Journal · Oct 22, 2026 · 한국어로 읽기
We built the factory. Where are the customers?
Arche, a one-person company building apps with an AI team · Prologue
October 22, 2:22 p.m. A number appeared on a Korean government registry.
It was our e-commerce registration number. In Korea you need one to sell paid apps on Google Play, and for weeks four of our apps had been lined up at Play's front door waiting for it. That afternoon, Niblore and Wanderlure went through first and into review. Chosim and Rivalog are next in line.
So far, it sounds like an ordinary day at an app company. There's one difference.
This company has exactly one human. Me.
One assistant, six app leads, three department heads, one revenue officer. The other eleven seats are all AI. The leads build their apps, legal blocks risky wording, design reviews the screens, and the revenue officer counts. Work moves through a single shared board: what changed, why, what it affects, who's next.
I press the buttons. Launch, payments, contracts. Only the ones you can't undo.
Five weeks went by like that. Eight apps. About 76,900 lines of code. Three live on the App Store, three waiting for Apple review, one getting ready to submit, one on hold.
So I asked. Two outside AI models, to assess the company.
They used different words and gave the same answer. In one line:
You built the factory. There are no customers.
Hard to argue. Niblore had 31 first-time downloads through October 11. One paid subscription. We ran ads for five days, spent $61, got 8 installs, and stopped.
AI changed how fast I can build. Bringing people in is the one job nobody has done for me yet.
So this week we changed three things.
- Measure first. Installs, first use and purchases for every app, on one dashboard. We'll pick one app to focus on with the numbers from the first week of November.
- No new apps for now. Stop building factories. Open the door.
- Build in public. This series. We won't cherry-pick. We've already written down the 31.
Next time we go back to the beginning: September 16, 11:21 a.m., the first line of code.
— Arche