Bringing an idea to life. What took months now takes a weekend

Hey all,

I’ve been a developer for a decade now and have built a ton of personal projects that have made a little cash. I also work for a product agency, so going from 0 to 1 is my bread and butter. While I can build an end-to-end product, I’m lacking in a few key areas, like UI design and marketing. I’m also finding that as I get older, I don’t have the luxury of spending my evenings and weekends building side project that nobody uses.

Why am I saying all this? It’s because I wanted to validate an idea for a new project within a few days, but my brain was telling me that it would take weeks to plan, design and build. I have a wedding coming up, so I can’t spend all my time on a shiny new project 😅.

As for the idea itself, I wanted to solve a problem I’ve faced whenever I’ve tried learning a language. I'm of Greek Cypriot descent and have been trying to learn the language but there’s no single resource that trains all four skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) in a way that feels cohesive or engaging. So I wanted to take on the challenge of building exactly that. But I didn’t want to release something fully-featured into the world and discover there’s no demand for it.

So with that context, I gave myself two goals for this project:

1. Bring something to life as quickly as possible and get real-user feedback
2. Lean into Claude as much as possible, especially for the things I’m not great at

Bringing Speak Greek to life in one weekend

Before I deployed anything to the web, I wanted to validate whether what I wanted to build was feasible. Can I create a tool that teaches and tests people across the four key language skills?

I wrote down some ideas for exercises I wanted to include, and Claude spun up a few examples. I then set up an ElevenLabs account to generate the audio for listening examples, and to also turn the student’s spoken Greek to text.

Shockingly, this part of the process only took an hour or so. I’ve integrated with my fair share of APIs, so there were no issues setting up with capturing the user’s audio and sending it to ElevenLabs. Once I created a dozen or so different exercises, I went ahead and started thinking about the branding.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not great at coming up with a brand. While I have done branding work in the past, it’s a very time consuming process for me, and I know that it would take me longer than a weekend to come up with something that wasn’t balls.

This led me to use a tool that I’ve had my eye on for a while, Impeccable. The landing page alone is beautiful enough for me to trust that it would do a decent job. Within a few minutes it delivered a clean and simple interface with consistent spacings, typography, colour, and hierarchy. There is even a “live” mode, where I could select a part of the UI I wanted to change, and it would present me with three different options. I would choose my favourite, and go from there.

I recognise that an AI-generated design system may feel uninspired or be inconsistent, and these are things that a good UI designer would spot in a heartbeat. So given the choice, I would work with a strong UI designer any day.

I then made a first pass at creating a landing page. This meant getting an email marketing service set up. I went with Loops, and it was my first time using it. Mainly because it had a stripped back feature set and very generous free tier.

For the landing page I wanted only the essentials:

1. A headline that communicated the number 1 value proposition
2. A way to capture emails for interested users
3. An interactive demo for testing the four skills

I did a first pass at structuring the landing page myself, but I wanted to give extra care here. A bad landing page that’s not mobile-friendly, has poor messaging or is poorly structured can waste opportunities to win over curious learners. To ensure I wouldn’t let that happen, I tried out Garry Tan’s Office Hours skill. I used it to evaluate the effectiveness of the landing page, and discover how to refine it

The two key improvements it suggested (and I wholeheartedly agreed with) were:

1. Bring the exercises immediately under the hero
2. To not ask for an email until after the product’s value has been demonstrated

Previously the exercises were too far down, and I was prompting the user to register the interest right in the hero. Both big mistakes in hindsight.

Once that was done, I spent a bit more time setting up the technical infrastructure. For the technically curious, here’s the tech stack:

• Svelte (UI Framework)
• Cloudflare (Site hosting)
• Supabase (Auth and DB)
• Loops (Email marketing)
• PostHog (Cookieless product analytics)
• ElevenLabs (Speech-to-text and Text-to-speech)
• Claude (Personalised exercise feedback)
• Lemon Squeezy (Payments) - Not yet implemented

So… what do people think?

Earlier on this week, I shared the project on the r/greek subreddit. While the post didn’t go viral, I got 14 upvotes, I did get five emails and two pieces of qualitative feedback: the core idea is great and they like the immersive aspect of the exercises.

While five emails is not validation. It’s making me confident that there are people out there who’d love to see where this project goes. My next steps are:

• Keep pushing forward with an SEO strategy
• Share progress on appropriate message boards
• Create the first unit and make it available for free

So… what do I think?

My thinking around building personal projects is shifting. This is something that would’ve previously taken me a month, and now I managed to get an idea out into the world within a weekend. And it wasn’t just a simple landing page or a questionnaire, but an interactive demo page that’s polished and has product analytics baked in.

I’ve been a bit conservative when it came to vibe coding (prompting your way to a codebase you don't fully understand). As someone who’s built software for 10 years, I like to be in control. But I’m starting to treat Claude Code less like a black-box of slop, and more of a programming partner whose code I review and tweak. I still feel in control, but the tedious work is almost completely gone.

Thanks for reading this far! If you happen to be interested in learning Greek, or know someone who is, then please check out speakgreek.co.uk. I’d love to hear any and all feedback that you have!