iFMade with iterFact
Month One

31 Days From Quit to Shipped

On March 6, 2026, Paul Clark left his job. Six days later he bought a domain. Five days after that, the MCP server was live — before the website even existed. This is the story of what happened next.

April 12, 2026One person, zero fundingEverything that follows is real
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Quit to full product
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Lines of code
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External funding
The Sprint

Every milestone, in order

From the day he walked out the door to the day the product turned one month old. Not a single day wasted.

Day 0 March 6
Burned the boats
Left RVR Consulting Group. No fallback plan. No next job lined up. Just a thesis: AI outputs are ephemeral. Someone needs to make them permanent.
Day 6 March 12
Domain acquired
iterfact.com — lowercase i, capital F. Iterate until it's a fact. The name encoded the thesis before a single line of code existed.
Day 9 March 15
MCP live — before the site
The MCP server at mcp.iterfact.com went live. Infrastructure before interface. Most founders ship a landing page first. Paul shipped a protocol server that turns Claude into an artifact factory.
Day 11 March 17
First commit
App shell, Supabase auth with Google sign-in, library save flow, Create page wired to live MCP generation. From empty repo to working web app in one day.
Day 14 March 20
Trademarks filed — 4 classes
Brand protection before first user. Four trademark classes covering the full product surface. Most founders file trademarks after their first funding round. Paul filed before his first user.
Day 12–16 March 18–21
Identity and engine
Iterator identity system, user profiles, @handle URLs, sharing/inbox flows, template instances, 40 rendering engines, prompt stack canon, critic system, narrative spine planning. The MCP went from "call Claude" to a 12-step production pipeline.
Day 19 March 25
Python SDK on PyPI
pip install iterfact — installable infrastructure. Developers can build artifacts from scripts, notebooks, CI pipelines. iterFact isn't just a website. It's a package.
Day 20 March 26
First tech fund reaches out — cold
The CEO of KiwiTech — a tech investment firm with 500+ portfolio companies, 2,000+ investors, and a $144M prior exit — messaged Paul on LinkedIn. Unprompted. 20 days after quitting. Before the product was even polished.
Day 27 April 2
First investor meeting
KiwiTech meeting. They'd already invested in Beautiful.ai — the competitive adjacent. They saw what iterFact does that their portfolio company can't.
Day 30 April 5
The 60-second reply
Raad Mobrem, CEO of Intro.co (backed by a16z and Seven Seven Six), responded to Paul's DM in under a minute. Paul had flagged a broken booking link — no pitch, just helpfulness. Call booked for April 17. Paul paid full price, $350, declining a $150 discount. Respect as a strategy.
Day 32 April 7
Anthropic Partner Network
Karl Kadon, Head of Partner Experience at Anthropic, emailed personally. Application cleared initial review for the Claude Partner Network — a $100M ecosystem with zero fees, co-sell pipeline, and enterprise deal flow. iterFact isn't just built on Claude. It's in Anthropic's partner orbit.
Day 34 April 9
Security sprint
6 critical/high findings closed in one day. OAuth replay race, bearer timing leak, identity IDOR, cross-tenant template bug, atomic credit charging, CORS hardened. Before having paying users. Before having an incident. Discipline.
Day 35 April 10
The defining product decision
Templates are the product. This single decision collapsed the cost structure ($0.07/artifact), locked the quality floor, and made the watermark conversion funnel possible. Every decision after this one flows from it. Same day: custom domain publishing shipped — auto-DNS, worker routing, zero dead ends.
Day 36 April 11
Conversion funnel + PWA
Full 4-phase conversion flow: anonymous preview with watermark, claim/auth/publish, funnel analytics. Build free. Pay $1 to publish. IKEA effect + Amazon one-click + Canva watermark in one flow. PWA with offline artifacts deployed in under an hour.
Day 37 April 12
Month one
You're reading it.
By the Numbers

What one person built in 31 days

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Commits on main
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Tests with CI gates
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Database migrations
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MCP tools
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Rendering engines
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Prompt quality modules
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Trademark classes filed
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Infrastructure providers
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Deploy targets
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Monthly visitors
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Person
Market Signals

Velocity creates signal

Before the product was polished, before there was a pitch deck, before there was a single paying customer — the market started responding.

Inbound capital

KiwiTech

CEO cold-messaged on LinkedIn, day 20. Tech fund with $144M prior exit, 500+ portfolio companies, and a direct investment in Beautiful.ai — the competitive adjacent. They came to iterFact, not the other way around.

Strategic access

Raad Mobrem / Intro.co

CEO of an a16z-backed expert marketplace replied in 60 seconds. Call booked for April 17. Paul paid full price ($350) and declined a discount. A broken link became a relationship.

Platform partnership

Anthropic Partner Network

Karl Kadon, Head of Partner Experience, emailed personally. iterFact cleared initial review for a $100M partner ecosystem with co-sell pipeline, Anthropic engineers on deals, and directory listings. Zero fees, zero revenue share.

Distribution partner

Justin — Founding Affiliate #1

Locked in as exclusive real estate vertical partner with a network of 2,800 agents. First affiliate spot taken before the program even launched publicly. The sales force is organizing itself.

Category validation

Base44 — $80M acquisition

Wix acquired Base44 for $80M cash. Solo founder, bootstrapped, 250K users in 6 months. Now at $100M ARR. Proof that AI-generated output as a product category scales. iterFact operates at a different layer — but the market is proven.

Installable infrastructure

pip install iterfact

Python SDK on PyPI. Not just a website — installable infrastructure callable from scripts, notebooks, and CI pipelines. Three entry points to the same engine: MCP, REST API, SDK.

The Ideas That Made It

Seven decisions that shaped everything

MCP-first distribution
Ship the protocol server before the website. The product was embedded in Claude — where demand is created — before anyone had to "discover" iterFact. Users don't find you. You're already inside their tool.
Templates as the product
$0.07 per artifact. Pre-certified quality floor. Security by construction. The economics that make the watermark conversion funnel work. The defining product decision.
The iteration thesis
AI is great at v1, terrible at v2. Versions stack inside one artifact. Sections are independently addressable. The critic loop repairs weak sections automatically. The entire product exists because this insight is true.
Custom domains as infrastructure
Publishing to acme-consulting.com transforms iterFact from a tool into invisible infrastructure. The best platform is invisible to the end customer. The Shopify insight.
The prompt stack as IP
15 quality modules encoding cognitive science, design principles, accessibility, and editorial rules. Loaded into every generation context. The 500th template benefits from templates 1 through 499.
Build free, pay to publish
Users invest time and data into a template, see a watermarked preview, pay $1 to publish. IKEA effect + one-click + Canva watermark. Card captured, credit balance counting down, depletion loop begins.
Artifact-as-distribution
Every published artifact is an ad for iterFact. The "Built by iterFact" badge is the Mailchimp footer model. The product markets itself through its own output.

iterFact doesn't want to change the world. Just make it easier to be understood.

31 days. One person. Real infrastructure, real pipeline, real billing, real security audit, real custom domain publishing, real trademarks, real market signal. No pitch deck required — the code is the pitch deck. And month two starts tomorrow.