Building Folio in public: week one

Ten days from first commit to fifty routes, live Supabase, Stripe in test mode, and the system brief locked.

What I learned in order:

One — commit the brief before you commit code. The 10/10 invariant and full-autonomy mandate are the two lines that prevent feature-creep drift. Both live at the top of CLAUDE.md and get re-read every session.

Two — kill triggers in week one, not month three. Day 30 under two paid pilots, day 90 under three thousand MRR, kill. Written down, impossible to unsee.

Three — marketplace before launch. Templates by other studios are the only scalable top-of-funnel an opinionated product can build. We seeded five, shipped the submission flow, and reserved 70 percent of every install for the author.

Four — the proposal public link is the retention surface. Nobody cares about your dashboard. They care about the page they send to clients, and whether it opens fast and looks right on an iPhone at 2:14 am.

We are three weeks from deploy and every week the product gets a little harder to describe as "just another docs tool."