Twenty years of expertise. Four months to build.

The platform that needed rebuilding

For years I ran Gigster - a marketplace connecting entertainers, speakers and event professionals with clients - without really understanding the technology underneath it. I was the founder, the face, the strategy. The tech was something other people handled. That was fine, until it wasn't.

User expectations had shifted. The platform had dated. Competitors were moving. Rebuilding it properly would traditionally have meant a development team, a substantial budget and a level of technical fluency I simply didn't have. The conventional path - describe what you want, hand it to someone else, hope for the best - had run its course.

Then AI arrived

I underestimated it at first. Most people do. I thought of AI as a writing tool - useful for drafts and summaries but peripheral to the real work of building something. That turned out to be completely wrong.

What started as curiosity became an obsession. I began spending hours inside these tools - understanding how software products are structured, how databases work, how user journeys are designed, how workflows connect. The more I explored, the more I realised the line between technical and non-technical people wasn't as fixed as I had always assumed. I wasn't suddenly a developer. But I could participate in the process - meaningfully, specifically, usefully.

Encoding twenty years

What started as a rebuild became something I hadn't anticipated: the process of translating everything I know - every hard lesson, every deal that went wrong, every moment where trust broke down between a client and an artist - into logic, workflows and rules that the platform now enforces automatically.

A developer given a brief could have built software. What I built is different. It holds the accumulated knowledge of someone who has lived inside this industry for two decades. The platform knows what to do because I know what to do - and I found a way to put that into code.

What surprised me most wasn't the technology. It was the psychology. I had spent years speaking about resilience, adaptability and stepping outside your comfort zone. In that rebuild, I lived those lessons again in a context I hadn't expected. I was a beginner - not on a stage, not in the ocean, not in a rehearsal room, but in technology. And beginners ask different questions.