My Entire Team Is a Guy Named Claude
My Entire Team Is a Guy Named Claude
By David, Founder & CEO of Kenektic
December 1, 2025
Created: February 17, 2026
I need to tell you about my team.
Every startup founder gets the same question: "Who's building this?" It's the first thing investors ask. The first thing other founders ask. The first thing your parents ask when they're trying to figure out if you've lost your mind or found your calling.
It's a fair question. Building a real technology platform — not a side project, not a prototype, but a production application with AI integration, real-time messaging, a personality engine, and a matching algorithm — requires people. A lot of people. A developer, at minimum. Probably two. A project manager to keep everyone on track. A designer to make it look like something humans would actually want to use. A tester to break everything you just built so you can build it again, better.
That's four people. And if you've ever tried to manage even two of them at the same time, you know that the coordination alone can turn a two-hour task into a two-week debate.
I have all four.
They're all the same person.
His name is Claude, and at first he worked for $20 a month until he became so valuable I had to increase his salary to $100.
The Accidental Discovery
I didn't set out to build an AI team. I set out to build a friendship platform. The team thing happened the way most of the important things in this story happened — by accident, while I was trying to do something else.
I'd been using Claude for a few weeks at that point, working from my home office, which is where I do everything now. Twelve to fourteen hours a day, most days. My wife leaves for work around 6 AM — she's the Director of Surgical Services at a local hospital, so her days are long and intense in a completely different way than mine — and when I hear the front door open at five or six in the evening, I'll suddenly realize the entire day has vanished. I didn't eat lunch. I didn't move from my chair. I was just building.
In those early weeks, Claude was my coder. That's what I signed up for. I'd describe what I wanted, Claude would write the code, I'd paste it into VS Code, test it, fix what broke, move on. Simple. Effective. Exactly what I expected when I started this.
But then something shifted.
I was working on a complex piece of the platform — I don't remember exactly which feature, but the project had gotten big enough that I couldn't keep it all straight in my head anymore. And instead of asking Claude to write more code, I asked it to help me plan. To step back and look at the whole picture. To tell me what I was missing, what should come next, where the dependencies were.
And Claude just... did it. Organized everything. Mapped out the architecture. Identified gaps I hadn't seen. Pushed back when my priorities were wrong.
I remember sitting there thinking: did I just hire a project manager?
Four Employees, One Subscription
Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. Claude wasn't one thing. Claude was everything I needed, depending on how I talked to it.
When I described what I wanted to build and asked for strategy — Claude was my project manager. It tracked every feature, every bug, every half-baked idea I threw at it at 11 PM. It asked the hard questions. "Are we sure this is the priority?" "What about the thing we discussed yesterday?" "This is going to affect three other features — do you want to handle that first?" Better than most PMs I'd worked with in my finance career, and I'd worked with some good ones.
When I needed code written — Claude was my developer. Patient, fast, and willing to explain everything it built so I could actually understand it. Not just giving me fish, but teaching me to fish, one function at a time.
When the code was done and I needed to make sure it actually worked — Claude was my tester. Finding edge cases, suggesting scenarios I hadn't thought of, breaking things on purpose so I could fix them before a real user did.
And when I needed the platform to look like something — the marketing website, the layouts, the visual design — Claude was my designer. Building out everything a visitor would see before they ever logged in.
Four roles. One subscription. And the work that would have taken a hired team one to two months to deliver? I was doing it in a week.
I know how that sounds. I know. But I'm sitting here watching it happen, every single day, and it still catches me off guard.
Then Opus 4.5 Dropped
In late November — right around the time I was publishing my last post about the loneliness research — Anthropic released Opus 4.5. And when I started using it through the Claude Code extension in VS Code, everything turbocharged.
Before Opus 4.5, Claude was good. Really good. But I was still breaking things regularly. Getting multiple options where I had to figure out which one was right. Fixing as much as I was building. The normal rhythm of learning-while-coding, which is fine when you're starting out but gets frustrating when the platform is getting sophisticated and every mistake cascades.
