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Zero to Launch · Session 05 · Wed Oct 7, 2026

Ship the Surface

Your site and every page that points at it

Ship AIPhoenix, ArizonaPress → to begin

Ship AIShip the Surface01/27

What Ship AI is

Builders showing each other the work.

  • Builders & founders
  • Phoenix
  • Free, always

The best AI education isn't behind a paywall or on a stage — it's in the open, for free.

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Your host

Santos Hernandez

Founder & Host

Founder and Lead Product Engineer building agentic AI systems. Founding product hire at ZBD — the money layer for games — $0 to $12M ARR, the EU's first MiCAR approval, and money transmitter licenses in 26 states and D.C. He started Ship AI to give Phoenix builders a room where you show the work, not talk about it.

Santos Hernandez
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The site is the one asset every channel points at.

Get it wrong and every visitor you earn leaks straight back out of it.

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Tonight

  1. 01The structure, and section order
  2. 02Teardowns, live
  3. 03Positioning above the fold
  4. 04Proof over adjectives, one CTA
  5. 05The Next.js boilerplate handoff
  6. 06The content plan
  7. 07Audit the rest of your surface
  8. 08Set the pages up, one at a time
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Sponsors

Sponsors are why none of this has a ticket price

Ship AI is seeking corporate sponsors. Published tiers, $1,000 through $10,000, paid in cash, credits or hours — all three count the same. There's an opportunity at every price point, and a custom arrangement is always on the table.

shipai.club · Free, always

The menu — shipai.club
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Where we are

  1. Aug 5GTM Engineering
  2. Aug 19Zero to $3,000
  3. Sep 2Outbound Agents
  4. Sep 16Unfair Advantage
  5. Oct 7Ship the Surface
  6. Oct 14Agentic Growth
  7. WeekendHackathon

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.

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Builder sites fail the same three ways

  • The hero describes the technologyWritten for the person who built it, read by someone who doesn't care yet.
  • The proof is adjectives"Blazing fast", "powerful", "seamless". A stranger discounts all of it instantly.
  • Five competing CTAsWhich is the same as none.

None of these are fixed by a faster build. They're fixed by judgement — which is what tonight is for.

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Act one

The page

Every section has a job. Anything without a job gets cut, however nice it looks.

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Section order, top to bottom

  1. Herowhat · who · one CTA
  2. Proofimmediately, not later
  3. How it worksthree steps, not five
  4. The objectionname it before they do
  5. CTAthe same one, again

What it is, who it's for, one call to action. This is September's one-liner, unchanged if it was any good. A stranger decides here, in about four seconds, whether to keep reading.

Logos, numbers, one real sentence from a real user — right under the hero, before you've earned any patience. Proof placed halfway down the page is proof nobody sees.

Three steps. If it genuinely needs five, the product is explaining itself badly and the fix is upstream of the page. Show the thing doing the thing; a screenshot outperforms a paragraph.

Price, lock-in, security, "we already use X" — say the worried thing out loud and answer it. Otherwise they leave to go worry about it somewhere you can't reply.

The same call to action from the hero, repeated. Not a second one. Five competing CTAs is the same as none, and it's the most common self-inflicted wound on a builder site.

Five sections, five jobs. Anything on the page that can't name its job is decoration, and decoration is what you cut first.

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If the positioning doesn't survive contact with the page, the positioning was the problem.

The hero is a test of session 04, not a writing exercise.

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Proof

Adjectives

  • Blazing fast
  • Enterprise grade
  • Seamless
  • Powerful
  • Trusted by teams

Evidence

  • p99 under 100ms
  • SOC 2, report on request
  • Two clicks, here's the video
  • Here's it doing the hard case
  • Three named logos

You need less of the right-hand column than you think. Three real items beat a page of the left.

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Plan, then write

~/your-product

/site-structure → /landing-copy

reading 04-positioning/README.md6 sections, 1 CTAwrote 05-site/structure.md

Structure first: sections, order, and the job each one does. Then copy from the positioning brief — hero, sections, CTA — so the page says what you decided in September.

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The boilerplate handoff

~/your-product

/site-scaffold → /og-image → /perf-pass

scaffolding app/ …og images: 4 routesLCP 1.2s — deployed

Next.js routing, metadata and sections; then links that preview properly; then the Core Web Vitals fixes that actually move the number. Deployed on a real URL tonight if you're building along.

