From Idea to Shipped in 20 Hours

Shipping is just the beginning. 70 hours, solo, no team — that's what it took me to ship a production-ready SaaS to live users. With the workflow and stack in this book you can do it in 35–40 hours, and the 20-hour path is real with the optional templates and boilerplate (sold separately). This book covers the part most guides never reach: what keeps the product alive after you ship — maintainable, discoverable by AI agents, and defensible under EU law.

This is the unvarnished documentation of a real build. Every lesson comes from a live project; every hour count is real. What's inside: • A No-Hardcoding standards discipline — single-source patterns, pre-edit hooks, a verify-gate, with a real audit of the boilerplate as the worked example. • API and MCP infrastructure — a tier-based public API and an AI-agent-ready MCP server, so AI agents can use your product. • The four-tier gating model — free / registered / pro / elite, server guard plus UI hook reading one source of truth. • More production patterns — append-only audit logs, geo-block region-pinning, upstream-license audits, content embeds. • Building EU-sovereign — a full migration roadmap to European providers with honest trade-offs per building block.

What you'll build: classic SaaS, marketplaces, content platforms, community products, digital shops, booking systems, business tools. The architecture is the same — users register, pay for access, get features by plan. EU-compliant, automated emails, admin dashboard, multiple auth methods, cron jobs.

The workflow: three AI tools, three roles — Claude Chat for strategy, Claude Code for implementation, v0.dev for design — and how they work together to make solo development viable at production quality. Who it's for: you have a product idea and want to ship it — and keep it maintainable, discoverable, and defensible as it grows. You're comfortable with AI tools but want to understand what's happening.

No senior-engineer background required; command line and Git are enough. The complete path — from idea to launch, and from launch to a SaaS that sustains itself.