The five-phase workflow I use to ship indie products

The old workflow had four phases: Foundation, Build, Ship It, Iterate. Distribution came last. Tracking came after shipping. You built the whole thing in the dark, then announced it when it was done. In practice I kept finding I'd built features nobody had seen yet, tracking nothing, with no public footprint until the day I declared it ready.

I reworked the whole thing. Five phases now:

Phase 1: Foundation. Same as before. Docs, setup, deps. Run /setup (renamed from /init because VS Code 1.111 ships a built-in /init slash command that would shadow it).

Phase 2: Go Live. Get a URL, even if the product isn't done. Deploy, register the tool on modrynstudio.com as status: building, run the first /log post. Every day a URL exists is a day Google can index it.

Phase 3: Instrument & Distribute. Wire analytics, run /seo, run /launch, run @check as a quality gate, post on socials. All before writing a single line of core product code.

Phase 4: Build the Core. The actual product work. One killer feature, end to end. /validate before major implementations. When stuck: competitor research, /validate focused, Plan mode, roadmap.

Phase 5: Iterate. @check, /tool update, /log post, /social if warranted. Repeat until first paying user.

The biggest shift: distribution isn't the end state. It's a habit you build from day one. Waiting until you have something "worth sharing" means you're building in the dark: no data, no feedback, nothing compounding while you work.

@check got promoted too. It's not a one-time pre-ship gate. It runs at transition points: end of Phase 3 (setup clean before building features?) and after every major Phase 4 implementation (ready for users?). Before running it, switch the chat permissions picker to Bypass Approvals so it can run end-to-end without interrupting itself on every file edit.

The boilerplate is at github.com/modryn-studio/nextjs_boilerplate. Public, free to copy. Built for one-person studios that ship fast.