10-week programme · Intake starts October

Stop waiting for a technical co-founder.Own your code.

Ten weeks to turn your idea into a working product – three kinds of mentor in your corner, a library of hard-won methods on tap, and AI as your build partner. High-code. Real architecture. Your own venture.

No dev background required Weekly 1:1 with a specialist mentor Learn on demand, not on a timetable
your-app / deploy.sh
$ git push origin main
→ CI/CD triggered on GitHub Actions
→ Tests passing ✓
→ Deploying to Railway…
$ curl https://yourapp.com/health
200 OK · stripe.connected · db.ready
$ ./ship-it --to production
The wall you hit

AI got you 60% of the way. The rest is real.

Your prototype won't leave localhost

You've vibecoded something that works on your laptop. But domains, DNS, SSL, auth and payments are a wall you can't see over.

AI keeps breaking your own code

One prompt fixes a bug, the next unravels something else. Without real architecture in your head, every session is a coin flip.

You're waiting for someone else

Cold-emailing technical co-founders. Overpaying agencies. Watching your idea sit still while other people ship theirs.

Weeks 1–2

Come with an idea. Or come and find one.

The first two weeks are for getting your venture straight – whatever you're starting from. You'll pressure-test it against a real market before you write a line of code.

Nothing yet

No idea at all? We brainstorm with you. Structured ideation, market gaps, and where your own skills give you an edge.

A note on your phone

Something you keep coming back to but have never started. We'll help you find out if it's real.

A half-built prototype

You've vibe-coded something that half works. Bring it – we'll get it onto solid ground.

An existing venture

Something live or shelved that needs rebuilding, extending, or finally finishing properly.

Then you agree a scope you can actually deliver. With your mentor, you size the build to your starting point and the ten weeks in front of you – so you finish with something real instead of something half-done. Ruthless scoping is one of the most valuable habits this programme gives you.

Your mentors

Three specialists. One venture. Every week.

Most programmes give you a coding tutor. You get a rotating bench of three – a technologist, a product specialist and a business operator – because a solopreneur has to be all three, and nobody is born good at all of them. One focused one-to-one session each week, rotating as your venture moves through the programme.

Tech mentor
Someone who's shipped

A working developer who reviews your code, unsticks your build, and keeps your AI workflow honest. They won't write it for you – they'll make sure you can.

Why did you structure it this way? Show me what the AI gave you and what you changed.

Product mentor
Keeper of the scope

Design thinking, user testing and brutal prioritisation. They stop you gold-plating features nobody asked for and push you to talk to real users sooner.

Who have you actually shown this to? What did they do with it?

Business mentor
The commercial reality

Market fit, pricing, and how this becomes a business rather than a project. The conversations technical founders usually avoid until it's too late.

Who pays for this, how much, and why would they choose you?

How it runs

Ten weeks, four phases

A rhythm, not a rigid schedule. Your mentor sessions and your build move at the pace of your venture.

01 · Weeks 1–2

Idea & validation

Bring or brainstorm your idea. Test it against a real market and real people. Agree a scope you can deliver.

02 · Weeks 3–4

Design & set-up

Design your product and data model. Get your environment, repo and AI development workflow running properly.

03 · Weeks 5–8

Build, test, iterate

Build your core, put it in front of real users, learn, and improve. Repeat. This is where the product takes shape.

04 · Weeks 9–10

Document & pitch

Final iteration, then write it up and prepare your pitch against the assessment criteria.

What you'll ship

Not a practice build. A live web app.

By week 10 you have a real, deployed application on your own domain – with auth, payments and monitoring – and the architectural understanding to keep building it.

A real full-stack app

React + TypeScript on the front, Node + Express + MongoDB on the back. Not a Bolt export, not a walled prototype – code you own end to end.

Live on your own domain

Buy the domain, configure DNS and SSL, deploy to a real host on Railway, wire GitHub Actions CI/CD. Push to main, ship to production.

Auth that actually works

Sign-up, login, protected routes, sessions. Clerk integrated cleanly so real users can sign in from day one.

Payments live

Stripe wired in end-to-end. Subscriptions, one-off charges, webhooks – your app can take money before the cohort ends.

AI as your dev partner

Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot used the way senior devs use them – with conventions, guardrails and a CLAUDE.md that keeps AI on-rails.

