There was a moment, somewhere around 2008 or 2009, when it felt like the internet was a secret that hadn’t fully leaked yet.
You could spin up a WordPress site, find a niche with decent search volume, write useful content, slap some AdSense on it, and build something that actually paid the bills. No investors. No team. No pitch deck. Just you, a laptop, and a domain name you’d bought at 2am because the idea wouldn’t leave you alone.
I was doing exactly that. I’d left Malta, moved to Mallorca, and started WP Mayor in a basement. For months it was just me down there, building a WordPress resource site with no reward, no traffic, no validation. Just a belief that if the bloggers I admired could do it, maybe I could too.
The basement era
That period had an energy to it I’ve never quite found words for. It was freedom, but more specific than that. The feeling that you could opt out of the default path and build something real on your own terms, from wherever you happened to be.
I remember walking into coworking cafes in Thailand in 2012, right as the digital nomad thing was taking off. You’d look around and every single person had their WordPress admin page open. Everyone was building something. The tools were the same for all of us: WordPress, a cheap theme, maybe some AdSense. It wasn’t about who had the best resources or the biggest team. It was just up to you. Your taste, your creativity, your ability to ship.
That gave you a strange kind of conviction. If everyone around you was using the same tools, the only variable was you. And that felt like the most honest playing field you could ask for.
The tools were dead simple compared to what we have now. WordPress for the site. AWeber or Mailchimp for the list. Google Analytics to obsess over traffic. A basic understanding of SEO. That was it. If you could write and you could ship, you had a shot.
And you didn’t need an audience before you started. You didn’t need followers. You didn’t need a personal brand. You just needed to solve a problem well enough that Google would send people your way. The work did the talking.
WP Mayor grew out of that basement in Mallorca. No VC, no co-founders, no team for most of it. Just consistent output and an understanding of what people actually needed.
When it stopped being fun
Somewhere around 2013, something shifted.
Social media had been growing for years, but it started to feel mandatory. Suddenly the game wasn’t just about building a good product or a useful site. It was about building an audience. You needed followers. You needed engagement. You needed to post constantly, to perform constantly, to be visible constantly.
The platforms owned the distribution. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, eventually YouTube. You could write the best content in your niche and it would disappear without a promotional push. Algorithms decided who got seen and when, and they changed constantly, usually in ways that benefited the platform more than the creator.
The solo founder got buried. Not by failure, but by complexity. Building a business became inseparable from building a personal brand, which meant building an audience, which meant showing up on social media, which meant dancing to someone else’s tune.
A lot of people I’d watched build quietly in the early days either burned out or pivoted into the content creator economy, where the content itself became the product. The emphasis shifted from building things to talking about building things. From solving problems to documenting your journey. From work to performance.
Some people thrived in that era. But the specific kind of freedom that had drawn me to the internet in the first place quietly eroded. The “build something real and get paid for it without having to perform” kind.
For a while I thought maybe that era was just gone. That you had to pick: either build in obscurity and accept the ceiling, or build an audience and accept the performance tax.
The energy is back
Then, somewhere in 2023, I started to feel that early-internet energy again.
Not from a new social platform. Not from a new SEO trick. From AI.
I want to be precise about what I mean, because the hype around AI and solopreneurship has become its own kind of noise. People talk about AI enabling solo businesses as if the big unlock is productivity: doing more in less time. That’s real, but it’s not the thing.
The thing is leverage at the level of capability, not just speed.
In the early days, a one-person business had real limits. You could be the writer, the strategist, the product person. But if you needed serious design work, you hired out. Development, you hired out. Customer support at scale, you hired out. The solo founder ceiling existed because there were only so many skills one person could hold.
What it used to take a team of ten to produce, one person can now handle at a meaningful level of quality with AI in the loop. Not perfectly. Not for everything. But well enough to ship, to compete, to build something real.
The hacker-in-a-basement energy is back. Except now the basement has a very capable intern who never sleeps.
The moat is taste
Here’s where I think people are getting it wrong.
The conversation about AI and business tends to focus on what AI can do. And yes, it can do a lot. But AI can do those things for everyone. If everyone has access to the same tools, the tools aren’t the differentiator.
The differentiator is knowing what to build. And why. And for whom.
That’s taste. The ability to look at a market, understand a real problem, and make ten thousand small decisions about what the product should be that add up to something people actually want.
AI can execute. It cannot care. It cannot have the instinct that comes from years in a specific niche, from being the customer before you became the builder, from knowing the difference between what people say they want and what would actually help them. That discernment is still human work, and it might be the only work that matters now.
The people who got it wrong in the early blogging era weren’t the ones who failed to grow their audience. They were the ones who mistook the medium for the mission. They kept optimising for traffic and clicks long after the real opportunity had shifted. The ones who survived built things that lasted because they stayed focused on actual problems, actual products, actual value.
The same filter applies now. The one-person business isn’t back because AI makes it easy to generate content or automate tasks. It’s back because AI gives a person with clear vision and real domain knowledge enough leverage to actually build and ship what they see.
Why freedom still matters
I’m writing this because I felt something recently that I haven’t felt in a while. The specific excitement of sitting down to build something with no committee to approve it, no audience to perform for, no algorithm to feed. Just a problem I understand well and tools powerful enough to help me solve it.
That feeling is what drew me to this in the first place. Not the money, though the money matters. Not the scale. The freedom to decide what to work on, how to work on it, and what it should become.
For about a decade, that feeling got harder and harder to hold onto. Building online required so much performance, so much platform-dependence, so much noise.
Right now, it feels accessible again. You can build something quietly, ship it, and let it work. You don’t need to document your journey. You don’t need to build in public. You don’t need a following before you start.
You need a problem worth solving, the judgment to solve it well, and enough staying power to see it through.
The rest, you can actually get help with now.
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