Solo Founder Era

The Solo Founder Era began in late 2024 and continues through April 2026. It is the period in which Mike shifted from student and apprenticeship employee to shipping commercial products on his own momentum. The self-described identity is "solo founder shipping AI consumer agents, fast, in public." The name of the era preserves the self-framing, but the record shows the reality is more layered: the solo apps run in parallel with a continuous co-founding partnership with Achraf Adjileye on the BALLER sports-tech suite.

The Shift

No single entry marks the transition. The academic capstone (hogwarts_artifacts_online, October 2024) overlapped the earliest commercial products. Wayzze (February 2025) was the first publicly-committed founder bet and the first project Mike held a LinkedIn "Founder" title for. The shift was gradual. The Safran apprenticeship ended in September 2024, academic deliverables continued into October, and the solo commercial identity only crystallized in early 2025.

Two Tracks of Work

The era runs on two parallel tracks that share time but not narrative framing:

Solo consumer apps. Rapid shipping of AI-infused mobile and web apps, most under the mikebapps.com umbrella: KONQR, Realicheck AI, Retro AI, Picture AI (June 2025), Outgoing Agent (July 2025), Quit Sugar (August 2025), Past Yous (September 2025), Avocado (December 2025), SageVox (January 2026), Pulse (ongoing). The cadence is one shipped product every six to eight weeks.

Sports-tech co-founding with Achraf. BALLER, SquadGen, Goal Contribution, and now Transfer Portal constitute the "Collaborative Work" listed on the GitHub README. These products are co-founded with Achraf Adjileye, the Paris-based sports-tech founder Mike met by early 2024. The co-founded track is the single longest-running project in Mike's working life and, by the end of Q1 2026, the one consuming the most strategic attention.

The solo framing on the GitHub profile and vlogs understates the co-founding track. A reader seeing only the solo apps would not know about the BALLER suite; a reader seeing only WhatsApp would not know about the solo apps. Both are real.

Pulse as the Solo Face of the Era

Pulse is the flagship solo product. The distribution strategy (Reddit, Instagram Reels, Strava Clubs, Parkrun, running stores) is the most specific distribution write-up any product receives. Pulse is the product of the solo founder identity, a running groups app built on Mike's Runner Identity, and the most publicly documented.

Pulse, however, has stalled in recent months. The April 1, 2026 WhatsApp line "rien ne bouge sur Pulse" (nothing is moving on Pulse) is the clearest signal. Mike's attention has migrated to Transfer Portal with Achraf. The public solo founder identity and the actual allocation of 2026 founder time are no longer the same thing.

The Residency

The summer 2025 stint at anomalie.space as Founder in Residence is the one moment the solo apps track and the co-founding track overlapped in physical space. Outgoing Agent shipped from the studio, the lu.ma Hackathon July 2025 sprint happened during the same weeks, and Achraf dropped in repeatedly. The residency demonstrated that the two tracks are not incompatible. It also made visible how much of Mike's shipping velocity came from a shared workspace rather than from pure solo work.

Building in Public

Building in Public is the documented strategy layer for the solo apps. Mike vlogs the founder journey on YouTube (@bmikdaam) and shares numbers on X/Twitter (@bmikdaam). The README documents the journey including first revenue, pivots, and milestones. The co-founded BALLER track, by contrast, stays largely off the public surface; it shows up only through occasional product links and an invisible network of sports-tech connections.

Stack of the Era

TypeScript and Next.js dominate web and SaaS projects. Dart (Flutter) handles mobile where React Native is not used. Swift entered with SageVox (January 2026). Claude (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI) are listed as tools — the first era where AI tooling is presented alongside languages as first-class stack components. Python appears consistently in the Outgoing Agent, SageVox, and Transfer Portal backend work, used for agent backends and scripting modules rather than as a primary shipping language.

Early Tensions in 2026

By April 2026 the era has visible strain. The Kima rejection of BALLER, the Pulse stall, and the Wayzze retrospective regret all converge. Mike's own Q1 2026 reset language, "j'ai surtout besoin de reset, 1er trimestre de 2026 pas comme prévu", marks the first explicit acknowledgment that the solo-founder rhythm is not self-sustaining forever. Emigration from France (Toronto named as possible destination) enters the conversation for the first time.