First Deploy

A real site on a real URL by the end of the session, with your session-01 one-pager as the hero and five sample pages generated from real data. The setup is the slow part and we do it as a room.

Five-minute setup

Do this before the session starts, or in the first ten minutes while the framing happens. Nothing here is required to attend.

1. Have an agent installed

   Claude Code, the Codex extension, or whatever you already run. Every skill file below is plain markdown with frontmatter — it works in anything that reads a skills directory.

2. Get the skills

   Download this session's bundle and unzip it at the root of your project. It writes into .claude/skills/ and nothing else.

   unzip -o day-zero-03-first-deploy.zip -d .

3. Point it at a real product

   An idea in a notes app counts. The skills read your repo, your site and your README before asking you anything, so run them from inside the project rather than a blank folder.

4. Make somewhere to put the output

   The skills write markdown and don't care where it lands. One folder per session — 01-voice/ through 04-agents/ — at the root of your project. Make tonight's before you start rather than mid-run.

The steps

1. 01

   Install the agent and clone the template

   Node, then Claude Code or Codex, then log in, then clone the Day Zero template. This session needs a paid plan or an API key — worth saying plainly. The instructions went out in Discord beforehand; if you did them at home, you're ahead.

   Done looks like: The agent starts inside the template folder and can list the files in it.

2. 02

   Plan the structure before you write a line

   /site-structure

   Sections, the order they go in, and the job each one has to do before it earns a scroll. Anything without a job gets cut, however nice it looks.

   Done looks like: You can say what every section is for, and there is exactly one call to action.

3. 03

   Make the hero your one-pager

   /landing-copy

   Straight from 01-voice/positioning.md, in the voice skill you built the same night. Proof over adjectives everywhere below it — a number with a method behind it, the product doing the hard case, one sentence a real person said.

   Done looks like: What it is and who it's for, above the fold, without scrolling. No line describes your architecture.

4. 04

   Scaffold and deploy

   /site-scaffold

   Routing, metadata, sections, then push. Deploy early and deploy ugly — an empty page on a real URL beats a perfect page on your laptop, and everything after this is an edit rather than an event.

   Done looks like: A URL you can paste into Discord and watch someone open.

5. 05

   Work backwards to the content plan

   /content-map

   From what your ICP types into a search box to the pages that answer them, one query per page. The articles you drafted in session 01 get a home in the same pass.

   Done looks like: Every page title is something a real person would actually type, not a phrase you'd like to rank for.

6. 06

   Generate five pages, not five hundred

   /programmatic-pages

   One table of real data, one template, five rows. Then read one of them out loud: if it's a keyword with a header on it, that's a doorway page and it belongs in the bin, not on the site.

   Done looks like: Five live pages, and you'd be glad to land on any of them from a search.

7. 07

   Make it presentable, then check it's fast

   /og-image → /perf-pass

   Links that preview properly are ten minutes you spend once and get back on every share for the next year. Then the Core Web Vitals fixes that actually move the number, and only those.

   Done looks like: The URL previews deliberately in a chat app, and you know your LCP and aren't embarrassed by it.

What you leave with

03-site/ — structure.md, copy applied to the real page, a deployed URL in scaffold.md, content-map.md, five sample programmatic pages live, og images and perf.md.

If you get stuck

Something in the terminal breaks — it will. Paste the whole error back to the agent, not a summary of it. That is the workflow, not a workaround. If the deploy from the command line won't cooperate, import the repo in the Vercel dashboard and move on; you're here for the site, not the CLI.

Or ask in Discord — mentors and everyone else's work in progress are there between sessions.