🏠 How Sahil Lavingia Runs a $10M Company with 1 Employee using AI

GM! It’s Brett. I know a lot of people will hate this but it needs to be said: if you want traditional success - money, notoriety, impact - you MUST put in the work, especially in your 20s and 30s.

Of course there are levels to success, but for the crazy ambitious rest of you, NOW IS THE TIME. The playing field has been leveled and the opportunities are endless.

This is one of the greatest wealth-creating super cycles ever. The opportunity is available to you too - you just have to capitalize on it.

Anyway, let’s get to it.

Sahil Lavingia runs Gumroad ($10M ARR, 1 employee) by replacing rigid engineering cycles with an AI-first workflow.

Instead of 2-week sprints and long planning documents ("PRDs"), he uses a tool stack comprising v0, Slack, Devin, Cursor, and GitHub to ship features in minutes.

His process depends on the complexity of the task:

Devin, which is connected to the codebase, writes the code and opens a "Pull Request." Sahil reviews it, merges it, and deploys it immediately.

To make this work, Sahil advises that "CSS murders AI productivity" because it forces the AI to read too much context (e.g., 5,000+ lines just to change a button). Consequently, he is migrating Gumroad to Tailwind, a simpler design system.

His newest product, Flexile, already uses this "zero CSS" architecture, allowing the AI to edit code flawlessly.

Get the whole context from a podcast here.

These new AI coding models have officially reached the point of no return.

Over the last week I’ve been up til 3AM every night writing 20K lines of code - solving technical challenges no one else could solve, shipping major features I’ve been dreaming about, improving everything from UI to infrastructure… and I’m non-technical.

That’s the part people don’t understand yet. You just need clarity, a problem, and the willingness to sit down and push.

The other day, I explained the HARDEST technical challenge we face as a company, told it to solve it and I’d give it a “big reward,” then went to the gym for an hour.

When I came back - it was SOLVED.

To say this is a revolution is an understatement.
This is what it feels like when the world quietly shifts beneath your feet.

As an early adopter and technically literate already, I was able to be one of the first to be truly unlocked by this technology.

But you’re next.

This is truly the age of the idea.

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Last week’s poll: If you guessed AI-generated… you were right.

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~65%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~35%)

Here’s the original.

Micro is a CRM that doesn’t feel like homework and an email client that knows what matters. Simply put, it’s an all-in-one productivity tool that organizes itself so you don’t have to.

LHV is a community-driven, early-stage venture fund backing ambitious founders at the earliest stages.

If you’re building tools that help founders, investors and other professionals who want to be 100x more productive with 100x less work, and you’re interested in advertising with us, send an email over to [email protected] with the subject “Homescreen Ads”