We've opened pre-registration for the last Saturday in May (which will be here sooner than you think). Hope to see you again as we continue to expand this community of both technical and non-technical people.
I appreciated Kailin Spencer’s glowing review calling it her new favorite event and praising the supportive vibe-coding atmosphere; Shreyans Khunteta’s reflection on how showing up led to great conversations, his book talk, and vibecoding with 50+ people; Srikar Desikan’s post about building a fruit recipe generator prototype (“Fruitwise”) during a previous session; Alex Allen’s Threads post highlighting the event and a coding agents talk; and Antoinette Janus discovering the tech scene at her first Seattle-area meetup.
From our most recent event, I created Vibe Brief - a free, browser-based worksheet that turns a vague app idea into a paste-ready prompt for whatever AI you build with. We landed on the keyword “educational,” and the lesson I keep watching people relearn the hard way is that vibe coding works when your brief works. Skip the brief and you get sprawling features, unclear users, and an AI that builds the wrong thing beautifully. So I made the part everyone skips into something you can do in ten minutes: four short sections that force you to name who hurts, what you’re shipping, what could kill it, and what you’re cutting. It’s especially for the non-developer who’s been burned by “build me an app” prompts that go nowhere, the curious tinkerer who wants their first AI build to finish, and anyone in this community who wants to teach this discipline to someone else, because once you’ve written one good brief, you can’t unsee how much faster everything goes.
Now, here’s something else I’ve been working on since last we met IRL…
Open your phone. Open the contacts app. Find the last three people who reached out to hire you, book you, work with you, or figure out who you are. Where did you send them?
If the answer is LinkedIn, your resume PDF, or “scroll through my work on this big slow site,” I want to talk to you about a third option.
There’s a kind of page most people don’t have, and it’s the one that does the most work. Not a resume. Not a portfolio. Not a LinkedIn profile. Something in the middle. A single URL on a domain you own that says: here is what I do, here is the proof, here is how to hire me. You can call it a pitch page, a hire-me page, a tear sheet, a credentials page, a one-pager. The name matters less than the function. What matters is that it exists, that it lives at a URL you control, and that it does its job in about thirty seconds.
I built two of these in the past month. One for my event hosting experience at chris.pirillo.com/host/ and another for community management experience at chris.pirillo.com/community/ (with more to come). Both took an afternoon. Both replaced about an hour of explaining myself in DMs every time someone asked what I do.
I want to walk through why this format wins, what goes on it, and how to build one yourself with AI in less time than it takes to update your LinkedIn headline. Because right now, your domain is probably collecting dust, and the bar for fixing that has never been lower.
Three formats already exist for telling people who you are. None of them do this job.
Resumes are passive. A resume is a list of past work, formatted for a specific kind of reader (a hiring manager, an ATS) who is doing a specific job (filtering applicants for a known role). You send a resume because someone asked for one. It is shaped by the request, not by you. It says “here is everything I’ve done” and trusts the reader to figure out the rest. That works inside an application pipeline. It does not work when someone shows up cold with a question like “can you host our launch event in October?”
Portfolios are sprawling. A portfolio is a browse experience. Designers and writers built the format because their work is visual or textual and benefits from being shown at scale. That makes sense for those crafts. It does not make sense for a community manager, a webinar host, a fractional operator, a developer evangelist, a founder. There’s nothing to “browse.” There are receipts to present. A portfolio’s hierarchy fights you when the goal is conversion in thirty seconds.
LinkedIn is everyone’s house. It’s a rented apartment with the same wallpaper as forty million other tenants. You don’t control the layout. You don’t control the URL structure. You don’t control which features get rolled out next to your name. You can’t make the page do the thing you need it to do, because LinkedIn is optimizing for LinkedIn, not for you. If your only digital presence lives on a platform you don’t own, you’ve outsourced your front door to a landlord who charges you in attention.
The pitch page is the missing middle. It’s static, like a resume, so it doesn’t sprawl. It’s curated, like a portfolio, so it carries proof. It lives on a domain you own, like nothing else in this list, so it survives platform shifts. And it has one job: convert the warm contact into a conversation.
