The builder behind the swan
46.5 hours in. 443 messages to an AI page-builder, 20 threads with another AI just to keep my own thoughts straight. Swan Society was sitting in a judges' inbox instead of a draft folder, and I still hadn't slept.
Then I did sleep. Then I found out I got an honorable mention. I cried a little. Moving on.
This page is the part that doesn't fit in a pitch: why I built this, how it actually got built, and who's behind the gold swan.
Why this exists
Here's the question I ask about every broken system, whether it's a business process or a kid mid-meltdown: what's the unmet need that's stopping this from working?
For book clubs, the answer was never "more books" or "more enthusiasm." I watched a real one die — not because anyone stopped loving the books, but because one person kept carrying the logistics until she quietly stopped. Nobody voted to kill it. It just stopped being worth the admin tax.
Swan Society is my answer to that: something to carry the logistics, so loving a book club and running one don't have to be the same unpaid job.
The 48 hours
In June, I applied to SheBuilds — a women's hackathon run by Lovable — with an idea and zero engineering background. Then I showed up for 48 hours and built a real app: real auth, a real database, real AI features, cold-tested on my own phone at midnight before I let myself submit it.
Honorable mention, B2C category. Meg O'Keeffe's PlayHer took the win, and she earned it — go look at what she built.
The judges also handed me the most useful kind of feedback: the specific kind. "When someone lands on your site, they need to understand what it does before they're asked to do anything… A landing page is your pitch." They were right. I'd built for people who already understood why Swan Society exists, not for someone landing cold. The page you scrolled past to get here exists because of that note.
How it's actually built
I'm non-technical, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Swan Society runs on Lovable, with Supabase handling the real auth and database underneath, Groq generating the AI book picks and discussion questions, and Resend sending the emails. I didn't write the code. I described what I wanted, over and over, until the tool built it.
I've done this before — a household finance engine, a summer camp logistics app, same method each time: vibe coding, for problems I personally had and couldn't find solved anywhere else. The part of this era that still kind of blows my mind: it collapses the distance between having a feeling about how something should work and having the actual thing.
More about me
People Ops and Finance operator by trade — I've built the operational dashboards other people open once and never touch again, so I know exactly what "functional but nobody wants to use it" looks like. Carlsbad, CA. Mom of three. Recovering startup survivor, currently building something new.
Come find me
I write about all of this — the AI, the vibe coding, the parenting-adjacent chaos of building something solo — over on The AI Ops Octopus. Come find me there, or on LinkedIn, if you want the unfiltered version.
And if you run a book club, want to start one, or have ever watched a good one quietly die in a group chat: I've got 50 founding member spots open. Free, no catch, just real feedback. You tell me what's broken, I fix it. That's the whole arrangement.
🐙 — Christina
People Ops & Finance operator · Mom of 3 · Carlsbad, CA
Recovering startup survivor · Book lover · Chronic over-deliverer