I teach film in Spain. A year ago I had zero programming experience. Today I have a live product that monitors 12 eBay marketplaces and BrickOwl across 30+ countries, filters thousands of listings with AI, and sends real-time deal alerts to LEGO collectors.
The problem
The LEGO secondary market is worth ~$700M/year. Sellers constantly misprice sets — they don't know market values or just need to sell fast. But finding those deals means manually scrolling through eBay for hours across multiple countries. Nobody had built a proper deal radar for this.
What I built
ScoutLoot scans listings in real-time, compares prices against market data, calculates exact shipping costs to your country (including post-Brexit UK import charges), and runs every listing through a 20-step AI quality filter. If a genuine deal appears, you get an instant alert via Telegram, Discord, email, or push notification.
How I built it with no coding background
Claude for architecture decisions and strategic planning, Claude Code for server-side implementation, and a lot of testing and iterating. The stack is Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, and BullMQ on a single DigitalOcean server. This is my second project — my first was a 30,000-line crypto bot, also built entirely with AI assistance.
Where I am now
Pre-revenue, preparing for official launch. The product is live and working. Revenue model is freemium — free tier with limited alerts, Pro at €4.99/month, plus eBay affiliate commissions.
Happy to answer questions about building with AI as a non-developer, or about the LEGO secondary market — it's much bigger than most people think.
Respect. Going from zero coding to a live multi-market monitoring system is not trivial.
A few things I’d think about early, especially for a deal-alert platform:
• Are you using official eBay and BrickOwl APIs, or scraping? If scraping, how are you handling rate limits, IP bans, and terms compliance?
• With real-time alerts, how are you preventing abuse, for example someone trying to reverse-engineer your filters or flood the system?
Concept is strong. If the alerts are fast, accurate, and legally compliant with marketplace rules, collectors will stick around.