This is one of the two sessions where the boilerplate lands. Up to here the program runs light on purpose.

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Act two

The brand as a build artifact

Session one promised this one. A brand isn't a logo you commission — it's a system in your repo that every surface imports.

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The brand system, in code

  1. Tokenscolour · type · spacing, one file
  2. Componentsthe same ten pieces everywhere
  3. Generated collateralfrom data, not from Keynote
  4. The copy layerICP · value props · USPs
  5. Every surfacesite · deck · README · invoice

Palette, type scale, spacing scale, the wordmark — one file the whole surface reads from. Not a Figma page someone copies hex codes out of by hand, but a module an agent can import. Decide it in an hour on day one and never decide it again.

Buttons, cards, tables, section headers, the footer. Build them once and consistency stops being discipline and becomes a dependency — you get it for free even at 1am on a Saturday of the hackathon.

Decks, one-pagers, case studies, OG images — rendered from structured content by the same components as the site. These slides are an array in a repo, drawn by the design system you're looking at. No export step, and a typo is a one-line commit.

The brand isn't only visual. The segment, the value props and the USPs from Sep 16 get baked into the strings every surface renders — hero, bio, pinned post, email footer. One brief, many outputs, no drift.

The pitch deck, the sales one-pager, the GitHub README, the banner, the receipt. A stranger meets you in a random order and shouldn't be able to tell which one you built first.

A design system on day one is the cheapest decision in the program. It costs an hour, and every artifact after it is close to free.

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Polish is a build step now, not a hire.

Session one claimed polish takes you from looking like a 4 to a 9 — same product, same features, same founder. This is the build step that does it, and it's why the deck, the site and the one-pager can't disagree with each other.

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Act three

Everywhere else

Your site is one of maybe eight places someone lands when they go looking for you.

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One positioning, every surface

They'll check X, LinkedIn, GitHub, an app store listing, an old Product Hunt page. Each reads differently, so each gets set up individually — but every one of them refracts the same brief.

  • Site
  • X
  • LinkedIn
  • GitHub
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One profile at a time

  • Handle and nameFindable, consistent, the same everywhere. Boring is correct here.
  • BioThe one line that has to match the site hero. If they disagree, a stranger believes neither.
  • Banner and pinned postThe two things seen before anything is read.
  • LinksPointing at the current thing, not the last one.

/social-audit finds the damage — usually a stale bio and a banner from two products ago. /social-profile fixes one platform per run.

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The content plan

  1. The queryWhat the ICP actually types, not what you'd enjoy writing about.
  2. The pageOne page per query, answering it properly. Twenty of them, not two hundred.
  3. Template or writeTemplated where the data is real, hand-written where judgement is needed.
  4. Generate/content-map, then /programmatic-pages and /article-draft. A skill file, not a lecture.

Every page here is another door into the same brand system — same components, same claims, no second writing session.

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Once the positioning is settled, the whole pass is mechanical.

Which means it belongs in an agent, not in an afternoon of tab-switching. The brief came from Sep 16; tonight it just gets rendered onto every surface that has one.

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Thank you

Dan & Workuity

Platinum sponsor · The venue

Workuity Biltmore hosts and sponsors every meetup in this series and the October weekend that closes this program. Thank Dan on your way out — nine days from now we're back in this room for real.

Workuity
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Sponsors

Back the room, not a billboard

Ship AI is seeking corporate sponsors for the weekend and the next program. Tiers run $1,000 to $10,000 and they're published on purpose — cash, credits or hours, whichever you actually have. Opportunity at every price point, custom arrangements always welcome.

shipai.club · Free, always

The menu — shipai.club
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Say hi

  • X@5antoshernandezBuild in public — arguments welcome.
  • Discorddiscord.gg/kZSJMNveYMWhere tonight's links, slides, and skills land.
  • Work with medesic.xyzWant systems like these built and run for you? That's my team.

Everything is open source — the deck, the skills, the template repo. Take it all.

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Just ship it.

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Next

Agentic Growth — Wed Oct 14, Workuity Biltmore

Two days before the hackathon. Automated distribution, performance marketing basics, and the CAC ceiling that decides whether paid works at all.

shipai.club · Free, always

Session page
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