041: Build It Yourself

Hi there

For over a year one platform ran almost everything in my business: my email list, this newsletter, my sign-up pages and my online course. Some weeks ago I replaced it, by vibe coding the whole thing myself.

Time to read: 5 minutes

In this edition:

• The Platform I Stopped Paying For
• What If You Do Not Run a Business? (including a useful prompt)
• The Two Rules Your Team Needs

Speakers Wanted: Claude for Leaders

We are looking for speakers for Claude for Leaders in Zürich. Non-technical speakers, non-technical audience. If you use Claude in your own work and have a real story from inside your company, send me a message.

The Platform I Stopped Paying For

It costs $180 a month. Just over $2,000 a year.

I want to be fair to it. I chose it deliberately, it did the job for a whole year, and one login held everything. Convenience is what I was paying for, and for a long time it was worth the money. But not in 2026. Sometimes I still hardly believe I can vibe code so many things. And no, I am no software developer. For me Python is (and will remain) a scary reptile.

What changed is that I could build the pieces myself. I wrote about it on LinkedIn when it happened, if you want the short version.

The word for that now is vibe coding. You describe what you want in ordinary language, the AI writes the software, and you judge the result instead of reading the code. Andrej Karpathy gave it the name in early 2025. I have never programmed. I have described things, in English, the way I would explain them to a new colleague.

What I typed to rebuild the newsletter archive.

So at the end of June, I opened a new chat in Claude Code and I described what I actually needed: where my subscribers live and how they get labelled, what a sign-up page has to do, and the one that kept me awake, what happens to the newsletters I had already sent.

There were 36 of them sitting inside a platform I was about to cancel. Two years of writing, in someone else’s box.

They are now a small site of their own. You will find them on my newsletter page, under Past editions. All (now) 40, one page each, with a picture card index. It took some hours. You are reading number 41.

The STAR career transition course, which combines online modules with coaching, moved to its own page as well, with the videos hosted elsewhere and a payment link at the end.

Now the part I would not want you to skip.

I did not build everything, and I would not advise it. Getting an email to land in more than a thousand inboxes rather than in spam folders is a hard, unglamorous problem that other people have spent years solving. So I bought it. A dedicated email service, about $40 a month, and it is what put this email in front of you. Payments and video hosting are bought in too.

The rule I gave myself was to buy the hard parts and build only the glue between them.

The bill went from $180 to $40. That is $1,680 a year saved, which is nice, and it is also definitely not the only thing I got out of this experience.

The bigger one is that I can change my mind now. When I want a new feature, software, app, or dream anything, I write a few sentences and it exists that evening. I have stopped waiting to see whether a company somewhere puts the feature I need on its roadmap.

What If You Do Not Run a Business? (Including a Useful Prompt)

Most of you do not run a business. You have a job, a team, a manager, and an IT department with a view on all of this. So the story above can read like something that only applies to founders.

I think the same move is available to you, in a smaller and more useful form.

Vibe coding again, in plain terms: you write down what you want, the AI builds it, and you check whether it is any good. There is no course to take and no language to learn. The skill is describing your own work clearly, which is the part almost nobody has ever done.

You usually need an agentic environment, like Code in Claude or Codex in ChatGPT. These are included in your Pro (or higher tier) subscription, starting at about $20 a month.

Things people around me have built this way in an evening.

At work:

• The weekly report you assemble by hand from three exports
• A one-page comparison table out of six sets of interview notes
• A tracker for a project where the official template never quite fitted
• A tool that reads a job advert and tells you what is missing from your CV
• A running record of your own work through the year, so the December self-assessment takes an hour instead of a weekend

Outside work, which is where most of the monthly fees actually sit:

• A morning digest of the five sources you genuinely follow, instead of the three paid newsletters you skim
• Something that reads an insurance policy, a rental contract or a pension statement and tells you in plain words what it actually says
• Your own money in one view, built from the exports your bank already gives you
• A training plan that adjusts to how the week actually went, instead of the fitness app you pay for every month and open twice
• The family holiday plan, with flights, bookings and the packing list in one place, and the booking pages opened and ready if you are relaxed about entering the card details yourself
• A revision helper for a teenager preparing for exams. We have built countless MAP tests and similar interactive tests in html for my son. Well, my AI agent, Klaus did.

Look at the subscriptions on your phone. That is a good starting list.

The limit, and I mean this seriously. Everything you build at work stops at your company’s data. That means client names, personal data, anything under an NDA, and anything pulled out of an internal system. Build around your own work, keep confidential material out of it, and tell your IT team what you are doing before you build it. Describe exactly what the thing touches. That conversation is short when the honest answer is nothing sensitive.

If you do not know where to start, use this. Copy it, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT, and answer honestly.

It will come back with more than you can do. Start with the one that irritates you most. That is the one you will actually finish.

Doing this on your own? If you want a read on where you and your team genuinely stand with all of this, rather than where the noise suggests you should be, the assessment takes five minutes.

The Two Rules Your Team Needs

If you lead people rather than a business, this is the section for you.

I would be surprised if nobody in your team has tried this already. Somebody has built a small thing on their own laptop, at the weekend, and has said nothing about it to anyone.

Those people usually care most about doing the job well. The risk is the same person pasting something into a chat window that should never have left the building. A ban mostly moves the whole thing out of sight, which is worse.

Two sentences from you would cover most of it.

The first names what may never go into a tool nobody has approved. Client data, personal data, anything from an internal system. Say it in words people still remember on a Friday afternoon.

The second is about what the thing is allowed to do. Anything an employee builds may prepare, draft and suggest. Sending, posting or paying on behalf of the company waits for a person to read it first.

That second rule is the one I run my own agents on. They write emails all day. They may not send them to anyone except me. It is the line I use on stage: give away the work, never the judgment.

This is the conversation I run with leadership teams in the AI workshops. If you want it in your room this autumn, hit reply and tell me roughly when.

If you would rather talk it through first, there is a small number of consultation slots each month. Every request is subject to confirmation. Bookings are reviewed before a slot is confirmed, so please read a booked time as a request until you hear back.

Still looking for speakers for Claude for Leaders in Zürich. If that is you, send me a message.

Before I Go

I still pay for plenty of things. Email sending, payments, video hosting, my accountant, and a coffee subscription I forget about every month. The list is shorter than it was, and I know why each item is on it.

What are you still renting? Hit reply and tell me, I read every answer.

Talk soon,

P.S. The old newsletters all survived the move. Every edition since number one is on the newsletter page, under Past editions.

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