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Physician Forge

BuildForge

A book on building side projects that replace your W-2.

How I ship while still on a W-2 — then the exact agent path: Cursor, a VPS, DNS, costs, Discord for communities, and the ops checklist you skip until something breaks.

By Drew Albert ·@drewalbertmd · Last updated 15 Sep 2026

Buy BuildForge — $19.99Book + community — $44.99

PDF + SKILL.md pack · living book · All sales final. No 7-day money-back on the PDF (unless required by law).

BuildForge cover beside an open PDF page and a Cursor window showing SKILL.md
PDF for you. SKILL.md for your agent. Same ladder.

You get

  • PDF — Human read — Drew essay voice. Continuously updated as chapters improve.
  • SKILL.md pack — Same ladder as markdown prompts for Cursor / Claude / Codex. Drop it in and build.
  • Eighteen chapters — from first idea through Cursor, VPS, DNS, costs, Discord, and the security checklist.

Optional

Community + mentorship · +$25 Lifetime Discord room + mentorship for book buyers. Lower tier than yearly Forge Membership ($390/yr) — not a silent upgrade to full annual.

Want the full membership? $39/mo or $390/yr

Sample chapter · Ch. 11

Cursor when you don’t code

I keep getting the same question from physicians who want a side project:

Do I need to learn to code before I use Cursor?

No. You need a laptop, an account, a folder on your computer, and the willingness to describe what you want in plain English — then read what it changed before you trust it with anything important.

Cursor is not ChatGPT in a browser tab. ChatGPT talks. Cursor can change files on your machine (when you let it). That’s the whole point — and the whole risk.

If you skip “open a folder,” the agent has nowhere solid to put work. That’s the #1 beginner failure I see.

Read the full free version on /building/ · the paid book is the curated ladder + prompts, continuously updated.

Buy the full book — $19.99

Chapters

What’s in BuildForge

18 chapters · tap one to expand

  1. 1TL;DR

    Whole game: ideas → scope → structure → charge → automate → launch → grow → build with an agent → don’t skip the ops checklist.

  2. 2Why build side projects when the W-2 already pays?

    Salary isn’t a business. Keep the job as rocket fuel; build a second engine for optionality — surgery is the example, not the gate.

  3. 3Coming up with ideas

    Friction over feeds. Kill board + AI-durable pass. 10→3→1 — not AI-wrapper hunting.

  4. 4Sticking with scope and focus

    One job per product. Agents overbuild — you cut.

  5. 5Basic structure to build

    What a side-project repo looks like before features: folders, one stack, env vs code, local → server.

  6. 6How to be okay with charging money

    Ask early. Prefer paid from day one. Ideally no free tiers.

  7. 7Automate

    Bots and scripts only when time saved wins. What not to automate.

  8. 8Example projects

    Case-study tour of PF-shaped builds. Points forward to the build half.

  9. 9Launch

    Ship early. Post where your audience already is. Friendly tone — payment works.

  10. 10Distribution and Grow

    After launch day: keep showing up. Link graph. Organic compound.

  11. 11Cursor when you don’t code

    Download, one folder, Agent vs Ask vs Plan, first-win prompts.

  12. 12Rent a VPS + SSH into Cursor

    Hetzner, SSH keys, Remote-SSH, pasteable prompts.

  13. 13DNS the agent can edit

    Cloudflare API so the agent can point the name at the box.

  14. 14Agent-native + MCP

    Shape products agents can use — tools, docs, MCP.

  15. 15Analytics that survive deploys

    First-party stats. DB outside dist/. Backups that outlive rsync --delete.

  16. 16Costs — what you actually pay

    VPS, domain, Cloudflare, LLM APIs, Stripe fees. Kill SaaS middlemen when you can own the pipe.

  17. 17Discord bot to run communities

    One bot that runs the room — membership roles, Grok /ask, after you have something to gather people around.

  18. 18Security, Cloudflare, Git, and the checklist

    Secrets, TLS, backups, deploy that can’t wipe data, remotes, robots/llms.txt — don’t ship without this.

Built in public

I don’t have a wall of fake tweets yet. What I do have: the free ship logs that feed this book — same prompts, same stack, written while shipping Physician Forge.

Buy — $19.99+ community $44.99