Why I Built Sol Avery

What 2-3 months of sleepless nights and ALL CAPS prompts built.

I’ve been deep into vibe coding for the past 2-3 months.

Built a bunch of apps to automate my own workflows. Watched countless videos. Couldn’t sleep at night. Pulled my hair out. Sometimes had to write prompts in ALL CAPS. Anyway.

Over the holidays, while everyone was on vacation, something stuck with me: Founders keep pitching me their ideas, waiting for my validation. And I keep saying the same thing:

“Do customer discovery.” “Read The Mom Test.” “Go talk to people who have the problem.”

Then I thought: Everyone’s already building landing pages and collecting waitlists. A page takes 10 minutes. But those emails just sit there. Talk to each one individually? That takes days.

So I decided to test my thesis: Instead of a static survey after someone leaves their email, I built a persona. Wrote her backstory. How she talks, where she lives, where she works — a full “Her” movie situation. Not a cold chat. She tries to understand the customer’s real problems, read between the lines, measure buying motivation.

Her name: Sol Avery.

100 cold emails or 100 conversations with real insights? I’ll take the insights.

I became the first user of my own product. If you have the same problem — you get an idea and want to test it with real people — give it a try and let me know what you think:

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Monday I’m hosting David Cohen, founder of Techstars, on my podcast.

Got questions for him? Drop them below.

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