Production hygiene

Sentry monitoring, backups, disaster recovery, security basics. The unsexy stuff that keeps a real app from falling over.

The library

Learn what you need, when you need it

Short lessons capturing the methods and hard-won wisdom of our trainers and mentors – seven themes, available from day one and all the way through. No fixed timetable to fall behind on. When your build reaches authentication, you watch authentication.

01

Using generative AI for business and for learning

How to get real work out of AI rather than plausible-looking noise – prompting and context that holds up under pressure, judging output you can't verify yourself, and using AI to teach yourself whatever you need next.

Prompting & contextAutomating your workloadResponsible, effective use
02

Business models and understanding market needs

Finding out whether anyone actually wants this before you spend ten weeks building it – locating a niche, scoping an MVP that can ship, deciding what to charge, and understanding the obligations that come with a real product.

Validation & nicheScoping an MVPPricing & obligations
03

Design thinking, agile and AI coding

How to work like a developer rather than someone typing hopeful prompts – designing before building, iterating in small deliberate steps, and driving AI coding tools with enough structure that what comes out actually holds together.

AI coding practiceIterative deliveryCode that lasts
04

Environment and safe AI

Setting yourself up to move fast without breaking things you can't recover – a reproducible development environment, and a clear-eyed view of exactly where AI will quietly mislead you.

Dev environmentsThe limits of AIEvaluating output
05

Application architecture and design

The patterns underneath every web application – how the layers fit together, how state and data actually flow, how authentication really works, and where AI features belong if your product needs them.

ArchitectureData & stateAuth & AI features
06

Making your app production ready

What shipping genuinely demands – hosting choices, domains and certificates, deployment pipelines, monitoring, backups, security and taking payments.

Deployment & hostingPipelines & monitoringSecurity & payments
07

Getting your first clients and go to market

Turning a working product into a venture – finding your first users, measuring what actually matters, and communicating clearly to the customers and collaborators you'll depend on.

Go-to-marketMeasuring what mattersCommunicating & selling

Each lesson gives you the concept, the direction and a worked demonstration – deliberately not every keystroke. You fill in the detail with AI, and your mentor is there when you're genuinely stuck. That's not a shortcut: self-directed technical work is the capability being built.

What you actually learn

Concepts that transfer, taught through a real stack

This is high-code, not low-code – you'll write real code and understand what sits beneath it. But the point isn't the framework. It's the thinking that outlives whatever framework you're using this year.

How systems fit together

Frontend, backend, database, state and data flow – the architecture every web application shares, whatever it's written in.

The hard parts, properly

Authentication, data persistence, validation and payments. Concepts that work the same way whichever service or language you pick.

What shipping demands

Hosting, domains, pipelines, monitoring, backups, security. The terrain you have to cross to put anything real in front of users.

Working with AI properly

Prompting, context, reviewing what it wrote, version control as your undo button, and knowing when it's confidently wrong.

The stack

The exact tools we cover

No toy frameworks. This is the modern, production-grade stack real solopreneurs ship with today – and the tools are the vehicle, not the point. The concepts underneath them transfer to whatever you use next.

Core stack

  • React
    Frontend framework
  • Node + Express
    Backend API
  • TypeScript
    End to end, typed
  • MongoDB + Mongoose
    Database + modelling

AI coding tools

  • Claude Code
    Primary agentic tool
  • Cursor
    AI editor, agent mode
  • GitHub Copilot
    Autocomplete baseline
  • Claude + ChatGPT
    Debugging + brainstorming

Auth and payments

  • Clerk
    Authentication done right
  • Stripe
    Payment integration
  • React Hook Form + Zod
    Forms + validation

Ship, automate and monitor

  • Git + GitHub
    Version control, your undo button
  • Railway
    PaaS deployment + CLI
  • GitHub Actions
    CI/CD pipelines
  • n8n
    Automation and workflows
  • Sentry
    Error tracking + observability
Programme Outline

Every lesson, mapped out

Click any module to expand the full list of topics.

>_ technical-solopreneur / curriculum.tree
  • Test the idea, choose the stack, scope an MVP you can actually ship in 10 weeks.

    • Validating your idea and finding a niche
    • Choosing a tech stack for a solo builder
    • MVP scoping and tradeoffs
    • How the layers of a web application fit together
  • Work with Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot as a genuine development partner, not a code generator.

