Sometimes an idea that looks like a small side project turns into a real business. You become so absorbed in it that your friends forget what you look like. I can tell you now: it is worth it.

AI has changed a lot of lives. This is how it changed ours, and how Alex and I came to build Operum.

It started with Alex

Alex is an engineering leader with more than 20 years of building high-performance trading platforms for hedge funds and capital markets. Here is how he tells it:

"I was building a trading app solo with Claude Code and hit a wall. The AI was fast, but I was still the bottleneck: planning, reviewing, testing, shipping and marketing all went through me. So I started building a team around it, and that became Operum."

It was a small project, to get himself unstuck. That trading app is now AskTurret.

The Operum desktop app on a laptop, ringed by six agent cards — PM, Community, Marketing, Architect, Engineer and Tester — around a prompt reading “Describe what you want to build…”

Then it built my website

For years I had wanted a website for my photography studio that I was happy with. I took courses, I built it on Wix three times, and Alex had promised me a custom one that he never had time for.

His prototype finally made it happen. He built a first version quickly and showed me how to change it myself. I described my ideas to the agents, and they built them, tested them and published them. Under a week of my own work later, I had the site I had wanted for years. Then we did the SEO work that used to take me weeks, in a day.

And it never stopped being easy. Today, when I need a change anywhere on the site, a new landing page, a new photo, a new form or a new blog post, I ask my Operum agents and it is done within minutes.

The noranshine.com photography site: a full-bleed black-and-white couples portrait under a large serif COUPLES wordmark, with a Request a Free Consultation button.

My studio's website: noranshine.com

Then I got brave

I wanted my own client system, built around how my studio works, with an AI assistant inside that knows my business and every client. I have no technical background, and I did not believe I could do it.

I built it by myself, section by section, in four months, and moved my whole studio onto it. It handles payments, booking calendars and automation, and everything else that takes routine work off my hands and makes talking to my clients better. The assistant has read my knowledge base and every call, email and message on each client's record.

And I am not done. Right now I am building something for wall art design and in-person sales that I can't wait to show.

The Noran Shine CRM dashboard: sidebar navigation with stat tiles for new leads, sessions, overdue tasks and monthly revenue, alongside today's appointments, a task list, a revenue chart and a clients overview.

Noran Shine CRM, the system I run my studio on

And that is when the little project became a company

I said to Alex: "This is huge. I want every non-technical founder to be able to have this power. Let's make it happen."

So we stopped building for ourselves and started building for everyone like me. Alex brought what he knows about how real technical teams work together. I brought fifteen years of building human teams, my experience running a business, and everything I had learned building with Operum myself. Then other people without a technical background started building with it, a doctor among them, and what they told us shaped the product.

We went quiet for months to do it. It was worth it.

What we have built with it so far

  • My studio's website: noranshine.com
  • Noran Shine CRM, the client system I run my studio on: crm.noranshine.com
  • AskTurret, Alex's AI trading intelligence platform: askturret.com
  • A personal finance app we built for our own family. It has worked so well for us that we plan to open it to other people.
  • Next: a project to help our autistic daughter. The plan is ready, and I am going to build it in public so you can watch how it is done.

The AskTurret AI trading assistant: a positions blotter showing paper-trading stock and crypto holdings with profit and loss, beside a chat thread answering "what's my riskiest position".

The FinanceFlow dashboard: a monthly money-flow diagram fanning income out across spending categories into savings, above budget alerts for food and fuel.

Your turn

If you have real expertise in something, you can build a business around it. If you are passionate about something, you can make it exist. If you just want to fix one thing in your everyday work or life, you can build that too. You do not need a technical team, and you do not need anyone's permission.

A year ago I would not have believed any of this about myself. Now I can't wait to see what you build.

Operum is live at operum.ai. You start with 14 days of free Premium, then pick Free or a paid plan.

Operum works with Claude. If you are new to Claude, that is fine: everything you need to get started is on operum.ai.

On Thursday, October 15, we launch on Product Hunt. Come and tell us what you would build. We are so excited to show you.