The State of Solo Founders, 2026

What we found

The cost of starting a software company has fallen, and it shows up in who applies to our directory. Between May and October 2026, 61% of the startups in our sample listed a team size of one. Most of those founders had shipped something: 80% described themselves as launched or further along. Nearly all of them had their own domain too, with only 5.4% using a free hosting subdomain.

Revenue is a different story. 82% of solo founders reported no revenue at all, and only 15 of 592 reported $1,000 or more a month. Getting a product live has become the easy part. Finding people who will pay for it has not.

This matches what larger datasets suggest. Carta, which sees startups on its cap table platform, reports that the share of new startups with a solo founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025 (Carta Solo Founders Report). On the outcome side, Kyle Poyar's analysis of ChartMogul data on 6,525 software companies found that AI-native startups were far more likely to be early outliers, yet fewer than 1% reached $10 million ARR within 12 months of first monetization (Growth Unhinged). The ceiling may be rising, but that says little about the typical founder, who is the person this data describes.

The September jump added founders, not revenue

Submissions stepped up in September 2026. After filtering, we counted 91, 111, 116, 138 startups a month from May to August, then 251 and 263 in September and October. Solo founders drove most of that change. Their share of the sample went from 55% before September to 66% after it.

The new arrivals had less traction than the founders before them. From May to August, 77% of solo founders were pre-revenue. In September and October, 86% were. The number reporting $1,000 or more a month stayed in low single digits every month: 1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 3. Monthly solo submissions more than doubled, while the share reporting that level of revenue slipped from 3.2% to 2.1%.

We do not know what caused the jump. The form fields did not change around that time, which rules out one obvious explanation, but a directory like ours also becomes easier to find as it grows, so this may say more about our site than about the wider market. Treat it as a question, not a trend, until another few months of data come in.

Is AI behind it?

AI is the obvious explanation, and our data supports it only partly. 46% of solo founders described an AI product, which is a lot. But the share of all startups mentioning AI did not grow alongside submissions. It was 57% in May and 50% in October, and it moved around in between with no clear direction.

There is a caveat here. We only know what a product does, not how it was built. A founder who used AI tools to write an invoicing app would not show up as an AI startup in our count. So this number measures AI as a product category. It cannot tell us how many founders needed AI to get started, and that is probably the more important question.

One finding does favor AI products. Among solo founders, 22% of those with AI products reported some revenue, against 14% of the rest. At $1,000 a month or more, the count was 12 of 275 against 3 of 317. Those are small numbers, and they could reflect buyer interest in AI or simply the kind of founder who builds it. They do not show that adding AI to a product produces revenue.

Solo founders and teams look very different

Teams in our sample reported revenue far more often. 48% were pre-revenue, against 82% of solo founders, and 30% reported $1,000 or more a month, against 2.5%.

This comparison flatters teams, and it should be read carefully. The teams group runs from two co-founders to companies of 50 or more, and some of them were already established when they applied. Hiring people usually follows revenue, so some of those teams have revenue because they are older, not because they had a co-founder. What the gap does suggest is how much harder the first stretch is alone. A solo founder has to build, sell and support the product with the same pair of hands.

What solo founders are building

SaaS and AI products lead by a wide margin. Developer tools, productivity and marketing software follow, which fits a pattern founders have long described: people build for problems they know, and technical founders tend to know other technical people's problems. Healthcare, finance and e-commerce are much rarer, even though those are industries with large budgets.

Those last categories usually take more than software to enter, including regulation, sales cycles and industry knowledge. That barrier may be exactly why a solo founder with real experience in one of them has less competition. Our sample is too small to prove it, with fewer than two dozen solo founders in each of those three categories, but it is a question worth asking before building the next general productivity tool.

What about the one-person unicorn?

The idea of a billion-dollar company run by one person gets plenty of attention, and it makes a good headline. It has little to do with what we see. In this sample, 4 of 592 solo founders reported $10,000 or more a month. The more useful goal for most people working alone is far smaller: a product or service that pays one salary and that one person can run.

Our sample probably undercounts successful solo founders, because a founder with steady income has less reason to fill in a free directory form. So this data does not show that solo businesses cannot work. It shows where most founders who are actively looking for visibility stand.

What this means if you are building alone

If you have launched and have no revenue, you are in the majority: 63% of solo founders in our sample said the same. These are the steps we would take from that position.

1. Talk to buyers before writing more code. AI makes building cheap, which makes building the wrong thing an easy mistake. Run a round of customer discovery using our interview template.
2. Ask for money early. A free user tells you much less than one who pays. Our idea validation guide and pricing guide cover how to test this before you scale anything.
3. Treat distribution as the main job. Our founder-led sales path is free, and our launch checklist covers the directories. A listing brings a short burst of attention. It rarely brings customers by itself.
4. Know how long you can keep going. Working alone usually means funding the company yourself. Use the runway calculator to set a date for deciding whether to continue.
5. Decide if you need a partner. If you keep stalling on the same skill, read our co-founder guide. Solo is a good choice for many people, but it should be a choice.

How we did this, and what it cannot tell you

The data comes from founders who asked to be listed in the Startup Project directory. They chose their team size, revenue range and stage from a form. The form has no preselected answers, and founders must pick one for each field. Nobody checked these answers against bank accounts or payment records.

Our inbox gets a lot of automated submissions, so we cleaned the data before counting anything, and we applied the same rules to every month:

• 1,578 directory submissions received, May to October 2026
• 236 removed for repeating a website already in the queue
• 350 removed as automated or bulk, based on known submission services and senders with three or more entries
• 22 removed as local service businesses
• 970 analyzed

Four limits matter when you read these results:

• This is not a random sample. People seeking a free directory listing skew early, solo and online, so the 61% solo share should not be applied to all startups.
• Revenue is self-reported. Founders may round up, or may leave out revenue they would rather keep private.
• Some automation probably remains. Our filters catch known patterns, and our analytics recorded fewer visits to the form than the number of submissions. Blocked analytics could explain part of that gap, but some automated entries may have got through.
• Six months is a short window. It can show a pattern. It cannot show a long-term trend, and this page does not follow individual founders over time.

We publish aggregates only. No founder or company can be identified from these figures. We plan to refresh this page as more data comes in, and the date at the top will show when it last changed.

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