This course and its site

The idea

Take a subject you know, here running a crew of AI agents, and turn it into a small paid course with its own site. The crew researches the market, drafts the lessons, designs the pages, builds the site and wires up checkout. You make the calls.

This blueprint is the one you are reading. Everything below happened on 17 October 2026, the day this course was made. Where something was still in progress when this was written, it says so.

Who it serves

The buyer is anyone who wants to learn the subject. The owner is anyone who knows a subject well enough to teach it and wants to spend their time on the decisions instead of on production.

The skills the crew needs

• Research with sources: market, competitors, rules and prices, with every claim linked.
• Plain writing: drafts checked for the habits that give machine text away.
• Design: page mockups the owner can open in a browser and approve.
• Build: an Astro site on Cloudflare, with sign-in links by email.
• Payments: a hosted Stripe checkout, so no card ever touches the site.
• An ad-policy check, so no copy promises income.

The setup

• One Firstmate home on your computer, with Claude Code.
• One project repository for the course, set to local-only at first so nothing is pushed until you decide.
• A Cloudflare account, a Stripe account and a Resend account, all opened by you, in your name.
• No card, password or payment key is ever given to an agent.

What happened on day one

The captain gave one request: a paid course that teaches people to set up and run a crew. The crew went to work, and every decision came back to the captain. These are the tasks that ran that day, in order.

1. A research scout looked at the market and wrote a design report. It covered the competition, the rights questions (Firstmate is MIT-licensed and made by Kun Chen), how to sell from the EU, Meta's ad rules and a first set of ad drafts. It ended with ten decisions for the captain, each with a recommendation.
2. The captain answered them. The course became a standalone brand on its own domain, with a free tier that ends at a working setup and two free blueprints. The crew had recommended a monthly price. The captain chose $49 once instead, as a founding price, with a single tier.
3. A naming scout proposed names, checked each one against domain registries and social handles, and searched for clashes. The captain wanted "crew" in the name, picked Unattended Crew from the shortlist and bought unattendedcrew.com on Cloudflare, by hand.
4. A pitch scout wrote marketing angles and ad hooks, and ran a script over every line to catch income claims.
5. A design scout made the eight page mockups this site is built from, checked them at phone and desktop widths in light and dark mode, and measured the colour contrast.
6. A writing task wrote the free lessons, these two blueprints, the eighteen previews, the page copy and the legal pages into those designs. Midway the captain added the five named crew roles you see on the landing page.
7. A build task for the Astro site, with checkout and sign-in, was queued behind two last calls for the captain: the refund policy and whether to announce a later price rise. The captain had already approved the visual direction. The ad drafts waited on the build, and the paid lessons on the writing task.

The captain also capped the first ad test at a small fraction of what the research proposed, and kept three jobs that involve money or identity: opening the Meta ad account, setting up Stripe, and sending a courtesy note to Kun Chen on launch day.

The first week's steps

Each step is a request you give your first mate. Change the subject to yours.

1. "Scout a paid course on [subject]: who already sells one and at what price, what the free material already covers, the rules for selling it from [country], and the ad rules that apply. End with the decisions I need to make."
2. Read the report and answer each decision. Price, name and brand are yours.
3. "Scout names for it that contain [word]. Check the .com for each."
4. Buy the domain yourself.
5. "Design the pages as mockups I can open: landing, free course, paid page, checkout, sign-in, member area, about."
6. Open each mockup and say what to change.
7. "Write the free lessons and the public page copy into those designs. No income claims."
8. "Build the site on Cloudflare with Stripe checkout and sign-in links by email." Open the Stripe and Resend accounts yourself, and paste their keys into Cloudflare's secret settings yourself. The site reads them from there, and the crew never sees them.
9. Read every page on the preview link before it goes live. Then say "merge it".
10. "Write the paid lessons." Review each one before it is published.

Monthly tool costs

These are tool costs only, checked on the date above. Prices change, so check them again before you rely on them.

The decisions you keep

• The subject, the promise and what the course will never claim.
• The name, the price and whether to offer refunds.
• Buying the domain and opening every account that takes money.
• Which ad, if any, goes to review, and how much to spend.
• Each page before it goes live, and each lesson before it is published.
• Who to ask before you launch, such as the author of the tool you teach.