Business & Entrepreneurship — Build Something That Lasts
Frameworks for building a durable solo business — positioning, pricing, operations, and the trade-offs that founders discover too late.
Most business advice is written for venture-backed startups. This guide is different — it is for the solo founder, the consultant, the creator building a profitable business on their own terms.
Latest Articles
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If you hand over everything you can to AI, what will be left after a year? Thoughts after reading "Live a Year Without Relying on Humans"
Former "Wall Street Journal" technology reporter Joanna. Stern spent a whole year handing over health, transportation, housework, work and psychological counseling to AI, testing more than 100 products and interviewing nearly 200 people. I am also a technology journalist and am currently writing "AI Unmanned Company". What I want to take away most from reading this book is not which tool is easy to use, but the three principles she set for myself: always test, set an evaluation baseline, and ...
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Where should project managers go in the AI era? Understand the five new basic skills of PM from Japan’s JSOL debate over the definition of “interests”
After AI takes over data collection, progress tracking and reporting, will companies still need project managers? Starting from the cost management project of Japan's JSOL project manager Tsubouchi Susumu: the same "interests" are expressed separately by two departments, and AI cannot analyze it literally. This article summarizes the five basic skills of PM in the AI era: translating business language into data language, formulating hypotheses and asking customers to correct mistakes, decid...
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Anthropic's listing application form S-1 vernacular interpretation: In more than 300 pages of documents, seven things that office workers should understand in the AI era
Anthropic will file a listing filing S-1 with the SEC in October 2026. This article breaks down seven things in the more than 300-page document in a way that ordinary office workers can understand: revenue doubled dozens of times in two years, AI is a heavy-asset business betting on electricity and chips, how the $80.7 billion book loss came about, AI turned from a tool into a virtual colleague, the black and white letter that the model may be out of control, the conflict with the US governme...
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I built more than 800 resources into an island that you can visit
I spent one night using Vibe Coding to build a 3D archipelago island.vista.tw that was scattered on more than a dozen websites, including more than 800 articles, paper resources, AI gadgets, briefings and books. This article shares what each of the nine islands received, why this island was built, and the five steps of taking inventory first, clarifying what you don’t want, making a small sample first, letting the AI write the program and making your own judgments, and letting it grow autom...
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How many people do you need to run a company?
A design studio owner asked me: Hiring one more person will increase the fixed cost by tens of thousands per month; if you don’t hire someone, the project will have to be pushed out. The lack of workers is a structure that cannot be returned to, and the question that operators should ask has changed: from "how many people do I still lack" to "how many systems do I still lack?" This article takes advantage of the typhoon break to talk about the core ideas of the new book "AI Unmanned Company":...
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The rise of the agent economy, turning e-commerce marketing upside down
When consumers no longer browse page by page, compare prices, and add to shopping carts in person, but give verbal instructions to a personal AI agent, authorizing it to complete cross-site deductions and place orders in the background, the underlying logic of e-commerce operations for decades is disintegrating. The first point of contact for a brand has shifted from human eyeballs to machine algorithms. The countdown sales, promotion funnels and pop-up discount codes designed for human psych...
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I validate a business idea?
Talk to 20 potential customers before writing a line of code. If you cannot get 20 people to describe the problem in their own words, the problem is not sharp enough yet.
What should I charge?
Charge for the value delivered, not the hours worked. Start by asking: what does solving this problem save or earn the client? Your price should be a fraction of that.
When should I hire my first employee?
When the work that only you can do is being crowded out by work anyone could do. Hire to reclaim your time on the highest-leverage work, not to scale vanity metrics.
How do I handle slow months?
Slow months are inevitable — plan for them. Keep 6 months of expenses in reserve, use slow periods to invest in your own skills and content, and never make big pricing decisions from a place of scarcity.
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