Ship It Alone

From a live product, not a demo

Ship It Alone

By Michael Cahill

Building a real SaaS with an AI coding agent.

Not a tool manual. The story of one live subscription product, built and run by one person: every decision, bug and outage is real, and so are the rules each one became.

Available soon · $29 USD Read a free chapter

Who it’s for

  • You want to build and run a real product on your own, with an AI coding agent.
  • You can follow technical writing, but you don’t want a textbook.
  • You care about the unglamorous parts: billing, email, backups and staying online.

Not for you if you want a no-code template or a get-rich-quick plan.

The real story behind it

The book follows Mathter, a live website that makes printable math worksheet packs. One person designed it, built it with an AI coding agent, takes payments through Stripe and runs it from a small computer at home.

You get what actually happened: the plans that changed, the bugs that only appeared with real money, the outages and the rules each one became. The code stays private. The decisions are all here.

Proof, not promises

The product is live. Visit mathter.ca and try it. The free chapter covers six real incidents:

  • Aug 2026 A “quick check” took the whole site down.
  • Aug 2026 A host reboot took the tunnel with it. Down for about an hour.
  • Sep–Oct 2026 A network that dropped out every six minutes.
  • Oct 2026 A build died halfway and broke the site until rebuilt.
  • Oct 2026 Inbound email was down for eight days, and nobody noticed.
  • Oct 2026 A “safe” restart caused two minutes of errors.

Each one became a rule the AI agent now reads every session. From the starter CLAUDE.md in the bundle:

## Never touch production while developing

- Never run a development server in the folder production serves from. Not even for “a quick check”.
- All experiments go in a git worktree with its own build folder.

Last updated October 2026. First edition, version 1.0.

What’s inside

  1. Part 1 Before you write any code
    1. 1 Pick a problem small enough to finish
    2. 2 A stack you can run alone
    3. 3 Working with an AI agent without losing control
  2. Part 2 Building the product
    1. 4 Money: plans, trials and Stripe
    2. 5 The engine: generating content that is never the same twice
    3. 6 Making a PDF that fits the page, every time
    4. 7 Accounts, email and the boring parts that break
  3. Part 3 Running it
    1. 8 Hosting on almost nothing
    2. 9 Outages I caused, and what each one taught me
    3. 10 Free pages as the front door
    4. 11 An AI “CEO” and an AI “operator”
  4. Part 4 The honest part
    1. 12 Numbers, mistakes and what I’d do differently

Appendices

  1. A Starter CLAUDE.md
  2. B Launch checklist
  3. C Stripe test-mode script
  4. D Glossary for non-developers

What you get

  • The full guide as a PDF, about 140 pages, plus a smaller-page PDF for phones and tablets.
  • An EPUB for e-readers, Apple Books and Kindle, a Kobo edition in Kobo’s own format, and a one-file web edition that opens in any browser.
  • A starter CLAUDE.md: the rules file an AI coding agent reads every session.
  • The launch checklist and the Stripe test-mode script, ready to use.
  • Every future update of this edition, free.

Questions

What format is it?
A zip with the book as a PDF to print or read on screen, a phone-sized PDF, an EPUB for e-readers and Kindle (send it with Send to Kindle), a Kobo edition, and a web edition that opens offline in any browser, plus the starter CLAUDE.md and the checklists. A short README says which file suits which device. You download it right after paying, from a page that works for 30 days.
Do I need to know how to code?
It helps. The book explains every idea in plain words, and Appendix D is a glossary, but you’ll get the most from it if you’ve built something before.
Which AI agent does it use?
Claude Code. The habits carry over to other agents.
Can I get a refund?
Yes. Full refund within 14 days, no questions asked.
Who handles payment?
Stripe. Your purchase is sold through Link, Stripe’s merchant of record, which handles sales tax for your country. The price includes any tax.
Something else?
Email [email protected].

Ship yours.

Read the free chapter first if you like. It’s about the outages.

Available soon · $29 USD