Building a Real Business App

Title: Building a Real Business App, Part 1: Contacts, Logins, and Room to Grow

Topic:
We build a working business application from scratch: user logins, a contacts list, and a foundation designed to grow one piece at a time. This will become the base app for your business.

We use the setup from our first meetup, with Claude doing the building (the tools underneath: Laravel and Filament, both free and open source — you'll never touch them directly). You describe what you want; it writes the code. You'll watch the whole thing happen, warts included.

If something breaks during the demo, that's part of the show.

You'll leave with the exact prompt we used, a step-by-step guide, and a "when it breaks" playbook so you can build the same app at home, at your own pace. Budget an evening for it, not an hour. Anyone who promises an hour is selling something.

Never touched a code editor? Good. This session assumes exactly that. We won't either.

Why this?
Simple. We need to start with a solid foundation. Most of the jaw-dropping AI apps you see online are demos that will either break in the real world or crack when you try to incorporate them into your business. This is the opposite: we start with a plain, useful foundation app so you can have a solid starting point that you own, running on your own computer.
Have a small team? Down the road this same app can live on a shared computer on your network, or in the cloud, with a login for each person. That's why we're building it right the first time.

Agenda
10:00 — Arrive, say hi, grab a seat
10:10 — Introductions: Two minutes max. Who you are, what you do, your experience, and what you hope to achieve or your current pain point.
10:20 — News: Is prompt engineering dead? What Anthropic said this past week.
10:30 — Core Fundamental: subscriptions vs. API tokens, in plain dollars
10:40 — Presentation: Building the core foundational app. A step-by-step plan will be available.
11:10 — Open discussion: questions, variations, and what you'd want your version to do. Demo what you are working on. Ask for help. Up to you.
11:50 — Cleanup: help us reset the room and we're out by noon

Who this is for?
Self-employed and small business owners. No technical background needed, and no laptop required. Come as you are.

First time? Perfect.

As always: no sales pitches, no lead-gen. No dumb questions. This is a collaborative group. We share and help each other. We don't believe in a fixed pie.

Where:
Library 21c, Room B6 1175 Chapel Hills Dr., Colorado Springs, CO