How it works.

A weekend, spread how you like — Friday evening to get moving, Saturday and Sunday for the rest. 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. The guided path: open Claude Code, type /start-and-ship, and the agent drives every step while you make the decisions — built for people who have never shipped a website. The manual path: a clean codebase and docs, for developers who'd rather drive themselves.

before you start

Two accounts, one app

Claude Code is the AI assistant that does the technical work below — it comes with a Claude subscription, about $20/mo. GitHub is where your kit lives; your purchase grants your GitHub account access to it automatically. Both take a few minutes to set up and neither requires anything you'd call “coding.” The full walkthrough is on the start-here page — this section is just the map: where your site actually lives, once it exists.

Your computer

Where the agent works and where you preview changes before they're public. Turning it off doesn't take your site down — nothing here is the live site.

GitHub

The fireproof copy of your code. Every “publish” sends your work here first — it's also how your purchase delivers the kit to you.

Vercel

The storefront. It watches GitHub and serves your live site to the world, 24/7, whether or not your computer is on.

Friday evening~10 min

Saturdaya few hours — niche and setup

Sunday~3–5 hrs — content and ship

a weekend, honestly — not a fixed number, because niche selection and content are thinking work, not typing work

Friday evening

Buy, then open Claude

~10 min

Guided

After checkout you do three things once, in your browser — connect your GitHub account (the /start page walks you through creating one if needed), install the Claude desktop app with a Claude Pro subscription (~$20/mo, includes Claude Code), and paste one prompt into Claude Code. From there the agent drives: it installs the remaining tools, explains each step in plain language, fetches your kit, and confirms the sample site runs on your machine. Progress saves at every step, so you can stop and resume in a later session.

Manual

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.

Saturday

Pick your niche

variable — the real hard part

Guided

The niche-research skill runs the selection worksheet as an interview, with real lookups as you talk: demand signals, what affiliate programs exist for each candidate and what they pay, what the competition looks like. It scores your candidates with you. The decision stays yours — this is the one step nobody can honestly do for you.

Manual

Work through the niche-selection worksheet before touching any config. Getting it wrong costs you the rest of the timeline; getting it right is the actual hard part.

Set up your affiliate programs

~30–60 min (approvals come later)

Guided

The find-affiliate-programs skill finds direct programs and Amazon for your niche, explains commissions and cookie windows in plain English, and sits with you while you apply — you click and fill anything involving your accounts, the agent explains every screen. Approvals can take days; the build doesn't wait. Links go live clean and untagged; when a tracking ID arrives, the agent upgrades them with a one-line config change.

Manual

Apply to the programs yourself and collect your tracking IDs. The kit's registry pattern means an unapproved program is a one-line config edit later, not a rebuild.

Configure the site

~30–60 min

Guided

The agent carries your niche and program decisions straight into site.config.ts — brand, domain, homepage copy, programs, analytics — and confirms the config passes validation before touching content. It also rewrites the methodology and legal pages, which are plain markdown in this kit, never React.

Manual

Open site.config.ts yourself and edit the brand, domain, nav, homepage, 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.

Sunday

Write your first real content

~2–4 hrs

Guided

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, hosting, launch

~30–60 min

Guided

The deploy-and-domain skill creates your own GitHub repo, connects Vercel, and walks the domain purchase and DNS records with you screen by screen — you handle anything involving payment, the agent handles everything else, then verifies the live site end to end. The launch-week skill closes by turning the marketing playbook into a concrete 7-day plan for your specific niche.

Manual

Any registrar works — Namecheap is a reasonable default: cheap, free WHOIS privacy, free email forwarding. Vercel's free tier fits this kit's static-first architecture: connect your 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.

after the weekend

What Monday actually looks like

The site being live doesn't mean the work is done — it means the setup is. What happens next is content, testing, and watching what actually gets clicked, on your own schedule. We're honest about that instead of pretending “live” is the finish line.

Read the honest version of what comes after →

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

Get the kit — $149