Solo Founder Articles & Notes 2026

The only thing that grounds an overconfident engineer is owning a module: you break it, you fix it. What 15+ years leading engineering teams taught me.

My production SaaS stack 2026 is Bun and Hono with Postgres; my MVP and personal-brand stack is Next.js 16 with SQLite. Here is why I run both.

I release my royalty-free music catalogue under CC BY 4.0 while running ten-plus SaaS ventures. Split-lane math: visibility floor, not revenue floor.

MCP as CMS is the 2026 pattern for running your brand site admin as a private MCP server. The 9-tool surface, Bearer auth, and the convergence test.

The boring AI SaaS stack I run as a solo founder in 2026: Next.js 16, SQLite, BetterAuth, one small VPS. Real hours, proportion-framed cost.

Public 2026 data says llms.txt does not move AI citation numbers. I ship one on this site anyway, per-request and dynamic. Here is the honest case.

Postgres is the default for a reason. It is also the wrong default for a solo-founder SaaS in 2026. This site runs on SQLite; here is why that is the correct call.

I am a musician turned founder. This is the one rule that runs both crafts: what can be removed and still have the song work, and the tests I use.