I'm Writing a Series. Here's What It's About.

For the last year I have been quietly building something I was not expecting to build, and I have decided to start writing about it in public.

The short version is this. I run an embedded systems company called Microscale. Sometime last year, I needed an accountant and could not justify hiring one, so I built one out of an AI. The thing I built turned out to be good enough that I started running my own company’s books on it. Then other people started asking if they could use it too. Then a British ERP company found it and decided, in a fifteen-minute meeting, that they wanted to resell it in the UK. Then I realized the thing I had accidentally built was not really an accounting app — it was the first module of something much larger. A suite of AI co-workers. A Business Operating System. The kind of thing that twelve months ago would have been impossible to build alone, and that today I am building anyway, mostly alone, with a co-founder and a lot of help from AI coding agents.

I want to write about it because I think the story is worth telling, and because I think the moment we are living in — the moment where a single person can build software that used to require a whole company — is not being talked about honestly enough. Most of what I read about AI is either hype from people who are not actually shipping anything, or fear from people who have not actually used the tools. I have been shipping, and I have been using the tools, and I have opinions. I want to put them on the page.

What the series covers

Over the next several weeks I am going to publish a series of essays about all of the following:

The origin story. Why an embedded systems company decided to bet on AI. What the forcing functions were. How a failed cloud startup two years ago turned out to be the foundation for the thing I am building now.

Vibe coding with Claude Code. What it is actually like to ship production software almost entirely through AI agents in 2026. The rules I have had to learn the hard way. The mistakes I made and the architectures I threw away before one of them worked. A technical companion piece for the engineers who want the gory details.

The accidental product. How an internal tool becomes a company, and how you know when it has. The moment I stopped calling Clerk “my accounting app” and started calling it something much larger.

The Business Operating System thesis. Why I believe the future of small-business software is not better apps but a coordinated team of AI co-workers. What the suite looks like. Why I started with accounting. Why a second agent is already in production.

Our first reseller. How a British ERP company found the product and decided to resell it in the UK after a fifteen-minute demo. What the deal taught me about the difference between a product and a platform.

Hiring the founding team. An open call for the people I need to build the Nigerian operation. This is the most actionable essay in the series — if you are a salesperson, a customer success specialist, an accountant, or an engineer reading this and thinking “wait, is he talking about me?” — you are the reason I am writing it.

Lessons learned. What I got wrong about building with LLMs and what I would tell myself a year ago. What I got right about dogfooding. The partnership that makes all of this possible and why I am not actually a solo founder even though it sometimes looks like I am.

The deep cuts. The design philosophy behind an AI-native product. Why I refuse to template any response the user reads. Why every UI feature has to come with an agent tool. Why the small business owner, not the accountant, is the user.

Who this is for

If you are a founder thinking about AI, I wrote this for you.

If you are an engineer wondering whether “vibe coding” is real leverage or a party trick, I wrote this for you.

If you are a small business owner wondering why your accounting software feels like it was written for someone else, I wrote this for you.

If you are thinking about joining an early-stage company and trying to figure out which ones are serious, I wrote this for you — the recruitment essay in particular.

And if you are just curious about what one person in Abuja is doing with the AI tools the rest of the world is still figuring out, I wrote this for you too.

The cadence

I am going to publish weekly, starting next week, on this Substack. Each essay will also go out in shorter form on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, but the canonical version lives here. If you want to read the whole thing in order, subscribe. If you want to read only the essays that look interesting to you, the titles will make it clear which ones those are.

A couple of essays will publish out of sequence because they are time-sensitive. The hiring essay in particular — I need the team now, not in three months when it happens to come up in the running order — so expect that one to drop early and to be pinned to the top of the page while I am still reading applications.

One more thing

I am going to write honestly. I am going to tell you about the things that worked and the things that did not. I am going to tell you about the architectures I threw away, the deals that died, the mistakes that cost me months, the partnerships that saved me, and the decisions I am still not sure about. I am not writing a victory lap. I am writing a field report from inside a thing that is still in motion, and I do not know how it ends any better than you do.

But I think the view from here is worth sharing, and I think the people who want to read it will recognize themselves quickly, and I think the ones who don’t want to read it will also recognize themselves quickly, and both of those outcomes are fine.

The first essay goes up next week. Subscribe if you want to read it the moment it drops.

See you then.