From Broken Build to Successful Launch
A passionate solo builder used AI tools to create their app idea but hit a wall of stubborn bugs, a broken database design, and a confusing user flow. We stepped in to fix, rebuild, and ship — turning their vision into a real, launched product.
The client had a genuine app idea and the drive to build it themselves using AI-assisted coding tools. They got further than most — a working prototype existed — but the project had quietly accumulated serious problems under the surface. The bugs were not simple typos. Several were deeply rooted in a database schema that had grown organically without a clear design: tables with ambiguous relationships, missing foreign key constraints, and queries that returned inconsistent results depending on the order data was inserted. The UI had a similar issue — features had been added one by one without a coherent user journey in mind, leaving the overall flow confusing and frustrating for anyone who wasn't the person who built it. The client had spent weeks trying to debug the worst issues alone, going in circles. They came to us not to have the project taken away from them, but to get expert guidance that could unlock it.
We started with a full diagnosis session — going through the codebase and the app together with the client, so they understood exactly what was wrong and why, not just what needed to change. The database was redesigned from scratch with a proper relational schema: clear entity relationships, correct constraints, and a migration strategy that preserved the existing data. Drizzle ORM was introduced to enforce type safety between the schema and the application layer, catching entire categories of bugs at compile time rather than at runtime. On the UX side, we mapped out the intended user journey in Figma first — identifying where the flow broke down, where users were expected to understand context that was never communicated to them, and where screens were doing too many things at once. The redesigned flows were simpler, with each screen having a single clear purpose. Debugging the hardest issues was a collaborative process: we pair-programmed through the trickiest problems, explaining the reasoning at each step so the client could learn from the process rather than just receive a fix.
The app launched successfully. What had been stuck for months was live within five weeks of us joining. The rebuilt database eliminated the data inconsistency bugs entirely. The redesigned user flow reduced the steps required to complete core actions significantly, and early user feedback described the experience as intuitive — a word no one had used about the original version. Equally important to the client: they came out of the engagement understanding their own codebase far better than when they went in. The goal was never just to fix the app — it was to help a capable person successfully ship their idea.