Honest notes from two people actually doing the work.
No filler, no jargon, just what fixed-price product builds and signal-based selling actually look like, written by the two people doing them.
Agency pricing: the maths behind a quote that made no sense
Traditional agency quotes look inflated because of how they're built: salary and overheads multiplied by two or more, then divided by billable hours. A founder-led studio without that structure can quote differently.
Vibe coding: no AI overlords, no 10x engineers. Just code someone was willing to put their name to.
Vibe coding, describing what you want and letting AI write it, produces work that looks right, which isn't the same as being right. Trust in AI-generated code is falling even as adoption rises, and one independent test found an AI coding agent succeeding only 15% of the time unsupervised.
Intent data and signal-based selling: everyone says it works. Almost nobody's actually doing it.
96% of B2B teams using signal-based selling say it works, yet only about a quarter of companies actually use it, mostly because the tools that do this were built for sales teams, not solo operators.
No-code lock-in: the bill that punishes you for growing
No-code platforms like Bubble price by usage, so growth itself can trigger runaway bills, and leaving means rebuilding from scratch since there's no code to take with you.
No sales pitch dressed up as advice. Just an honest answer, even when it's "don't."
Most agencies say yes to keep the invoice moving. Our Discovery Workshop is built to sometimes say no, because the expensive mistakes happen before a line of code gets written, not during the build.
Signal-based selling: send more emails isn't a strategy, it's a coping mechanism
Buyers are usually most of the way through their decision before they'll speak to a vendor, and whoever reaches them first at that moment wins most of the time. Sending more emails doesn't fix a timing problem.
AI tool pricing: recently, several platforms proved our point for us
Google, Zapier, Microsoft and Replit all changed their pricing within weeks of each other, and the pattern is the same: usage-based pricing that punishes you the moment you actually rely on the tool.