Blog

Build log. Two people + AI, shipping a portfolio of software products.

Your Profile Should Outlive Your Job

When you leave a job, you leave behind your entire body of work — locked in someone else's SaaS accounts. What if your identity was yours to keep?

200 Commits: GTM Infrastructure for 8 Products

Day 3 of the AI-native sprint. CI pipelines, Stripe billing, Postmark emails, security headers, SEO, and launch blog posts — across all 8 products.

Building in Public: An 8-Product Portfolio in 3 Days

Three days. 8 products. 900+ commits. One person and a fleet of AI agents. An overview of the First Party portfolio and what we're building.

Dogfooding as Product Strategy: Build What You Need

Every tool we need to run First Party becomes a product in the portfolio. Why dogfooding is the ultimate product-market fit hack.

LinkSmith: The Free Link Shortener That Doesn't Nickel-and-Dime You

Bitly charges $35/mo for branded links. LinkSmith gives you short links, QR codes, and click analytics — with a generous free tier and no surprise paywalls.

Why We Build for Work and Life

Most software companies pick a lane — business or consumer. AI economics let us build both. Here's why we think that matters.

The Case for One Database

Every SaaS tool creates a separate silo for your data. We think there's a better architecture — and we're building toward it.

YourSiteIsDown: Uptime Monitoring Without the Enterprise Price Tag

Pingdom wants $15/mo for 10 monitors. YourSiteIsDown gives you uptime monitoring, status pages, and instant alerts — starting at $19/mo with a 30-day free trial.

25 commits

Day 5: YourSiteIsDown Goes Live

We shipped our second product — an uptime monitoring service — and deployed it to production in under 4 hours. Also launched our blog, set up automated health checks, and started work on a Mac Mini AI control room.

220 commits

220 Commits: The 1,000 Startups Thesis

Day 4. 42 product candidates documented, a scoring framework built, 14 PRs merged, StartupGraph hits 6,502 companies, and 7 multi-agent PRs land.

184 commits

184 Commits: Design System + Deploy Pipeline

Day 3. Redesigning First Party and Groupthink websites, deploying GitHappy, building a unified design system across 10 repos.

120 commits

120 Commits: Launching Dwellsmith + MCP Servers

Day 2. A household management app goes live, a 13-tool MCP server ships, and we stand up a marketing site and iOS app in one day.

91 commits

91 Commits: Building Multi-Agent Meeting Infrastructure

Day 1 of our build sprint. Voice AI agents joining Google Meet, an MCP server open-sourced, and GitHub issues filed by voice.