Start & Ship is a paid affiliate website starter kit that uses AI-guided build prompts to take you from niche research to a live affiliate content site on your own domain, on top of a Next.js and TypeScript codebase.
What is Start & Ship?
Start & Ship is a one-time-purchase kit created by Charles McQuain, the operator of four public affiliate production sites (paddlerspick.com, bourbonproof.com, availsim.com, supapoints.com). It takes your answers to an AI interview in Claude Code as input and produces a deployable static site with six money-page templates, affiliate tracking, FTC disclosure, and AI-search readiness. The kit runs on Claude Code (included with a Claude subscription, about $20/mo) and deploys to Vercel's free tier. All numbers behind the product are published on realnumbers.online, including losses.
Key Features
- Six money-page templates — prebuilt page shapes for "Best X for Y" roundups, single product reviews, head-to-head comparisons, gift guides, price-tier ladders, and supporting editorial, with layout decisions already made.
- AI-surface layer — a JSON-LD factory, llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, answer-first blocks, and schema CI make the site legible to AI search engines and citation crawlers.
- Agentic coding layer — CLAUDE.md, skills, and typed Zod schemas turn agent mistakes into build errors so a coding agent can't publish invalid pages.
- Affiliate plumbing — tracked /go/ redirects, dual-CTA components, and FTC disclosure components wired in by default on every recommendation page.
- Source ledger + staleness CI — every claim carries a source URL, and expired citations fail the build instead of letting sources rot silently.
- Editorial and compliance pages — shipped templates for correction log, methodology, author schema, privacy policy, terms, and disclosures.
- Operator's Notes — real timelines, real revenue, and a $0-site teardown included in the repo documentation.
Who is it for?
Start & Ship targets people who want a real affiliate site but don't want to start from a blank repo. First-time website builders get a guided path where Claude Code checks their machine, installs what's missing, interviews them through niche selection, applies to affiliate programs, deploys, and connects the domain. Developers can skip the guided path and work directly with the clean Next.js + TypeScript codebase using Cursor or Codex. Agencies and freelancers building sites for clients can use the Agency tier, which includes white-label rights for unlimited client sites.
What can you do with Start & Ship?
- First-time site owners: launch a niche affiliate site in a weekend by running the included /start-and-ship prompt in Claude Code; the agent handles terminal setup, configuration, and deployment.
- Affiliate content creators: publish review and roundup pages with correct JSON-LD per page type, FTC disclosure on every recommendation, and dual-CTA that puts the better commission link first.
- Agencies and freelancers: use the white-label Agency license to build unlimited client sites without paying a recurring platform fee.
How does Start & Ship work?
After buying, Polar grants your GitHub account access to a private repo. You open Claude Code and run the /start-and-ship prompt, which walks you through niche research, affiliate program selection, template configuration, deployment, and domain connection. The included skills validate frontmatter against Zod schemas and run source and build checks before any page goes live.
