For developers who can build but have never sold
Ship Alone
Build and Sell a Micro SaaS as a One Person Business with AI
The method: choose, build, charge for and launch a small product on your own, and know when to stop.
About the book
You can build it. You just can't sell it.
For 14 years I built software other people had decided on. For the 9 years since, I've launched my own. Roughly 30 products. About 25 are dead, and when I went back through my notes on every one of them, not a single product had died because of the technology. They died because nobody knew they existed, or because somebody knew and didn't want it enough to pay.
Ship Alone is those notes, turned into a method, with the embarrassing parts left in.
It's a practical book for one person building a small software product: a micro SaaS run as a one person business, with AI agents doing the reading, sorting and drafting that a team used to do. You build it in a week. You charge on the first day. And you know within 30 days whether to keep it or kill it.
How it fits the series
Ship Alone is the method, and the place to start if you have never sold a product of your own. Nobody Bought It is the evidence it came from, Who Pays for the AI? takes the bill a model adds, and The Second Product is what comes after the first one pays.
Who it's for
Developers, freelancers and agencies of one who can build and have never charged anyone for a product of their own. And people who know one corner of an industry inside out, recruiters, landlords, accountants, who couldn't build anything until now.
What's inside
- A one-hour test that kills bad ideas before they cost you a week. Expect to lose your two favourites. Most people do.
- The words to use when you ask a stranger for money for something that doesn't exist yet, and what their "no" is really telling you.
- The dullest, safest stack for a solo product, set up in an afternoon, so technology stops eating your evenings.
- An honest account of what AI agents are good for, where they confidently make things up, and how to catch them before a customer does.
- Pricing that doesn't quietly bankrupt you the moment the product starts working.
- Distribution treated as the hard half it really is: your first people, launch week in the right order, being found by answer engines, and the silent second month nobody writes about.
- Kill rules you write while you're still hopeful, so you're allowed to stop.
A kill rule that works has a metric, a number, a date and an action.
Questions readers ask
- Is it for founders raising money?
- If you want to raise money, hire a team, or build something that needs 10,000 users before it works, this isn't your book. I've tried that twice. It's in the graveyard.
- What will I have when I finish?
- One idea that survived an honest hour. A price you've already charged. A launch aimed at real people. And a date on which you'll decide, calmly, whether to keep going.
- How does Ship Alone fit with the other books in Ship Alone?
- Ship Alone is the method, and the place to start if you have never sold a product of your own. Nobody Bought It is the evidence it came from, Who Pays for the AI? takes the bill a model adds, and The Second Product is what comes after the first one pays.
