She Built 10+ Apps With AI. The Hard Part Wasn’t Building

El shares what she learned about app ideas, AI tools, marketing, and getting products into the world.

With no technical background, El has built multiple apps using AI app-building tools. Along the way, she discovered that creating the app is only one part of the process. Finding a real problem, understanding your audience, marketing the product, and learning from what doesn’t work matter just as much.

El’s first app taught her the difference between building and solving a problem

One of El’s early apps helped people organize pickleball games, including court times, prices, reminders, and payments.

The problem? People were already happy organizing games through text messages. The app offered more structure, but the problem wasn’t painful enough to make people change their behavior.

That experience changed how El approaches app ideas. Instead of assuming something is useful, she now researches what people actually need before building.

Her approach changed when she stopped relying on prompts alone

Early on, El thought building with AI meant describing an idea and letting the tool create it.

Now she does much more preparation. She creates an app summary, defines the ideal customer, limits the first version to a handful of features, and thinks about what can wait for later versions.

We talk about the tools she has experimented with, including Lovable, Bolt and Claude Code, and how her building process has evolved.

Building an app is only half the work

One of El’s biggest lessons has been the importance of marketing and distribution.

“The marketing and getting it out to the masses is the other half. Building the app is one half.”

Her experience with SkullChat showed how unpredictable launching can be. After months of building, she launched, got an early user, and then the app broke.

We talk about finding users, building in public, organic marketing, and why launching an app is really the beginning of learning from real users.

Good app ideas can come from surprisingly simple places

The Last Monday grew from a retirement countdown spreadsheet a friend was using. El turned the idea into an app that sends daily messages as retirement gets closer.

She also built her own version of an AI dictation app in around 20 minutes after finding a prompt online.

Her projects show that app ideas don’t need to start with groundbreaking inventions. They can come from personal needs, inefficient processes, or simply thinking: I could build that.

More women need to see themselves as app builders

El also talks about why she wants more women building with AI.

Through her workshops, she has watched women with no traditional technical background turn their own experiences into app ideas and working products.

Her advice for anyone still watching tutorials and wondering if they’re ready is simple: stop consuming and start building.

You learn by building, testing, failing, fixing and shipping.