Nail it or fail it. Either way you leave with a website.
Type stevenkostrzewski.com into a browser right now and nothing happens. On Thursday, August 20, 2026 we're going to fix that live, in an hour, while you fix yours.
It runs like a baking show. Two rounds, a Panic Button, and a vote at the end on whose came out best. Bring a laptop and a glass of something.
Thursday, August 20, 2026 · 5:00 to 6:00 PM PT · Online
It comes out wrong. That's the show.
There's a show where amateurs try to recreate an elaborate cake they found on the internet, and it comes out looking nothing like the picture. Nobody gets humiliated. That's the format, and that's this.
You'll see a beautiful reference site. You'll have an hour. Yours will not look like the reference, and at :55 we'll put them side by side anyway and laugh about it.
Steve is the one going first. He's building from nothing on screen the whole time, so you get to watch the mistakes happen live instead of seeing a finished thing and wondering how it got that way.
Three shapes.
You pick one at :10. The people who finish are the ones who showed up already knowing which. The ones who don't spend the first ten minutes deciding, and ten minutes is a sixth of the event.
The one-pager.
The portfolio.
The one-idea site.
Run of show.
Pour something. Meet your judges.
One sentence each on what you're building. This is the entire planning phase and that's on purpose.
Builder's Choice.
Pick one of the three shapes and get something on the internet. It's allowed to be ugly. It is not allowed to be a preview link. Whoever lands first wears the gold favicon, which is exactly as prestigious as it sounds.
Nail It or Fail It.
The real build, against the reference. One Panic Button each: hit it and one of us is on your screen for three minutes, no questions asked. Save it. You'll want it at :40, not :26.
Hands off keyboards.
Whatever is live is what gets judged. Yours, on a real URL, on the actual internet.
Reference on the left. Yours on the right.
We put them side by side, everyone votes, and somebody wins a badge. This is the part people stay for.
Reference on the left. Yours on the right.
Everybody drops their URL, we put it next to the reference, and the room votes. The winner also gets posted by both of us on LinkedIn the next morning.
The show gives away $10,000 and a trophy. We give away an SVG you can paste onto the site you just built. Only one of those two prizes replicates itself.
Bring this
- A laptop. Any laptop.
- A glass of wine. Not negotiable in spirit, entirely negotiable in practice.
- One thing about yourself you'd put on a website. That's the whole content strategy.
- The prework, done. It takes ten minutes and we send it two days early.
The prework
We'll email it 48 hours before. It takes ten minutes: get Claude installed, pick a photo of yourself, and write two sentences about what you do.
That's the whole thing. Do it with wine too, we're never going to know.
Two judges.
Chad Holdorf
Steve Kostrzewski
Questions.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. That's the entire point of the hour.
What if mine looks nothing like the reference?
Correct. That's the format. The whole thing is built on that gap.
Is the Panic Button real?
Yes. One each, three minutes, one of us live on your screen. Use it late.
Do I need to buy a domain?
No. You'll want one by :45. They're about $12 and we'll show you where.
Is the wine mandatory?
No. It is, however, strongly indicated.
Will it be recorded?
Yes, and you'll get the recording. The useful part still happens live.
Ten seats.
Ten, because two judges can't unblock more than that in an hour. This one is free. The next one won't be. You'll get the prework 48 hours ahead and the link the morning of.
(Fine print: we are not affiliated with the show, or with Netflix, and nobody here is a pastry chef. We just like the format, and between us we own an unreasonable number of cake pans.)