Here’s the situation: I’m a tech lead with 16+ years of shipping software. I’ve built the thing, scaled the thing, watched the thing burn down at 3am. I know what I’m doing.
I’ve built two SaaS application over the last few months, but...
Our second kid arrives in a few months, I’m renovating a 60s house solo and I have a full-time job at a startup. I want to be there when the kiddo arrives, not staring at error logs or fighting churn. I can’t bootstrap one, let alone multiple SaaS products on nights and weekends like some early 20s productivity YouTuber.
On top of that, AI is comoditizing the whole coding part faster than engineers can update their LinkedIn bio.
Time for a course correction.
The Status Quo
I’ve got two fully functional SaaS products sitting on my hard drive.
Real products, not weekend toys that require 5 prompts to replicate.
The first is an AI-powered product intelligence tool that builds knowledge graphs from the most relevant sources for SaaS businesses, such as Intercom, Sentry, GitHub, and more. It lets you consult with different product agents that help you make connections across your entire product.
The second is a customer feedback platform with automatic impact scoring, department routing, drafting and automatic answering, self-improving documentation and ambient on-page AI. Couple months of work. Fairly solid architecture.
And I’m giving them away.
Not because they failed. Because I don’t have the time or bandwidth to turn them into fully working businesses on the side.
The pivot
So here’s what’s going down instead:
Open sourcing everything. Both products, full code, AGPL license. Fork it, learn from it, run it yourself. Bring your own API keys, self-host the whole thing. I’m not maintaining it for you – but you can maintain it for yourself.
Documenting the process. The architecture decisions. The tech choices. The failures. Not sanitized tutorials where everything works on the first try – the real thing, with all the sharp edges.
Writing for whoever finds it useful instead of MRR. This newsletter is the business now. Free tier gets everything. Maybe there’s potential for sponsorships or a paid tier later. Or not.
The math is simpler: I write when I can. I build when and what I want to. Nobody’s paging me at 3am because their dashboard won’t load. And if I skip a week because the baby’s sick, nothing breaks.
On AI commoditizing code
Here’s the thing dev are afraid to say out loud: code is becoming an even bigger commodity.
I built Claritree’s core in two weeks. Not because I’m some 10x genius but because Claude helped me write 90% of it. The architecture decisions were mine. The code? Increasingly, it’s just... code. Fungible. Reproducible.
When anyone can spin up a SaaS in two weeks, the product isn’t the moat anymore (never really was, if you’re a fast builder). What matters is:
Trust – do people believe you know what you’re doing?
Process – can you show your work over time?
Distribution – do people actually want to hear from you & can you reach them?
Looking at the products, it’s easy to see the valuable part isn’t the code. It’s everything I learned over 16 years and applied building them. The architecture decisions. The tradeoffs. The mistakes.
That’s what’s actually scarce.
What you get
If you stick around, here’s what’s coming:
The code. Claritree and Feedbackview, fully documented, on GitHub. Real MVP-level production code, not tutorial garbage.
The breakdowns. How I built an AI knowledge graph system. How I structured a multi-tenant SaaS. The database schema decisions, the prompts.
The process. New builds, documented as they happen. I’m not stopping building – I’m just changing what I do with the output.
The honest version. I’m not here to sell you a course or pretend I’ve got it figured out. I’m here to build interesting things and share every step. That’s the whole pitch.
What’s next
Product deep-dives. Architecture, tech stack, the AI bits, all of it. Plus the GitHub link so you can actually poke around.
After that: probably something new. I’ve got ideas. The itch to build doesn’t go away just because the business model changed.
Pull up a chair and subscribe to follow along.
Time to change some diapers and build cool shit for fun.
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