The bar for building one used to be high. You needed a designer, or a Squarespace subscription, or enough HTML to be dangerous. That’s no longer true. AI now does the part that used to gate this entire format. Anyone with a Cloudflare Pages account and an afternoon can ship one. Most people haven’t, because the format isn’t named yet. So I’m naming it. Pitch page.
Eight things, in roughly this order. Skip any of them at your own risk.
The headline. One sentence that says exactly what you are. Not “30+ year tech personality with diverse experience across community, content, and creator partnerships.” That’s a LinkedIn About section, and nobody reads those. The headline on my hosting page says “Webinar host and live event MC for tech brands.” The headline on my community page says “Community lead for tech brands.” These are boring. They do not need to be clever. They need to be specific enough that a recruiter or buyer can decide in one sentence whether to keep reading.
The proof block. Numbers, names, and named outcomes. “35+ webinars in 2025/26.” “Built Intel’s community Discord that’s still running after I left.” “300+ apps shipped.” Specifics earn trust. Vague phrases (”hundreds of thousands of impressions,” “high engagement,” “trusted by leaders”) get skipped. If the proof can be verified by a search, even better. Hiring managers will check.
The hero image. One photo of you that feels like the work. If the page is for hosting, you’re on camera. If it’s for community, you’re with people. If it’s for software, you’re at the keyboard. The image is doing identity work the headline can’t.
The what-I-do section. Four to six bullets describing the engagement model. Not your resume. Not your skills list. The frame is: “what someone hires you to do, in their language.” For hosting that’s “fireside chats, panel moderation, product launches, conference MC.” For community that’s “fractional community lead, program design, Discord setup, ambassador programs.” Use the phrases your buyers use. Match their search terms.
The receipts. Logos of companies, names of programs, dates of events. Real things that happened. This is the section that separates a real pitch page from a Carrd template. If your receipts are thin, the page should be honest about that. Lean into what you have rather than dressing up what you don’t.
The testimonial pull-quote. One quote from someone who hired you, by name, with their company. One. Not fifty. If you don’t have a verifiable quote yet, leave the section out. A missing testimonial is fine. A fake-feeling testimonial kills the whole page.
The FAQ. Six to ten questions a buyer or hiring manager would ask, with honest answers. “What’s your rate?” “Are you remote-friendly?” “How does the engagement work?” “What software do you use?” The FAQ is the part of the page that respects the reader’s time. It also doubles as an SEO asset, because the questions buyers type into Google often match the questions in your FAQ word for word.
The contact block. One way to reach you. Not five. Not a contact form. An email address or a calendar link. Make the click count.
That’s the whole thing. Maybe 800 words of content total. One page. Done.
Here’s how I built mine. The whole process is three rough phases.
Phase one: dump everything you know about your work into an unstructured document. Don’t outline it. Don’t format it. Write what you do, who you’ve done it for, what worked, what made you proud, what you’re tired of explaining. Mine for the hosting page was a six-page brain dump that included sponsor names, webinar formats, etc. None of it was organized. All of it was raw. Kinda like me! LoL
Phase two: hand the brain dump to an AI tool and ask it to structure the content for a pitch page. I used Claude. Other people use ChatGPT. Either works. The prompt was something like: “Here’s everything I do. Build me a single-page pitch page for hiring managers and buyers. Headline, proof block, what-I-do, receipts, FAQ, contact. Cut everything that isn’t immediately useful. Ask me to clarify anything that’s ambiguous.” The AI’s first draft was rough. The second draft, after I corrected its assumptions about my work, was usable. The third draft was the one I wanted to ship.
Phase three: Make an infographic of it. Distill. I wound up finding OpenAI’s Images 2.0 to be perfect for this part of the process (because, quite frankly, Claude still lacks in the visuals department at the moment). Refine it. Ask for remixes if you hate what you see. Give it direction if you care to do so.
