Path · Founder
Founder path: build, sell, and operate to $500K ARR with AI.
Your job is product, ops, and sales — at the same time. AI is the lever that lets you do all three solo. Here are the 5 articles, 3 skills, and the stack founders rely on between $0 and $500K.
5 articles to read
All articles →$500K solo founder case study: the 5-step pattern
We dissected 10 solo founders who hit $500K ARR with AI as their primary leverage. Eight share the same 5-step pattern. Here's what they actually did, with timestamps and stack.
Monthly Transparency Report: May 2026
The monthly receipts. Revenue, costs, content shipped, traffic, citations, mistakes, and the next 30-day plan. May 2026 edition.
6 Months as a Solo Founder: The Real Numbers
The honest 6-month report from running 500k.io solo with AI as the only team. Revenue, costs, hours, mistakes, and what I'd do differently. No fluff.
Pricing your first AI product: 12 founder anchors
Most AI founders price their first product at $9-19/mo, and most go bust within 8 months. Here are 12 pricing anchors from founders who hit $500K, with real numbers.
Newsletter sponsorship economics: $500-$5,000 per send breakdown
Every newsletter operator I know fumbles their first sponsor deal. Here is the actual rate card math, the 4 deal structures, and the floor below which you should refuse.
3 skills to install
All skills →ops
Sentry MCP
Sentry's official MCP server. Search issues, fetch stack traces, query events, and triage incidents from the agent.
ops
Data Plugin (Cowork)
Query, visualize, and interpret datasets — write SQL, run analysis, and build dashboards via Anthropic Cowork.
ops
Grafana MCP
Search dashboards, query Prometheus/Loki/Tempo data sources, and triage incidents in Grafana.
Next step
Get the $500K AI Stack PDF — founder edition.
The 13 tools, ranked. Plus the build-sell-operate stack from 10 founders who hit $500K ARR solo.