I Quit My Job to Build Solo: AI Helped Me Ship Everything. Now What?
Let me start with something I'd rather not admit: since quitting to build products full-time, I haven't landed a single outside gig. My own projects are the only work I've had.
This isn't me complaining. Think of it as a weekly report to myself. This week (October 24–30), Claude and I pushed 45 commits and got a lot done. But once it was all shipped, I realized the thing actually holding me back was something else entirely.
1. What AI helped me ship this week
The biggest piece was automated distribution for my personal site. I set up AI to post two kinds of content to my X account every day. The first is the "one-liner of the day" from my investment briefing, plus its feedback-loop diagram. The second is a summary of my site's dev log, with images redrawn to fit how things look on X. (Anything investment-related is just my personal take for discussion, not investment advice.)
I tweaked a bunch of details along the way:
- When a briefing gets rewritten as a tweet, it can only use facts and numbers from the original. Nothing gets added and no numbers get changed. It should sound like a researcher's own notes, with no marketing speak;
- The images kept drawing "AI" as some abstract symbol or a robotic arm. I changed the rules so that stops unless it's genuinely needed;
- Large image uploads were failing, so they now go up as JPEG;
- If a briefing's loop diagram had one invalid edge, the whole diagram used to get thrown out. Now only the bad edge is dropped.
2. Video and review: covering the parts where I'm not around
Xiaohongshu videos had their own run of problems this week. The voiceover read "AI" as the Chinese word "爱" (love). There were pops that sounded like little explosions at 0:20 and 0:24. Once those were fixed, I noticed the picture was a bit shaky. I tracked down each cause, fixed them one by one, and turned the result into the template for future videos.
Then there's review. I don't want to sit at my computer checking every single post, so I added three buttons to the Telegram bot MakanCloud already uses: "✅ Post", "⏭ Skip", and "✏️ Edit". Tap "Edit", reply with a note, and Claude on my Mac revises the post and sends it back for another look. This week I got through three days' worth of content just by tapping on my phone.
3. The smoother it runs, the more uneasy I feel
Once all this automation was running, I asked myself: I graduated from the National University of Singapore, I'm bilingual in Chinese and English, I use AI to build real projects every day, and my time is my own. So why haven't I had a single outside opportunity beyond my own projects?
I gave that exact question to the AI and asked for an honest assessment, not just agreement. My own read is that I just haven't connected with the right people yet. Honestly, though, I'm not sure that's right.
What I do know is that if you just keep your head down and build, nobody comes looking for you. So I started a new project called "Opportunity Radar". Every day, AI searches for relevant opportunities, drafts outreach, tracks replies, and runs regular retros. My social media updates have to line up with this goal too. On day one it turned up a few new leads and drafted several outreach messages and a post.
Whether it'll work, I don't know yet.
4. What "making a living on real skills" means to me now
Before I quit, I thought real skill meant being able to build things. With AI, one person really can ship a complete system. That's how MakanCloud got built.
But this week made me realize that building it is only half the job. The other half is making sure the people who need it know you exist, can find you, and are willing to trust you. AI can help with that half, but it can't do it for me.
From here on, I'll write up how Opportunity Radar is going, honestly. If it works, I'll write about it. If it doesn't, I'll write about that too.
If you're looking to build operations systems, internal tools, or automation scripts for a restaurant or small business, or if you're building solo too and stuck on finding customers, leave a comment or DM me. Happy to chat.