Build and Grow Your Own Digital Products—As a Company of One

When Christine Vallaure's first online course went online, it did not go viral. What actually happened was slow, steady growth from a side project she started during the pandemic, until she preferred it to her work as a UI freelancer in Berlin. In her talk on 14 May 2025 she shows how she runs it alone and why she never wanted the usual startup path of funding, growth and exit.

What the talk covers

• Reframing: staying small is a choice. Without funding, time is your most important asset, so she keeps her calendar free and her costs low. She says to look at profit margin rather than revenue, and in one-person companies it is often far above 90 percent.
• Building: own the core of your product and do not outsource its heart. If you can code, do it; AI coding tools let her build things she could not before; and she runs her learning platform entirely on a no-code tool. Her products are MVPs for life, so she can pivot overnight.
• Growing: decouple time and money with automation (a payment triggers sign-up, data transfer and a newsletter) and use AI as a tool. She uses it to write despite dyslexia, to translate her videos with her own cloned voice, and to experiment with a chatbot trained on her courses.
• Ideas: nobody builds the world's best product. Like books, products find their readers.

Q&A

How to finish a side project: mix formats such as articles, talks and videos. How to start: build the smallest thing and put it online. Burnout: she calls it the most relaxed time of her life, and adds to ask her again in five years.

Who it's for

Freelancers who want to build their own product, with or without code.