👋 I can't code. This year I built a CRM, a website and a software company anyway
I'm Olga, 43, a business person with no technical background. Fifteen years in HR, then a portrait photography studio. I have never been a developer.
Today I do work I used to hire entire teams for. I built my studio's website. I built a full CRM that runs my business, with payments, booking, automation and an AI assistant that knows every client. I did the CRM by myself, in four months.
I did it with Operum, a team of six AI agents that my co-founder Alex and I created. And here is the part people don't believe: we build Operum with Operum. The whole company is just the two of us. No employees, no agency.
We do it while raising three kids with no outside help, in a country we moved to ten years ago.
I'm not telling you this to impress you. I'm telling you because a year ago I was sure this kind of work wasn't for people like me. Now I do it for myself, and we're building it for other founders and creative people who have the idea and the expertise, and no technical team.
So I'd love to hear from you: what would you build if the technical part stopped being the obstacle?
Replies
For anyone curious about the other half of this story (why we built a team of agents rather than another AI tool), I wrote mine here
A quick update for anyone following along 👇
We were supposed to launch Operum on Product Hunt today. We're moving it a few weeks.
Operum's AI teams ran on Claude through each user's own subscription. That needs Anthropic's approval, which we'd been waiting on for a long time. Two days before launch, the answer came: no. The alternative would have made Operum too expensive for the founders it's built for.
So we're doing sooner what was already next on our roadmap: making Operum's AI team work with more than one AI provider. I'm grateful to Anthropic; Claude is how we built all of this.
Everything in my post above is still true. I still can't code, and we're still building. We just took a turn.
I'd love to know: which AI tools do you use today, and which would you want your AI team to work with?