One builder per vertical — the math that changed

The cost of building software collapsed sometime in 2024. Most of the industry still hasn't priced that in.

When we started Lojik Labs, the default shape of a consumer product team was six to twelve people — a backend engineer, a mobile engineer, a frontend engineer, a designer, a product manager, plus the PM tax. That team could ship maybe one major feature a month, service 50k users, and break even on $30k MRR.

We now ship the same feature in a week. One person.

## What "one builder per vertical" actually means

Every product in our portfolio has exactly one engineer. Not "tech lead plus a contractor." Not "me plus my cofounder doing design." One person owns the schema, the API, the UI, the infra, the ops, the support queue.

The only shared resource is the infrastructure layer — Supabase org, Vercel team, Sentry project, the auth/billing pattern library we copy into every new product.

## Why this works now

Three things changed at the same time, and they compound:

1. **AI collapsed syntax cost.** Writing CRUD code, wiring up auth, porting between APIs — this is 80% of an engineer's week at most companies. Claude does it in minutes. What you spend time on is *judgment*: what to build, what to cut, what to defend.
2. **Infrastructure got free.** Supabase, Vercel, Clerk, Stripe — the boring parts of software used to cost a platform team. Now they cost $50/month per product until you have real revenue.
3. **Distribution got weirder.** Niche markets stopped being reachable by ad spend. They got reachable by WhatsApp, by Reddit threads, by one well-placed Twitter post. That rewards operators who understand the niche, not marketing teams who optimize funnels.

## What it doesn't work for

Horizontal SaaS with a million competitors. Anything where the moat is sales muscle. Anything that needs 24/7 human support from day one.

It works for vertical software — clinic scheduling in Spanish, bar-crawl coordination on a specific college campus, sportsbooks in Mexico. Markets too small for a16z but big enough for one engineer to live well off.

## The studio model

Lojik Labs is the meta-layer: shared Supabase org, shared auth pattern, shared design system, shared Claude Code workflows, shared legal. Each product gets one builder who keeps 25–40% of their vertical's upside.

We're testing the hypothesis that a well-run studio of solo builders outperforms a single well-staffed startup at this scale. The portfolio is eleven products deep so far. We'll tell you in 2027 how it went.