Build Week is KmikeyM’s annual platform development sprint: a time-boxed run of three to five working days in which Mike Merrill and developer Aaron Parecki work through the year’s accumulated feature requests for kmikeym.com and vote.kmikeym.com, ship a batch of improvements, and announce them to shareholders. It is one of the project’s recurring institutions alongside the Shareholder Summit and Shareholder Poker, and much of what this wiki documents (fractional shares, Memberships, Policy Votes, the share wall) first shipped during one.
How it works
Feature requests collect year-round in a backlog tool called Change Map. Build Week opens by triaging that backlog into a scope list, and ideas that miss the cut go back in the queue for the next edition. Every edition starts with unglamorous dependency and maintenance updates before the new features (“Boring, but important!”, as the 2024 announcement put it).
The work is done by Aaron Parecki, who has maintained the platform for years and is himself a shareholder. Greg Borenstein wrote the original site code, which Mike credited in 2023 as “still running my life sixteen years later.” Development work is invoiced and paid in shares, so a Build Week typically ends, some months later, with a share issuance that shareholders can see in the Shareholder Registry.
The editions
Build Week 2023 (February, four days) was the first. It kicked off with a livestream and shipped homepage improvements including a Federal Reserve economic data widget, a Buy Shares Now flow, Dollar Cost Averaging subscriptions, a one-transaction /buy page, offer warnings on the Trade page, a PHP 8.2 upgrade for the voting code, Vacation Mode (the admin can pause the market with a note), and the beta of Policy Votes, the open-ended votes described on Politics. Recap: news.kmikeym.com/build-week-2023.
Build Week 2024 ran in two parts (February 17 to 19 and March 18 to 22) because of scheduling constraints, under the theme of making KmikeyM more sustainable. Part one covered maintenance (Rails, Mailersend, Twilio), moved payments from Gumroad to Stripe, and introduced fractional shares (at launch, to three decimal places; see How the Market Works for how they work as of now). Part two built the share wall and implemented the Membership Share, whose enabling proposal passed with 81% approval. Recap: news.kmikeym.com/build-week-2024.
Build Week 2025 was planned for spring, slipped to late August, and delivered the largest structural change so far: the Membership Share went live and the membership tiers launched, putting vote details, the order book, the Leaderboard, the User Directory, and the Discord invite behind shareholder access. Current tiers and pricing are on Memberships. Existing accounts were grandfathered through the end of 2025. Mike also acknowledged missing his stretch goal of a shareholder gambling game, a feature that has now been reached for and missed in more than one edition. Announcement: news.kmikeym.com/membership.
Status
As of August 2026, no Build Week 2026 has been announced. The 2025 edition remains the most recent.
Related
Memberships · How the Market Works · How to Buy a Share · Politics · Shareholder Registry · KmikeyM Economics · Shareholder Poker