Let's build a business together

In 2009 I spent 75 minutes each way in the back seat of a commuter group’s car on the way to my internship, coding on a fat laptop until it got too hot to keep on my lap.

The commuter group thought I was nuts.

I was building something called couk. You’d post what was in your fridge, it would recommend recipes using those ingredients, and it’d find coupons for whatever you were missing. 45 days of hustle and it never shipped. I moved on to games.

Today I could build couk on my phone, on the bus, in a couple of days.

That’s the reason for all of this.

Building isn’t the hard part anymore

I’ve been building full time with agents for about two years. I haven’t written a line of code by hand in over a year. It just stopped being the bottleneck.

You can ship a working prototype in an afternoon now. Making it good still takes months. And getting someone to pay for it is a completely different job.

The hard parts are:

• Knowing which problem is actually worth solving
• Getting it in front of the people who have that problem
• The last 5%, where a demo turns into something people rely on

Most people sitting on a good business idea don’t have the build side. Most builders don’t have the customers. I’ve watched both groups stall for years.

So here’s the idea

coopcollective is me partnering with people to ship real businesses with AI.

You bring the problem. Ideally one you know better than anyone because you’ve lived in it. You know who has it, what they’re doing about it today, and what they’d pay to make it go away.

I bring the build. Agents, infrastructure, shipping, and the loops that keep it running after launch.

We build it in weeks. A working product people can sign up for, not a pitch deck.

Then we go get revenue. That part takes months and it’s where most projects quietly die. We don’t get to skip it, so we plan for it from day one.

This isn’t an agency. You’re not hiring me, and I’m not hiring you. We’re building something together and we both have skin in it.

Why in public

Everything gets shared. Revenue, what we tried, what broke, the bad weeks.

I’ve been doing this with Nullshot, the messy bits as well as the wins, and it still feels weird every time I post. But the lesson I keep relearning is that you can’t afford to stay quiet. If you’re heads down on something great that nobody’s found yet, that’s the whole problem.

Stealth used to make sense. Now you can build something real so fast that if you’re hiding it for more than a couple of weeks, you’re just hiding.

Building in public also keeps us honest. It’s hard to pretend something is working when the numbers are posted every week.

Who I’m looking for

Not every idea makes it. I have a rule that new ideas sit in the back pocket for a while before I do anything with them. Most die on their own. The ones that survive are usually worth chasing.

What I’m looking for:

• You know a specific problem and the people who have it
• You want a business, not a hobby project
• You’re fine with the journey being public, wins and losses
• You’ll talk to customers every week, even when it’s awkward

What you don’t need: a technical background, a team, or funding.

How to start

DM me on X at @codingcoop. Tell me the problem, who has it, and why you’re the one to solve it. A few sentences is plenty.

The first few collaborations will be documented here from the very first conversation.

You have an idea and I have the agents. Let’s go build something that pays.