Over the past year I shipped four things mostly solo: spectr-ai (an AI smart-contract auditor), Scry (chat with any EVM contract), Argus (a transaction-firewall extension), and Lomi (a multi-tenant SaaS). They span security, Web3, browser extensions, and B2B SaaS. Building that many different things alone taught me lessons that no single project would have. Here are the ones that actually changed how I work.
Lesson 1: the scariest part is rarely the part you think
For every one of these, I budgeted my fear for the technically hard part. The AI analysis in spectr-ai. The bytecode reconstruction in Scry. The dual-scope RLS in Lomi. Those were hard, but they were knowable hard, the kind you can grind through.
The parts that actually threatened to sink each project were the boring ones at the edges. The Chrome Web Store review for Argus, not the firewall logic. The proxy resolution in Scry, not the chat. The deployment and auth for spectr-ai, which are still the things blocking it, not the auditing engine that works fine. The lesson: the moat is usually the unglamorous integration work, and I consistently under-budgeted for it.
Lesson 2: AI changed the economics of solo building, but not the way people say
