Trent — solo full-stack operator
Based in Kelowna, BC. Design, build, ship, and operate products end to end — 10+ shipped products across e-commerce, SaaS, marketplaces, content, and mobile, and a portfolio of 145+ branded sites running on 7 Hetzner VPS.
Approach
How I work on products
The through-line across everything I have shipped: product thinking first, engineering second, operations always — no team, no hand-offs.
- Pricing before code
- Every product I build starts with pricing, positioning, and user psychology before a line of code. Business model clarity drives the technical decisions, not the other way around.
- Full-stack ownership
- Product strategy through UX, engineering, infrastructure, and operations — the same person end to end. The constraint is the point. It forces clarity.
- AI as governed system
- Claude and OpenAI integrated as production systems with multi-model orchestration, per-token cost tracking, and human review where it matters. Not chatbot demos.
- Security as practice
- Quarterly self-audits across production infrastructure — 41 issues in the most recent one, worked through and remediated. Hardening is operational, not occasional.
What I do
Areas across the product lifecycle
The full stack of product ownership, from strategy through infrastructure. These are the four rough categories most of my work falls into.
- Product strategy and positioning
- Pricing, business model design, positioning, and early-stage user research. Every product I have shipped has gone through this process before any engineering happened.
- Full-stack engineering
- TypeScript, React, Next.js, and TanStack Start across 16+ production apps. PostgreSQL with Drizzle and pgvector, Hono and tRPC APIs, and Claude/OpenAI integration.
- Infrastructure and security
- 7 Hetzner VPS servers, 30+ Docker containers, 18 PostgreSQL databases, CI/CD pipelines, SSH hardening, fail2ban, and quarterly security audits.
- Marketing and growth
- Paid search, paid social, email, content marketing, and CRO — primarily through the fractional CMO work at trent.marketing across B2B and B2C clients.
Background
Where the experience comes from
Six years of engineering leadership, five years of product management, and five years of marketing and brand work — all as a solo operator shipping and running products.
The span reads wide because it is wide, but the work is all variations on one thing: owning a product end to end. Every system I have shipped has forced me to think about pricing and positioning, user psychology, engineering architecture, infrastructure operations, and go-to-market at the same time, as the same person.
- Solo operator, not a team. I have never built behind a team. Every product, every brand, every piece of infrastructure is something I designed, built, shipped, and continue to operate myself.
- Product thinker first. Engineering is downstream of product strategy. I look at pricing, segmentation, and user psychology before I think about stacks or frameworks.
- Shipped, not prototyped. 10+ products in real production with real users and real uptime constraints. Most of them are still live and operating.
Why the breadth matters
I am most useful when a team needs product ownership across an entire system — not a specialist who hands off to other specialists. The right spot for me is product leadership at the intersection of e-commerce, subscriptions, and physical-digital products, or applied technical work in mission-driven organizations.
By the numbers
- Products shipped
- 10+
- Branded sites operated
- 145+
- Production VPS
- 7
- PostgreSQL databases
- 18
Looking at my work?
The portfolio is the fastest way to see what I build and how I think about it. Every project is something I shipped and operate myself.
“I design, build, ship, and operate products end to end without a team. Product strategy through infrastructure operations — same person, no hand-offs. The constraint is the point.”
Operating principles
- Start with pricing, positioning, and psychology — before writing a line of code.
- Read the system as it is, not as it is reported to be.
- Small, verifiable changes beat big rewrites almost every time.
- Security is operational practice, not an afterthought.
- Avoid hand-offs wherever possible. Strategy through operations, same person.
What sticks
What a collaborator or employer gets
These are the things that consistently come up in the work I do and the conversations I have about it.
- Strategy and execution in one person
- No hand-off from the person thinking about the product to the person building it. Strategy decisions survive contact with the codebase because the same person makes both.
- Speed from constraint
- Working solo means I move fast from idea to shipped code. Not because I am cutting corners, but because the decision cycle is one person deep.
- Transparency about what works
- I am comfortable telling a team what I am seeing, whether it is good or bad. Most of the useful conversations in consulting engagements start with that.
- Operational reliability
- 145+ branded sites, 7 VPS, 18 databases running in production. The ability to ship is table stakes; the ability to operate what you ship is the real work.
Outside of work
Squish Biscuit is the thing outside of work that became a thing at work. It is a pet content brand I built around my dog Captain. About 1.3 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — wholesome viral dog content that started as a passion project and turned into a real brand.
I care about pet welfare more broadly. Breed Standard is a planned counterpart to Squish Biscuit — focused on dog welfare, breed education, and pet safety rather than entertainment. Pet-industry work in registration, reunification, and safety products is one of the spaces I am most interested in applying the rest of my operating experience.
Based in Kelowna, BC. When I am not at a keyboard I am usually outside with Captain.