Why I built Groundbase as a solo dev (and why that's the point)

There's no team behind Groundbase. No co-founder. No funding round. No sales department, no marketing department, no support tier. It's one person — me — building, shipping, fixing, and answering email. That's it.

I want to talk about why that's deliberate, what it means for you if you sign up, and why this shape of company is showing up more in 2026 than ever before.

Why solo

The honest reasons, in rough order of how much they mattered:

1. I wanted to build something I'd actually use

The CRM I needed didn't exist. The ones that DID exist either cost too much for one person (HubSpot per-seat math), assumed I had a team I don't have (Pipedrive's deal-routing UI), or were entry products in someone else's funnel (Zoho Bigin → Zoho One upsell). So I built the one I'd use. Building it solo was the only way to keep it shaped like the thing I actually wanted.

The moment you bring in a co-founder, an investor, or a team, the product starts getting shaped by THEIR opinions about what should exist. Which is fine — sometimes those opinions improve it. But often they pull it toward the average of everyone's preferences instead of the specific thing one person needed. Solo means the product gets to stay specific.

2. I don't want investor pressure

VC-backed SaaS has a script. Hit growth targets, raise the next round, hire the team, expand the feature set, eventually exit. Every decision filters through "does this help us hit the next milestone." That works for some founders, fine. It's not the life I want.

Solo means I'm building for the long-term economics of a small business, not the short-term metrics of a growth round. I can charge $9/month forever instead of being pressured to raise prices for the chart. I can refuse to add features (like social media management) because the math doesn't work for users, even if it would look good in a pitch deck.

3. The economics of small SaaS actually work

A solo SaaS at $9/month with 200 customers is $1,800/month — close to enough to live on in many parts of the world, with no team to pay, no office, no investor expectations. At 500 customers it's $4,500/month. At 1,000 it's $9,000/month. None of these are huge numbers, but for one person they're sustainable lives.

You don't need a billion-dollar exit. You need ~500 customers who like the product enough to stay subscribed. That's a different shape of business than "must grow to acquisition" SaaS, and it's the shape Groundbase is trying to be.

4. The buyer experience is better

When you email Groundbase support, you email me. Not a tier-1 ticket queue, not a chatbot, not a contractor in a different timezone reading from a script. The person who built the feature you're confused about is the person who replies to your email about it. That's a wildly different experience than what you get from any 100+ person SaaS.

When you find a bug, I can fix it that day. When you have a feature request, I can decide right then whether to build it. There's no roadmap committee, no JIRA backlog grooming session, no product manager translating your words into a ticket that an engineer will see in three sprints.

What this means in practice

Some honest implications:

The product moves at one person's pace. Big SaaS companies ship features faster because they have 50 engineers. I ship slower because I'm one person. The tradeoff: each shipped feature is exactly the shape I want it, not a compromise across stakeholder opinions.

Support is direct but bounded. I reply within a day or two. I read every message. I genuinely care about whether the product is working for you. But I'm not 24/7 — I sleep, I take days off, I occasionally have a week where I'm heads-down on a release and reply slower. That's just what solo looks like.

The roadmap is opinionated. I won't build social media scheduling (that's a Hootsuite job). I won't build a CMS (use Ghost). I won't build ad platform integrations. I want Groundbase to do the CRM job extremely well and play nicely with the rest of your stack via webhooks and MCP. If you want one-vendor-does-everything, you want Zoho or HubSpot, not me.

There's bus-factor risk and I won't pretend otherwise. If I get hit by a bus, what happens to Groundbase? Honestly, I'd keep things running — the infrastructure (Cloudflare Workers, Turso, Stripe) is mostly stateless and self-managing. But there's no second pair of hands. That's worth knowing if you're choosing a CRM for a mission-critical workflow.

Why this shape of company is showing up more

Solo SaaS in 2026 looks different than solo SaaS in 2018. The tools got better. A single person can now:

• Spin up infrastructure that used to require a DevOps team (Cloudflare Workers, Turso, Vercel, Render — pick your platform)
• Process payments globally without a finance team (Stripe handles tax, currencies, dispute management)
• Send transactional email at scale without a deliverability engineer (Resend)
• Connect AI to anything via MCP and let your customers' AI tools do work in your product without you building integrations per service
• Distribute a real product to a global audience without a sales team (Gumroad, Stripe Checkout, marketing site → done)

What used to require a 10-person company can now be one person plus a coherent stack. The market is starting to catch up — buyers increasingly understand that "solo dev" doesn't mean "amateur"; it means "different economics."

What you actually get

If you sign up for Groundbase, here's the honest deal:

• A CRM built by someone who uses it daily for his own business
• Direct support from the person who built it
• A roadmap that prioritizes solo-operator needs (not enterprise sales features)
• Flat pricing that won't change to chase an investor's growth chart
• Real bugs that get real fixes from the person who knows the codebase
• The bus-factor risk of one-person companies

If you sign up for HubSpot, you get an enterprise-grade product with a 5,000-person company behind it. Different tradeoff. Pick by what you actually need.

Groundbase is the solo-built version. $9/month flat, 14-day trial, cancel anytime. If you'd rather buy from a person than a company, this is the one.