“I'd rather ship five small things in public than polish one in private.”

Question 01

What made you start what you're building?

I kept launching things and finding the embarrassing stuff two days too late. A live payment test key in checkout, a missing social preview image, a dead link on the page everyone landed on. After enough of those I had a mental pre-launch checklist I ran every time, so I turned it into ShipKit: a Mac app that scans your site for the 65 things that quietly break a launch, before you hit publish.

Question 02

What was the moment you knew it was worth doing seriously?

When strangers started paying for it without me asking. Five customers is small, but the first sale from someone I had never spoken to told me the pain was real and not just mine.

Question 03

What's your current stack and why?

Swift and SwiftUI so it is a real native Mac app that runs every check locally, no account, no upload, your site never leaves your machine. Cloudflare hosts the site and the update feed, Stripe handles the one-time unlock, Sparkle ships silent auto-updates, and Linear keeps a solo founder organised. Claude Code is my pair programmer for most of it.

Question 04

The stack, in one place

What one person uses to ship a real Mac app:

1. 01Swift + SwiftUI — a native Mac app; every check runs locally, nothing leaves your machine
2. 02Xcode + CleanShot X — build it, then show the build in public
3. 03Claude Code — basically a second developer
4. 04Cloudflare — hosts the site and the auto-update feed
5. 05Stripe — the one-time unlock (incorporated through Stripe Atlas)
6. 06Sparkle — silent auto-updates
7. 07Next.js — the marketing site
8. 08Linear — keeps a solo founder organised

Question 05

What's the biggest mistake you've made so far?

Building the product before building an audience. The code was the easy part. I shipped something polished to almost nobody, then discovered distribution is the actual job.

Question 06

How are you finding your first users (or readers, or customers)?

Building in public on X, launching on Product Hunt, and hanging out where indie founders already are. Honestly I am still figuring this out, which is the whole point of doing it in the open.

Question 07

What's a non-obvious thing about your business model?

A pre-launch tool has a rare-use problem. People need it intensely, but only when they launch, which is not often. So a one-time price is honest today, but the real business is turning a launch-day painkiller into something you run on every deploy. That is the next chapter.

Question 08

What rule have you kept that's paid off?

Ship in weeks, not months, and launch in public even when it feels too early. Every time I waited for it to be perfect, I just lost time and learned nothing.

Question 09

What would you tell yourself 12 months ago?

Start posting before you start building. The audience is the moat, not the app. And charge more than feels comfortable.