Building & Shipping
Products and SaaS taken from idea to deployed — pricing, build-in-public, the lot.
My Parity Test Was Comparing the Bug to Itself
I cached Freebo's yacht availability endpoint and wrote a parity test to prove cache == live. It stayed green for weeks while quietly shifting dates by a day. Here's how the test masked the bug — and the two-line fix under it.
I'm Open-Sourcing the SaaS I Just Shipped
Six days from idea to deployed on Cloud Run. The pricing was $10 a year. Then I looked at the math on solo-founded micro-SaaS and decided the better business is to give it away.
The Export Button Is the Whole Product
Feedback tools have existed for ten years. The interesting move now isn't the comment UI — it's the file you hand to Claude Code on the other side.
Firebase Couldn't See Its Own IP
I bought siterevisions.com, pointed it at Firebase Hosting, and waited. Verification kept failing. The bug wasn't DNS propagation — it was Cloudflare answering for itself.
I Built the Pricing Knobs Before I Had Anyone to Turn Them
First paying Freebo tenant negotiated 6% instead of the default 10%. The change took thirty seconds because the system was designed multi-tenant from day one.
Forty Seconds on Ten Million Points
I built a working LiDAR ground classifier in Rust in one Claude Code session. Forty seconds on the Autzen benchmark, 47 cm RMSE against the professional classification, no PDAL, no GDAL, no Windows.
Why Replit Won't Eat My Booking Platform
A friend asked if Replit was going to put Freebo out of business. The honest answer is in five rules I've been writing in production code for months.
I Said Deploy To Vercel. Railway Heard Me.
I had three static HTML mockups, a client waiting on a link, and a deploy target in my head. Railway had different ideas — and it shipped before I finished my sentence.
Launch May 2026 Was Still On My Homepage
The hero said 'Launch May 2026.' It was June. I had a customer waiting. Thirty minutes, one Google Calendar embed, and one duplicated-button bug later, the launch date was gone.
Fifteen Transactional Emails In One Claude Session
Freebo had fifteen Novu workflows all sending the literal string 'set in Novu Dashboard.' One session, one React Email package, fifteen real branded emails in my inbox by morning.
I Asked Claude Where to Put an Imaginary $100k
A five-dimension rubric, twenty-nine projects, and the uncomfortable answer about what I'm actually building.
The First Email on My Waitlist Was a Question
doesthisthingwork@gmail.com signed up for the Freebo waitlist. The full Next.js plus Resend pipeline that delivered them, and the small thing that actually mattered.
When to Bypass Your Own API
I designed ReelForge with immutable brief versions and a clean state machine. Then I needed to fix 30 finalized scripts without triggering a full regeneration — and the right answer was to skip my own API entirely.
The Fifty-Thousand-Dollar Test Booking
I added an AI agent to Freebo. It told me a $500 booking was worth fifty grand. Here's what went wrong and why it matters.
Pointing Cloudflare at Railway Without Breaking SSL
The CNAME-already-exists error, the SSL handshake loop, and the port-8080 magic that finally made freebo.ai resolve. Here's the actual sequence that worked.
A Brand, a Website, and a Rick Burgess Meme
My friend mentioned he sells water filters. A few hours later his company had a name, a site, and a stack of custom video memes on my phone.
Thirty Seats and a USB Drive
I went from a half-formed idea to a fully planned workshop in one sitting. The curriculum, the pricing, the marketing — all of it.
The Machine That Draws While You Read
An open-source idea I can't stop thinking about: a tool that generates illustrations for any book, synced to the audio.
My Startup Is a Folder
Sixteen markdown files. Six layers. Zero incorporation paperwork. The company already has an operating system.
I Shipped a Button That Called Nothing
Seven builds. One missing variable. A perfectly functional button sending requests into void.
We Built the Whole Stack, and It's Only the Beginning
Freebo is a booking platform for tour operators with double-entry accounting, real-time availability, multi-tenant isolation, and async financial pipelines. Built by a team of two. Here's what that means for the industry.
I Locked Myself Inside My Own Desktop
I built a kiosk mode that traps me at my desk until the work is done. On purpose.
Nobody Tells You Pricing Is the Whole Product
I thought the hard part of building a booking platform was the booking. I was wrong by a mile.
The Future of Software: Free, Custom, and AI-Powered
Why I believe all software will be free or dirt cheap within 5 years, and how vibe coding will reshape the entire industry.
Cheap Software, Priceless Value
When B2B software becomes nearly free, where does the real value go?