What happened after the 5am idea
An excited wasp
So there I was, sitting up in bed at 6:30am with the idea for greetful buzzing around my head like an excited wasp. My husband hadn’t even opened his eyes yet. Meanwhile, I’d already downloaded two more AI tools and used up the daily limit on every single one. Before breakfast. Before caffeine. Before I’d even worked out what day it was.
This is what happens when you give me a spark of an idea. I run with it. Full speed. No warm‑up. No stretching. Straight into the sprint.
AI
I’d been learning about AI for a while, trying to understand what it actually does and how it could help real people in real life. Not the sci‑fi stuff. Not the “replace your entire workforce with a robot army” stuff. Just the simple, practical ways it could make life easier. So when greetful arrived in my head that morning, I could suddenly see how AI might help me build it too.
And this is where the chaos began.
Because here’s the thing. I like to do everything on the tightest budget known to mankind. If there’s a free plan, I’m on it. If there’s a trial, I’m squeezing every last drop out of it. Which means I see the dreaded “You are out of limit, please upgrade” message more often than I see my own reflection. I find it very rude. I’ve only just arrived and already they’re shaking the donation bucket at me.
But I was excited. I could see a way forward. I could see how AI might help me build something useful. So I kept going. And very quickly discovered that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
You Tube
Naturally, I turned to YouTube. And what a journey that was. Apparently, according to the internet, you can “build an app in 5 minutes and make £2k before tea time”. You just need a “no‑code building site”, a “Supabase backend”, some “APIs”, and to “always, ALWAYS put Row Level Security on every table”.
Every table? Why? What table? Do I need an Allen key?
What are you talking about, bro?
Where were the people my age? Where were the normal humans? Where were the women who weren’t filming from a neon‑lit gaming chair?
I didn’t want to become a tech influencer. I just wanted to build something that helped people stay connected. Something warm. Something human. Something that didn’t require me to learn a new language spoken exclusively by 22‑year‑olds who say “let’s goooo” every three minutes.
Just give it a go
But here’s the funny thing. Even though I didn’t understand half of what I was watching, I kept going. I kept learning. I kept trying things. I kept breaking things. I kept running out of usage limits. And slowly, very slowly, greetful started to take shape.
This was the beginning. The messy bit. The “what on earth am I doing” bit. The bit where excitement and panic lived side by side like two cats who don’t like each other but tolerate the situation.
And honestly, looking back, I wouldn’t change it. Because this is the part where I realised something important.
You don’t need to know everything to start. You just need to start.