    • AI coding foundations and prompting
    • Advanced AI coding workflows and CLAUDE.md conventions
    • Catching and correcting AI mistakes
    • Using AI for DevOps and infrastructure tasks
  • The core of a modern web app – React + TypeScript on the front, Node + Express + MongoDB on the back.

    • Dev Containers setup and local environment
    • React + TypeScript, TanStack Query, state management
    • Node + Express APIs, MongoDB + Mongoose
    • Forms and validation with React Hook Form + Zod, data persistence
    • Authentication with Clerk and JWT
    • Filtering, sorting and pagination
  • Domains, DNS, SSL, CI/CD, monitoring, backups and payments – the parts most tutorials skip.

    • Domains, DNS and SSL
    • Shared vs VPS hosting, Railway deploys and PaaS trade-offs
    • GitHub Actions CI/CD and security best practices
    • Sentry monitoring and production logging
    • Backups, disaster recovery and database migrations
    • Stripe payments integration
The assessment

Your pitch is the assessment

No exam. At the end of the programme you present your venture to your trainer and peers, and submit the documentation behind it. You'll know the criteria from the start, and you get feedback on your work as part of the assessment – plus a piece you can use afterwards to show what you can do.

What you cover
  • The problem, your market, and why this venture
  • A demo of what you built
  • What users told you, and how you responded
  • The technical decisions you made, and why
  • Ethical, legal and data considerations
  • What you learned, and what you'd do next
After ten weeks

What actually changes

Not a finished business – ten weeks doesn't do that, and anyone promising it is selling you something. Here's what you really walk away with.

A tested product

Built by you, on React and Node, scoped properly and put in front of real users more than once. Yours to keep building.

You understand architecture

Frontend, backend, database, auth, deployment – how they fit and why your design decisions matter. No more following tutorials blindly.

AI that works for you

You can prompt well, judge the output, revert cleanly when it goes wrong, and debug without looping endlessly telling AI to fix its own mess.

Commercial judgement

You can validate a market, price a product, and tell the difference between a feature people want and one you fancy building.

Confidence in your own code

You'll trust what you've built because you understand it – not just because it happens to work.

The ability to keep going

The most durable outcome: you can teach yourself whatever comes next, with AI, without a course to follow.

We're deliberately honest about this. Some things you'll practise hands-on; others you'll learn as knowledge and apply later. You may not take your product fully to production inside ten weeks – production is taught so you understand what it demands, not as a box to tick. What you will have is a tested product and real technical and commercial judgement.

Who this is for

Builders, not spectators.

This is a genuine, high-code programme. It's not a no-code tour and it's not a "learn to code" bootcamp aimed at a junior dev job. It's for people who want to ship their own product.

  • Founders with a product or idea who want to build it themselves instead of hiring a dev team
  • Vibe coders who've been shipping with AI and want to genuinely understand the architecture underneath
  • Anyone who wants to ship something real – with auth, payments and real hosting – entirely on their own
A note on prerequisites
  • No developer background needed, but come ready to learn new concepts and push yourself.
  • This is a high-code programme. You'll read and write real code, not drag and drop.
  • Done any coding before, even a short online course? You'll feel right at home.
  • Completely new to code? AI tools make it more accessible than ever, but expect a genuine challenge.
Where it takes you

The paths this opens

Technical Founder

Build and ship your own product without hiring a dev team. Move from idea to a live, paying application on your own terms.

Indie Hacker

Run a portfolio of small SaaS products yourself – you own the code, the infrastructure and the roadmap.

Technical Co-founder

Bring genuine engineering credibility to a co-founding team. Read, review and ship real code, not just talk to developers.

Cost

Founding cohort pricing

The first cohort is priced at $2,500 while we launch the programme. Future cohorts move to the standard programme price of $3,320.

Founding cohort price
$2,500$3,320

Available for this first intake only.

No payment required to register interest.

Standard programme price$3,320
Founding cohort saving$820

Intro price ends when founding cohort places are filled.

What's included
  • Ten weeks, part-time, around your work
  • Weekly one-to-one mentor sessions
  • Rotating tech, product and business mentors
  • Full on-demand library across all seven themes
  • Live sessions and peer cohort
  • Pitch assessment with structured feedback
Applications opening soon

Join the waitlist.

Get first access to the founding cohort. Waitlist spots are limited and won't last long. Complete your application and one of our advisors will reach out.

FAQ

The questions people ask