How Two Non-Coders Built and Shipped Two Web Tools While Working Full-Time

A few months ago, neither of us had built a website. We had full-time jobs, a lot of curiosity about AI, and no idea how domains, hosting, or “shipping” actually worked.

Today we have two live tools and more than 500 people have used them. This is how that happened, and why we’re starting this blog.

Basically, we are two friends who attended Bachelors degree together in Electrical Engineering class of 2016-2020. In our last year of uni, we both worked on a same project with two other classmates. It was new, fun, something with Arduino. Later on, we continued our journey on different paths. We both started working in a full time job, and with time it became once in a while telephonic conversation kind of connection. Nevertheless, our “once in a while” conversations were mostly on some new tech, some games and books. Later on, we thought let’s try to do something in our after office hours time. Something which is doable, and it was again a long pause about what to do? !

For almost one and half year it was only merely in conversations on what to do, this one, that one and so on. Later on, when AI, frontier models and all were developing so fast and we thought let’s try something with it. We started few Instagram pages, worked on it now & then for one year but it did not worked out. And we took down those IG channels.

Where it started

We got into AI this summer and wanted to learn by building something real, not just watching tutorials. The plan was simple: make small web tools that solve problems people actually have.

The problem was, we didn’t know what to build, how to build it, or where it would live online. We started with nothing and just kept asking the same question: what’s the next step?

The problem we already knew

Our first idea came from our own student days. Whenever we applied for something online, the upload form had a strict file size limit, and our photos were always too big.

Our workaround was ridiculous. We’d send the photo to a friend on WhatsApp, download the compressed copy, then crop it by hand. Every single time.

That became reduceimagefilesize.com. It took about a month to go from idea to a live site. We did not knew what tools to use and the basics. So we started learning from youtube, and understanding it rather than directly telling AI to do everything. We tried with first method it did not worked out, the tool was live but it did not functioned the way it was supposed to. Rather than reducing image size it was giving random sized output images compared to uploaded one. So have started tracking our whole worklflow and started kind of auditing but as we are not experts, we made AI our teammate. After one whole week running in circles, we finally solve it out.

Tool number two

Once the first one worked, we felt we could do it again. Our second tool is generatemyqr.com, a QR code generator with customization that’s free, needs no sign-up, and doesn’t store your data.

We built it that way on purpose. Most QR tools we found wanted an account or an email first, and we didn’t think a QR code needed one.

What we actually learned

First of all, it was all new so I guess it was all a learning curve. We learned how to work with VS Code, Node.JS, Astro.JS and make it work together.

Since we were doing it out of our interest to learn, we did not wanted to spend money on subscriptions for vibe coding platforms or AI tools. And another reason was that we would not learn the basics if we would have took those subscriptions and used those tools. So basically, we kept it as low cost as possible.

To be honest, the only cost we had was like buying a domain and nothing more. It costed us like 10$ i would say.

After buying domain we did not even knew how to host, so for these two tools we faced challenges while hosting tools like DNS server, connecting things with hosting platforms and all. But at the end, we did it.

What we’re doing next

This blog is the next step. We’ll share what we build, which AI tools are worth your time and how to use them, and what’s new in AI, with sources so you can check for yourself.

We’re also keeping the tools free and simple. If you’ve got a small problem that a tiny web tool could fix, tell us. That’s how both of ours started.

This post was AI-assisted and reviewed by the Veneris Labs team. Images generated with AI.