Making room for something of my own.

I grew up with a fairly clear idea of what a sensible life looked like. Work hard, get a stable job, and keep going until retirement. Starting a business felt risky. It was something other people did.

That expectation stayed with me. Family, responsibility, and security matter to me, and they still do. So do independence and work that feels meaningful. I’m trying to make room for all of those things.

Experience is a starting point

I’m based in Northern Ontario, Canada. I’ve spent more than twenty years building software and leading teams across different industries. That work has given me a lot to draw on: technical judgment, experience working with people, and an understanding of how much happens after the first version ships.

Now I’m building a business of my own alongside employment. The software experience helps. Finding clients, deciding what to offer, and running the business are things I’m learning by doing.

A real client, with a real problem

My web development business is called Bunker41. I’ve completed my first client project for ANP Office Furniture: a Shopify store with a custom Purolator freight integration. I wrote the whole thing up — the quote I got wrong, the vendor who went silent, and the mistake that was mine — in My first client thanked “the team.” There is no team..

That’s a concrete place to start. A client needed a store and a way to handle freight, and I built it. It gives me actual work to learn from as I figure out how to grow the business.

Making things, and deciding what matters

I’ve also worked on software products of my own, including Drift and Magpie. Making the software is one part of the work. Finding a reason to keep building it is another. Getting something to work doesn’t settle whether it can become a business.

AI is part of how I work, too. I built an operating system inside Claude to help run the agency: I stay the director, agents help with delegated work, and a skeptic challenges assumptions. Direction and review remain my responsibility.

I’m considering whether that system could become a product. It’s an experiment at this point, and I want to be clear about that while I work through it.

Why I’m writing about it

One Person, Real Business is my publication on Substack. It’s where I share the process: client work, product decisions, useful technology, and the practical details of running a business on my own.

You might be building alongside a job, chasing a first client, or just quietly wondering whether the skills you already have could support something of your own. That last one is where most people stop, usually for years. I stopped there for a long time myself.

I can’t hand you a formula, because I don’t have one. What I can do is show the work at close range: what I tried, what it cost, what happened, and what I’d do differently. That is more useful than encouragement, and it’s the thing I wanted to read before I started.

You can read the publication on Substack or see what I’m focused on now. If you’re looking for help with a web project, Bunker41 is where to find my services.

I’m sharing this while the work is happening. That means there will be decisions here before I know how they turn out.

I also wrote about building and shipping Magpie on my own, which is the closest thing here to a worked example.