June cohort · Founding price £499 · Bookings close in

Build your own business tools with AI.

A four-week live group for small business founders who want to stop just using AI for emails and start building tools for the way their business actually works. No code required. No developer needed. You bring the business problem. We build it together.

Dates
1 June to 22 June 2026
Time
Mondays · 11:00 BST · 90 minutes
Format
Live Zoom + lifetime recordings + Builders Circle
Investment
£499 + VAT (founding price, regular £999)
Reserve my seat
Founding June cohort pricing. VAT is added at checkout. Free tier of Claude is fine. No credit card needed for tools. No-quibble refund during session one.
About this page

The June Cohort.

This page is for The June 2026 cohort of the Build with AI Bootcamp.

We run one cohort each month. The June cohort is the founding cohort, with founding pricing of £499 + VAT. From the July cohort onwards, the standard price of £999 + VAT applies. Bookings for the next month's cohort open on the first of the previous month.

If you're reading this in early June and bookings have closed, the July cohort details will be available from this page.

Why the June cohort matters

The founding group shapes what comes next.

The June cohort is the founding cohort of the Build with AI Bootcamp. Founding cohorts get more than a price discount.

You'll be the people I refine the bootcamp around. Your questions shape what makes cohort 2 better. Your builds become the case studies I share with future founders. Your feedback gets acted on directly.

Founding cohort members get the founding price (£499 + VAT vs £999 from cohort 2). They also get a 30-minute 1:1 with me after the bootcamp, something that won't be included as standard from cohort 2 onwards. And they get the relationships that come from being the first ones in, when the group is smallest and the attention is at its highest.

If you've been waiting for an entry point into building with AI, this is it. Founding cohorts aren't repeated.

First, an honest question

Is building with AI the right move for a small business right now?

Most founders' first instinct with AI is to use it for content. Drafting emails. Writing marketing copy. Summarising documents. That's all useful, but it's also where every employee in your business can use AI on their own with a £20 ChatGPT subscription. It doesn't create real advantage, it just makes existing tasks faster.

The strategic move, the one that genuinely changes the economics of a small business, is building bespoke software for your specific processes. The thing your business runs on, made for you, not adapted from generic SaaS. That used to require £20,000 and a developer. Now it requires £499 and four weeks.

This is the move most founders are missing. Building with AI isn't another thing on your AI to-do list. It's the move that gives you something your competitors don't have: tools designed around how your business actually works.

If you've already got AI handling your content and you're wondering what's next, this is what's next.

First, an honest filter

Who this is and isn't for.

This is for you if

  • You run a small business and you can see processes that should be small apps but never get built
  • You can't code, and you don't intend to learn to code in the traditional sense
  • You want to build practical internal tools, customer tools, dashboards, calculators, or workflow helpers
  • You want to see this work properly, not watch another slick demo on social media
  • You would rather understand the patterns yourself than always rely on a developer
  • You can commit roughly 4-6 hours a week for four weeks

This isn't for you if

  • You're already building with AI regularly and want advanced developer techniques
  • You're a developer looking for a CS-style course on AI-assisted coding
  • You want a polished, production-ready application by the end of four weeks
  • You want someone to build it for you
  • You think AI is just hype and are looking for a reason to confirm it
Why most first attempts fail

You may have tried this once. It didn't quite work.

REASON 01

You picked the wrong project

Most first attempts fail because the project was too ambitious. People pick something that needs auth, integrations, and edge cases handled, then quit when it falls over. Week 1 is about choosing a first build that is actually buildable.

REASON 02

You didn't know the prompting patterns

Building with AI isn't just describing an idea and hoping the model sorts it out. There are specific patterns that work and specific ones that send the AI in circles. We work through both, hands-on.

REASON 03

You couldn't deploy it

The tutorials often end at "look, it runs on my laptop." That's where the real work usually starts. By week 4 your build is on the internet, at a real URL, and you understand how it got there.

REASON 04

You had no one to ask when it broke

Building alone is hard. When the AI does something unexpected and you don't know why, the tutorial can't help. The group can, and after the bootcamp the Builders Circle keeps that support going.

What you'll walk away with

Four weeks, four things you keep forever.

01 / THE SKILL

You'll know how to build with AI

Not in theory. You'll have done it, with your own hands, on a real problem from your business. You'll know which prompting patterns work, which to avoid, and how to recover when the AI drifts off course.

02 / THE TOOLKIT

Your setup is ready to keep building

Your tools, your accounts, your workspace, your deployment platform. Everything configured before week 1 and refined over the bootcamp so you can sit down and start a new build without setting everything up again.

03 / THE FIRST BUILD

A real build, in your hands

You'll spend the four weeks building a real tool for your business. The skill is guaranteed. The build is the vehicle. If you turn up and put the time in, you'll learn how to build with AI properly. Where your specific build ends up depends on what you've chosen and the time you've put in, but that's true of any craft, and learning the craft is the point.

