Build logs · series
Studio Build
Build logs about how Sandcastle Labs itself is built: marketing site, brand voice, infrastructure decisions.
- Audience
- Agentic studios and indie founders
- Rhythm
- Weekly while shipping site or brand work
Arcs that include this series
Posts (9)
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An operating scorecard that runs itself
We moved the studio's operating scorecard onto a Neon database and a scheduled tick, and a traffic anomaly proved why that mattered.
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Warming up a days-old domain: the cheap SEO that compounds
A low-token SEO audit of two days-old sites found a 3-hop redirect, a dateless sitemap, a thin page, and short guide descriptions.
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The audit right after the rebuild
We rebuilt sandcastlelabs.ai on a new brand system, then audited it the same day and caught a leftover internal codename still live.
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Running an agent-native studio like a series of small bets
We built the agent-native studio workflow behind our operating plan and scoreboard before hiring anyone, so progress gets measured, not guessed.
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Lookout: a marketing analytics scorecard that refuses to fabricate trends
We built Lookout, an operator analytics scorecard for both marketing sites. It reads PostHog, assesses what's working with volume-aware confidence, and renders a graph-rich HTML report. Its one design principle: if the numbers are too small to say something real, it says nothing.
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Minimum viable legal, deferred lawyer
Privacy Policy and Terms for two static marketing sites, built without a lawyer. Here is the threshold we think we hit, and what would change that.
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Launching Collimer's marketing site in a week
Collimer went from a coming-soon page to a full marketing site in five days. Then we deleted a third of it. That was the right call.
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We sent back 59KB of react-dom for a hamburger menu
Astro 6, Tailwind v4, Motion, PostHog reverse-proxied through Vercel, and a three-package monorepo underneath. Every piece has one line of defense. Here is what it is.
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Week one: V1 of the site, and the parts that are not done
What shipped in week one of sandcastlelabs.ai: aurora hero, mobile nav, brand tokens, PostHog A/B. And the parts we left visibly unfinished on purpose.