About 80% of my close friends use AI now. Tech, non tech, doesn't matter. They all use it.

But here's what I keep noticing. Most of them use it like a smarter Google. A few of them use it to build things. And the gap between those two groups is wider than I expected.

So I want to tell you about three people. One product manager in New York. One senior software engineer. And me. Three completely different brains. Three completely different problems. Three things actually built and shipped.

And then I want to ask you a question.

Story one: The PM who built a diamond guide as a joke

A close friend of mine in New York is a product manager. Her route there was not the obvious one. Masters in international economics and finance. Years on a trading floor doing equity and fixed income. Numbers brain. Strategy brain. The kind of person who reads the back of a financial report for fun.

She doesn't write code. Never has.

Recently she got engaged. Beautiful. Then came the next problem. She had to buy a ring, and the diamond market online is a mess. Confusing terminology. Conflicting advice. Marketing pretending to be education. Every page trying to sell her something before she's even understood what she's looking at.

So she opened Claude Code. One evening later, she had a working diamond guide live on the internet. Built by someone who freely admits she still cannot tell you what a CSS class is.

Here it is: https://fanishka.github.io/diamond-guide/

She told me she built it as a joke. I told her I probably won't use it. She laughed. Fair.

But that's not the point.

The point is, an economics graduate with zero coding background saw a problem in her own life and went and made the fix. That's it. That's the whole story. One night, one tool, one shipped thing.

So if you're sitting there going "but I'm not technical"... I have notes.

Story two: The engineer who rebuilt his database

Now you might say, fine, but I work in tech. I see development every day. I already use AI.

Cool. But are you using it to build solutions for the people around you? Or are you just using it to write your standup notes faster?

Meet case study two. Senior software engineer. Spent his whole career in code. He'd been using PostgreSQL and MySQL like the rest of the world for moving and fetching data, and the speed was simply not what he wanted for the workloads he was running.

So he sat down with AI and built his own.

It's called shard db. It's a high performance file based database written in C. Single binary, no external dependencies, sub 5ms queries on a million rows, and roughly 2.7 million key value operations per second on bulk insert.

In English: it's faster than what he had, it doesn't need a separate server to babysit, and it does a lot of the things the big database engines do, just lighter and quicker for his use case.

Could he have lived with the existing tools? Of course. Most engineers do. They complain about the speed in Slack and move on.

He didn't. He built the better thing.

You can see it here: https://github.com/sayyiditow/shard-db

And before you tell me databases are a different sport from diamond guides, that's exactly the point. Different brains. Different problems. Same move. See the gap. Close the gap.

Story three: Me, building The Forge

My background is physiotherapy. Then I went corporate, did a masters to catch up, and have been moving through communications, marketing, operations, and product management ever since. So I'm somewhere between the two stories above. I understand tech. I'm not a developer.

For a while now I've been struggling with our CRM and sales pipeline at Leadapreneur. Off the shelf tools either did too much, too little, or asked us to bend our process to fit theirs.

So I built our own. I call it The Forge.

It's a Trello meets salesforce kind of app. The business development team has a full pipeline view to work from. The CEO and the rest of the team have a command centre to see how we're doing across the month at a glance. No more manual reports compiled by hand on the last Friday of the month.

And here's the embarrassing bit. I'm addicted. I add a delete button on a Tuesday. I add a tracking widget on a Wednesday. A new nav bar on a Thursday. Every day I talk to the team using it, hear what's broken, and ship the fix.

It's not my first build. There's a Kahoot style game we use internally. A marketplace for our client programmes. A planning app. But The Forge is the one I've spent the most time testing properly, because real money flows through it.

So what's the actual point, Hanaa?

One person. Two close friends. Three very different builds.

A diamond guide built as a joke. A database built out of frustration. A CRM built out of necessity.

None of us waited for permission. None of us hired a developer. None of us called a meeting to decide whether to build it.

We saw a problem. We cared about it enough. Then we built.

That, in one sentence, is what we mean by being a Leadapreneur.

In the AI x Talent Accelerator we run, Journey 1 is about finding the right problem and actually caring about it. Journey 2 is about exploring solutions until you land on one you'd happily fight for. And then you build. The whole programme is engineered to take talent that is currently stuck in complaint mode and move them into builder mode. It's a mindset shift first. The building is the easy part once the mindset clicks.

And speaking of building

I am pleased to announce we are launching the public version of this in Kuala Lumpur.

It's called Greatness Games KL — Season 1. 30 days. 25 slots. Solo, no teams to hide behind. You'll work through the same Problem, Idea, Forge, Pitch arc that our enterprise clients run, with AI as your primary thinking tool the whole way. At the end you pitch a real innovation project to your own management. Your project must be valued at 40,000 MYR or more, and one person walks out as KL's first Top Leadapreneur.

It's HRDC claimable. Kickoff is 22 June. Workshops are 1 to 3 July at Common Ground Bukit Bintang. We end with a celebratory dinner around 31 July.

Details and application here: www.leadapreneur.com/greatness-games

Build your better world

If a finance graduate can build a diamond guide on the weekends, and a software engineer can write his own database in his evenings, and a physio turned COO can build a CRM her team actually uses, then what's stopping you?

Probably nothing. Probably just the moment of deciding.

If we can build, so can you.

Build your better world.

Written by Hanaa Maysoon
COO Notes