Solo · Paid engagement · 2026
My cousin works at the school and was venting about how much of their financial recording was still done by hand. I did not take long to see a fix, so I offered to build it, and it became my first paid project as a solo developer.
Most of the school's financial recording still lived on paper. Staff described the symptom, not a specification, and the work was figuring out the difference: mapping the existing paper workflow into something structured without making daily entry harder than it already was.
I ran the entire thing: spotting the pain point, gathering requirements, writing the PRD, building, iterating through revisions, and deploying. The client told me to take my time and that even more than a month would be fine. I presented the first working MVP on day three.
The finished system replaced a manual process with something staff use for daily entry, monitoring and reporting, delivered well ahead of the schedule the client expected.
That a client describes a symptom, not a specification, and the work is figuring out the difference. I also learned what leaning on AI properly does to a delivery timeline. The speed was not the point on its own, but arriving that far ahead of what someone expects changes the entire conversation you get to have with them afterwards.