The Build Story · a limited series

One pilot. Thirty days. Fifteen chairs.

On a Tuesday evening in June I typed a question into an AI. Thirty days later there was a product — native apps on three platforms, a detection engine measured like an ML system, Stripe billing, and a soundtrack with its own licensing files. This is the story of those thirty days, told from the receipts.

The founding document · Jun 16, 8:09pm

“I have a dji drone… every video they shoot includes a sidecar file that's an lrf file. I'm not sure what those files do, but i'm assuming they have details about the flight… figured I'd start here and we can have a conversation about what's possible.”

A note on the writing

You'll notice, reading this, that parts of it sound like an AI wrote them. That's because it did. One of the things I discovered this month is that AI gives me superpowers I didn't have before — and one of them is writing. I'm not a good writer. I never have been, and it's always been the thing that held me back. So this time I used the AI for both: to build what I think is probably the best tool out there for editing drone footage, and to tell you the story of building it.

Thirty days, seven chapters.

JUN 16 — JUL 18 · 2026

Each bar is a chapter's span across the month. Chapter one is a single evening; the finale spans all thirty days. The hatched stretch is the quiet fortnight — two weeks when almost nothing shipped — compressed here so the busy days can breathe. The gap in the axis is the story of chapter two.

Chapter
· QUIET FORTNIGHT ·
Jun 16
Jun 18
Jul 7
Jul 14
Jul 18
01“I'm not sure what those files do”Jun 16 · one eveningLiveRead the chapter
02A tool for an audience of oneJun 17 – Jul 5LiveRead the chapter
03Teaching it tasteJul 7 – Jul 13Upcoming
04“tldr; I may want to turn this into a business”Jul 7 – Jul 12Upcoming
05My creative agency doesn't existJul 9 – Jul 17Upcoming
06“Here's a crazy idea”Jul 10 – Jul 14Upcoming
07Fifteen chairsJun 16 – Jul 18 · all 30 daysFinale

Chapters release serially. Chapters one and two are live — get the next one by email.

Some of what's in there
57 min

A native iPad app went from “let's start” to installed on my iPad in fifty-seven minutes.

259 commits

Thirty days, roughly nine commits a day, every day — including the days I spent flying.

35,000+ lines

Python, Swift, JS, and shell — a telemetry pipeline, a multi-tenant SaaS, and native apps on three platforms. No framework anywhere.

30 person-months

The old-way estimate, priced subsystem by subsystem — the telemetry archaeology, the 3D theater, the detection engine, the native apps. Completed in thirty days.

$500–700K

What the finale prices the old way at: three engineers plus specialists, twelve to fifteen months, fully loaded.

15 chairs

A traditional org would staff fifteen distinct roles to build this. The finale's title contains an accounting error I've decided to keep.

Get the next chapter.

Seven chapters, a declared arc, and an ending. One email when the next one lands — nothing else. Separate from the product waitlist.

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