Thirty years building products · one week at a time
See your idea move every week.
Most founders hand a dev shop their savings and wait half a year for something they can barely evaluate. I work the opposite way: you get my full focus for one week at a time, pointed straight at the core of your idea, with visible progress you can see and react to as we go. Fast, in the open, and you decide each week whether to keep going.
I build products — and I've done it at every level, from frontline engineering to startup CTO to VP at a Fortune 50 company, over thirty years. I work solo and AI-assisted, one founder at a time, so the week is entirely yours. You're not hiring an agency. You're hiring me.
One week at a time. You're never locked in.
Here's the rhythm. It's deliberately simple — the short cycle is the whole point.
We scope the week.
Before anything starts, we agree on the one thing the week is pointed at — the core of your idea, the part that has to work for the rest to matter. Not a feature wishlist. One core loop, chosen together. You'll know exactly what we're aiming at before we begin.
I build, in the open.
I spend the week building it — solo, focused, AI-assisted, fast. You get a short update from me every day: what moved, what's next, anything I need a decision on. You're not handing off and disappearing for six months. You're watching it come together and steering as we go.
We look at what we've got.
At the end of the week, I walk you through it live — running on a real URL, something you can click through yourself. A good week usually means a working core you can demo to investors or customers, built on a real foundation a future engineer can extend rather than rebuild. I aim for that every week. I don't pretend every week guarantees it — software is iterative, and I'd rather be honest than oversell.
You decide what's next.
Continue, and we scope another week. Pause. Or stop — you keep everything I've built, it's yours. No multi-month contract, no cancellation fee, no hard feelings. If it's working you run it back; if it's not, you walk. That's your insurance, and it's the whole reason this works.
Both sides of the deal, in plain terms.
A week of my full focus produces something real. When a week goes well, you walk away able to:
Demo it live. It runs on a real URL, not just my laptop. You can pull it up in a meeting, screen-share it, hand someone a link.
Click through the core of your idea. The central thing your product does actually works, end to end — real logic, not a clickable mockup that falls apart when someone goes off-script.
Put it in front of investors or customers. It's credible under a real demo — solid enough to raise on, or to test with the people you're building for.
Hand it to an engineer and keep building. What I build is a foundation, not throwaway scaffolding. Real authentication, a real data model, real structure, in source control with a repeatable deploy. The next developer builds on it — they don't start over.
That last one is the part most prototypes get wrong. Sometimes throwing work away is the right call — you learn the tech was wrong, or the idea doesn't hold up live, and that lesson is worth the week. What's wasteful is throwing away good work for an avoidable reason: a demo that wows on Friday but was built on scaffolding that can't survive month two. I build the core right the first time, so when the idea proves out, the week you spend with me compounds instead of evaporating.
I'm just as clear about what a week doesn't buy — because knowing the edges is how you use this well.
It isn't production-hardened — on purpose. It's not built to handle thousands of users, survive traffic spikes, or pass a security review yet. That work is real and it matters — after you know the idea works and people want it. Spending your first week bulletproofing something unvalidated is exactly how founders burn runway. We prove the idea first; we harden when there's something worth hardening. When you get there, I'll hand you the checklist — and I can do that work too.
It isn't a finished product. We point the week at the one core thing that has to work. The edges around it — settings, admin screens, every nice-to-have — come later, week by week, as you decide they're worth it. A week buys depth on what matters, not a thin coat of everything.
It isn't a fixed feature list delivered by Friday. You're hiring my focus and judgment for a week, aimed at your core loop — not a contract for a guaranteed set of features. Software is iterative. Some weeks we get further than planned; some weeks we learn the first approach was wrong, and that's the valuable thing we got. I'd rather tell you that honestly than pad a promise I can't keep.
It isn't a place for real user data — until it's ready for it. We start with realistic fake data, so you can see everything work with zero risk. Putting real people's information into an unhardened prototype is a deliberate decision we make together, in writing — never something that quietly happens because it'd be convenient. I'll protect you from that even when it's tempting.
I'm Mike. I've spent thirty years building products — and I've done it from almost every seat.
I started in technical support in the late '90s, as close to the ground as you can get, learning firsthand what breaks and why people get frustrated. From there I spent a decade as an engineer and architect helping scale a company from 200 people to IPO, then ran engineering as CTO at multiple startups and as a VP of technology at a Fortune 50 media company. Seed-stage scrappy and Fortune-50 scale, and most of what lives between them.
That range is the point. I've seen which corners are safe to cut early and which ones come back to haunt you — because I've been the engineer who inherited someone else's shortcuts, and the executive who paid for the rebuild. I know what "good enough to prove the idea" actually looks like, and I know what a real engineer needs to pick the code up later and keep going.
And I never stopped building. Long before the current AI wave, I taught myself Java, database internals, and Windows API guts on nights and weekends to build a platform that analyzed thirty million hands of online poker — because I wanted it to exist. That's the instinct I bring to your idea: not a manager pointing at a whiteboard, but someone hands-on in the code, who'll learn whatever your problem needs and ship it. Now, with modern AI tooling on top of three decades of judgment, one focused person moves at a speed that used to take a team.
That's what I do now — one founder's idea at a time, built fast, with everything I've learned about doing it right.
I went back to building. On purpose.
After thirty years, the thing I wanted to do next surprised me: go back to building. Hands on the keyboard, full stack, soup to nuts.
My career bingo card is full — engineer, manager, CTO, an IPO, acquisitions, a few shutdowns too. I left a job I hated to spend my days doing the thing that doesn't feel like work: sitting with a founder and turning an idea into something real.
Here's what thirty years actually buys you — judgment about what matters. The tools write the code now, and I've gotten good at directing them; the hard part was never the typing. It's knowing which problems are worth solving and which to ignore. Most products will never need to scale to Facebook size, so you ship the thing and solve scale when it's a real problem, not a hypothetical one.
Most solo founders don't need a team of ten engineers. They need one experienced builder who can take them from idea to customer and make the right tradeoffs.
I won't ace a LeetCode screen. I'll figure out the actual problem and ship the actual thing.
Simple and flat. No surprises.
No hourly billing, no scope-creep invoices, no surprises — you know the number before we start.
One flat fee for the week. You decide week to week whether to keep going, so you're never committing to more than the week in front of you.
Why the first week is less
The start is the most uncertain part — you don't fully know how I work, and I don't fully know your idea yet. So the first week is lower on purpose: a smaller first step to see how we work together, before you commit at the standard weekly rate. If it goes well, we keep going at $6,000 a week. If it doesn't, you've risked far less to find out.
Tell me what you're building.
If this sounds like what you need, tell me a bit about what you're building. I read every one of these myself and reply personally — usually within a day or two.
Can't wait to learn about what you're building.
Got it, and thank you. I read every one of these myself, so give me a day or two and I'll reply for real with some initial thoughts.
— Mike