Phil Smy
I build software businesses, invest in developer-founders, and write about what I learn doing both.
I have been writing code since the 1970s and running businesses since 2001. I built Zonmaster, an Amazon seller SaaS, alone to more than 10,000 users and multi-million dollar revenue. Before that I co-founded Speirtech, the world’s first real-money mobile gambling platform, which arrived about five years too early and produced a London keynote called “WAP is Crap.” I have also had a company on Shark Tank, Toygaroo, and it went well (in the sense that we got investment from Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary).
These days I live in rural Tohoku, Japan, run Code Grey, and write Solo Operator.
Solo Operator
Building something alone means making the decisions alone. You decide what to build and what to cut. You decide when to launch, and when to stop. You work out whether the problem is the product, the market, or you, and whether the thing that has taken six months of your life deserves another six.
Solo Operator is where I write about those decisions. It draws on what I have built, what I have failed at, and whatever I am working on right now.
Subscribing is free, and Ship Smaller arrives immediately. It is a 75-page book about cutting a product down to something you can actually test, with seven worksheets, along with a set of Claude skills that run the same process on whatever you are building.
Paid subscribers get everything I publish, including the private Code Grey posts about what happens behind the scenes as I start putting my own money into other founders.
Code Grey
Code Grey is my angel investment company. I started it because the startup world systematically overlooks experienced founders, particularly developers and solo operators over 50 who do not fit the standard picture of what a founder is supposed to look like. I am interested in people who have spent years learning how to build things and are now putting that experience into something of their own.
I write the process up as it happens. Paid Solo Operator subscribers see the companies I look at, what interests me, what worries me, why I pass, why I invest, and the mistakes I make along the way.
Work with me
There are two ways in.
If you are raising, or about to pitch someone, I run a free 15-minute pre-pitch review. You send a deck or a site, I read it cold, and I tell you where I stopped reading and why. It is capped, so it is not always open.
The Founder level of Solo Operator is for people who want me involved in what they are building. It runs for a year and includes a private one-to-one session every month. There is no curriculum and no generic coaching program. You bring whatever is in front of you. Maybe you have three directions and need to choose one. Maybe the product has grown into a mess. Maybe you need another pair of eyes on positioning, pricing or scope. Maybe something is working and you need to decide what deserves your attention next. Or maybe you have the uncomfortable feeling that you are building the wrong thing. We work on the decision in front of you, and then you go build.
Background
I started writing code in the 1970s, at nine years old, on punch cards. I have been a professional developer since the early 1990s and have worked in Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany. I still write code most days, mostly Ruby on Rails.
Speirtech taught me that being wrong about a market and being early to one look identical from the inside. Zonmaster taught me that a product can keep working long after you should have asked whether it was still the right thing to build. I also spent a month building a feature that nobody ever clicked on, which was the cheapest of the three lessons.
I live in rural Japan and work largely alone. The failures have been at least as useful as the successes, and that is most of what Solo Operator is about.
Contact
Email is the best way to reach me: phil.smy@code-grey.com. I read everything, and I reply to most of it, though not always quickly.
If you want me to look at a specific deck or product, book the pre-pitch review above instead. You will get a better answer and a faster one.
Twenty years of building businesses gives you answers to some questions. It gives you much better questions for the rest.