Building a One Person, Billion Dollar Software Company w/ Allan Wells of Rocketable
At some point this afternoon, a founder will step onstage at YC Demo Day and propose a fairly outrageous idea — a one person, billion dollar AI maximalist software holding company.
Alan Wells hit my radar after seeing his tweet about building Rocketable that made the same outrageous claim as above. I decided to shoot him a DM and share a screenshot from the Facts section of the indie website that read:
We’re obsessed with the idea that someone is going to build a business doing $100M in revenue with less than 10 employees and see it as this generation of founders’ 4 min mile. Once someone shows it can be done, many more will follow. We want to partner with the one that does to help define a repeatable playbook for those that follow.
We decided to schedule a time to talk, originally as a video call.
As timing would have it, I ended up in San Francisco on the day of our call and proposed to meet in-person instead. As timing would also have it, we happened to have all our cameras in tow and proposed we film the pitch meeting, as he’s working in an opportunity space, and in a way that resonates deeply with how we think about things with indie. He agreed, and we’re publishing that conversation today.
Some takeaways from this conversation:
— Alan is building a company focused on acquiring and automating small SaaS businesses using AI. He envisions a future where AI can streamline operations, enabling a single person to manage a portfolio of companies.
— Alan experienced a turning point when he input an entire app’s source code into a large language model (LLM) and observed it resolving issues that previously required hours of manual work. He believes this is a game changer, even if data integration is not quite there yet.
— Initially, he tried using off-the-shelf AI customer service tools. Unsatisfied, he concluded that the true knowledge base of an application lies within its source code, leading him to develop custom AI solutions.
— Rocketable aims to automate functions like customer support, product management, and marketing using AI, even employing AI-generated avatars. The objective is to maximize efficiency and scalability in software operations.
— The future will favor builders who can harness AI to create and manage niche software products. He sees potential for significant automation in product development, particularly in gleaning insights from customer feedback and rapidly iterating on features.
Alan, as an archetype, is something we’ve been flagging for a while now. In my Indie Era of Startups presentation, I talked at length about a growing wave of repeat founders and early employees of venture backed startups that will be building this next wave of breakout companies differently. Alan is an alum of Uber and Cruise, and he’s taking lessons learned from those experiences to build the leanest and most scalable team possible, going all-in on the modern tooling available for him to do so.
As you’ll see in the video, the conversation flowed freely, and he did a fantastic job articulating his worldview and plans for Rocketable, making it an easy yes by the end of the meeting.
We’ve never recorded a pitch live and had no idea how it might turn out. Now that we have, it’s kind of cool to have this artifact of a first meeting, and our commitment to invest, to mark the beginning of a long and profitable relationship.
To Alan — best of luck with demo day today, and can’t wait to get to work on partnering with you on Rocketable.
And to those who see themselves in Alan’s journey, or share a similar worldview, we’d love to talk. We hope you enjoy within this one as much as we enjoyed recording it.
