We’ve been working with founders to bring new products to market for over 20 years. The Product Design Sprint significantly improved how we work with founders to plan, design, and build the right product. Now, AI tools have significantly lowered the bar for our clients to get started with prototyping their ideas before even contacting us, which is very powerful.
But we’ve noticed a trend as these tools have gained in popularity. While these prototypes are often able to short-circuit the product design process in positive ways, being able to continue on actually bringing that codebase to launch isn’t realistic. The amount of work it would take to add get the codebase in order, add basic security features, real backend functionality, and get the app in a state that we can continue on with real design and development is expensive and a dissapointing setback in the pace.
At the same time, we’ve seen that tools like Claude Code, in the hands of experienced thoughtbot developers, can be used to rapidly create new applications that are backed by a full test suite, built on best practices and are able to serve as the foundation of a real product that can eventually actually launch to production.
We believe there is an opportunity to bridge that gap, which has led us to set out to build the newest product of our own, ReadySetGo.
With ReadySetGo, we envision an AI application generator that creates first versions of products, built in Rails to thoughtbot’s best practices that can be tested with real users and serve as a solid foundation that can be built upon, all the way to production and launch.
Our first goal is creating a tool we can use ourselves as part of the product design sprint. We want to not only replace our current process for clickable prototypes, but provide a quality foundation of the app to continue building from after the sprint.
Once we hit that milestone we’ll have real working software in our hands that we can use and refine in our sprints. Then we’ll be able to expand from there to it being more self-service.
Building in the open
It’s been a while since we’ve created a commercial product of our own and this time we’re doing something new by developing it out in the open.
We’ll be developing ReadySetGo in public on our weekly livestream. If you’re unable to tune in live, episodes are immediately available on-demand afterwards.
On last week’s episode we planned things out, refining our initial target users and functionality. On this Friday’s episode we actually start development by creating the repository, getting things set up, and creating an initial Ruby app script that takes an app idea, generates a new Rails application using some of our go-to open source projects (like Suspenders with Clearance and Roux), and uses an LLM to build out a unique feature-complete with tests.
We also just released Giant Robots Episode #603: The product we are going to build where we discuss ReadySetGo even more.
We hope you’ll check it out and follow along with the development.