Phase four: take the infographic you like most and turn the structured content into a single-file HTML page. I asked Claude to write the HTML directly, with inline CSS, no build step, no framework. I used Claude design for my community page, Claude on the web for my event host one. The results were a very small (“portable”) files I could host on Cloudflare Pages for free. Took a few hours to get from outlines to live pages.
Total time from “I should have a pitch page” to “my pitch page is live”: about one day. Total cost: AI credits I already have subscriptions for, plus the domain I already owned.
The interesting part of this workflow is what the AI forced me to do. Sitting with a 6-page brain dump and watching an AI ask me clarifying questions made me see my own work the way a buyer would see it. The “what I do” section is the section that benefits most from this. Most people describe what they do in the language of their internal experience (”I run programs,” “I build community”), and AI helps you translate that into the language of someone hiring. The translation is the work.
Three reasons.
The first is search. Google’s results are increasingly dominated by AI-generated overviews and answer engines that rely on structured data. A static HTML page on a domain you own, with proper schema markup, gets cited in those overviews. A LinkedIn profile does not. A portfolio site without schema does not. The pitch page format is the cheapest way to win the search surfaces that exist right now.
The second is speed. Buyers and hiring managers are time-poor. They want to know in thirty seconds whether you’re worth a fifteen-minute call. A pitch page answers that question. A resume PDF requires download and parsing. A portfolio requires browsing. A LinkedIn profile requires logging in and dodging the platform’s noise. The pitch page is the lowest-friction way to communicate “this is who I am, this is what I do, this is how to hire me.”
The third is durability. LinkedIn changes. Twitter became X. Substack might pivot. Every platform you don’t own has a clock on it. A static HTML page on a domain you own has been a stable format since 1995 and will keep being one. Your pitch page outlasts every platform you also use.
You don’t need to abandon LinkedIn. You don’t need to delete your portfolio. You need a single canonical URL that points the world at you, on infrastructure that survives platform shifts, with content shaped by you. That’s it.
Here’s what I’d ask you to do this week.
Open the domain you own and aren’t using. (You have one. Almost everyone does.) Spend thirty minutes brain-dumping what you do, who you’ve done it for, what makes you good at it, and what you’re tired of explaining. Hand the brain dump to Claude or ChatGPT. Ask for a single-page pitch page. Iterate twice. Render it as HTML. Push it to Cloudflare Pages or Netlify or GitHub Pages. Send the URL to the next person who asks what you do.
If you’re stuck on naming the page, name it /hire/ or /work/ or /book/ - or use “free” subdomains. If you’re stuck on the headline, write the most boring possible version and ship it. The page can be wrong and still be useful. A live pitch page on a domain you own is worth ten unsent perfect ones.
If you build one, I want to see it. Bring it to the workshop. Send me the URL. I’ll be doing the same thing. Iterating mine in public, breaking it, fixing it, watching what hits. The bar for this format has never been lower. The reward for being early is that yours ranks before the rest of your industry catches on.
You don’t need to be a developer to build software. You need a community that meets you where you are and shows you how to start. That’s us.
As a reminder:
If you missed the ‘fireside chat‘ from that weekend, you can watch it online.
I hope you were able to submit your survey (with any links to what you might’ve created this weekend).
We will, once again, have food and beverage for those who join us on-site.
Feel free to review “What is Vibe Coding“ if you’re still unfamiliar with its promise.
I am always available if you need help / guidance along the way. chris@pirillo.com!
Remember to bring your computer... and curiosity!
Four new ones since the last issue. The arcade is at over 320 apps now, which is a number I have stopped finding believable and yet here we are. I’m still looking for inspiration for the next one!
Hueday. The free alternative to Colorstrology. Type a birthday (year included), get a deterministic color back. Same date always returns the same hue. Includes a named color match against a 353-name CIELAB library, four PNG export sizes, and a share card. Built because someone asked me what color my birthday was and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. The empty state is an ambient color cycle that crossfades every seven seconds, because the front door of a color app should look like a color app.
