Field note #1: I incorporated Mariano Ventures

Most build-in-public posts open with a win. This one opens with a new company and zero customers.

Companies House registered Mariano Ventures. That's the news. No launch, no revenue, no Stripe dashboard.

Why now? Boring reason. To get Stripe to verify the business and take real payments, I needed a real company. So I made one. The live payments bit comes next.

The goal

Build businesses that pay me an income that buys time and freedom. Not revenue. Money I actually take home, after the business has covered its costs.

There's no deadline. I'm not going to invent one.

I used to measure success in salary. These days I measure it in time and freedom.

The constraints

I'm doing this on purpose with very little money.

Budget: $200 in total for setup and the first experiment. One envelope, no top-ups. It's in dollars because the tools bill in dollars; revenue will be in pounds.
Spent to date: $52 of $200: $32 for the domain and the first $20 month of hosting.
Outside the cap: my AI subscriptions and the incorporation fee.
Focus: one commercial experiment at a time, until someone has paid for it and actually uses it.

Hosting alone would empty what's left of the envelope in about seven months. So Project 001 has to start paying its way before then.

Small budgets are a feature. They stop you buying your way out of thinking.

The stack so far

Grok Bot: an AI assistant app I use to run a standing team of AI agents (more on them below).
ChatGPT/Codex and Claude: build the product, interchangeably. I haven't picked a favourite yet, so they're both on the bench. I review what they ship.
Linear: the task list, decisions and spending ledger.
GitHub: the operating documents and the code.
Cloudflare: where I bought the domain.
Vercel: hosting.
Supabase: the database, on the free plan.
Resend: sends the sign-in emails, also free.
Stripe: payments. Test mode only for now; live payments are what the company is for.

The team, such as it is

The company is me plus a standing team of AI agents:

Ops keeps the task list, the spending ledger and the evidence.
Marketing picks the priorities and writes briefs.
Website Editor looks after this site.
X Manager finds interesting things to read and drafts posts for my X account.

The rule is simple. Agents draft, I sign off. Nothing public goes out (this post included) until I've approved the exact text. They're helpful, tireless and not allowed to press publish.

Where things honestly stand

Customers: 0.
Revenue: £0.
Public wins: none yet.

What does exist: a registered company, a one-page holding site, and a private preview of the first product that isn't open to the public. The only payment that's gone through it was a test, and it was refunded.

I'll publish the real numbers as they come in: revenue, costs and the things that don't work. If this goes badly, you'll read about that too.

What Project 001 is

Project 001 is a short, self-paced online course for UK bookkeepers. It covers practical, everyday productivity tasks, and it deliberately gives no tax or compliance advice.

A few decisions behind it:

Built before the first sale. The whole thing exists before anyone is asked to pay. That goes against the usual advice to validate first, and it's a deliberate bet: selling a course that doesn't exist yet makes no sense to me, and building it costs nothing but my time.
Self-hosted. It runs on my own site rather than through a marketplace platform.
A brutal success test: one independent paying customer who actually uses it. My own test purchase doesn't count. Neither does a payment from someone who never opens it.

It goes live soon. I'll share the name, the price and the link once the page is actually live, not before.

What's next

Get Stripe verified, sign off the release and put Project 001 live.
Next field note: what running a one-person company with AI agents looked like in week one, approval gates and breakages included.
A launch field note with the honest numbers, including if nobody buys.

Follow the process on X: @marianocarrica. New field notes will be collected under Field notes on this site.

That's field note #1: a new company, a $200 envelope and a plan. Let's see what the next one says.