Well after about 5 years of work, there's a monthly subscription option for The Key Players Club. That's downplaying the code I just deployed. I've rewritten The Key Players Club's entire back-end to support monthly subscriptions, which will also support a lot of other billing-related goodies from Stripe down the road.
This effort had a lot of starts and stops because of burnout and I didn't have the time with my other TKP responsibilities. I began the project in August of 2021, and then I didn't write a line of code between August 2022 and March of 2024. It again became vaporware between April of 2024 and January 2025, and finally the last pause was between September 2025 and February 2026. Since then I leveraged the hell out of my nights, weekends and Claude Code.
I'd be kidding myself if I didn't think this would have a more significant impact if it was done 5 years ago, but either way it has been a blocker to the codebase that's been removed. What does that mean? Expect more site improvements, new features and a better experience on the website.
Now on the content side, I can begin a push to identify some new writers to compliment the existing team. To say I'm re-energized by the James Franklin era would be an understatement.
If anyone wants more nerdy details, feel free to ask.
Comments
Very cool! Thanks for all of your hard work on TKP. What's the monthly subscription cost?
It's $9.99 / month.
I appreciate everything you do to keep the lights on. Happy to support in my small way!
Happy to hear you are reinvigorated with the program Joe- TKP is one of my daily website checks and I appreciate all of your effort.
Just curious, was Claude a major factor in you getting over the hump? Did it help with some of the tedious work? My org is slow to adopt, but it starting to push AI (manufacturing)
Claude Code was a major factor. It didn't only help with tedious work, it helped with all the work. I delegated writing all the code to it. Where I interjected myself was during review and somewhat with planning the approach. What took som upfront effort from me was building out its infrastructure (agents, skills, etc), but now that it's in place I can move fast. It was super helpful at bridging the gaps between my down periods. Without, I would have had to re-familiarize myself with why I stopped, what I was doing next, what was already done. That would have taken my weeks, whereas it just understood the git history nearly instantaneously.
Thanks for your work Joe. The best time to plant a tree was 5 years ago, the next best time is now!
If Claude code/codex didn't exist, would this update have happened?
Edit, I'm a dumbass and completely skimmed over this line
Does this replace KPC? Is it just a monthly subscription to KPC? Is it something completely different?
It's just paying monthly for the same thing you're paying yearly for right now. I received a lot of feedback over the years from people who said the yearly price was out of their budget and they could afford monthly at $9.99.
Hopefully some of them decide to follow through and join. 😂
I know nothing about ones and zeros, but thank you for all of your hard work, Joe.
I know what you mean by that but the phrasing struck my funny bone so in the vein of sarcasm..../s
1) A 1 is a straight vertical line while a zero is a circle
2) I'd rather have 1 followed by 10 0's m($10,000,000,000 if we're talking $ than 0 followed by ten 1's ($0,111,111,111 3) though I'd be ok settling with a little over $110MM even if I'd prefer $$10BB
4) multiply anything by 1 ands it stays the same- multiply anything by zero and it declines to zero
5) and finally-unrelated-I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy!
TGIF and Happy Friday!
I've not yet had a frontal lobotomy so, it's tough to really know.
But, I think I understand what you are getting at.