Author
James Burfield
Senior SEO consultant, solo builder, runs SoloShow
I'm James Burfield, a senior SEO consultant based in Bath. I've worked in SEO since 2000: I built and ran a digital agency, grew a publishing brand to 800,000 monthly visitors from the client side, and have run SEOBurf as an independent consultancy since 2024.
I also build and run my own portfolio of UK data sites, on my own and mostly with Claude Code. UK Term Dates, My MOT Checker, My Fuel Prices and Population Statistics are among them, and so is SoloShow.
The guides here come out of that work. Where a guide quotes a cost, it's from my own bills. Where it describes a problem, it's one I hit on a live site.
Guides by James
- Vibe coding security: the holes I found in my own AI-built app
Five security holes in SoloShow, a site I built with Claude Code: what each one was, how I found it, and the fix. Plus the checks I now run on every build.
- Building a directory site with Claude Code
Directory sites are easy to build and hard to make work. Here's the build, and the three decisions that matter more than any of the code.
- Choosing a domain for a side project
Which TLD, what a .co.uk actually costs you in search, and why the availability checkers lie.
- Deploying to Vercel: the parts that catch people out
It builds locally and fails in CI, the env vars that exist but are empty, and the commercial-use rule on the hobby plan.
- Getting your first 100 users on your own
No audience, no budget, no co-founder doing sales. What actually works, roughly in order of how much it hurts.
- Programmatic SEO for side projects
Generating thousands of pages is the easy part and the part that gets you ignored. How to decide what deserves a page, and what to put on it.
- Supabase auth for a solo builder
The setup that works, why row level security is the whole point, and the three mistakes that quietly expose your users' data.
- The launch checklist
Everything to do before you tell anyone, in the order that stops you doing it twice. Includes the UK bits nobody else mentions.
- Idea to live site in a weekend with Lovable
What you can genuinely finish in two days with an AI app builder, where it stops helping, and the point at which you should take the code and run.
- Taking payments as a UK solo founder: Stripe, Lemon Squeezy or Polar
The VAT question decides this, and guides written for a US audience skip it. What changes when you are a UK sole trader selling software abroad.
- What a side project actually costs to run
Real monthly bills from solo builders, and the three line items that turn a £0 project into a £40 one without you noticing.