Vibe Brief. A free worksheet that turns a vague app idea into a paste-ready prompt for whatever AI you build with. Built because the April ctrl+alt+create live event landed on the keyword “Educational,” and the lesson I keep watching people relearn the hard way is that vibe coding works when your brief works. Skip the brief and you get sprawling features, unclear users, and an AI that builds the wrong thing beautifully. Four short sections force you to name who hurts, what you’re shipping, what could kill it, and what you’re cutting. Ten minutes, paste-ready output.
TileLoom. Sculpt seamless 3D-printable tiles in your browser. Parametric controls, Frank Lloyd Wright textile-block presets, tessellation patterns, single 3MF export to Bambu Studio. This one’s for the maker community. If you have a 3D printer collecting dust between projects, this is a thirty-minute design-to-print pipeline.
Hopf Skip. Explore the Hopf fibration in your browser. Twelve topology presets, generative color harmony, ribbon and tube fiber rendering. It’s a 4D-to-3D math art playground that exports 4K PNGs. If “stereographic projection of S³ onto S²” sounds intimidating, the app is the explanation. Click through the presets and the math becomes visual.
md-preview.app. A native macOS markdown viewer with mermaid diagram rendering, KaTeX math, and Quick Look extension support. Open Source on GitHub. For anyone who lives in markdown files (writers, vibe coders, anyone working with Claude or ChatGPT output), this is the kind of utility that should have existed years ago.
Human 3.0 and PAI. Both from Daniel Miessler. Human 3.0 is a paid program for becoming AI-fluent and self-directed in the post-corporate era. PAI is an open-source Personal AI Infrastructure that runs on top of Claude Code or whatever agent platform you use. Together they’re an interesting bet on the same shift this newsletter keeps circling: knowledge work is being unbundled, and the people who win are the ones who treat their own infrastructure as seriously as a company would treat theirs.
arcade-app by ajot. One playground for every AI model, native macOS. Text, image, audio, video, any provider, one app. If you switch between Claude, GPT, Gemini, and a dozen image models the way I do, this collapses ten browser tabs into one place. Could be worth your while?
Scratchpad by Casey Margell. A scratchpad tool from a builder in our broader community. If you spend your day in a dozen text fields and lose half your thinking between them, this may be the kind of small utility that pays for itself the first week.
Last Saturday of the month. That’s the cadence now.
When: Saturday, May 30. Noon PT. About 2 hours.
Where: Foundations, 1605 Boylston Ave, Seattle. Streaming on YouTube and Twitch.
Cost: Free. In-person spots are limited; online is unlimited.
Fireside chat guest: my friend Joel Telling, aka the 3D Printing Nerd. He’s joining us to chat about how vibe coding has helped him complete a once-abandoned iOS app, build a maker industry event experience on mobile, and better inform people about critical legislation that impacts his community. If you were looking for inspiration, Joel consistently exudes it.
Sponsor: Presented by Every. They cover the food and the venue, and they’re why this stays free.
Register: luma.com/305ghqpc
Bring a laptop. Bring an idea, or pick one up when you get here. Bring a friend who’s been on the fence about whether AI building is for them. The answer is yes.
A few things rattling around from the past couple weeks:
The hardest part of the pitch page wasn’t the writing. It was deciding what to leave out. Every time I added one more credential or one more bullet, the page got worse. The pages that convert are the ones that look almost empty. There’s a lesson there for app design too. Every UI gets worse the moment you add the eleventh thing.
I keep meeting people whose personal domain redirects to LinkedIn. That’s a domain working against you. The redirect is fine, the destination is not. If you own the domain, you owe yourself a page on it.
Hopf Skip taught me that almost no one knows what the Hopf fibration is, and the people who do know are split between mathematicians who think it’s beautiful and physicists who use it for spinor calculations. Building an app for both audiences was a useful exercise in not picking a lane.
A friend asked me if vibe coding is “still a thing” or if the moment has passed. The moment hasn’t passed. The moment is now. The thing that’s changing is who shows up. The early adopters got their apps shipped in 2024 and 2025, and the next wave is showing up at the workshop right now. Wave two is bigger.
The cost of building a pitch page is the same for everyone. The reward for shipping one early is exponential. Be early.
Yours Digitally,
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