Hey, thought I’d make this post to share what I’ve been up to the past few months.

I haven’t been very active on this blog since before one month ago, but I’ve actually built some cool stuff I wanted to share with you!

Work

I’ve been at Plain for the last few years. It’s a very cool, modern B2B support platform, made for tech-savvy teams.

When I joined, we barely made enough money to afford a couple of lattes and now we’re a Series A company, growing fast and we’ve signed up some really crazy logos - Cursor, Vercel, Raycast, Granola to name a few.

I’ve learnt a lot through this journey. It’s really humbling to think you write good, clever code and then watch it all burn down when the next big logo onboards and you have to frantically rewrite it all at midnight.

I also got to build some of Plain’s core features - for example, I built Plain’s Slack integration, which processes north of 2mil messages per year. Absolutely crazy.

But the most valuable learning for me was being able to see how a SaaS business is built from the ground up. It’s something I had never seen before as I was always dealing with deeper backend tech teams in the past. But I got to see and participate in onboarding some of our first users, observe how we sell to them and how we scaled that once we got bigger.

That same playbook is what I’m using today to grow some of my personal projects. Let me tell you a bit about them.

Vibegest - my first SaaS

A major breakthrough and one of my proudest achievements this year is finally launching my own app.

I’ve always managed to spend my free time productively but that typically involved learning something concrete to grow my skill set.

For example, I’d spend time reading computer science books and taking notes whilst I’m at it (I also publish them here) or build some throwaway projects with the intent of learning something new.

But for the first time, I decided to build projects that will be live services I sell online.

The first one I built is Vibegest - it’s a personalised newsletter that lets you get the gist of what’s going on without the noise of social media.

There’s endless news feeds you can track and they are full of noise & drama. Just open Twitter and see for yourself.

So I built vibegest to compile the top news from the places I care about - this involves Hackernews and certain subreddits:

Once I did, I thought others might have the same problem and they did! I haven’t spoken about this project a lot anywhere, maybe a tweet here and there, but I have around 20 customers receiving their own vibegest.

I’m still not charging for it or spreading the word about it as I’m not yet happy enough with the value prop. After reading vibegests for a few months, I stopped doing that. There was still a lot of toil in browsing through a big list of links.

However, I’ve been working on a new version that looks much much better:

This one has summaries under each article so I can get the gist without having to open each one and skim through it. That is so simple but so effective.

I also added support for Bluesky which enabled me to track my favorite tech influencer who left Twitter and hence, I had lost track of:

After these changes, I’ve started to really enjoy my daily Vibegest. I look forward to reading it every morning.

This new, better version, however, is built using a very hacky experiment where I have Claude Code running in a container that goes every day and compiles the Vibegest for me.

That worked out incredibly well but it doesn’t scale beyond like 3 users.

So next step is to migrate the real Vibegest to this new format, start charging for it and launch it properly.

PS: If you’d like to receive the new Vibegest as well, feel free to reply or DM me and I can stretch my Claude Code container a bit to handle your newsletter as well 👌

My Go Course about AI Engineering

While I was working on Vibegest, Matt Boyle reached out to me, suggesting we do a collab where I make a course for his site. So I put Vibegest on the sidelines for a bit and made the AI Engineering with Go course.

I had made a course in the past for Udemy, that was not very profitable for me, given how much time I spent on it and I hadn’t considered making another one since.

However, with Matt’s help, I managed to make something quite good. The course itself is very detailed, a lot of good stuff’s in there on how to build AI apps with Go using all of the tricks I’ve learnt from working on AI features at Plain.

Most other AI courses are super expensive and just cover some basics, but in my case I managed to go into some pretty nice details, where by the end I’m showing folks how to build their own AI agent for learning System Design.

I actually think the app we built in that course can be taken, bunbled up nicely behind a paywall and become quite a successful SaaS on its own!

After launching the course, more than a 100 ppl signed up and I made around 10k usd in the first few months. So I’m definitely happy with the outcome!

I can see myself doing more of this in the future.

My obsession with Claude Code and launching Claude Control

Along with working on my Go course, I was really getting knee deep in exploring and using Claude Code as my daily driver when working on my projects - both at work and on my side projects.

But there was one thing I was really missing in my workflow - being able to use Claude Code from my phone while I’m on the go.

I saw that Cursor had this nice feature where you could trigger Cursor from Slack and I thought it’d be so cool to have something similar for Claude Code.

And that’s how Claude Control was born.

It’s a background agent for Claude Code.

The way it works is that you can deploy dozens of agents, pointing at your different repos from the app and I take care of setting them up in containers which I manage for you.

Initially, I just used it to make some PRs here and there on the go, but over time I’ve started to reeeally expand my usage and explore new use cases:

In fact, that’s how that Vibegest experiment I shared about is run as well - Claude Code is deployed in one of my containers and it has a bunch of markdown and python scripts which lets it compile my daily newsletter.

Another example - I’ve setup Claude Control with access to my logs, database (read-only) and codebase so now I use it as my AI debugger

This is super useful because I have this simple alerting system where I get a slack message anytime there’s some error on the server. I can then take the request ID, point Claude Control at it and let it figure out what went wrong.

The amount of time and toil this saves for me is insane - I haven’t opened server logs in months but the amount of bugs I’ve fixed with this workflow is a lot.

There’s a lot of other experiments I’ve done as well and those probably deserve their own blog post, so I’ll leave that for another time. (Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss it ;) )

This project ended up being useful for a bunch of other folks as well - I have four paying customers already, all of them companies in various stages. The largest one is a Series B company with more than 35mil usd in funding (!)

I expected my first SaaS customers to be a bunch of friends, paying a few dollars per month but I was quite wrong. It’s wild that these companies put their trust in me and I’m steadfast on not letting them down now - so I’m really doubling down on Claude Control and growing it more.

Another surprising thing with this project is that Anthropic launched their own “Claude Code in Slack” integration recently and I thought that’d be the end of Claude Control but I was wrong on that account too.

Turns out, Anthropic and all other background agent providers charge an astronomical fee per user (150$ last time I checked), whereas I charge for a single Team license.

The model others are using simply doesn’t work well when you want to let your whole team use Claude Code. You can’t charge 150$ just because your product manager asks a question occasionally to learn how something works.

So that’s the direction I’ll be building towards - a background agent, optimized for full-team use.

What’s ahead?

That was a quick overview of what I’ve been up to. Hope I managed to inspire you to go and try building your own projects - you never know where you can get to!

For me, I feel quite fortunate and happy with my progress so far and I plan on investing more in my ventures.

As a starting point, launching some new features for Claude Control that properly differentiate it from the competition and also re-launching Vibegest. Perhaps making another Go course in 2026 as well?

I also really need to step up my marketing game. For all of my projects, I did close to zero marketing, it’s actually wild how people are discovering me at all.

How about you? What have you been up to?

Hit reply & let me know!