Welcome
I'm a full-time developer building a $9/month tool on the side. Here's what that actually looks like.
I’m Daniel — software architect turned solo founder. I spent years designing systems for other people’s products. Then I quit complaining about overpriced tools and built my own.
Right now I’m building Drippery — a drip email series tool for creators. Kit wants $39/month for the same use case. My infrastructure costs $0.04 per user. That gap is the whole bet.
This newsletter is where I document what it actually takes to get there.
What I write about
🚀 Building products — real decisions with real tradeoffs. Like why I rebuilt my entire email engine over a weekend, or why three API layers in one app need to stay permanently separate.
🤖 AI as leverage — practical experiments. I stopped running my side project on my own computer and let Claude Code deploy directly to production. Here’s why that’s not as reckless as it sounds.
📦 What I’m shipping — honest Drippery updates. Features, mistakes, numbers.
Where to start
Three posts that give you a feel for what this place is:
I Pay $0.04 Per User. My Competitors Charge $39/Month. — Why I quit complaining about email tools and built my own as a solo founder with a full-time job. Start here if you want the origin story.
I Stopped Running My Side Project on My Computer — Every change Claude Code makes goes straight to the live app. The workflow that makes that possible.
One Embed, Two Platforms Growing at Once — How a Drippery signup widget silently converted a Medium reader into a Substack subscriber. The flywheel I’m building.
Who this is for
You’ll get something out of this if you’re:
A developer who wants to ship something of their own someday
A founder figuring out how to use AI without the hype
Someone building a product or audience who wants an honest view from inside the process
You’ll probably bounce if you’re looking for marketing playbooks, growth hacks, or motivational content. This isn’t that.