Notes from
the studio.
How we think about building, AI, and the discipline of doing less, better.
Ideas are cheap. Conviction is the rare thing.
Everyone has ideas. Almost no one has the patience to make one true.
How we validated an app before writing a line of code
A landing page, a waitlist and a $300 ad test told us more than a month of coding would have.
The AI-native test: would it survive the lights going out?
Take the intelligence away. If the product still stands, it was never the future.
The 60–90 day build: what a one-person studio ships
Inside the cycle that turns a validated idea into a usable MVP — and the parts we deliberately leave out.
The case for doing less, far better
A long feature list is usually a confession that you didn't know what mattered.
Why we kill apps that don't hit D30 ≥ 15%
Retention is the studio's circuit breaker. Here is the rule, and why holding to it is the whole strategy.
Why we build a constellation, not a single star
One product is exposed to luck. A portfolio compounds.
Model routing: keeping AI cost under the margin line
Cheap models for cheap jobs, mid-tier only for the work that matters, and caching everywhere. The margin lives here.
Taste is the last moat
When anyone can build anything, the scarce skill is knowing what's worth building.
One stack, many apps: the compounding architecture
Orchestration, memory, billing and auth, built once. Every new app makes the next one cheaper.
Build for the human on the other side
Every product is a promise to a person having a hard day.
The organic loop: turning certificates into a growth channel
How shareable proof-of-learning becomes the cheapest acquisition channel we have.