The Creative Workshop

This week we're moving out of the hypothetical and real life talking lessons from a solo entrepreneur.

Naill McLean has spent 15 years in product management and can't write Python. With Claude, he built RightBuild, a full product management platform, in three weeks, and he now ships customer feature requests overnight.

Naill demo'ing RightBuild shows ust how much is possible and in such a short period of time. The amount he has to show is the clearest proof of what one person can build right now. Then we get into how he works: his repo setup, self-maintaining docs, a nearly free stack, and the fundamentals AI hasn't changed.

→ RightBuild: https://rightbuild.io
→ Naill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naillmclean/

If 90% of the lifecycle of software is spent in maintenance mode, getting updates, getting bugs resolved, etc then we need better understand how  well gnerative AI tools can help us with that task. 

This week, we shipped updates to Rule of Life including journaling features and easy ways to carry Rules forward month over month. We also solved a few bugs!

And along the way, we learned some of the ups and downs of maintaining software using genAI tools. We found how easy (not) it is to use these tools to update, maintain, and manage the state of software that's shipped and in market. Sometimes the tool thinks it's smarter than it is, and that causes some headache.

We keep coming back to this, but the code and actual software development being easy doesn't equate to the product being good or solving a problem or beating a competitor. We talk about that, and how the operational efficiency that AI can provide still requires some tech skillz and know-how before the benefits can really expand.

This week I didn’t ship.

I set out to build pedalbolt.com, a simple way to build a bike workout and send it straight to your watch and trainer. I ride a lot on my trainer, and making one workout shouldn’t take a $20 a month subscription.

In about 6 hours of building, Pedalbolt can sign you in with Google, build a workout that scales with your FTP, and schedule it, which in turn sends it to your device for connecting to your trainer. The catch is that Garmin isn’t letting new developers go direct anymore. So every workout has to go through a third party. In this case, intervals.icu. While internals.icu is great, that’s one more account, one more thing to break, and when something breaks, you’d rather just pay the $20 to not have to worry about. 

We talk about:

• What we built, and a demo from building a workout to seeing it on the watch
• What AI made easy: workout file formats and power targets that change with your FTP. Continued ease of just...building.
• Why UX matters more now that anyone can build their own tools
• Where my week went: a Packers game, plus branding YouTube, the Substack and App Store screenshots. That’s part of the whole product too (thanks, Crossing the Chasm).

I don’t know if Pedalbolt becomes a real product. It might just be a tool I use myself, and that’s fine. That’s part of what we’re learning here.

Next week we turn to the inside of the business: what internal, operational tools can we build? We’ll use Rule of Life as the example.

Links:
 Pedalbolt: pedalbolt.com
Rule of Life: getruleoflife.com
Substack (written by hand, no AI): hamerstix.substack.com
YouTube: youtube.com/@TheCreativeWorkshopPod

It has been an incredible and exciting place in the Creative Workshop. This week, we built, tested, and shipped a mobile application!

Rule of Life is a tool to help you live more specifically and intentionally based on the monastic tradition. It is rooted in faith and has faith as a central element, but also adds the other ares of your life like relationships, work, or your physical well being. With daily practices come daily habits, all of which build toward the person you want to become.

The product, infrastructure, and general application behind Rule of Life is at both times wild and significant while incredibly simple with a large amount of shared code. We built a mobile app that supports iOS and Android, a CLI, a web app, and the capability to easily add support for wearables. All infrastructure (auth, database backend, monitoring, etc) required to support the application was also shipped. 

It was a wild week, and couldn't have been done with out our guest, Andrew Harris. Andrew is a full time Engineer, but as he mentions is a backend engineer and not a front end or mobile engineer. 

We're both very excited by what we learned, but also in the app that we built. 

🌐 Website: https://getruleoflife.com/
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCreativeWorkshopPod
✍️ Substack: https://hamerstix.substack.com/

This week we shipped the AI Swear Jar, a somewhat passive aggressive tool for holding your coworkers accountable when they use AI without checking the output. Spot someone passing off unverified AI work? Bust them using a native Slack app or a form right on the site. They get an email, and they're asked to put money in the jar, scaled to their level: $1 for individual contributors, all the way up to $100 for the C-suite. Every donation goes to a rotating monthly cause.

The app looks simple on the surface, but moving from building a basic website to a real application posed some challenges. The app needed a backend, email notifications, a Slack app with a running tally, donation links, and dev, test and prod environments. More of the week went into setup and configuration than into building the app itself.

A lot of lessons learned. At the surface, it's a pretty basic and straightfowrard app, but there was a good bit of work to get done outside of purely generating the code. That means there was a lot of work done outside of the AI tools

Try it at https://www.aiswearjar.com

Shoutouts to the tools that made this week possible without a cost associated. Made building, trying, and testing far more straight forward.

- Supabase (https://supabase.com): database backend, with separate dev and prod
- Resend (https://resend.com): email notifications out to users
- ImprovMX (https://improvmx.com): email at my own domain, forwarded to any inbox. 
- Every.org (https://www.every.org): donation processing, so the Swear Jar never holds anyone's money

🌐 Website: https://www.hamerstix.com
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCreativeWorkshopPod
✍️ Substack: https://hamerstix.substack.com/

In the first episode of The Creative Workshop, John walks through a week of cleanup and consolidation. After years of various ideas and playing and tools, there were assets, apps, code, and various states of ideas in many many places. This week focused on bringing all that together, pulling scattered projects out of Lovable, Replit and a handful of GitHub accounts into one central GitHub repo, and making Claude the single "do stuff" tool for building, testing and shipping.

You'll hear why he moved off Lovable, what it took to get a local-to-dev-to-production workflow running again after years away from hands-on coding, and how the whole operation launched in about 10 hours: a website on Netlify, a Substack with paid subscriptions through Stripe, a YouTube channel, and this podcast. The best part: it all runs for about $22 a month, and podcast hosting would be the biggest cost if he ever upgraded.

Nothing gets talked about here unless it's done, done. Next week: the AI swear jar.

🌐 Website: https://www.hamerstix.com
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCreativeWorkshopPod
✍️ Substack: https://hamerstix.substack.com/

How fast can one person with a little tech know-how and a lotta bit of AI go from an idea to something real that ships? That's what this show is about.

Every week we pick an idea, build it, ship it, and come back to tell you what happened: what delivered, what broke, how long it took and what it cost. Season one is all about personal tools. Tools meant for an individual to use in their day-to-day.

This is for anyone with ideas and a bit of tech awareness who wants to see what's possible when you stop planning and start shipping. 

Come build along with us. You can follow the show on your favorite podcast app, YouTube, and Substack. 

🌐 Website: https://www.hamerstix.com
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCreativeWorkshopPod
✍️ Substack: https://hamerstix.substack.com/