What we built

MainShop (mainshop.ai) is an agency-in-a-box for local small businesses — barbers, plumbers, dentists, small contractors. It bundles a website, a missed-call engine (Cadence underneath), lead capture, review automation, and managed social into a Crawl/Walk/Run tiered offer at $199 / $349 / $499 one-time + $10 / $20 / $50 monthly.

The shape of what we shipped

The wedge is the day-zero site. The moment a customer signs up, an AI build pipeline generates and deploys a real mainshop.ai-quality website at their domain. Not a queued brief, not a "we'll be in touch" page — a live site, hosted, in minutes.

The Crawl/Walk/Run ladder is the operator-set pricing model (replaced an earlier $1,950/mo agency-retainer model that was wrong for the buyer).

• Crawl ($199 + $10/mo) — real site, day-zero, hosting kept current.
• Walk ($349 + $20/mo) — Crawl + SEO + lead capture + missed-call engine (Cadence-backed voice receptionist).
• Run ($499 + $50/mo) — Walk + managed social (Castmint-backed) + lead gen (SDR-backed) + monthly growth report.

Why "agency-in-a-box" is the wedge

Agencies charge $2k/mo for retainers. Local businesses can't afford that. SaaS tools (Squarespace, etc.) leave the owner to figure it out. The agency-in-a-box bundles agency outcomes (site + leads + reviews + content) into a SaaS price point — single canonical price, no proposals, no discovery calls. Crawl/Walk/Run lets the owner start small and climb.

The honest result

MainShop just landed its first paying customer (Shear & Shave barbershop, $250 deposit, founder-direct sale). The product is real, the ladder is real, the canonical price source is test-locked. The next M0 milestone is 3 paying clients; we're 1 of 3 as of 2026-05-20.

What the next lessons cover

• Lesson 2: the single canonical price source pattern — how to lock pricing across every surface (homepage, /pricing, Stripe, OG meta) so it can't drift.
• Lesson 3: the day-zero site build pipeline — how to deploy a real client site in minutes, not weeks.