u/Easy_Planner

I’m a QA engineer, not a developer.

I don’t really know programming languages deeply. I took some Python courses, I understand basic structure, and sometimes I can read code if it’s simple enough. That’s about it.
But at some point, I got curious: how far could I actually go if I tried to build a real product with AI?

I often have too many things going on at once, and because of that, I forget very basic things, or some main thing, idk when I started, but my brain got overloaded, maybe it's mental or just life goes very fast, idk. Not because they are unimportant, but because my head is full. I tried several planners and task apps, but most of them felt either overloaded, too complex, or just uncomfortable to use regularly.

At first, I thought: okay, maybe I can build something simpler for myself.
From every open window I've heard a lot of stories about apps that some schooler built with an old granny's laptops, e.t.c

And I started

I started with a dialogue in GPT, but the first question was right -"how tf could I do this, can you help me, what should I do?"
We discussed a lot: my pain, idea,

He said - Figma prototype.
And honestly, when I saw that something could be clicked and looked like an app, I thought: “Wow, this is almost real.”

That was probably my first big misunderstanding.

A clickable prototype and a real working product are very different things.

In the beginning, my process was basically just chatting with GPT. I would describe a feature, ask for code, paste errors back, ask again, and repeat. It worked for small things, but very quickly, the whole process became messy.

Then I tried using Vercel’s AI tools and auto-agents. That helped me understand the direction better, but I also realised that discussing features only in chat becomes chaos fast. You lose decisions, context gets blurry, and it becomes hard to understand what was actually planned.

And then i thought, wtf, a'm good at my job, i know how the real process should go

And from that point magic started

I've created trello, notion, figma project, e.t.c
Started to describe features at first, work with an AI after this to make them better, also i found a nice "feature-discovery-flow" skill for Codex, but it will be slightly later

I moved to a more structured process with Codex app. That changed a lot for me.

At some point, my friend joined me. He had an iPhone(i'm an Android guy), was also excited to try building something real, and together we started figuring out things we had never worked with before: Expo, iOS builds, domains, Resend, landing pages, app release flows, and a lot of small details that I honestly didn’t ever touch and only know about their existence (sometimes even didn't know :D ).

Instead of “let’s ask AI to build a feature”, I started writing specs for each feature: what it should do, what cases it should handle, and what the expected behaviour is. As a QA, this felt much more natural to me.

And then came another funny realisation.

I thought releasing an app would be something like: click “release” and done.

Of course, I was very wrong.

The release itself turned out to be a whole separate layer of work: preparation, testing, store requirements, accounts, builds, landing page, emails, onboarding, small bugs, edge cases, and all the boring but necessary things that make a product feel real.

It was like a flashback from times when you're relocating from one apartment to another, when you've packed all the major stuff, but those little things that were left took a lot of time ><'

But eventually, we launched.

And then something even more surprising happened: we got our first few users :D

Not thousands. Not some crazy overnight success story. But real people started using something that began as my personal experiment with AI.

The MOST important thing, though, is that I started using my own product every day.

And honestly, that felt amazing. It still does.

After that, I started thinking more seriously about marketing, cus why can't i show this product to the people, and maybe make my life slightly easier :D

I tried posting on TikTok and Instagram, making short videos, also in AI (sad that Sora has gone...), explaining the idea, showing the product. It was useful, but it didn’t bring a lot of users yet.

So now I’m trying to learn the next part: how to talk about the product, find the right users, and build with feedback instead of guessing.

The idea is still simple:

A planner that feels lightweight, easy to use, and not overwhelming. Something community-driven, where users can help shape what gets built next (we've even made a feedback form in UI for this). The subscription price is meant to be around the price of a coffee per month.

The biggest lesson so far: AI can help a lot, especially if you are not a developer, but it doesn’t remove the need to think clearly. If anything, it makes structure even more important.

You still need specs
You still need testing
You still need product decisions
You still need to understand what you’re building and why.

I started this thinking I would just build a simple planner with AI.

It turned into learning how software products are actually made.

For those of you building SaaS products, especially as non-engineers:

What was the thing you most underestimated when you started?

P.S. This text was also partially made with AI, of course. I’m too lazy to write such a long story from scratch, so I turned my voice notes into something more readable :D