Building tiny internet projects. Founder of @promptbase and @zonelessdev. Once bought 300 emoji domains from Kazakhstan.
Bristol, England
Joined May 2020
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First post in 4 years
I’ve been busy bootstrapping PromptBase to 450k+ users
But I was burning $9,400/mo in opaque Stripe fees for seller payouts
So today I’m launching Zoneless: an open-source clone of Stripe Connect using USDC
Identical API, except payouts cost $0.002
I’ve been dogfooding it on PromptBase for 3 months:
- 2,200+ sellers onboarded
- 1,400+ payouts completed
- $9.4k/mo in Stripe fees → ~$5/mo
- 73% of sellers chose Zoneless over Stripe
Experimented with adding an MCP server so you can search PromptBase in ChatGPT, Claude etc.
After 1 week:
🙋♀️ 60 users
🔎 1,300 searches
Pretty tiny but users who find it seem to use it a lot
A few nights ago I instructed an AI agent to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it whilst I was asleep - it just had to benefit the site in some way.
I wanted to see what this felt like - which sounds really weird - I know.
It decided to ship a feature that alerts users before their account is about to get timed out from too many declined submissions - a pretty useful idea based on a lot of emails from support.
It went well, and worked! - waking up and seeing it felt very cool. It was a bit like the AI equivalent of one of those trust experiments where you fall back and someone has to catch you (thankfully I was caught)
I completely missed the OpenClaw hype - I actually thought it looked kind of dumb at the time.
But the past week or so I've been quite enjoying using Grok Bot - which is very similar (and like OpenAI dots I guess).
I have a support bot that uses my Gmail to answer emails, an engineer bot that writes code, and a security bot that monitors my Cloudflare and server logs for suspicious things.
I’m super intrigued by this as a solo founder/developer as a way to run a "big" looking company from the outside as just one person.
Woke up to 100+ stars on the repo, thank you for the support! ⭐️
I've never built open-source before, so this is all pretty new
Back to building now 🫡
First post in 4 years
I’ve been busy bootstrapping PromptBase to 450k+ users
But I was burning $9,400/mo in opaque Stripe fees for seller payouts
So today I’m launching Zoneless: an open-source clone of Stripe Connect using USDC
Identical API, except payouts cost $0.002
I’ve been dogfooding it on PromptBase for 3 months:
- 2,200+ sellers onboarded
- 1,400+ payouts completed
- $9.4k/mo in Stripe fees → ~$5/mo
- 73% of sellers chose Zoneless over Stripe
Check it out here 👇
Website + docs: zoneless.com
Github: github.com/zonelessdev/zonel…
New Post 🎉 "Why Developers Are Building So Many Side Projects"
🎰 Gambling at the side project casino
🤳 Emergence of developer-influencers
📉 Avoiding project disaster
✨ Super creativity
So fun to explore this trend for a16z Future!
future.com/developers-side-p…
I'm writing a post (for a16z!) about the trend of building many projects instead of one, including:
🎰 Gambling at the Side Project casino
🤳 Emergence of Developer-Influencers
📉 Avoiding Project Disaster
✨ Super Creativity
It's out next Tuesday Aug 9th!
New Post 🎉 "I Spent 2 years Launching Tiny Projects"
💡 Updates on all my projects
🎢 The pros and cons of micro-SaaS
🔮 Biggest lessons after 2 years
This was so fun to write. Time flies!
tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_spe…
I'm writing a "2 years of Tiny Projects" post about
💡 Updates on every project I've launched
🎢 The pros and cons of micro-SaaS
🔮 What I've learnt over 2 years
Releasing it on May 18th!
🛍 I bought back One Item Store, my original tiny project!
💸 Why I bought it back, how much I paid, and what's next: daily.tinyprojects.dev/119
