Blog

Most 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...

I'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...

One 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...

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...

Let'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...

Before 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...

I 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?