Your Prototype Works. Now What?

Something remarkable has happened in the last two years.

If you have an idea for a software product, you can build a working prototype without writing a line of code yourself. ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or any one of a myriad of others will generate it for you. The barriers that kept non-developers out of software creation have fallen.

This is genuinely wonderful. I’ve spent years nurturing coders, at every level, and the biggest obstacle was never intelligence, nor the lack of imagination. It was the gatekeeping: the arcana of syntax, the ceremony of tooling, the thousand small rituals between idea and working code. None of that is your problem. The essence of your problem is the thing you want to create your app to do. AI coding tools have stripped away that unnecessary ceremony.

But here’s what I keep seeing: people build something that works, and then they’re stuck.

The prototype runs on their laptop. It has no tests. Dependencies are pinned to whatever version the LLM happened to know about. There’s no monitoring. The database schema was improvised. Documentation is the chat history with an AI.

None of this matters for a prototype. All of it matters for a product.

This is where I come in.

I use the same AI tools you do, by the way. They make me more productive too. But it turns out that knowing what questions to ask — and knowing when the answer is wrong — is still a skill. The LLM doesn’t know your business context, your scale requirements, your compliance obligations. Someone has to.

I’m a chartered engineer with deep experience in production systems. I help early-stage startups take their early iterations and make them production-ready:

I’m not here to throw out what you’ve built or rewrite everything from scratch. I’m here to give your early iteration the foundations it needs to grow — and to hand off cleanly to a larger engineering team when that time comes.

And once it’s production-ready? Now go. Sell it! That’s your job. I’ll keep it running, that’s mine.

If you’ve built something and you’re wondering what the next step is, I’d love to hear about it.