Chassis for solo operators.
The PM Drive for the founder of one — running content, sales, ops, partnerships, finance, hiring, and the product all at once. One project per motion. Forge AI scaffolds the projects, breaks tasks down, writes the Friday digest. The cognitive load of "what's the state of every motion this week" offloads to the system instead of running on RAM in your head.
You don't buy Chassis on its own — you hire a department, and Chassis comes included. For code-heavy solo work, the entry point is the Engineering department ($99/mo, run by the CTO). Add a department when a motion needs leverage. Graduate to the full C-Suite ($699/mo) when the business pulls every direction at once.
The job.
Solo operator work is multi-motion juggling. You don't have a separate marketing person, a separate sales person, a separate ops person, a separate engineer. You are all of them, in different headspaces depending on the time of day. Monday morning is content; Tuesday is the sales call; Wednesday is debugging a billing issue; Thursday is the partnership conversation; Friday is the weekly review and the next week's plan. Each motion has its own backlog, its own context, its own next step that's slipping in the noise.
Most solo operators duct-tape together: a flat task list (Apple Reminders / Todoist / Notion), a calendar, a CRM (or a spreadsheet), a content calendar (or another spreadsheet), a personal accountability journal, and a fading Notion page that was supposed to be a quarterly plan. The seams aren't where revenue leaks — they're where attention leaks. The next step on the partnership conversation slips because it's buried in your inbox. The content calendar drifts because nobody but you is looking at it. The product roadmap exists in your head and in three half-finished docs.
Chassis is the project layer that gives each motion its own canvas — content, sales, ops, partnerships, finance, hiring, product. Forge scaffolds them on day one based on your venture profile. Each project has a backlog, a cycle (weekly or quarterly), an owner (you, or future-you-with-an-assistant). The Friday digest summarizes everything that happened across all motions, so the weekly review takes 15 minutes instead of two hours of context-rebuilding. The "what should I be working on right now" question has a cheap answer that updates by itself.
It is not a productivity-bro app. It is a real PM tool sized for the founder of one running a real business across multiple motions, with the structural primitives (cycles, points, retros, GitHub sync if you ship code) that scale when you finally hire your first employee.
How Chassis fits the solo operator workflow.
One project per motion.
Content, sales, ops, partnerships, finance, hiring, product. Each gets a Chassis project with its own backlog, cycle, milestones. Switching motions becomes a project switch instead of a context-tab dance across five tools. The dashboard shows which motions have stalled and which are flowing.
Forge scaffolds the projects on day one.
Hit "Scaffold from venture profile." Forge generates the starter set of motion projects based on your business shape — content motion with weekly publishing milestone, sales motion with pipeline checkpoints, ops motion with Centerline-style quarterly bearings. Adjust, prune, run. The blank-page problem most PM tools have on day one is gone.
Forge breaks tasks down on demand.
A task that's too big becomes paralysis fuel for a solo operator. Hit Suggest. Forge proposes 3–5 concrete subtasks with descriptions. Auto-creates them. The "where do I even start" friction goes away because the next step is already on the list.
Friday digest writes itself.
Hit Generate weekly digest. Forge reads the activity log across every motion: what shipped this week, what's still in flight, what's blocked. The Friday review takes 15 minutes — read the digest, decide what next week looks like — instead of two hours of context-rebuilding from your inbox and seven Notion docs.
Centerline cadence for the business itself.
Quarterly bearings live in Centerline, the operating-cadence Drive. Each bearing promotes into a Chassis project. The "what we're doing this quarter" conversation is connected to "what I'm shipping this week" — instead of being a separate plan that gets forgotten by week three.
Scales when you hire your first employee.
Per-tenant pricing means adding a teammate doesn't add cost. The new hire shows up in Crew (their employee record), then immediately appears in the Chassis owner picker. Tasks reassign with one click. The system you set up as a solo operator becomes the system you onboard your first hire into — no migration, no replatforming.
Workflow walkthrough — a typical solo-operator week.
Concrete five-step example. Founder of one running a SaaS, content motion, sales motion, ops motion, partnerships motion.
- Monday plan-the-week. Open Chassis. Read last Friday's digest. Look at each motion project: content (post draft due Wednesday), sales (3 calls scheduled, 2 followups outstanding), ops (vendor migration in flight), partnerships (intro call Thursday). Pick the top 5 tasks across motions for the week. Move them into the current cycle.
- Daily kanban — what's the next step on each motion. The dashboard shows the top of each motion's queue. No mental context-rebuilding required — the next step is the top card. Move tasks across To-do / Doing / Blocked / Done as the day goes.
- Forge breaks down the gnarly tasks. "Ship the new pricing page" is too big. Hit Suggest. Forge breaks it into: draft the copy, design the layout, build the page in Webster, A/B test against the old page. Auto-creates them. The paralysis becomes a checklist.
- Block-detection on Wednesday. Tasks that have been in Blocked > 7 days surface to your inbox. Drop, escalate, unblock — three buttons. The thing that was silently rotting (the partnership intro you're waiting on) finally gets a decision.
- Friday digest, 15-minute review. Hit Generate weekly digest. Forge writes the multi-motion summary — content shipped, sales pipeline movement, ops progress, partnerships updates. Read it. Decide next week. Done. Compare to the two-hour Friday context-rebuild this used to take.
The other Drives that come bundled.
Solo operators rarely run on a PM tool alone. The natural pattern: start with one department for your dominant motion (Chassis comes included), add departments as the work demands, graduate to the full C-Suite when every motion needs leverage at once.
- Start with one department. Code-heavy? The Engineering department ($99/mo, run by the CTO) is the entry point — Chassis comes included. Right when you're stress-testing the product or have a single dominant motion.
- Add a department per motion. Content-led? Hire the Marketing department ($249/mo, run by the CMO — includes Quillsly + more). Sales-led? The Sales department ($199/mo, run by the VP Sales). Operations-heavy? The Operations department ($199/mo, run by the COO). Each department is its specialists plus the AI exec who runs them. Mix and match.
- Full C-Suite — $699/mo. All five departments, every Drive in the box (Finance free inside it). Right when every motion needs a department at once and you're bottlenecked by being one human in five seats.
Pricing for solo operators.
- Start with one department — $49–$249/mo. Pick the one that matches your dominant motion. Finance $49, Engineering $99, Sales $199, Operations $199, Marketing $249. Chassis comes included in the Engineering and Operations departments.
- Add departments as the work demands. Each is its specialists plus the AI exec who runs them — the CMO, VP Sales, COO, CTO, CFO. Stack them as more motions need leverage.
- Full C-Suite — $699/mo. All five departments. The whole cockpit (Finance free inside it; saves $96 vs. à la carte $795). Right when every motion needs leverage and you're tired of being one human in five seats.
- 7-day free trial on first install. Cockpit itself is free. Annual billing saves 20%. The tools are the cheapest part of what you're getting — the value is Forge running them and one shared data layer underneath. Per-tenant pricing — flat as the team grows.
Run your business on Chassis.
Sign up for Merkava, install Chassis, hit Scaffold from venture profile. Friday digests writing themselves by week two.