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Lessons Learned Building aServerless-First Businesswith AI
How two people took an idea and turned it into a real product — serverless-first, event-driven, and AI-native. What worked, and what we would never do again.
Mark Sailes
Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
Lee Gilmore
AWS Serverless Hero & Serverless Advocate
A day with the AWS community in Manchester
A full day of talks from the AWS community in Manchester. We are on stage together to tell the story of taking a business idea to a real, paying product — built serverless-first, with an AI-native workflow — and the lessons we would pass on to our past selves.
- Date & time
- Thursday, 1 October 2026
- 8:30 AM – 7:00 PM BST
- Venue
- Victoria Warehouse
- Victoria Warehouse, Manchester
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Browse coursesWhat Lee Gilmore & Mark Sailes will cover
Two serverless-first fans, one product, and an AI-native way of working. Here is the shape of the story — the detail is for the room.
From idea to product, with two people
In March we took a business idea and shipped a real product. We share the shape of what it takes to run a full platform without an ops team behind you.
Why we built serverless-first
Being serverless-first fans, we built with that mindset from day one. We talk about why that was the right call for a small team.
Event-driven at the heart
The main event — how one central event bus became the backbone of the product. Producers never know their consumers, so one event fans out to email, certificates, video and more.
Clean code, DDD and evolutionary design
Why hexagonal, domain-driven code is survival for a small team — and what makes the codebase legible to an AI so it builds in our style, first time.
How we build: Kiro, our AI-DLC and the harness
Steering docs, skills, hooks and CI gates that tailor AI output to our conventions and keep AI-speed safe — so the agent moves fast without shipping slop.
What we would never do again
The honest bit — the missteps and the trade-offs we would warn our past selves about.
Build modular, keep it clean, and put events at the heart.
Small, well-bounded modules and clean, DDD code stay legible — to us and to the AI. Event-driven architecture is the backbone that keeps every capability decoupled, so producers never know their consumers. That is what lets a two-person team keep saying yes to features.
Thank you — ask us anything
Come and find us after the talk — we would love to hear about what you are building and talk architecture.
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