Saving money & having fun with Claude

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my dirty weekend away with Claude Code.

I expected the honeymoon to end by Monday. Or that I'd burn out by Wednesday. Unexpectedly, we're now going steady.

Between coaching calls, burning off Easter calories, finishing song two and life, I shipped three projects this week. Two with real world utility, one for fun:

• bigfeet aggregates mens shoe deals in Australia in size 14 - 17

• Free Cloudflare Podcast Hosting replaces an annoying podcast hosting bill I was not getting any value from

• daily movie bot drops dialogue from one of my all time favourite films, Heat, into a private telegram channel 3x a day

bigfeet

• Pain point - I wear a US 15 / 16 and finding shoes was depressing

• Solution - source, aggregate, dedupe and present them

• Outcome - saved ~$250 so far

Free Cloudflare Podcast Hosting

• Pain point - I was paying a podcast host $20/mo for hosting

• Solution - tell Claude my pain, see if I could build it free on Cloudflare

• Outcome - saving ~$20/mo

daily movie bot

• Pain point - nil. I love film and came up with this idea over a beer

• Outcome - 3 lols a day

Learnings

• An audience of one is a great place to start. I am selfishly solving my own problems. If someone else benefits, great. It's not my definition of success - instead, I measure success against: did I learn something new and did I complete the project. The reward is the process itself, rather than an outcome, like admiration or users.

• It's easy to hyperoptimize workflow. I could tune token budgets, use Openrouter to get the right model for the job and run a precision workflow. There's thousands of suggestions on how to do this on LinkedIn. At this stage, I don't care (and maybe you shouldn't either). I bought a Claude Max plan and it usually lasts 4.5 hours out of a five hour session. NB: if you're on Pro, spend the extra ~$130 on Max and just. freaking. build.

• It's fun to hyperoptimize speed. I use Wisprflow to dictate (thanks Eva!), I run concurrent windows and when I build something on the web, I optimize it to be as fast as it can be. Demoing a product and having someone say "holy shit that's so fast" opens up a conversation for me to say "yes, I can show you how to do that." Speed creates momentum and is addictive.

• Batch processing helps throughput. My bookmarks are overflowing with interesting stuff to listen to and to learn from, but unfortunately, I can't ingest information AND build at the same time - I end up doing both poorly. So, I save bookmarks in a to-do folder and come back to them when I need a break. On that note - token burn, Github commits and other numbers are fun to show off, but aren't really representative of output or progress (for me) because...

• I'm not writing BRDs, PRDs or product decks, yet. I'm consciously fumbling through projects, allowing them to emerge, take shape and following the thread. This means I'm going to be way less efficient and burning way more tokens. As a former Business Analyst, Group Product Lead and Director of Product, I learned Bigco "product management" was about 2% product and 98% management and/or regurgitating a leader's product vision back to them. That administrative constraint doesn't exist for an army of one and I'm loving it.

If you're building something cool or want to, but don't know where to start, comment or DM me.

I'm happy to help.