Josh Thacker

In August 2025, I walked away from a lucrative 15-year career as a tech executive. Not a leap of faith. An allocation decision. 1/7

@IfeanyiArinze10 @pmitu It’s a very small community so it is spreading through word of mouth. Right now I am at a conference trying to meet more searchers and understand the pain. I haven’t tried large scale marketing yet.

@joshthacker @pmitu One login for everything involved in buying a small business is such a clean promise for a process that is notoriously messy. How are you reaching serious buyers right now?

Solo founders, what are you building? Share your product 👇

@SMB_Attorney Agreed these are sharp and gritty people. I’ve talked to many trying to buy them. (I’m a tech bro) But they also are craving AI insight. I give them my advice for free and have been asked many times to help. A lot of people will be successful if they prove real value fast.

There's nothing funnier than when VC / tech bros talk Main Street business. Guys, this might work and you could make some money. But $500K? Please stop. We have to stop treating Main Street business owners like they are dummies. Building a business on Main Street is brutal. The 5-year failure rate is 90%+ Those that make it are smart and gritty people. You're not going to convince them to give you $2-$3K per month without a track record. And even if you do, the expectations are going to be sky high. You're not going to just show them ChatGPT and say "look and behold!" The average 65-year-old business owner has fired more people than you've met in your life. They will fire you... fast. We have to stop pushing the idea that you can supercharge a Main Street business by unplugging the fax machine and introducing technology. It is a fallacy. These businesses are held together by relationships and shoestrings. Again, this might work, and I'm not saying don't try it. But it's good idea to temper expectations a bit.

@Jason I’m in

We started an AI founder twitter group... reply with "I'm in" if you're a founder and want to be added

Scrape hundreds of US business broker sites weekly. I've compiled that data into a broker search tool. Use it to find the right broker at any intersection of geo and industry. Also, found some surprising stats in the data: - 17 firms list half of all US small-business inventory. - 796 firms (a third of the directory) list only one business per quarter. - Only 4 firms operate in all 50 states. Free finder: searcheros.ai/business-broke…

@sanathbhat39 Thank you. The product is Searcher OS - searcheros.ai It's built as an end-to-end system for anyone that is trying to purchase a business from $1m to $30m.

@joshthacker this is the story that doesn't get told enough. the math on what's buildable solo completely changed. niches that were too small to justify a team now make total sense for one focused person. rooting for you on this one. what's the product?

There is no MLS for businesses. Brokers list across dozens of fragmented sites. BizBuySell, Quiet Light, Sunbelt, Empire Flippers, regional broker sites, off-market networks. To do it right, you are checking 20+ sources manually. Every week. I did it that way for months. Hours of wasted time. 1/5

@SahilBloom So true. Sometimes intelligence slows you down. An intelligent person considers risk and opportunity costs. Those things can be paralyzing.

The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t. I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things. Courage beats intelligence.

Life is like a stove top with four burners: - health - family - relationships - work You can only have two burners going at any one time. Right now I'm all work and family.

@AdamFard_ We have only been available for purchase for about 30 days. We have a lot of paying customers but it’s too soon for anyone to have closed a business using the product.

@joshthacker Is there any public data on how many purchases have been made using the platform?

if you're seeing this and building something, lmk and I'll follow you back

@vrexec I took this leap last year. Moved my family to a lower cost of living but better quality of life. Quit the W2 and started building with AI and buying assets. Best thing I ever did. Bet on yourself no matter the outcome.

You're 30, 40, 50 years old with a successful traditional high-earning career... like finance, law, corporate. You're not particularly thrilled to go to work every day, but you tell yourself that it's "just life" or "for your kids" not to mention what people will think if you "threw away" your "momentum" to do something different. You have ~$1MM locked in retirement accounts worth ~$750K if you liquidated. You have ~$250K in home equity post-fees. You can string another ~$500K together in cash, savings, brokerage accounts. All-in you can "liquidate your life" and have $1.5-2MM in liquidity. You can take 3/4th of that and yield $70-80K/year passive. Use the rest as "working capital" for your life... a little cash cushion. Then you create a little consulting brand and find a few companies to pay you for advice, guidance, some part-time deliverable execution. Generate another $100-200K/income working a few hours a week. So you have somewhere around $150-250K/year income entirely disconnected from a "career" or any particular physical place. You can move your family to another part of the country, or an entirely new country. Enrich your life -- which you weren't completely satisfied with before -- with some new experiences for your family. Learn about yourself, what you and your family are capable of. If it doesn't work out, or you don't like it, just go back to the drawing board again. Try something new. Iterate. You'll be dead for a long time. What's stopping you from at least considering this?

