Guides
Written for one person with limited evenings. Where the advice differs for a UK sole trader, we say so, because almost nothing else does.
Building a directory site with Claude Code
Directory sites are the easiest thing to build and the hardest thing to make work. Here is 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.