BuiltByBadge

First, the origin story, because this build did not start as this build. Week 8 picked a directory, the dataset play, and the dataset spent a month refusing to become a week-sized product. Somewhere in those mines, staring at a portfolio of sites that could not see each other, the sharper idea showed up, and the project made the call it had made once before with RSD Decoder: when the build will not ship, pivot to the sharpest adjacent idea and ship that. The directory went on the shelf. This is what the directory project actually produced.

This one was built from inside the problem. I run a portfolio of twelve live sites, and until last week they were twelve strangers: someone lands on the disc golf directory, likes it, and has no possible way to discover the text cleaner, the Medicare decoder, or any launch that comes next. Every launch spikes and dies, every site collects its own little trickle, and none of it compounds. BuiltByBadge is the plumbing that fixes exactly that: a small "Built by" badge on every site you ship, all pointing home to one hub page that lists everything you have made.

The twist that makes it a 2026 product instead of a 2012 widget: it is not a service, it is a skill. You drop one file into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or whatever you build with, have one setup conversation, and from then on your assistant remembers the badge for you. Finish a site in chat and it asks once: want your badge on this? Say yes and the badge is in and the project is on your hub. The maintenance burden of keeping a portfolio connected drops to saying yes.

And the badge itself is deliberately boring: three lines of static HTML, about 200 bytes, zero JavaScript, zero network requests. That is a philosophy, not a limitation. Script-drawn widgets are invisible to crawlers, can block or break pages, and die in unison when the service behind them has a bad day. An anchor tag in the HTML is a real, crawlable backlink on every site you ship, it renders instantly, and no server anywhere can take it down. There is nothing of mine that can break on a site of yours.

Shipped in week 13 on the standard ShipWolf loop, but this is the portfolio's first product that is a skill outright rather than a website with a skill attached. The product is the file: the setup conversation, five badge styles (Face, Ink, Paper, Stamp, Glass), the hub page template, and the ship-time prompt, all running inside the AI the buyer already uses. There is no account, no database, and no service behind it. If you do not have a site for your hub, the skill sets up free hosting in your name in a few minutes.

The money follows the honesty-first pattern this portfolio keeps betting on: free covers the Face and Ink badges plus the full hub, Pro is $29 once for all five styles, your brand colors, no BuiltByBadge branding, and every platform version. One payment, not a subscription, 30-day refunds by email, no questions. The FAQ even admits that nothing but the honor system stops free users from taking Pro features, and asks people who cannot afford it yet to ship things and come back. That paragraph will either cost money or build the kind of trust that prints it, and either way the result gets published here.

Best detail of the build: the site wears its own product. The badge in the corner of builtbybadge.com is the production markup, pointing at its own hub, and checkout runs through the SideRoad store. The whole thing is the portfolio thesis eating its own cooking: small, static, honest, and built to compound.

Launch-week zeros with the counters live. The number that matters most here is not on this page yet: how many badges end up in the wild, because every placed badge is a permanent little distribution engine for its owner and a proof point for the product. Downloads, Pro unlocks, and revenue all land here as they arrive.