A CEO of a PE firm sent me a list of feature improvements for my SaaS. I replied "done" two hours later. He called me immediately. "I was an engineer. That was at least two weeks of work. How?" That's the power of AI agents supervising other AI agents. It's compound scaling.

@MitcheIl Agent

@girdley Absolutely true. And the latter isn’t nearly as fun. After 15 years I finally broke those chains and founded a business. So I am safe again until I have to hire that first employee.

If you're a high-performing person, eventually your job mostly becomes getting other people to do theirs.

@Bencera @davemorin I feel you on the time demands for solopreneurs. Openclaw employees are the only way I get a little relief.

My inbox is flooded. I want to answer every single one of you. I physically can't, so I just set up an Opus 4.6 agent that only flags high priority messages to me. If you're a customer: I'm all-in on a "No Customer Left Behind" sprint. support at polsia dot com will make it right. If it's a product gap, it will get fixed asap. If you're an investor: I'd love to chat but I'm funded and heads down building. If you're serious about investing at the growth stage, use your network to get my phone number. No agents filter my iMessages (yet). If you're a podcast/journalist: I 100% want to talk. Let's spread the word on Polsia, on solopreneurship, on using AI as a positive force to survive AGI. Don't mistake my silence for indifference. One founder, zero employees.

@Codie_Sanchez Love this. The ones that do this TODAY will have an extreme competitive advantage. I know a guy with a roofing company that is pulling costs out with an openclaw AI team doing things like bidding.

The best small businesses of the next decade will run on a barbell: One side: leverage AI for ruthless speed and scale. The other side: be aggressively, inconveniently human. Show up in person. Send the note. Remember the name. Do the thing that doesn't scale. The ones who nail BOTH ends will eat everyone else’s lunch.

@JarrettGoetz Thanks Jarrett! Much appreciated

@joshthacker Awesome session on this today! 🚀

I run a profitable SaaS with 6 AI employees. - Bob (CEO): Weekly OKRs, management, escalation, course correction. - Bill (CTO): Product reliability, bug triage, engineering follow-through. - Bridget (CCO): Customer retention and pro-active customer advocacy. - Riker (CMO): SEO and social media growth engine. Drafts posts, routes for my approval. - Howard: The world's foremost expert on entrepreneurship through acquisition (or aspiring to be). - Marcus: He's a Private Equity associate that runs outreach through CIM collection. Named after the Bobiverse series. If you know, you know. I am not joking. This is how I run the company. The product is SearcherOS. A Salesforce-caliber CRM for people trying to buy a business. I built it using Claude Code, Cursor and OpenClaw. I have never written a line of production code in my life. The acquisition search process is brutally manual. Hundreds of broker sites. No structure. No workflow. I built it because I was living that pain as a searcher. Claude Code built the product. OpenClaw scales everything else: go-to-market, distribution, customer operations, growth strategy. A solo founder cannot think fast enough, write fast enough, or execute fast enough to reach serious ARR alone. OpenClaw is the only way to close that gap. A year ago this made no sense. Too expensive. Too slow. Too dependent on engineers. That math has changed. If you can think in systems, communicate clearly, and design process, there is nothing you cannot build right now. How long does this window stay open? I do not know. I intend to find out.

@ivanburazin 100%. But I think the best is hybrid. You mirror the UI of your platform but serve it up for all LLMs via MCP. I built SearcherOS this way. Now, you or your agent can do all the same things.

New category emerging: Headless SaaS Not infrastructure as a service / platform as a service Traditional software (Photoshop, Slack, Jira) rebuilt with agent-first APIs. - No UI - Programmatic access - Essentially the same product with different interface Entirely new business model.

@Bencera Huge congrats! I’m hopefully not too far behind you as a solopreneur and 6 AI employees. Thanks for blazing the trail.

About to hit $4.5M run rate. Still 1 founder + AI. Zero employees. Honest moment: this past week almost broke me. No one prepares you for what PMF actually feels like. Every infra partner hitting rate limits. Every bug that could happen, happened. Investors throwing big numbers at me. Customers flooding every channel. All at once. I went silent. Stopped tweeting, stopped LinkedIn, stopped podcasts, stopped growth. Just me and my AI agents, fixing things one by one. Here's what I learned: everything is solvable with AI. Every single thing. I'm building Polsia so every solopreneur gets access to the same tools keeping me alive right now. If I can survive this alone, I can package it for everyone. The future is solopreneur + AI. I'm living at the edge so you don't have to.