What we've
actually shipped.

novelboundbooks.com

A paid writing environment for people finishing a book. It holds the manuscript, the chapter structure and the cover brief in one place, and it saves continuously while you type rather than when you remember to.

The commercial mechanism is a seven-day trial that requires a card up front. That decision cost us conversions and we kept it, because the alternative — a free tier — fills a writing tool with people who never write. The money path has been exercised end to end with a real card, including the coupon flow, which at one point charged full price and now does not.

Mail sends from the product's own domain, aligned across From, DKIM and Return-Path. It lands in Gmail's inbox. It still lands in Outlook's junk folder, because a new domain has no reputation with Microsoft and no DNS record fixes that — only time and volume do.

• Next.js
• Postgres
• Stripe
• Resend
• own VPS

gg.cleverwolfdigital.com

A game review site where every title carries two independent scores out of 100 — one from accredited Expert Reviewers, one from everybody else — and the medal is decided by the lower of the two.

That single rule is the whole product. A game only takes gold when critics and players agree it deserves it, so the usual gap between a review aggregate and a user score becomes the thing being measured instead of an embarrassment to explain. All of the grading logic lives in one module, and nothing else in the codebase is permitted to decide a grade.

Sessions are handled without a third-party auth provider, which means one fewer vendor with a copy of the user table.

• Next.js 16
• TypeScript
• SQLite
• Drizzle
• first-party sessions

opalahoa.com

A local marketplace for Hawai‘i, built around the yard-sale sign rather than the auction listing. It includes a free pile, because a great deal of what changes hands here changes hands for nothing.

• Next.js
• containerized
• Traefik

levelupsmarter.com

A publication for self-directed adult learners, and the content engine that runs it. The engine is a command-line tool that drafts, validates, publishes and distributes an article, and it will refuse to ship one.

The validator is the interesting part. It enforces American English, checks that a new piece does not overlap an existing one beyond ten percent by shingle containment, and blocks publication until the search-console submission has actually been recorded rather than merely intended. Four articles once shipped fully distributed while the sitemap had never been submitted; that check exists because of those four.

• Python CLI
• WordPress
• SSH-first

Shopify storefront

The biohacking side of the publication, kept as a deliberately separate brand. The catalog was cut from eighty-six products to thirty-seven, and a research glossary was added so a product page can point at the mechanism rather than restate a marketing claim.

• Shopify
• structured research pages

cleverwolfhq.com

Six static pages — a services page, three audience-specific landing pages, an intake form and a confirmation page. No build step, no framework, no page builder. Each page loads in one request and fetches nothing.

A seventh page in the same folder is deliberately excluded from the server and returns 404 on purpose, because it carries internal pricing structure. Deploys name the six public files individually; a wildcard would ship the seventh.

• hand-written HTML
• nginx
• Traefik

multilingual property site · Honolulu

A property marketing site with a Japanese, Korean and Chinese language toggle, backed by a structured content store rather than a page builder, so a listing is data before it is a page.

The translation layer is cookie-based and adds a cold-translation cost the first time a locale is requested. Adding a language touches three places in the code, which is the number worth knowing before promising a fourth.

• Next.js
• next-intl
• headless CMS

storefront · custom pricing

An online store for material sold by the cut rather than the unit, where price is a function of dimensions and the customer supplies the dimensions.

Partial sheets are priced by a percentage held in configuration, not in the formula panel — a distinction that matters because the panel is the obvious place to look and the wrong place to change it. The store went live this month.

• WooCommerce
• custom pricing plugin
• ERP sync

instrumentation

Tracking for a vehicle-based tire search, so the business can see which vehicle a shopper searched and what they did next, rather than a single undifferentiated page view.

Data retention was extended from two months to fourteen at the same time. A year-over-year comparison is impossible if the warehouse only remembers one quarter, and the default setting quietly guarantees that.

• GA4
• Tag Manager

landing page + invitation sequence

A training invitation sent to an installer network in three waves — an invite, a reminder, and a catch-up for the ones who had not opened either.

629 messages delivered against 19 bounces, verified against the provider's own event log rather than against the sending script's exit code. Replies were routed to the client rather than to us, and two opt-outs were suppressed permanently.

• static landing page
• Resend
• suppression list