Ship the Surface

Everything about the site in one evening. The live time goes on the part that's hard to write down - structure, sequence, craft and judgement - with a site scaffolded and deployed on screen as we go. The mechanical half ships as skill files you run yourself: performance passes, OG images, article drafting and programmatic pages.

WHAT WE COVER
- The structure. Sections, the order they go in, and what the page has to accomplish before it earns a scroll.
- Teardowns, live. Good sites and bad ones, pulled apart on screen. Send yours ahead in Discord if you want it looked at.
- Positioning above the fold. The one-liner from session four becomes the hero. If it doesn't survive contact with the page, the positioning was the problem.
- Proof over adjectives, one CTA. What counts as evidence to a stranger, how little of it you need, and cutting everything that competes with the primary CTA.
- The boilerplate handoff. The Next.js setup: routing, metadata, OG images. Enough to get deployed the same night if you're building along - the depth lives in the skill files.
- The content plan. Working backwards from what an ICP searches for to the first twenty pages. Generation itself is a skill file, not a lecture.
- Audit the rest of your surface. The site is one of maybe eight places someone lands. We pull up a real set of profiles and read them cold: what does each one signal, what contradicts the positioning, what is abandoned, what is missing. Most of the damage is a stale bio and a banner from two products ago.
- Set the pages up, one at a time. Handle, bio, banner, pinned post, links, and the one line that has to match the site hero. Done individually rather than blasted, because each platform reads differently. A few done live so you see the pattern.
- Run it agentically. Once the positioning is settled the whole pass is mechanical, so it belongs in Claude Code or the Codex extension rather than an afternoon of tab-switching. Skill files generate the copy per platform, to the right length, from the same brief.

YOU LEAVE WITH
The structure of a site that converts, watched being built, plus a repeatable pass for every social page that points at it.

BRING
Nothing required. If you want to build along: laptop, Node installed, a deploy account you can log into, your positioning brief, a domain if you have one, and logins for whichever social accounts you already have.

WHO IT IS FOR
Technical founders, engineers, designers and indie builders who have shipped something and want it in front of customers. Free, and open to anyone - you do not have to attend the whole series to come to one.

THIS BUILDS UP TO THE HACKATHON
Session 05 of 6. The series runs every other Wednesday from Aug 5 to Oct 14, and every session is a piece of the same thing: by October you have positioning, a site, a channel and the numbers to read it. Then on Oct 16-18 we run Zero to Launch, a hackathon where you do not build - you launch. Whatever state your product is in on the Friday, you close it out, put it in front of people, and show what happened on the Sunday.

Anyone can compete. You do not have to attend a single session, and there is no application. Sessions stand alone too, so come to one or come to all.

Five prize categories: Best B2C Launch, Best B2B Launch, Best Marketing Site, Best Growth Engine, and a room-voted Crowd Favorite.

Full hackathon details: https://www.shipai.club/hackathon

SPONSORS WANTED
Ship AI is free and stays free. We are seeking corporate sponsors for the community and hackathon sponsors for the October prize pool - cash, or in-kind like API credits, AI platform usage, tools and food. Credits go straight into builders' hands and get spent on real launches, in public.

Sponsor tiers and what they include: https://www.shipai.club/hackathon#sponsor
Or reach out in the Discord: https://discord.gg/kZSJMNveYM

Venue: Workuity Biltmore, 2390 E Camelback Rd, Suite 130, Phoenix, AZ 85016

Full session details: https://www.shipai.club/hackathon/workshops/marketing-site
The program: https://www.shipai.club/hackathon
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/kZSJMNveYM