A place to begin
The Part of Business I Can’t Code My Way Around
Why building the business is easy for me—and building the relationships isn’t
Read on SubstackOne Person, Real Business.
I’m Jay. After 20+ years building software, I’m building a business of my own in my 40s. I share what I’m learning about finding clients, making useful things, and using technology to make the work manageable.
For anyone who has the skills and not the nerve yet. I’m not going to tell you it’s easy or that I’ve got it figured out. I’ll tell you what I actually did, and what it cost.
- 20+ years
- Building software and leading engineering teams across different industries.
- Bunker41
- My web development business, built alongside a job rather than instead of one.
- First client shipped
- A Shopify store for ANP Office Furniture with a custom Purolator freight integration.
- Started in my 40s
- Late enough to have doubts about it, and doing it anyway.
Latest from the journey
All writing on Substack
When Can I Actually Quit My Day Job?
Building a business is exciting. Knowing when to trust it with your family’s future is a different question.
Sometimes you gotta decline the work
I’m still looking for clients, but a recent opportunity asked for more time than I was willing to give.
My first client thanked “the team.” There is no team.
One Person, Real Business — Issue 02: An eight-week quote became a sixteen-week project. Here’s what happened between …
New writing is published on Substack rather than here. See what I’m working on now
Work in progress
What I’m building.
Different kinds of work. One business taking shape.
The business
Bunker41
I’m building a web development business. My first client project, a Shopify store for ANP Office Furniture with a custom Purolator freight integration, is complete. Now comes the work of finding the next client.
The experiments
Products of my own
I’ve worked on my own software products, including Drift and Magpie. Making the software is one part of the work. Figuring out what deserves more time is another.
The working process
An agency system in Claude
I built a system to help run my agency. I direct the work, agents handle delegated tasks, and a skeptic challenges assumptions. I’m exploring whether it could become a product; that question is still open.
The first client
Jason and the team at Bunker41 designed our commercial furniture webstore to help us penetrate the competitive GTA market. The site they designed is better than any competitors’ in the market. It is fast, sophisticated, and visually appealing with the advanced functionality you need in today’s market. We are beyond satisfied!
There is no team. It’s one person in a basement office. He wasn’t confused — he was describing what it felt like to be the client, which is the whole point.
Read what that project actually tookWhy I’m sharing this
Starting felt like something other people did.
I grew up believing the sensible path was to work hard, find a stable job, and stick with it until retirement. Starting a business felt like a risk for someone else to take. If you have ever had the skills to build something and talked yourself out of it anyway, I know that feeling well.
I still care about security and my family, so I started alongside my job rather than betting everything at once. That turns out to be a normal way to begin, and almost nobody writes about it honestly. So I do. The work, the decisions, the things that did not pan out, and what I would do differently.