Field notes on running a business with AI.
Thinkpieces, playbooks, and the occasional argument. From the SoloStack team.
- Explainer
What Is Cursor AI? The Plain-English Answer for Non-Developers
Cursor is a code editor with an AI assistant built into it. You describe what you want in plain English and it writes the code. Here's what it does, how it compares to ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, and why non-developers are using it to replace $500/mo of SaaS tools.
Read → - Course Guide
Claude Code for Business: The Course Business Owners Actually Need
Most 'Claude Code for business' courses are developer courses retitled. They teach building apps to sell — not automating the business you already run. Here is the operator's curriculum: five skills in the right order, what to look for in a course, and how the first month of automations actually plays out.
Read → - Field Guide
How to Automate Your Job: The Practical Guide for Small Business Owners
Most working days are 40% tasks you have done before: the same follow-up emails, the same weekly report, the same proposal draft. Here is a field-tested framework for finding those tasks, handing them to AI agents, and getting two to three hours a day back.
Read → - Field Guide
Best AI Automation Tools in 2026: The Honest Comparison
Most tools marketed as 'AI automation' are the same drag-and-drop workflow builder with one AI step added. Here's the real comparison — Zapier AI, Make.com, n8n, and Claude Code agents — and which one actually moves work off a small business owner's plate.
Read → - Beginner Guide
Command Line for Beginners: The 5 Commands You Actually Need
Most tutorials treat the command line like a career. It is not. You need five commands to install and run Claude Code or any AI tool. Here is what they are, why they are safe, and what happens once the AI takes over the typing.
Read → - Field Guide
The AI CRM For Small Business That Updates Itself
A traditional CRM is a filing cabinet you keep tidy. An AI CRM does the filing for you — enriching contacts, scoring leads, logging every touch, and drafting the follow-ups — so the only thing left is the judgement call. What it looks like for a small team, and how to get one without enterprise pricing.
Read → - Manifesto
The Repo Is The Company
What if every part of your business — every customer, every email, every dollar — lived in one folder on your computer that AI could read and run? Here's why that's already better than the 20-tab SaaS setup most businesses are stuck with.
Read → - Manifesto
The SaaS Stack Compression Phenomenon
Every tool you pay $50/month for — email marketing, scheduling, design, CRM — is being replaced by a short instruction file you can run on your own laptop with AI. Here's why the SaaS subscription era is ending, and what comes next.
Read → - Playbook
7 Claude Skills That Replaced Our Marketing Team
The exact skill files we use to run content, social, SEO, carousels, and nurture sequences without hiring marketers. Ready-to-fork prompts inside.
Read → - 30-Day Playbook · #1
Starting A Business Used To Take Me 12 Months. Now It Takes A Weekend.
Five businesses. $625K. Six years of running the same playbook. AI just collapsed the build timeline from twelve months into a weekend.
Read → - Personal OS
Paralysis Isn't Incompetence. You're Just Missing Systems.
I run multiple businesses on the side of a 9-to-5, with ADHD. The only way that works is the personal operating system I've vibe-coded around myself — six small tools, each built in a weekend, that take the load off the part of my brain that was trying to track everything at once. Same approach as SoloStack, pointed inward.
Read → - 30-Day Playbook · #2
Setting Up Your AI Coding Environment As A Non-Developer
Cursor, Claude Code, one folder per business — the minimum-viable setup for describing what you want in plain English and letting the AI write the code. No prior dev experience required.
Read → - 30-Day Playbook · #3
The Validation Loop: Find A Real Problem And Pre-Sell It Before Writing Code
The 7-to-14-day process for proving a business idea is real before you write any product code. Pick a problem people already pay to solve, talk to ten, pre-sell the smallest version, and collect signal that doesn't lie.
Read → - 30-Day Playbook · #4
The $13/mo Stack That Replaces $542/mo Of SaaS
How the $542/mo SaaS stack collapses to $13/mo when you move CRM, proposals, scheduling, email sequences, and the website into one folder. The honest math, the trade-offs, and what's actually realistic without coding.
Read → - 30-Day Playbook · #5
How To Get Customers Finding You — Without Paying For Ads
Five engines for attracting buyers when you don't have an ad budget: pages that rank in Google, answers cited in Google's AI summaries, short videos for Instagram and TikTok, a system that tells you what to make next, and cold outreach with a price competitors can't match.
Read → - 30-Day Playbook · #6
The Complete 30-Day Playbook
Day-by-day: customer research, pre-sell, build the smallest version, stand up the stack, ship. The full first-month operating plan from cold start to first paying customer.
Read → - 30-Day Playbook · #7
The Security Mistakes Every Vibe Coder Makes (And The 30-Second Fix)
Three places your API keys can leak — your laptop, your code, your GitHub push — and what scraper bots actually do with them within minutes of a commit. The .env discipline, the 30-second audit, and the four rules that keep you out of horror-story territory.
Read →