Lab Notes
What I learned paying for it.
Notes on building and running small products, written by the person who still runs them. No growth hacks, no frameworks with names. Just what happened and what it cost.
What Claude Code is actually good for on a client build
A year of shipping with an AI coding agent, and an honest split of what it does well, what it does badly, and what it can't do at all.
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AUG 2026
When I sunset a productThirteen is the number of products that are alive, not the number I've built. Here's the rule that keeps those two numbers different.
Operations
AUG 2026
What a false alarm costsThe most important thing an uptime monitor does is not alert you. Here's the fifteen seconds MyUptimeBot spends making sure it's right.
Craft
AUG 2026
The handoff doc I write before I need itEvery project here starts with a document that explains it to someone who wasn't there. Lately that someone is usually an AI, and the doc didn't change.
Process
JUL 2026
Why Leader Ethos charges hiring teams per completion, not per seatA pricing model where I only get paid when the product delivered something. Here's why that was the honest choice, and what it cost to build.
Craft
JUL 2026
Free forever is a design constraint, not a marketing lineThree of my pricing pages say "free forever." Here's what that promise forces me to build, and what it forbids.
Operations
JUN 2026
No ads, no dark patterns, no energy timersThe four rules every product here ships under, and why each one is a build constraint before it's a value.
Craft
JUN 2026
One codebase, two app storesI've shipped dozens of apps to both stores, in native code, React Native, and a few compilers I'd rather forget. Here's why the ones I build now are Expo, and when they aren't.
Building
MAY 2026
I ran my own tournament on FairwayNation before selling it to anyoneThe first paying customer of my golf tournament platform was me. That's the only way I knew what to build.
Craft
MAY 2026
One service to rule them allWhy every site I run posts its forms to the same small backend, and what that decision keeps buying me.
Building
APR 2026
Most marketing sites don't need a frameworkNearly every domain linked from this site is a folder of HTML. That's a decision, and it's the cheapest one I make.
Building
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