04 / THE COMMUNITY

Three months in the Builders Circle

Once the bootcamp ends you stay in the Builders Circle for three months. A private community of fellow Build with AI founders, with a weekly live Q&A group call and ongoing async support between sessions. The first months after the bootcamp are where most people quit. The Builders Circle is designed to be the reason you don't.

What could you build?

Real things, made for your business.

Here are the kinds of internal tools and customer-facing apps that small business founders build in groups like this one. None of these need a developer. None of them require integrations beyond what you've already got. All of them are realistic for a non-technical founder to attempt in four weeks.

Operations and admin

  • A booking system that integrates with your calendar, tailored to how you actually book work
  • An internal task tracker designed around your specific workflow, not adapted from generic SaaS
  • A client onboarding checklist tool that ensures nothing is missed
  • A meeting note formatter that turns rough notes into structured summaries
  • A holiday and leave request system that fits a small team

Customer-facing

  • A calculator that helps customers work out their costs or savings
  • A smart intake form that asks intelligent follow-up questions based on customer answers
  • A self-service FAQ tool trained on your actual support content
  • A quote generator that produces a tailored estimate from a few inputs
  • A simple status page where customers can check their order or project progress

Internal data and reporting

  • A dashboard pulling your key business metrics into one screen
  • A lightweight CRM tailored to how you actually track relationships
  • A customer feedback collector with automatic categorisation
  • A simple inventory tracker built around your specific stock model
  • A team training site for your SOPs with progress tracking

These are starting points, not a fixed menu. Your project comes from your business. What we work through in week one is helping you pick something that's both useful and realistic for the time you've got.

The toolkit

Free tools, free tier accounts, no credit card needed.

We standardise on Claude as the primary AI because it's strong at this kind of build work, but if you're already invested in another tool we show you how the patterns translate. The free tier of everything is enough to complete the bootcamp.

ClaudePRIMARY
ChatGPT
Cursor
Lovable
v0
VercelDEPLOY
The 4 weeks

How the June cohort actually runs.

What a session feels like

Each Monday session is 90 minutes on Zoom. The first 30 minutes is me walking through the patterns and concepts for the week, with screen-share so you see exactly what I'm doing. The middle 40 minutes is hands-on, your hands, on your build, with me available to look at your screen if you want, to answer questions live in the group, and to keep the energy moving. The last 20 minutes is debrief, what worked, what got stuck, what to try this week.

You don't have to share your screen if you don't want to. You can stay on mute, take notes, follow along, and apply it after. But the founders who get the most out of this are the ones who use the live time to actually build, alongside the rest of the group.

WEEK 1 · MONDAY 1 JUNE
11:00 BST · 90 min

Pick the right first build

What makes a good first AI build project and what makes a disaster. As a group we work through examples, share candidates, and each of you picks one project to focus on for the next three weeks. The rule is simple: small, useful, well-defined, and close to a real business process.

You leave week 1 with a clear focus for your build, plus a backlog of future builds worth doing once you've got the pattern down.

Outcome: a buildable first project, and a backlog
WEEK 2 · MONDAY 8 JUNE
11:00 BST · 90 min

Build it live, hands-on

Your hands on the keyboard. I work through the prompting patterns I use every day with the group building alongside. We cover how to brief the AI properly, how to read the output critically, how to course-correct when it drifts, and how to keep the build moving when it gets stuck.

It'll be fiddly. That's the point. Building with AI looks effortless in demos and is more like skilled direction in real life.

Outcome: your first build, working locally
WEEK 3 · MONDAY 15 JUNE
11:00 BST · 90 min

Make it real

The bit between "it works on my laptop" and "the team can actually use this." We cover data, how to load real data into your tool, where to store it, what's safe and what isn't. We cover the things that turn a demo into something usable.

By the end of week 3 your build is doing real work with real inputs, not just a hello-world demo.

Outcome: your build is doing real work, or you understand exactly what's blocking it
WEEK 4 · MONDAY 22 JUNE
11:00 BST · 90 min

Deploy it, then look at what's next

We work through how to deploy an AI-built app to a real URL on the internet. No SSH keys, no DNS panic, no server admin. By the end of session four you'll know how to deploy. Whether your specific build is fully ready depends on what you picked in week one and the time you've put in. The deployment skill is what you keep either way.

Then we get honest about what comes next. What's a prototype, what's production-ready, what would the next builds on your shortlist look like, and how to keep going with three months of Builders Circle support behind you.

Outcome: the deployment skill, a clear path forward, and your build ready for the world
Your host

Nick Butcher.

I've spent 31 years in technology. I've seen every hype cycle since email, the actual email, the one I installed onto people's desktops when they were still asking why they needed it. AI is the first technology in a long time that's changed how I work day-to-day.

I build things with AI every day. Landing pages, internal tools, prototypes, automations. The page you're reading now was built with the same patterns I teach. I'm not an influencer who started learning AI in 2023. I'm a practitioner who happens to teach what I do.

CTRL+ALT+AI is the brand I've built around practical AI guidance for small business founders. New videos on YouTube, practical guides on the site, and monthly group bootcamps for founders who want to learn this properly, hands-on, with someone watching what they do.

