What We Shipped in May: 16 Things, All Evenings, All Live

May was our biggest month. 16 things shipped, all of them live, all of them built in evenings and early mornings around day jobs. No sprint planning. No standups. Just a founder who uses sidething to build sidething, and around 50 early members who tell us when something's broken or missing.

Most of this list exists because someone hit a wall, told us about it, or we hit it ourselves at 11pm.

Here's everything that went live.

Panda got teeth

The first sidekick was a chatbot. A good one, but still a chatbot. You'd ask it something, it'd give you a thoughtful answer, and then you'd go do the work yourself.

This is gen 2. You don't talk through things with it anymore. You tell it what you need and it completes the work. "Draft my launch announcement email" comes back as a finished email, not a list of suggestions. The deliverable is a deliverable.

Generate, research, draft, plan. Those aren't conversation starters. They're verbs. Pick one, give it context, and the sidekick runs the whole thing end-to-end. No back-and-forth. No "here are some ideas for you to consider." You get the thing, done.

Onboarding rebuilt from scratch

The old onboarding was a form. Name, stage, idea, category. Five steps of things you already know about your own business, typed into boxes that felt like a job application.

The new one starts with a URL. Paste your landing page and we pull apart your positioning, your offer, your audience, and your competitive angle. No forms. No twenty questions. One URL and we know more about your business than most onboarding flows learn in ten minutes of clicking dropdowns.

No landing page? Import from your favourite AI instead. Paste a conversation from ChatGPT, Claude, wherever you've been thinking out loud about your business. Don't have that either? Manual input works too. Three paths in, all of them end with the sidekick understanding your business from day one.

Knowledge bank is live

Everyone's talking about AI memory right now. What does it know about you, where does it go, who sees it. We care about this a lot, and the knowledge bank is how we put it front and centre.

Everything your sidekick knows about your business lives in one place. You can see it, read it, correct it. 36 facts about your business, synthesised and ranked. It regenerates daily and feeds every chat, every playbook, and every generator. When you open the sidekick at 11pm and say "draft a cold outreach email," it already knows your product, your audience, your pricing, and what you shipped last week.

No black box. You see exactly what the AI sees. That's the whole point.

45 playbooks, ready to run

A curated library of the sharpest tactics across pricing, launches, outreach, and retention. Each one is around 400 words of distilled, specific, actionable guidance. Not theory. Not "here are 10 tips." Real playbooks you can run this week.

They're personalised to your business using the knowledge bank. The same playbook reads differently for a SaaS founder than it does for a freelancer selling templates, because the sidekick knows which one you are.

Pick one and go. That's the whole idea.

Revenue from day one

We embedded Stripe's Payment Element directly inside onboarding. See the price, pay, you're in. No redirect. No separate checkout page. No "click here to upgrade."

This was a deliberate choice. We're building in public and making money in public. Founding members subscribe right inside the flow that just showed them what sidething can do for their business. The conversion from "this understands me" to "I'm in" happens in the same breath.

Building in public, making money in public.

Team invites redesign

Invites were functional before. Now they're good. Pick roles (member, admin, viewer), paste multiple emails at once, and we catch duplicates before they cause confusion.

The small stuff matters here. If you paste an email that's already in the workspace, we tell you instead of sending a duplicate invite. If someone's already accepted, we don't send them another one. If you accidentally type the same email twice, we deduplicate before you hit send.

The boring stuff, done properly.

New front door

The landing page used to tell you what sidething does. Now it shows you. There's a live, interactive demo right on the page. Play with the real app before you sign up.

This came from a simple observation: people who tried the product stayed. People who read about the product bounced. So we stopped asking people to imagine what it's like and let them touch it.

Locked down. For real.

Full security audit across the entire platform. Row-level permissions on every table. Every Supabase function hardened. GDPR cookie consent with real preferences, not a dark pattern that pre-checks everything and hides the reject button.

We took this seriously. Permissions, data access, row-level security, all reviewed and tightened. If you're trusting us with your business data and your team's data, the least we can do is make sure it's actually locked down.

Your data is actually yours.

The invisible stuff

Twenty fixes across messaging, presence, notifications, and the small stuff. Email routing bugs. Double-fire issues on workspace invites. Streak calculations that drifted between screens. Currency display that showed the wrong symbol.

You won't see most of these fixes. That's the point. The kind of thing you only notice when it's broken, and it's not broken anymore.

What's next

June's already loaded. We're not slowing down.

If you're building something and you want a sidekick that actually knows your business, get your roadmap. Around 50 builders are already in.

FAQ

How many people are using sidething right now? Around 50 early members, all building real businesses. We're not opening the doors wide yet, but we're taking applications.

Is all of this live right now? Yes. Everything in this post shipped in May 2026 and is live for all members.

How do I get in? Head to sidething.com and apply. We're looking for people who are actively building something and want momentum, not a course.

Do I need a co-founder to use sidething? No. Most of our members are solo builders. Team features are there when you need them, but the core experience is designed for one person shipping in the evenings.