Zero to Launch · Session 02 · Wed Aug 19, 2026
B2C, with the dashboard open
Ship AIPhoenix, ArizonaPress → to begin
Case studies are usually told by someone with an outcome to sell.
This one is told with the analytics open, including the money that got wasted finding out what didn't work.
First 30 days
$3,000
One product, one dashboard, no redactions — including the channels that produced nothing and the money it cost to find that out.
$3,000
Not a hockey stick — a slope that got steeper each time a channel was confirmed rather than guessed at. The flat first week is the part nobody publishes.
$0
paid spend for the first $3k
$100–200
per day, profitably
4 mo
payback
The zero is the interesting number. Paid came later, and only once the arithmetic said it could.
Six Wednesdays, then the weekend. Every session is free and standalone — you don't have to attend all of them to compete in October, and catching up late is explicitly allowed.
Act one
What the channels actually were, in what order, and how much of it was repeatable versus lucky.
Spending before the unit economics were clear would have killed it.
Paid doesn't find product-market fit. It buys more of whatever you already have — including more of a leak.
Act two
Paid stops the day you stop paying. This doesn't.
It's a stage with a conversion rate, not a Discord you open and hope. It's slow, then it isn't — and ambassadors make the creative you'd otherwise pay for.
What didn't work, at the same length as what did.
Because that's the half nobody publishes, and it's the half that saves you a month.
Act three
Thirty percent of the October score. "We didn't really track that" is the most common way a good launch loses.
Wiring an event and never watching it fire is how you get eight weeks of empty charts. Take a baseline today, with today's date — in eight weeks it's the "before" half of your launch story.
Your first channel
/channel-plan
reading 01-roadmap/README.mddrafting test, budget, go/no-go…wrote 02-b2c/README.md
One channel, the specific test, the budget, and the go/no-go number — decided before you spend, or it's a rationalisation instead of a threshold.
Then instrument it
/analytics-wire → /bi-agent
wiring 5 events…verified 5/5 firingweekly report scheduled
Events per stage, wired and verified. Then an agent that reads the numbers weekly and tells you what moved, in plain English. Set it once in August and it reports all the way to the hackathon.
/paid-test
/community-plan
Now point the same structure at your own product.
First channel, the test, the budget, the go/no-go number. Four lines. Write them tonight.
Just ship it.
Next
The B2B counterpart. An ICP tight enough to write the email to, twenty named accounts, and a sequence built live from a blank page.
shipai.club · Free, always