The One-Man Company

. FOREWORD

The one-paragraph answer to "what is Microapp." Read this before the rest of the book.

1. 01 What Is Microapp 3 min read

   The one-paragraph answer. Before the seven brand decisions, before the architecture, before the agent team — the whole company, distilled.

I. BRAND

The message we tell, the audience we tell it to, and the enemy we name.

1. 02 The Brand 18 min read

   Seven decisions, founder-locked. The line, the audience, the enemy, the mission, the vision, the voice rules, the pledges.

2. 03 The Values 6 min read

   Four operating postures. How the team works day-to-day — not what we publicly promise (those are the Pledges).

3. 04 The Voice 8 min read

   Ten imperatives that keep every sentence sounding like one person, not a marketing department.

II. MODEL

How the company makes money — and where the first 10% of every dollar goes. The Costco model, said plainly.

1. 05 The Microapp 11 min read

   What counts as a microapp — one purpose, any runtime. Four quadrants the catalogue grows into, three spec-stage filters, and the taste every microapp gives a non-member before asking them to pay.

2. 06 The Model 8 min read

   How Microapp makes money: one membership, ads for non-members, AI at near-cost — and 10% of every dollar to charity. The Costco model, exactly.

III. BUILD

How the system fits together — architecture, language, and decisions we don't re-derive.

1. 07 System Design 22 min read

   How the codebase fits together — ubiquitous language, deep modules, sources of truth, decisions made, and the backlog.

2. 08 Built for Agents 10 min read

   Every Microapp is built to be used by an AI agent as easily as by a human. The commitment, the architecture, the rules.

3. 09 Tool Engines 11 min read

   The convention every Microapp follows so it works on the web AND for agents from the same source. One file, one function, two surfaces.

4. 10 Colophon 6 min read

   Palette, typography, and the components we use. The visual vocabulary the brand is rendered in.

5. 11 Tool UX 10 min read

   The widget conventions that turn brand and engine into one product. Inputs, outputs, errors, mode-switching, and the shared primitives Bob inherits.

6. 12 Page Patterns 10 min read

   The marketing-page constitution — one type scale, one hero pattern, one container set, no raw hex. The same brand on /about, /membership, /agents, /handbook.

7. 13 Illustrations 8 min read

   The hand-drawn editorial style — bold dark outlines, rounded shapes, speech bubbles, brand greens and golds. How every Microapp picture should feel.

8. 14 Decisions Index

   Every architectural decision we've made, kept in plain markdown so the trail never goes cold.

IV. OPERATE

How a one-human-orchestrator company runs on agents.

1. 15 The Agent OS 28 min read

   How a one-human-orchestrator company runs on agents. Five layers, four memory types, four-phase build.

2. 16 The Team 5 min read

   Steph, Kai, Bob, Lace, Simon, Ben — the agents that build, write, translate, and ship Microapp.

3. 17 The Autonomous Loop 10 min read

   How Microapp goes from Claude-Code-and-a-human to self-running on Cloudflare Workers — the four Workers already live, cron + queues + tool-use, and the trust gradient that keeps it safe.

V. LOGBOOK

Real conversations that produced the work. The agent collaboration, made literal — the central claim of this book, shown not described.

1. 18 The Logbook Index

   Selected sessions from the agent collaboration. Each entry is a real conversation that produced a real decision — the book's central claim, made literal.