For the past year-plus I've been running multiple live products completely solo — a crypto payment gateway processing transactions across 16 chains, an LLM API proxy with Stripe billing, a DEX on Base mainnet, packages on npm and PyPI, and integration PRs merged into Google's, AWS's, and Coinbase's agent framework ecosystems.
No team. No funding. One laptop and a set of AI tools that didn't exist a few years ago.
People kept asking how the workflow actually works — not "what's your favorite AI tool" but the whole system: how you go from idea to deployed product to paying users when you're the entire engineering, marketing, and support department. So I wrote it down. All of it. The result is Build in Public with AI: The Solo Developer's Guide to Shipping Fast — 268 pages, 13 chapters, and it just went live on Amazon.
What's actually in it
This is not a prompt engineering guide and not a listicle of tools. It's the operating system:
Part I — The Solo AI Stack. How to pick the two AI tools that actually matter and ignore the rest, structure your day around a Think → Prompt → Scaffold → Refine → Ship loop, and manage context across multiple projects without losing your mind.
Part II — Shipping Product. The Minimum Deployable Product framework (zero to deployed in a day), building fast without building fragile, running 3–5 products at once with a tiering system that prevents burnout, and a full chapter on AI-assisted smart contract development.
Part III — Distribution. The part most technical books skip. The PR Blitz strategy for getting your tool integrated into every major AI framework ecosystem, README-driven distribution, the awesome-list strategy, and building in public without it becoming a second job.
Part IV — The Operating System. Revenue models that work for one person, wiring up Stripe in a weekend, the emotional reality of solo building, what AI still can't do, and a 30-day playbook you can start tomorrow.
Plus appendices: the complete tool stack reference, 15 copy-paste prompt templates, and a printable Ship It checklist.
One idea from the book, free
Here's the concept that changed how I ship more than any tool did: the Minimum Deployable Product.
An MVP is defined by features. An MDP is defined by a state: deployed, reachable, and doing its one job in production. The difference sounds subtle but it inverts your priorities. You don't build features and then figure out deployment — you deploy a skeleton on day one (a single endpoint, a single page, whatever) and then every feature lands in a production context from the start.
Why it matters for solo devs specifically: deployment problems are the ones AI helps you with least — they're environmental, specific to your accounts and configs, and full of gotchas AI can't see. Feature code is what AI helps with most. So you front-load the part AI can't do while your motivation is highest, and spend the rest of the build in AI's strongest territory. Every hour after day one compounds.
Also, honestly: nothing sustains momentum like a live URL. Even an ugly one.
Who it's for
Developers. You can read a stack trace and make architecture decisions — you don't need to be senior, but this isn't a learn-to-code book. If you've been watching the AI-assisted-shipping wave and wondering how people actually run the full loop solo, this is the manual.
Build in Public with AI: The Solo Developer's Guide to Shipping Fast — $4.99 on Amazon
I'll be posting build logs and revenue numbers as this launches — that's kind of the whole point of the title. If you read it and something's unclear, wrong, or missing, tell me. Solo also means the errata department is me.
What's the biggest bottleneck in your own shipping loop — building, deploying, or distributing? Genuinely curious where people get stuck.
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