It all started with me watching a YouTube tutorial on how to use Claude. I thought: why not actually test what they're saying, in real life? I'm lucky enough to have some time in between running the business in Goa and retreat cheffing in Portugal. A laptop, some internet. So — let's go.
A year ago, if you'd told me I'd have a live marketplace platform — database, authentication, transactional emails, a working chef directory — built by me, solo, with zero coding background, I wouldn't have believed you. Here's the toolstack that got Tulsisphere from idea to MVP, and what each piece replaced.
**v0** wrote the actual app — pages, forms, features — from plain-language prompts. One change per prompt, always ending with "don't touch anything else." Replaced: a frontend developer.
**Supabase** runs the data — chef, venue, and facilitator profiles — plus magic-link login, no passwords. Replaced: a backend engineer and a DBA.
**Vercel** hosts it. Every published change goes live with no server to configure. Replaced: DevOps.
**Vercel Blob** stores every profile photo and hands back a public URL, no auth headaches. Replaced: a cloud storage engineer.
**Resend** sends confirmation emails that land like they come from a real company, not a random notification. Replaced: email infrastructure.
**YAMM + Google Sheets** handle the mail merge for waitlist updates and outreach — personal-feeling emails to hundreds of people. Replaced: a marketing platform.
**Later.com and Canva** run the content — scheduling and visuals for a consistent public presence. Replaced: a social media manager.
**Claude** is the thinking partner underneath all of it — where I work out what a form should ask, debug a broken email check, decide what ships next. Replaced: the co-founder I don't have.
"None of these tools are magic alone. What's new is that they compose."
One non-technical person can now string together a frontend builder, a database, hosting, email, and an AI thinking partner, and end up with something real, for a few thousand dollars and a lot of evenings.
Tulsisphere still isn't finished — no first match yet, no paid tier, plenty of rough edges. But it exists, and I built it.
I'm still treating this as a bit of a test — how far can one person get, alone, with AI doing the heavy lifting? But somewhere along the way it stopped being just an experiment. Seeing how many of you are following along, asking questions, genuinely curious where this goes — that's become real motivation of its own.
I might hire a professional developer down the line. For now, I'm learning a ridiculous amount doing this solo — SQL, database schemas, all the nerdy stuff. Maybe it's not that surprising, though: long before Tulsisphere, I spent years in business controlling, buried in master tables every month for financial closing. That same instinct — does this data actually hold up — translates almost directly to building a database from scratch. Different industry, same discipline.
Which is a strange thing to say for someone whose main hobbies are the kitchen and the yoga mat. But here we are.
— Balbina