July Business Review
I’m vibe-coding a new business every 30 days until something changes my life. For those of you with normal lives that don’t involve listening to tech podcasts, vibe-coding is when you provide natural language prompts to AI tools, and they bring your ideas to life. For someone like me who has a Google Keep file with a running list of apps, tools, and businesses that I’ve wanted to create, I finally feel like the world is at my fingertips, and I’ve gotta say, I’m having fun!
I’ve been really inspired by Marc Lou, this cute, mustachioed straight dude who serially launches apps and builds in public, publishing his monthly recurring revenue (MRR) for each of his businesses. I’m going to be doing something similar, although not all of my businesses are built for MRR, namely the seasonal Fire Island ones. Most Fire Island businesses only make money from about April to October. What I will track is monthly revenue per venture and a cumulative portfolio total.
June 2026 - Boatload
To catch you all up, in June, I launched Boatload, a tool that makes checking the ferry schedules to and from Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove easier and more modern. Boatload made $0 in July.
Moment of transparency, I should’ve launched the mobile app a long time ago. It’s the part that I can monetize. But getting my first app into the app store is a new muscle that I’m still developing. I think there are a lot of things that I’m doing for this one that I won’t have to do again, so I just need to sit down, lock in, and get past that.
You’ll be the first to know when I launch it. Thanks to the two people who signed up to beta test the app. I need more!
July 2026 - Fire Island Flyers
In July, I launched Fire Island Flyers, a business that makes it really simple to get postcards and flyers up in Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove. Doing anything on an island is hard, and getting marketing materials up is no exception. It usually entails sending the graphic to the printer, having the printer ship the package to the ferry, calling the ferry and having them send your package to the island, having someone on the island to retrieve the package when the ferry arrives, and then finding a distributor who is down to deliver to almost 1,000 houses and countless telephone poles. With Fire Island Flyers, just give me your graphic, and I’ll handle the entire thing.
To date, this business has made just shy of $900 with one client. My first customer found me from a post I did in one of the Fire Island Facebook groups. She has an IV hydration business and wanted to get clients for Pines Party weekend. She didn’t know much about the island, and I answered every question she had. I’ve been a service provider during Pines Party weekend, so I was able to tell her from experience how I thought her weekend would go. I also advised her on what should be on her graphic and where her QR code should lead potential customers. She reported to me that she had a successful weekend and that her customers found her through her marketing campaign. 🤸🏽♂️
I vibe-coded the website’s backend/admin panel to help me track metrics. It’s helpful for me to have a birds-eye-view, and if this business ever gets big enough to sell, the potential buyer doesn’t have to look through a bunch of different SaaS products (Stripe, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Google Analytics, etc) to get a full scope of the business.
My biggest weakness is marketing, and I really need to lean into it. It’s not that I don’t know how. It’s just the hat that I least want to wear, and arguably one of the most important ones.
Scoreboard
So here’s my scoreboard. Next month, it will have a new app on it and hopefully, more sales!
For August, I have two things in the works. Not sure which one I’ll launch first. But stay tuned. If you’re interested in vibe-coding, sign up for Replit with my referral link. Full disclosure: we both get credit if you upgrade to a paid plan. There’s a free plan to poke around with, and the cheapest paid plan is $25 a month, or $20 a month if you pay for the year. Let me know what you build. I don’t really have a community in this. It would be nice to hear from other people who are building as well. Until later!