A travel gym drop-in app, built solo with Claude Code in the loop. I set a six-week public deadline and missed it. This page is the honest version — wins, blockers, and what I'd do differently.
Sprint plan locked. Six weeks, one product, shipping to droppingin.app on 7 June. Domain secured, Supabase project spun up, first Lovable scaffold in progress. Blossom Advisory homepage now surfaces the build publicly — no going back.
Week 1 goal: end-to-end scaffold with auth, gym list, and one search flow. Working, ugly, real.
7 June came and went. I set a public deadline, and I didn't hold it — so the countdown is gone rather than quietly ticking past a date I'd already blown. No weekly cadence either; I promised Monday updates and stopped after week one. Both of those are on me.
What actually happened: I underestimated the unglamorous half. Vibe coding gets you a working screen in an afternoon. It does not get you working transactional email, sane DNS, anonymised personal data, or a search that fails properly when there are no results. That's the work that's been eating the weeks.
Where DropIn is now: search works, gym detail pages render with real drop-in pricing, and the core flow holds together. Still open before it goes live — a dead "How it works" link, a search that returns everything instead of nothing when a city isn't covered, and no booking action on the gym page.
Also in flight: GreenR, a rated recruiter directory I've wanted to build for years. Two products, one lesson — shipping is a muscle, and the boring part is where it gets built.
No new launch date until I can hold one.
I've spent 17 years around technology transformations. Advising, running programs, translating the jargon. But the world has changed. You don't need permission to build a real product anymore.
DropIn is proof for me — and for anyone paying attention — that a non-technical operator, with Claude in the loop, can go from idea to a real product. Not a prototype. A real thing, at a real domain, that solves a real problem for travelling athletes who want to drop into a gym. It has taken longer than the six weeks I claimed. It is still getting built.
Building it in public is the whole point. Because if it fails, you'll see that too. That's the deal.