All journeys

I want to run a one-person business

The technical work is the easy half. This route spends as much time on scoping, pricing and shipping as it does on building, because that is where these businesses actually fail.

You end with: A quote you can defend, a system somebody depends on, and the numbers proving it helped.

Explore

You cannot price work whose value you cannot compute.

  1. The economics of automation — Why one job gets automated and the near-identical one next to it does not. (3 lessons, 65 min)

Build

Enough to deliver, and enough to know your own exception rate — which is a pricing input long before it is a technical one.

  1. Coffee break: the summariser you can prove is wrong — Twenty minutes to build it, twenty more to find out where it fails. The second half is the point. (2 lessons, 40 min)
  2. The eval you actually need — Stop reading leaderboards. Build the harness that measures your task, on your inputs. (4 lessons, 8 min)
  3. Local or nothing — Run open-weight models on hardware you own, and know what they cost you in watts and seconds. (5 lessons, 6 min)

Earn

Test demand before building, price so the job survives delivery, then decide whether you are selling hours or a thing.

  1. Validate it in 48 hours — Find out whether anybody wants it before you spend six weekends finding out they don't. (3 lessons, 65 min)
  2. Price the work — Scope it, cost it, quote it — and know the number below which the job loses you money. (3 lessons, 80 min)
  3. Sell the thing, not the hours — Why your rate has a ceiling, where the repeatable part of your work is hiding, and what a product costs you after the sale. (3 lessons, 85 min)

Launch

Two shapes of delivery: a process you have access to, and a business you had to earn your way into.

  1. Ship one automation — Take one real process end to end, put it in front of people, and measure what it did for six weeks. (26 lessons, 1255 min)
  2. Automate a local business — Somebody else's business, somebody else's process, and a handover where you never get called again. (23 lessons, 1010 min)