I resigned a month ago from my CTO role at a fintech company in London, where I’d worked for six and a half years, to go full-time as an indie dev and build in public. It’s not too much of a risk for me since I’ve been making over £10k a month from my projects for a couple of years now. This is my last week at work, so I’m looking forward to dedicating my time to the thing I love, which is building cool things. I think the timing is also right now with AI. I’m losing my salary, but my first target is to match it with income from my projects. That’s my first goal. I will inevitably be more active here, documenting what I’m working on and how it’s going. I’m excited for my last week. If all goes well, I may never have a job again.

Well, this is a promising email to get on day one of going solo. I started converting some of my sites from AdSense to subscriptions and am currently at $700 MRR on Dodo Payments. I already had some subscriptions before going solo, but I migrated payment providers to Dodo this month. Most of my existing subscribers still exist on on my old service.

This is your daily reminder that you do not need to manually review every line of code anymore and should instead have review agents. Your review agent should be pushing the changes to the branch instead of asking the dev to make the changes.

One perk of not being an employee anymore is that I can go for a walk to clear my head and not worry about being late for my next meeting.

Had my morning coffee and jumped right in. One app I bought on @trust_mrr got its first subscription, which is great, so I’ll be spending a bit more time on that. I’ve removed some functionality from some apps (I don’t think people do this enough) to try to streamline what’s there. I’ve added trial subscriptions as a test to see if they help or not, and I’ll come back and review them in a week. Someone reached out via my support email outlining some issues, so I’m having a look at fixing those. So far, so good for the first morning. Traffic and revenue are looking okay, but I’m still at around £10k MRR, so let’s see what moves the needle here.

It’s my first working day as a solo dev tomorrow, and I think it will be interesting. Here’s what I’m thinking for day one. I’ll start by auditing my revenue and seeing how each of my sites and apps is doing. I’ll try to find growth hack opportunities for the strongest ones and audit each app’s subscription funnel to see where I can improve conversions. I’ll also do some competitor research to see if there are any improvements I can make to existing functionality or any quality of life improvements. I’ll see which apps I can convert to subscriptions and look into applying for AdSense on sites where subscriptions don’t make sense. I’ll also see if any sites need apps to go along with them. Then I’ll look at the ones that aren’t doing well to see if there’s an opportunity to breathe new life into them. I may also start planning some new projects, but let’s see how the day goes.

I always like experimenting with new things, which is important for understanding what types of new products and services the frontier may unlock. From time to time, you will see me build very random things that have absolutely nothing to do with any of my current SaaS apps. 😂

I made an indie dev game with Opus 5.5 where you can vibe code products, fake your Stripe screenshots and try to grow your MRR before you go broke. laptopmogul.vercel.app

I'm officially unemployed and may never work for anyone else again.

Mixed feelings on my last day at my job. Just trying to get through today, and then nearly seven years with this company comes to an end. Excited to see what I can do solo, but I've worked with fantastic people and I'll miss them. A weekend to reset, then all in on Monday.

Tomorrow is my last day as an employee. Next week, solo dev begins.

This year I built about 100 sites while working full time. I've always believed real projects are the best place to test what AI models can actually build. So I kept building real sites with different models, checking their code quality, design and UX, while trying different ways of getting traffic. That's how it got to 100. Here's what the traffic data showed. Combined, they went from 3k visitors a month in January to 113k in August, roughly doubling every month since May. How they did in the last 30 days: About 40 get under 100 visitors a month About 40 get 100 to 1,000 Around 20 get 1,000 to 10,000 4 get over 10,000 The top 5 bring in about three quarters of the traffic. One site alone brings in over 40%. Where the traffic comes from: Google 56% Bing 29% Yahoo 5% DuckDuckGo 5% ChatGPT 2.5% I often got traffic from Bing way earlier than from Google, so it seems far more essential for newer sites. ChatGPT sends visitors to 94% of my sites with 1,000+ monthly visitors, but only a quarter of the ones under 100. SEO is the foundation for GEO. How long it took, from each site's first visitors: 100 visitors a month: about 1 month 1,000 a month: about 4 months on average, some took 8 10,000 a month: anywhere from 1 to 8 months Once a site had been live for 3+ months, 9 in 10 got 100+ visitors a month and about 1 in 3 got 1,000+. The stack mattered too. My Next.js sites on Vercel grew 11x from April to August. My Astro sites on Cloudflare, launched the same month, grew 2x. Still working out why.

If I've had £10k MRR from side projects for years, why only quit my CTO role now? Because I think something just shifted. Small teams with agents can now ship things that used to need a whole company. If they know what they're doing. I've already seen the lines between skillsets blur at work. A product engineer with a bit of marketing can go a very long way now. My bet is that companies made up of one skilled person or a small team, working with agents, become completely normal in the next few years. I'd rather be early than watch it happen from a job.

2 more days as a CTO. Then it's just me and £10k MRR. Next week I'm focused on making up for the salary I'm walking away from. First, I'm doubling down on the apps already making money. Better subscription conversion funnels and more traffic to them. Then I'm getting my 10+ boring websites AdSense ready. Most need more content before I can apply. The one I've already converted should add £500 to £700 a month, and its traffic is growing around 100% month on month. No idea where the ceiling is yet. After that, something new. From Monday I don't have a boss. That's going to be new for me.