building a platform to help people connect : and the process of building it is one of the loneliest things I've ever done. Founders talk about the journey being lonely, and it's true at any size. But when there's no team, no co-founder, no employees to share the wins and losses with, the isolation is total.

It's not all suffering. If it were, I would have stopped. Here's what makes solo founding genuinely wonderful:

Speed of decision-making. When I decide to build something, I build it. There's no alignment meeting. No design review. No disagreement about priorities. The distance between idea and shipped feature is as short as it can possibly be. And now with AI-assisted development, that speed has multiplied : I ship features in hours that would have taken me days when I was first learning. The v2.0 rebuild : 300+ features, 12 repositories, an entirely new AI service : was conceived, designed, and built by one person. I'm not saying that's efficient. But it's fast in a way that teams can't replicate.

Owning every pixel. I know every line of code in v2.0 because I wrote it. Every design decision, every database schema, every API endpoint. For someone who wasn't coding two years ago, that depth of knowledge feels earned in a way that's hard to describe. When a user reports a bug, I know exactly where to look. When someone suggests a feature, I can evaluate its feasibility instantly because I understand the entire system.

Deep product intuition. Because I do everything : engineering, design, marketing, events, user support : I have a holistic understanding of the product that no specialist could have. I see how a backend decision affects the user experience. I see how a design choice creates engineering complexity. I see how real users behave at events and can translate that directly into product features. There's no game of telephone between the designer, the engineer, and the user researcher. It's all one person, and that unity shows in the product.

The wins are yours. When something works : when an event you planned fills up, when a user tells you the app changed their social life, when a feature you agonized over for weeks ships cleanly : that feeling is indescribable. There's no ambiguity about who made it happen. It's terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.

Before writing a single line of v2.0 code, I hosted over 50 events personally. Rooftop socials, community dinners, hiking trips, coffee meetups, tech mixers, cultural outings. In Toronto and New York.

Each event was a product research session disguised as a social gathering. I watched how people discovered events on the app. I observed how they interacted at the events. I noted what they asked for that we didn't have. I listened to the conversations that happened naturally and the ones that needed facilitation.

By event 30, I had a clear picture of what the product needed to become. By event 50, I was sure the v1.0 architecture couldn't support it. The codebase was full of quick fixes and decisions made when I didn't know better. The community features were bolted on rather than foundational. The data model couldn't support the matching and compatibility features I wanted to build.

So I made the call to rebuild everything from scratch.

I migrated the backend from Node.js 16 to Node.js 24. Rewrote the entire AWS SDK integration from v2 to v3. Rebuilt the community system from the ground up with five distinct community types. Built an AI compatibility engine as a new microservice. Added 50+ DynamoDB tables. Wrote 5,000+ automated tests. Designed and built 65+ new web pages. Translated roughly 94,000 strings across 15 languages.

The tech leads were still around but not actively involved in this rebuild. The interns had rotated out. This v2.0 was almost purely me : the person who two years earlier wasn't writing code at all : alone with a codebase, a vision, and several months of the most intense work of my life.

The result is the v2.0 release : 300+ features, a platform that feels fundamentally different from what came before. I'm proud of it. And I'm exhausted by it.

Use the tools that replace a co-founder, not the ones that distract from the work. A co-founder review your code and your thinking. Slack and Discord won't do that. I spent six months trying to work from coffee shops with other founders. It didn't help. What helped was raw time alone with the problem, a notebook for architecture decisions, and one advisor who knew Dart and would look at a specific piece of code I was stuck on. Find the tool, or the person, that does that work. Everything else is busywork.

Know when to hire versus when to learn it yourself. I taught myself Dart, Node.js, Python, and AWS because I had to. But I outsourced copywriting, legal structure, and tax filing immediately because I knew I'd lose three weeks to those and get it 70% right. The thing that makes you want to quit, the repetitive thing that pulls you away from the work that only you can do, hire it out or find a template. The thing that scares you? Learn it. You might learn something that makes the whole product better.

Have one answer to “why are you solo?” that you actually believe. Mine changed. First it was “my co-founder left.” That sounded like a failure. Then it was “I wanted to make decisions faster.” That sounded arrogant. Now it's “The product I'm building required me to understand every layer deeply. I couldn't delegate that understanding.” Find the version that's true for you. The investors will believe it more than you will, and that helps.

I'm not truly alone : I have tech leads who've been part of Escape from early on, and I'm grateful they're still here. But the company needs more. More hands, more minds, more perspectives.

I'm looking for people to join this mission. People who care about the loneliness problem as deeply as I do. People who want to build something that gets people off their screens and into the same room. People who can bring skills I don't have : in growth, in design, in community building, in operations.

The product is built. The platform is live. The foundation is solid : tested by over 50 events, validated across two markets, backed by a complete v2.0 rebuild. What comes next is scaling it.

If that resonates with you : if you've read this far and something clicked : I'd love to hear from you.

Building a startup alone taught me more about myself, about product, about resilience, and about the sheer stubbornness required to make something from nothing than anything else I've done. I don't regret a single day of it. Not the 3 AM debugging sessions. Not the events where five people showed up. Not the months of coding in silence.

But I'm ready for the next chapter to include more voices than just mine.