You bring the customers
I ship the company
A one-person startup studio. Every two weeks, 4 founders get a production app: auth, payments, Postgres, deploys, the works. Built in ten days by a CTO with twenty years in the chair and a fleet of AI agents. You leave with the keys, and a Claude Code setup with guardrails so you can keep shipping without me.
4 slots · closes Fri, Oct 16 · reply within 48 hours
- Applications close
- Fri, Oct 16
- Kickoff
- Mon, Oct 19
- Demo day
- Fri, Oct 30
- Slots
- 4 of 4 open
Day 1 spec lock, days 2 to 7 build, days 8 and 9 review, day 10 handoff.
What you walk away with
Not a prototype and not a pile of code. A running business with the keys in your pocket.
A production app on your domain
Auth, Stripe billing, Postgres, an admin panel, transactional email and analytics. Deployed, monitored, backed up.
Every account in your name
GitHub, cloud, domain, Stripe and app stores are yours from day one. No lock-in, no hostage code.
Claude Code with guardrails
The same skills and checks I ship with: type gates, safe migrations, QA flows, one-command deploys. Change the app in plain English without breaking prod.
A map of the codebase
Living docs that let any engineer, or any agent, be productive in your repo within an hour.
A 30-day warranty
If I shipped the bug, I fix it. After that, a retainer if you want one, or anyone you hire.
A launch, not just a repo
Demo day in front of every batch’s audience, and a seat with the founders who shipped before you.
Ten days, start to keys
Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed date. The only variable left is how fast you sell.
- Apply10 minutesTell me who your customer is and how you reach them.
- Call20 minutesIf it’s a fit, we talk within 48 hours.
- Day 1Spec lockWe agree on exactly what ships. Then scope is frozen.
- Days 2–7BuildA daily build log, screen recordings and a staging link you can click.
- Days 8–9Your reviewYou test against QA checklists. I fix.
- Day 10Keys + demo dayAccounts transferred, walkthrough recorded, launched live.
Ideas are cheap, customers aren’t
I don’t pick ideas. I pick founders who can already reach the people they’re building for. You bring the market; I bring everything else.
A fit
- You already reach your customers: an audience, a waitlist, a client list, a community you run
- You’ve lived the problem. Ten years in the industry beats a clever idea
- You’ll run it full-time, or close to it, after day ten
- You want production software, not a prototype
Not a fit
- An idea with no path to its first hundred customers
- You want someone else to find the market
- Crypto tokens, gambling, adult, or anything moving money or health records
- You need a team of ten for a year
Pick your terms
Cash pays for my ten days. Equity is how I bet on you. Every track gets the same build, the same ten days and the same handoff.
Co-found
Once or twice a quarter I go deeper: little or no cash, 30–40% equity, and I stay on as your fractional CTO for a year. Both of us vest. Invite only. Say so in your application if that’s what you want.
Add-ons
- Native iOS + Android app
- +$7,500
- Retainer after the 30-day warranty
- from $750/mo
One engineer, a fleet of agents
I’ve been shipping production software for over twenty years, most of them as a CTO.
This year the models got good enough that one senior engineer directing a fleet of agents ships what a five-person team used to. I’d rather point that at a portfolio of companies than at one.
— Sal
How every company gets built
- Typed end to end: no any, zod at every boundary
- Schema changes ship as migrations, never db push
- A QA checklist for every screen a person touches
- Deploys on push, health-checked, rolled back on failure
- Docs an agent can navigate in its first minute
Straight answers
Do I own the code?
Yes. The repo, the accounts and the IP belong to your company at handoff. My stake is equity, not control of your software.
Why take equity at all?
Cash pays for my ten days. Equity means I only win big if you do, and it’s why Standard costs a fraction of an agency, which will quote you $50k+ and a quarter for the same thing.
How is this different from Lovable, Bolt or Replit?
Those get you a demo. This gets you a business you can run: real auth, real payments, real migrations, real deploys, and a codebase a senior engineer would sign off on.
What happens after day ten?
Your Claude Code setup handles most changes. Anything I shipped wrong in the first 30 days, I fix. After that there’s a retainer, or hire anyone: the codebase is documented for exactly that.
Is my idea safe?
Applications are read by me and no one else. Like most investors I don’t sign NDAs before a first call, but if we work together, confidentiality is in the contract.
What do you build with?
One stack, every time: TypeScript, React, tRPC, Postgres and Prisma, with Expo for mobile. Boring, typed and fast, so your next engineer is productive on day one.
What’s the paperwork?
A services agreement and a stock grant. You form a Delaware C-corp before day one; it takes an afternoon online.
Batch 001 has 4 slots
Applications close Fri, Oct 16. I read every one myself and reply within 48 hours.