The Challenge
Tanya came from a marketing background and had worked at tech companies, but she didn't have a traditional technical or engineering skill set.
She wanted to:
- Build a real SaaS-style business around her ideas
- Launch something fun and genuinely useful that other people could use right away
- Actually get to deployment and monetization, not just play with AI in isolation
She tried a long list of tools:
- Glide – too hard to make truly marketable
- Softr – felt complicated
- Bubble – powerful but expensive and intimidating
Many platforms also made it difficult to monetize or ship something that felt like a real product. There was a huge gap between, "I can prompt AI" and "I have a live product customers can use." She needed a way to go from 0 to deployed and ready-to-sell without becoming a full-stack developer.
The Solution
Then she found Pickaxe.
Compared to the other tools she'd tried, Pickaxe was:
- By far the easiest place to start
- Genuinely marketable out of the box
- Fun to build in and share with others
With Pickaxe, Tanya built Capybara Affirmations, a wellness app where users generate unique, AI-created capybara affirmation images like "You're doing great" or "Your best is good enough"—personalized just for them.
Using Pickaxe, she was able to:
- Go from idea to a working app in about one week
- Attach a beautiful website to her Pickaxe without heavy engineering effort
- Ship something that truly felt like a SaaS product out of the box
Building her first Pickaxe became one of the coolest projects she'd ever done, giving her a massive confidence boost as a non-technical creator.
The Results
Capybara Affirmations quickly proved it wasn't just a side experiment.
Tanya's Pickaxe:
- Landed a feature in Digital Trends (with an exclusive interview)
- Was highlighted on Marginal Revolution, a large, influential blog
- Got picked up by several Japanese blogs, expanding its reach internationally
- Grew to over 6,000 users, with new signups still coming in every day
Beyond the press and user numbers, Tanya's experience with Pickaxe stood out because:
- She rarely ran into the frustrating build issues she encountered on other platforms
- Pickaxe had the perfect amount of guardrails for non-technical people—enough structure to keep things stable, without blocking creativity
- Even after trying tools like Lovable and others, she kept coming back to Pickaxe because it was simpler and more reliable for actually getting an AI product live
Why It Works
Tanya sits in that "gray area" so many modern creators live in:
- Comfortable with AI and tools
- Not a full-time developer
- Very motivated to ship, learn, and monetize
Pickaxe bridges the gap between knowing how to prompt and running a real AI product.
For Tanya, that meant:
- No wrestling with deployment or infrastructure
- No need to hire engineers just to ship an MVP
- A direct path from idea → functional app → real users and media coverage
Pickaxe let her take her marketing instincts, package them into a delightful product, and get it in front of thousands of people—without getting stuck in the technical weeds.
The Takeaway
Tanya's story shows what's possible when non-technical creators get the right platform.
If you're:
- A marketer, creator, or founder with a fun or useful AI idea
- Stuck between "I can use AI" and "I can ship a product"
Pickaxe gives you a way to build something that looks and feels like a real SaaS business from day one—just like Tanya did with Capybara Affirmations.