Paul
Founder
A founder who previously co-founded and ran allkpop for 17 years, scaling it to tens of millions of monthly readers.
Posts
Anyone can build a platform now. Almost nobody can get people to find it.I want to start this post with an admission that's a little uncomfortable, which is that the platform I built specifically to help other people solve their distribution problem is itself struggling with exactly the same distribution problem I built it to solve. ClaudeFolio is live, the submissions feature works, the upvoting works, the design is clean, and the rules are exactly the rules I wanted them to be. The only thing missing is the part where lots of people know it exists. And that part, as I'm learning the hard way, is the part that actually matters...
5/7/2026· Build logs
75% of New Apps Can't Hit 1,000 DownloadsMore than 75% of new apps launched in the past year failed to reach even 1,000 downloads, while app launches jumped 50% thanks to AI coding tools. That's not a coincidence. Here's what the data actually shows and what it means if you're about to build something...
6/17/2026· General
People Are Using LLM Bots to Write Their Own Posts on Reddit. What Happens When AI Trains on AI?People are getting too lazy to write their own posts, so more of the internet is AI-generated every year. The next generation of AI trains on that content. So what happens when AI starts learning from itself? It has a name, and real research behind it.
6/9/2026· Lessons
Google's AI Overview is Killing the Incentive to Make Good ContentThere's a crisis happening in the world of people who make things on the internet, and if you run any kind of content site you've probably already felt it even if you haven't fully named it. Google's AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that now sit at the top of a huge share of search results, are absorbing the hard work that publishers and creators do...
6/4/2026· General
How to Install Claude Code: A Beginner's Guide for Windows, macOS, and LinuxA beginner-friendly walkthrough of installing Claude Code from scratch on Windows, macOS, and Linux, including the desktop app option that skips the terminal entirely and the few things that trip people up.
6/3/2026· Tutorials
If You're a Vibe Coder, Ask Claude Code to Teach You the BasicsLearning the fundamentals sounds like a separate project that competes with shipping, which is why vibe coders keep putting it off. Here's a more realistic path: use the tool you already use all day as your teacher.
5/31/2026· Tutorials
Claude Code vs Claude Chat: When to Use Each OneClaude Code and the Claude chat interface look similar from the outside but are built for fundamentally different work. Here's when to use each one, and why most people end up using both in a hybrid workflow.
5/29/2026· Build logs
Why I Use Codex to Review Claude Code and Vice-VersaI rarely let one AI model's code go to production without a second model reviewing it first. Here's why cross-reviewing between Claude Code and Codex works, what it catches, and where it doesn't help.
5/27/2026· Tools
What to Do When You Get the "Large CLAUDE.md Will Impact Performance" WarningThat yellow warning about your CLAUDE.md crossing 40K characters is worth taking seriously, but the most common fix people reach for doesn't actually solve the problem. Here's what does.
5/25/2026· Tutorials
Why a Used MacBook Pro Is the Smart Buy for Xcode DevelopmentWhen I decided I needed a Mac for app development, mostly so I could work in Xcode and build for Apple platforms, my first instinct was to do what most people do and start pricing out a new machine. That instinct lasted about as long as it took to see the numbers, because a new MacBook Pro with the specs I actually wanted was well into territory that felt hard to justify...
5/24/2026· General
Hey Vibe Coders: If Claude Code, Codex, and all LLMs disappeared overnight, what would you do?Here's a thought experiment worth sitting with for a minute. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and every AI coding tool is gone. Not down for maintenance, not rate limited, not expensive, just gone. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, all of the LLM-powered tools that a huge number of solo founders now depend on, simply don't exist anymore, and there's no indication they're coming back. What would you actually do?
5/22/2026· Lessons
The portfolio approach: why some founders run ten small platforms instead of one big oneMost startup advice assumes you're building one thing. Find your idea, validate it, focus relentlessly on it, ignore every distraction, and pour everything you have into making that single bet work. It's the dominant model in the startup world and it isn't wrong exactly, but it was built for a specific kind of founder in a specific situation, and that situation describes fewer people than the advice implies. A growing number of solo founders are doing something different..
5/20/2026· General
You're three days into building with Claude Code and something feels off. Now what?I want to start this post by saying something a little unusual, which is that I haven't personally been in the situation I'm about to describe. The platforms I've shipped with Claude Code have generally either been ideas I was confident about from the start, or ideas I killed before I committed real building time to them, and...
5/18/2026· General
When to kill a platform you shipped with Claude CodeOne of the strange consequences of being able to ship platforms in a week with Claude Code is that you also have to develop a much faster sense of when a platform isn't working, because the old model where you spent months building something and felt obligated to give it a year before declaring it dead doesn't really apply anymore...
5/15/2026· Lessons
When it's time to move from managed hosting to self hostingMost solo founders start their first platform on a managed hosting service like Vercel, Render, Heroku, Railway, or one of the other platforms that have made deployment dramatically easier over the last few years...
5/13/2026· Lessons
The five questions I ask before I ship any new platform with Claude CodeI've shipped more than ten platforms in the past 3 months, and one of the things that's quietly happened over that stretch is that I've developed an actual decision framework for whether a new platform idea is worth building...
5/12/2026· Lessons
Why I run my own database servers instead of using managed databasesOne of the questions I get asked most often by other solo founders building platforms is what database provider I use, and the answer surprises people because it's not what most people recommend. I don't use...
5/11/2026· Build logs
Why Claude Design is a Game Changer (and where it falls short)During my time as a web developer and popular website owner there was one piece of the workflow that I dreaded more than almost any other, which was the design phase of any new feature or page. It wasn't that I had anything against designers, because the designers I worked with were genuinely talented, but rather that the cycle between having an idea and seeing a real working version of it was always slow, expensive, and full of friction in ways that quietly killed a lot of good ideas before they ever made it into production. So when Anthropic launched Claude Design a few weeks ago, I sat down with it expecting to be mildly impressed and ended up genuinely shocked...
5/3/2026· Tools
Claude Code is going to fail you eventually, and you need to be readyLet's get honest about something that doesn't get talked about enough in the vibe coder world, which is what happens when the tool goes down, when the API has issues, when the model gives you something that breaks production at 2am and realizing you don't actually know what any of it means. These moments are going to happen to anyone who builds with AI coding tools, and how prepared you are when they happen is the difference between an inconvenience and a real problem...
4/29/2026· Lessons
Dev shops are charging six figures for what Claude Code did for me in a weekBefore I get into this, I want to say upfront that I have nothing against dev shops. Some of them are great. They have real talent, they ship real work, and if you have the resources, they are absolutely the right call. This post isn't about whether they should exist. It's about what I learned when I actually went out and got quotes for a few of my ideas, and what happened when I tried to build the same things myself...
4/28/2026· Lessons
Why I built ClaudeFolioI ship a lot of sites. Most of them are built with Claude Code, sometimes in a weekend, sometimes over a few weeks. The build part is fun, but the "now what" part is where I kept getting stuck. How do I get my new site known to others?
4/27/2026· Lessons