How it works.

A day, focused, not eight hours of continuous typing — most of this is fast because the kit handles the mechanical parts (validation, structured data, redirects). Writing good content isn't fast, and nothing here pretends otherwise.

Every step below works two ways: point a coding agent at it, or do it by hand. Neither is required — the agent just does the typing.

Clone and install

~10 min

git clone the repo, pnpm install, pnpm dev. Confirm the sample site loads at localhost:3000 — everything you see is placeholder content, clearly labeled SAMPLE CONTENT. Same first step whether or not you're using a coding agent.

Pick your niche

variable — the real hard part

Work through the niche-selection worksheet before touching any config. This is the one step the kit genuinely can't do for you — getting it wrong costs you the rest of the timeline, getting it right is the actual hard part. An agent can talk through the worksheet with you, but the call is yours either way.

Configure the site

~30–60 min

Agentic

Paste the setup prompt into Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex. It reads CLAUDE.md, asks you for your niche, brand, domain, and affiliate programs, then fills in site.config.ts for you and confirms the config alone passes pnpm typecheck before touching content.

Manual

Open site.config.ts yourself and edit the brand, domain, nav, affiliate programs, and analytics fields directly — each one is commented. Run pnpm typecheck after; a bad config fails here immediately instead of shipping a broken site.

Write your first real content

~2–4 hrs

Agentic

Use the add-review-page or new-comparison skills. The agent scaffolds the correct MDX frontmatter shape, sources, and affiliate registry entries so schema validation passes on the first real try — no guessing the shape from scratch.

Manual

Hand-write the MDX frontmatter yourself, following the shape in schemas/review.ts (or the relevant schema) and the sample content as a reference. Either way, the kit doesn't write the actual review for you — real testing and real sourcing were never going to be automatic.

Verify

~5 min

Run pnpm typecheck && pnpm lint && pnpm check:sources && pnpm build && pnpm validate:schema. All five green means every content type's frontmatter is valid, no citation has gone stale, the build succeeds, and every JSON-LD object is well-formed. An agent runs this itself before calling something done; by hand, you run the same five commands.

Domain and hosting

~15–30 min

Any registrar works — Namecheap is a reasonable default: cheap, free WHOIS privacy, and free email forwarding for a real hello@yourdomain.com. Vercel's free tier is the path of least resistance for this kit's static-first architecture: connect the GitHub repo, accept the Next.js defaults, deploy — then add your domain in Vercel's Domains tab and follow the DNS records it gives you.

Customizing the look and feel

The fast path:theme color and every other brand token live in site.config.ts and app/globals.css as CSS custom properties, not hardcoded Tailwind classes scattered through components. Swap the accent color and you're visually rebranded in minutes, not a redesign.

For an actual redesign:generate new visual directions with an AI design tool — Claude Design or Google's Stitch both work well — then hand the result to your coding agent to implement across globals.css and the component files. This isn't hypothetical: this site's own design went through exactly that process.

That's the whole path. Nothing after checkout is a surprise.

Get the kit — $99