Building custom tools – scaling yoursef as a solo entrepreneur

Thursday, 5 June, 2025

A year ago, I was drowning in repetitive business tasks. Today, I’ve built a suite of custom apps that I use to run my freelance business almost on autopilot. Here’s how to scale yourself as a designer.

Building custom tools – scaling yoursef as a solo entrepreneur

The Swedish work ethic hits a wall

I’m a ux designer at Voyado by day, and a freelance videographer, designer and noob-coder by night. Like most Swedes, I have a pathological need to work efficiently – it’s in our milk, in our dna. But running a side business while maintaining a full-time job? That’s where things quickly start to crack.

The problem isnt the creative work. I love shooting the Swedish mountains, outdoor sports, or tell Restaurang Jords story. The problem is everything else: accounting, proposals, client deliveries, admin, to-do lists and recipe scaling for my weekend baking therapy. All those shitty mundane tasks that eat into the time I’d rather spend creating.

A 20 year wait has come to an end

Two things has been irking in the back of my head for the last 15 years. First the «Shall a designer understand code"-debate back in 2010-ish (hint, I was in the «Hell yes!"-camp). Secondly, at the fuse conferance in San Fransico 1998 , designers Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland from LettError nonchalantly stated «If the tool you need doesn’t exist, build it.» … and demoed a bunch of apps they had custom built to fit their needs.

I’ve always loved that, not the technology itself but the audacity of how to use it.

Now that ai is here it has clicked for me. 20 years of fumbling in the dark is over … but I’m late to the game. Very late. As Maria Montazami says «Nu måste jag tänka snabbt, jättesnabbt.»

The reality check

Let me be brutally honest: I’m not a programmer. I can understand php a bit, I fumble my way through JavaScript. I can, on a good day, set up a webserver. But I just haven’t had the time or skills to properly learn programming and app development.

But here’s the thing – and this is important – you don’t need to be a programmer anymore … or as LettError also puts it «Programming is too important to leave to the programmers".

My ai toolkit

I’ve settled on Claude as my main ai tool, partly because I like their logo (shallow, I know), but mostly because it’s less aggressive than chatgpt. It feels more like having a patient Swedish colleague than an overeager American intern.

My setup is Claude Desktop, which makes it possible for me to alter between working the Claude app and my local files and folders. I have even given Claude access to some of my most essential apps like Gmail, Notion and Spotify to be even more productive.

The «Aha» moment

I realized I was thinking about this all wrong, I’ve been banging my head agaings the NginX-wall, spending hours on Stackoverflow. Trying to learn programming first, then build things. But now, with ai, I can reverse that process. I wireframe what I want, I oversse, refine and Claude builds it while teaching me how it works.

It’s like having a master craftsman who doesn’t just hand you a finished piece of furniture, but walks you through every cut, every joint, every decision along the way.

The Swedish advantage

There’s something quintessentially Swedish about this approach – pragmatic, efficient, and slightly obsessed with optimization. We don’t build things to show off; we build them because they solve our problems. Såäre förståru!

In a couple of posts I’ll walk you through exactly how I think and structure my custom built tools that:

Next up: The surprisingly simple building blocks that make any app possible – even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life.