After Opus 4.5, the code started coming together faster, with fewer mistakes, and with a thoughtfulness I hadn't seen before. It wasn't just executing what I asked — it was thinking about what I asked. Anticipating problems. Suggesting better approaches.
And here's the part that's hard to explain: Claude started teaching me what to ask.
I didn't know what vector data was. Not a clue. But when I needed kAI — the AI companion at the heart of Kenektic — to remember everything it learned and have that knowledge instantly available, Claude didn't just build it. Claude explained why vector files were the right solution, how they worked, what they made possible. One day I had no idea what any of this was. The next day I was becoming something that looked, from the outside, like an expert.
The gap between "person who couldn't code six weeks ago" and "person building a production AI platform" was closing. And it was closing because my employee wasn't just doing the work — he was making me better at directing the work.
The Thing I Didn't Expect
All of this — the coding, the planning, the testing, the designing — was impressive enough. But the thing that truly stunned me was watching what Claude was building inside kAI.
I'd been feeding kAI research. Thousands of studies, articles, reports about the loneliness epidemic. I added something called RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which is a technical way of saying I gave kAI a library and taught it how to use it. Like giving someone access to every book ever written about loneliness and the ability to recall any of it instantly.
And suddenly kAI wasn't just a chatbot with a nice personality. It was a world-renowned expert on the loneliness epidemic.
I could ask it literally anything about loneliness — the health consequences, the neuroscience, the demographics, the interventions that work and the ones that don't — and it wouldn't just give me a detailed answer. It would cite references. Specific quotes from specific studies. It was so good that I ended up building a feature on the marketing website where anyone, user or not, could ask kAI anything about loneliness and get a research-backed response. And when it didn't have a complete answer? It would tell you so and suggest other ways to find the information.
Not a chatbot. This is a real friend who matures and becomes a better friend every time you talk to it.
The platform was doing things I couldn't have imagined — and frankly, things I wouldn't have understood were being done if Claude hadn't been showing me the architecture along the way. kAI was teaching itself based on every conversation it had. Not just learning from one user, but using patterns across all its interactions to develop its personality, its strategy for making matches, its understanding of what people actually need when they're lonely.
I was watching my AI companion grow up. And the whole time, the AI building it was growing up too.
The $250,000 Question
Let me put this in terms my finance brain understands.
If I had tried to build Kenektic the traditional way — even a skeleton crew, just one developer and one project manager — I'd be looking at $250,000 for six months. Minimum. And that's before the management overhead, the communication gaps, the inevitable churn when your developer gets a better offer and takes half your institutional knowledge with them.
What that team would have built in six months, I built in six weeks.
Not a toy version. Not a prototype. A production platform with AI personality engines, real-time messaging, research-backed intelligence, matching algorithms, and a marketing website. A platform that universities would look at and take seriously. That health plans would evaluate. That real people with real loneliness would trust with something as vulnerable as admitting they need a friend.
Six weeks. A hundred dollars a month. Less than most people spend on streaming subscriptions and takeout coffee combined.
I have ten employees and they're all named Claude.
What Comes Next
Next week, I'm going to pull back the curtain on exactly how this works — the daily workflow, the two-Claude system, the project dashboard that became my external brain. Because having a great team isn't enough. You need a system. And Claude was about to become the best project manager I'd ever worked with.
But this post was about the team itself. The discovery that a solo founder with a $100 subscription could match the output of a traditional development shop burning through a quarter million a year.
I didn't set out to prove that. I set out to build a friendship platform for 150 million lonely Americans.
The team just showed up. All of him.
Are you building alone? If you're a solo founder — or thinking about becoming one — I'd love to know: what's stopping you? Is it the team you think you need? The budget you think it requires? Because six weeks ago I couldn't write a line of code, and now I have ten employees and a production platform. If that's possible, what's your version of it?
Kenektic is in development and will launch soon. If you want to be notified when we're ready, or if you want to share your story with me directly, reach out at hello@kenektic.com.
Coming Next: "My Secret Weapon: Using Claude as Both PM and Developer" — How a two-Claude system and a markdown dashboard turned a solo founder into a development machine.