What's included

Everything you need to actually do this.

  • 4-Week Live BootcampFour weekly 90-minute sessions on Zoom. Hands-on, working through your own first build alongside the group. Live Q&A every session.
  • Lifetime replay accessEvery session recorded. Watch as many times as you need, forever.
  • The Build with AI Prompting PackThe exact prompting patterns I use, including the brief structure, the course-correction prompts, and templates for common build types.
  • Three months in the Builders CircleWeekly live Q&A group call plus async community access for the three months after your bootcamp ends. Continued access available afterwards for £49/month + VAT.
  • 30-minute 1:1 with Nick (founding cohort only)A follow-up call in the two weeks after the bootcamp. Bring a build you're working on, a question you're stuck on, or a plan for what's next. From cohort 2 onwards this becomes an optional paid add-on.
Reserve your seat
The Build with AI Bootcamp · June cohort
£499one-off
+ VAT
Founding price for the June cohort. Standard price from the July cohort onwards is £999 + VAT.
  • 4 live weekly sessions (90 minutes each)
  • Lifetime session recordings
  • The Build with AI Prompting Pack
  • 3 months in the Builders Circle (weekly Q&A + community)
  • 30-min 1:1 with Nick (founding cohort only)
SECURE·STRIPE·VAT ADDED AT CHECKOUT
No-quibble refund.

Turn up to week 1, and if at any point in that first session you decide it's not for you, drop me a line and I'll refund you in full. No forms, no questions, no awkward email back-and-forth. The bootcamp should earn its place in your week. If it doesn't on day one, that's on me.

Frequently asked

The questions everyone asks.

What is "building with AI"? I've heard people call it vibe coding too.

They're the same thing. "Vibe coding" was a casual term Andrej Karpathy used in 2024 that caught on as a buzzword. The activity is the same either way: describing what you want in plain English, having an AI write the code, iterating until it works. We call it "building with AI" because that's what it actually is and because the buzzword will date faster than the activity.

Do I need to know how to code?

No. That's the entire point. The AI writes the code. Your job is to describe clearly what you want and to read what comes back critically. If you can write a clear email to a freelancer, you can do this.

Do I need to pay for Claude or any other AI tool?

No. The free tier of Claude is enough to complete the bootcamp. You may eventually want to upgrade if you start building regularly, but you don't need to spend anything on tools to do the bootcamp itself.

Why is it £499 when other courses are £47?

Because this is genuinely different from a course. You're not watching pre-recorded videos and posting in a forum. You're in a small live group of founders, working hands-on for four weeks, with three months of Builders Circle access afterwards. £499 + VAT reflects what is actually being delivered. It's also the June cohort founding price. The July cohort opens at £999 + VAT.

I've already tried building with AI once and it didn't work. Why will this time be different?

Most first attempts fail for predictable reasons: wrong project, wrong prompting patterns, no path to deployment, no one to ask when it breaks. The bootcamp addresses all four explicitly. You work through the patterns in a structured way with someone who's been working with AI for years, alongside other founders attempting the same kind of build.

What if I'm using ChatGPT or Cursor or another tool?

You're welcome to bring your preferred tool. We standardise on Claude because it's strong for this kind of work and the patterns are easiest to teach from a shared baseline. But the patterns translate. If you're already paying for ChatGPT, Cursor, or Lovable, you don't need to switch.

Will I have a polished, production-ready tool by the end?

No, and I want to be straight with you about that. The bootcamp's job is to teach you the skill. The tool you build during it is the practice ground. You should expect a working prototype that proves the concept and is good enough to demo to your team. Production-ready takes more iteration than four weeks allow.

What if I miss a session?

Every session is recorded and the replay is yours for life. The bootcamp works best live because we work alongside each other and you can ask questions in real time, but if life gets in the way of one week, the replay catches you up.

What's the Builders Circle?

The Builders Circle is the private community for past Build with AI Bootcamp participants. Every bootcamp participant gets three months of access included with the bootcamp. It includes a weekly 60-minute live Q&A group call where you can bring questions, share builds, and get unstuck. After your three months, ongoing access is £49/month + VAT, cancel anytime. Your bootcamp session recordings stay with you forever, regardless of whether you continue Builders Circle membership.

How much time will it take outside the live sessions?

Plan for 2-4 hours a week between sessions to do the actual building work. The live time is 90 minutes a week. Without the between-session work, you won't get the outcome, so be honest with yourself about whether you can find the time before signing up.

Will there be more cohorts?

Yes. New groups run monthly from July. The June cohort is £499 + VAT. The July cohort opens for booking on 1 June at £999 + VAT.
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The June cohort closes Sunday 31 May.

The founding cohort of the Build with AI Bootcamp runs Monday 1 to Monday 22 June. You'll be the first ones through. You'll shape what the bootcamp becomes.

£499 + VAT, plus a 30-minute 1:1 with me as a founding cohort benefit. Bookings close Sunday 31 May. The July cohort opens for booking on 1 June at £999 + VAT, without the 1:1.

Reserve my seat