Building
Jared Franklin · former Stripe, Blispay, PayPal & Costanoa Ventures
The code got cheap.
So I built nine.
So I built nine.
One product person, a lot of AI agents, and one summer. No engineers, no designers, no team. Here is exactly what that produced, by the numbers.
3,329
merged pull requests
9
products people can use
<$5k
total spend, all in
1
product person, no engineers or designers
01 By the week
Merged pull requests by week
Wiring the factory
Full tilt
This week, partial
2
238
553
486
510
477
583
452
Jun 22
Jun 29
Jul 06
Jul 13
Jul 20
Jul 27
Aug 03
Aug 10
2026
Engineering repos only, so writing and marketing are excluded (the count includes one internal tool). The quiet weeks on the left were nights and weekends, spent learning to direct agents well. I left Stripe in early July to build full-time, and the plateau on the right, around 500 merges a week, is what one person plus those agents holds once it clicks. The week of August 10 is partial, through the 14th.
02 The portfolio · merged PRs per repo
AppealSeason
710 PRs
Nationwide property-tax appeals: finds the local appeal season, weighs whether the evidence supports a case, and helps homeowners prepare.
UnderstandMyPolicy
569 PRs
A household insurance operating system: organizes policies, keeps history, and flags document-grounded changes and inconsistencies.
LabLookup
420 PRs
Specimen-collection requirements across major labs, consolidated into one clinician-verified workflow for medical practices.
UnderstandMyRating
377 PRs
A decoder for VA disability rating decisions, grounded in the federal rating schedule, to help veterans have better conversations.
Spoolis
300 PRs
The verification layer for the agent economy: proof that purchased work was actually delivered before payment clears.
UnderstandMyCert
238 PRs
Guides small businesses through diverse-owned certifications (veteran, women, minority-owned) that unlock contracts.
TruckCompliant
210 PRs
A dashboard for every DOT deadline an owner-operator has to hit, where a missed filing can cost their authority.
NoticeOfChange
185 PRs
Turns the dense benefits notices an aging parent receives into clear deadlines before a missed window raises their costs.
HOACompliant
179 PRs
Helps condo and HOA boards stay ahead of association deadlines that can trigger fines or personal liability.
03 The frontier
Spoolis · where I am spending the next few years
The missing layer of the agent economy.
fulfillment verification, sitting between payment rails and economic outcomes
The nine consumer products proved the factory works. Spoolis is where I am pointing it next, and it is far bigger. As autonomous agents start buying real deliverables from each other, data, research, finished work, a cleared payment no longer proves the work was any good.
Spoolis compiles the acceptance criteria, verifies the delivered work, and issues a portable, programmable receipt of earned value. That receipt is what agent reputation, routing, and outcome-based pricing can finally be built on: trust that comes from verification, not from a payment simply clearing.
Read the full thesis at spoolis.com/thesis →
04 The argument
The cost of writing software collapsed. What did not collapse is the cost of earning a customer's trust, or of choosing the right thing to build.
So the edge is no longer how fast you can type. It is product judgment, taste, and the shared systems that let one person aim a lot of cheap output at problems worth solving. Each product turns a confusing, high-stakes process into clear answers, explicit rules, visible sources, and an honest next step. Fix a guardrail once, ship it everywhere.
That shared machine is why the whole portfolio cost under $5,000 to build, and why the next product adds only about $19 a month. It is also why I think a great software company can now be built on far less capital than it used to take. I write about that on my blog.
05 Writing · jaredfranklin.com
Aug 7, 2026
Great software companies may become too capital efficient for venture
Aug 7, 2026
Why $250K might not be enough: the code is cheap but the customer isn't
Aug 6, 2026
Maybe $250K is enough again
Aug 1, 2026
How to bridge to Codex after hitting the Claude Code weekly limit
Jul 30, 2026
Vibe-coding an analytics system for 8 products in a month
Off the keyboard, I live in South Florida with my wife and four dogs, Capri, Basil, Tofu and Moana. You can meet them here.
Counts pulled from GitHub, merged pull requests across all engineering repos, Jun–Aug 2026. · jaredfranklin.com · @jsfranklin221
Counts pulled from GitHub, merged pull requests across all engineering repos, Jun–Aug 2026. · jaredfranklin.com · @jsfranklin221