I Shipped 10 Products in 90 Days. Here's What I Have to Show for It.
Six months ago I had a corporate job, a neglected personal site, and a vague idea that I should build something of my own. Today I have ten deployed products, two accepting real payments, five generating organic traffic, and a monthly infrastructure bill of six dollars.
I also have zero marketing campaigns running. Which is the whole problem.
I need to back up.
In late 2025 I started building. The first project was a record store directory. I had this idea that vinyl collectors needed a better way to find independent shops, and that the existing options were either outdated Yelp pages or Reddit threads from 2019. So I built RecordStops. Astro frontend, Cloudflare D1 database, Mapbox for maps. I seeded it with 169 stores across the Carolinas, wrote a Google Places enrichment worker to pull photos and hours, and launched it on a Sunday morning.
I posted to Reddit. Five city subreddits, one vinyl subreddit. Within an hour people were commenting with stores I’d missed. By Monday I had 683 users. By the end of the first week I had my first email subscriber and a podcast host asking to feature the site.
That dopamine hit rewired something in my brain. And if I’m honest, it filled a hole I’d been carrying around for a while. The feeling of making something real and putting it in front of people. I’d forgotten what that felt like.
So I kept building. A camping gear site with 80 product reviews. A national parks directory. A waterfall guide. A DMV appointment alert system for South Carolina that actually charges money. A love notes subscription service where I wrote 2,515 text messages across five themes for husbands to send their wives. The spicy ones were the most fun to write and I’ll leave it at that.
Each project took somewhere between a weekend and three weeks. I built them all with Claude Code, which is the closest thing I’ve found to having a cofounder who writes clean code, never gets tired, and never argues about architecture decisions. The two of us would start at 5:30 in the morning and have something deployed by the time my kids left for school.
I’m a morning builder. Prayer, coffee, code. In that order. Most days the prayer is just “use me today.” I’ve noticed that the sessions where I pray first tend to produce the cleanest work. Draw your own conclusions.
Here are the honest numbers as of February 2026.
Making money:
SCDMV Appointments: Free tier, Pro at $5.99/month, CDL at $19.99/month. Real paying customers. Stripe is working.
SendMyLove: $5/month love note subscription. Currently has one subscriber. It’s me. But Valentine’s Day is today, so we’ll see.
Generating traffic:
RecordStops: 683 users in the first month. 296 stores across 5 states. 16 city guides. Weekly newsletter. Social media active. Podcast lead.
Potty Directory: 4,400 listings. About 190 real organic sessions per month once you filter out the bot traffic.
Camping Native: 80 gear reviews, all rewritten from AI slop into my actual voice. Blog active.
Best US National Parks: 63 parks with NPS API integration.
Best Waterfalls: 10,000 pageviews. Only 17 waterfalls seeded. Needs content and affiliate links.
Monthly cost for all of it: roughly $6. Cloudflare D1 gives you 50,000 databases on the paid plan. I’m using 8.
Now here’s the part where I tell you what I got wrong.
I built ten products and marketed zero of them. I spent 95% of my time writing code and maybe 5% telling anyone the code existed. A product nobody knows about is just a hobby with a domain name. And a man who only builds in silence is just hiding from the vulnerability of being seen.
I knew this intellectually. I even wrote it on a sticky note: “Stop building, start selling.” The sticky note is on my monitor right now. I’m looking at it while I type this.
The problem is that building is comfortable. I understand databases and API routes and component architecture. I can ship a feature in a morning. Marketing requires me to be a different person. It requires showing up in Reddit threads and Facebook groups and saying “hey, I made this thing” to strangers who might ignore me or tell me it’s garbage. Building is a closed loop between me and the code. Marketing is an open loop between me and the world. And the world has opinions.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” The discomfort of putting myself out there is the actual work. The code was the warm-up.
I’m getting better at it. The RecordStops launch taught me that four hours of Reddit posts generated more traction than 200 hours of code. That’s a ratio worth remembering.
People ask me about the AI part. How much of this is Claude and how much is me.
Here’s what I’ve found: Claude writes the code. I make the decisions. Those are different jobs.
I decide what to build, who it’s for, what the database schema looks like, which features matter and which ones are gold-plating. Claude turns those decisions into working software faster than I could on my own. It’s a force multiplier on the execution side. It does nothing for the strategy side. If I point it in the wrong direction, it’ll build the wrong thing beautifully.
The 80 gear reviews on Camping Native are a good example. Claude generated them initially and they read like AI slop. Generic. No opinion. No personality. So I sat down and rewrote all 80 of them in my own voice. First-person. Opinionated. Full of references to actual camping trips. That took a full day. But the content went from forgettable to something I’d actually want to read.
AI is the scaffolding. You’re still the building. The tool amplifies whatever you bring to it. If you bring clarity, you get clean architecture. If you bring confusion, you get a beautiful mess. Know yourself first. Then build.
The other thing nobody tells you about shipping ten products is how quiet it gets between launches.
The first week is exciting. Users show up. People comment. You fix bugs in real time. Then week two arrives and the traffic graph flattens. Week three, you’re checking analytics out of habit, not hope. By month two, the product is just sitting there, running its cron jobs and serving its pages to nobody in particular.
This is where most people quit. I know because I’ve quit before. More times than I’d like to admit. I have a graveyard of half-finished projects from my twenties and thirties that I abandoned the moment the initial energy faded. The pattern was always the same: excitement, effort, silence, surrender.
What’s different this time is the compounding. And maybe the maturity to recognize that the silence between launches is where the real character gets built. Patience is a skill. Consistency is a discipline. Neither one is glamorous.
Each project teaches something the next project uses. RecordStops taught me the Cloudflare D1 pattern that every subsequent site copied. The SCDMV scraper taught me Durable Objects, which I now use for reliable cron scheduling everywhere. The love notes project taught me Stripe integration, which took four hours instead of four days because I’d already built the auth pattern twice before.
I keep a file called progress.txt in every project. It tracks what I built, what I learned, and what to do next. When I come back to a project after two weeks away, I read progress.txt before I read the code. Future me thanks present me every time. We underestimate how much wisdom we lose to our own forgetfulness.
So what’s next.
Today is Valentine’s Day. SendMyLove is live. I’ve got 2,515 love notes loaded and a Stripe checkout that works. The plan is to spend the next month doing what I should have done from the beginning: telling people about the things I’ve already built.
RecordStops has a 60-day content calendar ready to go. SCDMV Appointments has a press kit and three email pitches written. SendMyLove needs a Product Hunt launch and a TikTok account.
I’m also writing again. This post is the first thing I’ve published on my personal site in months. It felt overdue. When you build in silence for long enough, you start to forget why you’re building at all. Writing is how I remember. It forces me to look at what I’ve actually done instead of obsessing over what’s next. There’s a kind of gratitude that only shows up in the rearview mirror, and you have to turn around to see it.
If you’re building something alone, here’s what I’d offer: ship it before it’s ready, tell people about it before you’re comfortable, and write down what you learn so you can compound it. The building part is the easy part. The showing-up part is where the real work starts. And the waiting part, the quiet middle where nothing seems to be happening, that’s where you find out what you’re actually made of.
I’ll be here, rucking at dawn and shipping before breakfast. Come find me on X if you want to talk about any of it.
Hey, did you scrape gmaps for porta potty companies or some different solution?