Alex West’s Solo Founder series: 13 first-person books tracing one indie hacker’s journey from twenty failed launches to a $1M/year business (CyberLeads) and its eventual wind-down. Each note below distils one book into its core concepts. Read in order for the full arc, or dip into a milestone.
- The Shotgun Years: Twenty Products, Two Years, No Payday - Alex West’s first two years going indie, launching product after product chasing $500/month and learning why marketplaces, big ideas, and building without selling all fail.
- Month in Six Months - After two years of failed launches, Alex used a day job at an MIT startup as field research to find a validated B2B idea and build his first profitable business.
- Niche Down to Escape Competition - How Alex West escaped a crowd of copycats not by out-building them but by narrowing CyberLeads to one customer, one pain, and one price tier.
- Quitting the Job - After his 20th product finally out-earned his salary, Alex West walks through why and how he left a prestigious job to go full time on CyberLeads.
- Into the Wild: Freedom, Survival, and a Timeless Life - Alex quits his job to run CyberLeads full time and learns that freedom, financial survival, and a life worth living matter more than raw business growth.
- Follow the Money - A year of clever growth experiments produces almost nothing, until a service nobody thought was worthy doubles the business in a week.
- Going All In - After six years, Alex incorporates in Cyprus and commits fully to CyberLeads, trading the dream of a product portfolio for one business that quietly works.
- The Productized Service Cage - Alex bolts a done-for-you outbound service onto CyberLeads, scales past $500k/year, and discovers he has built a more punishing prison than the job he escaped.
- Building the Team - How a reluctant solo founder built a global remote team, discovering that delegation is a fourth lever and that hiring, management and marketing are jazz, not science.
- Boring Business, Exciting Life - Alex West’s reflective capstone on why a dull, profitable business is the price of an exciting life, and how experience beats accumulated knowledge.
- First Million - Alex West hits a million in revenue, finds the moment anticlimactic, and uses it to reflect on advice, fulfilment, and living your own myth.
- The Equilibrium Trap - Why CyberLeads stalled at $500k/year, how three inputs explain any service business, and why harder optimization made everything worse.
- Castle in the Sand - The finale, where Alex shuts down CyberLeads, watches every framework break, and concludes that adaptation, not permanence, is the whole game.