I just earned my first $1000 from my venture

Nine months ago I left a 23-year career in big tech to build deepship.dev. The goal was to put the benefits of AI straight into developers' hands — pay only for the tokens the LLM uses while building real systems.

The idea: prompt it, and get a real, production-ready full-stack system — APIs, a React frontend, Postgres, with auth, payments, and notifications already wired in. Not a prototype that breaks at deploy. Working code you download, deploy to the cloud, and own outright. No subscription, no lock-in, ever.

I didn't want to build another AI wrapper, so the architecture is the part I'm proud of: cheap models handle planning, expensive ones only write the code, and a set of reusable libraries — auth, payments, emailing, notifications, stream handling, modern UX templates — means it never regenerates solved problems from scratch.

A $100 ad campaign surfaced an unexpected audience: small businesses priced out of custom software. Our first real project came from it — a fish delivery system across India. 1,000 distributors, benchmarked for 100,000 deliveries a day. Android, iOS, and web, built in two weeks, in production now. Solid proof that cheap and fully-owned still holds up under real load.

Two kinds of people, same need: developers who want to ship fast and keep their code, and businesses that could never afford a dev shop.

I built this mostly alone, and it wore me down more than I expected. That first $1,000 check was the first time I believed it might actually work.

Try it at deepship.dev.