Anyone can build an app now. Getting it to customers is the hard part.

I am not a developer. I spent twenty years designing learning programmes, and I built a working ordering app with AI tools. It took weeks of evenings, real testing, and more corrections than I want to admit. It did not take a developer, a funder, or anybody's permission.

That is now true for you too, whatever your business is. The website, the booking system, the costing model, the app: you can build them. Building has become abundant. So the edge is no longer who has the best tools. Everyone can have the tools now.

I also care deeply about schools and how children learn, and we write about that on our sister site, mypsquared.com - including the story of the app we built there and then scrapped, and why that was the best decision we made.

Here is what nobody tells you when you start: an app with no customers is not a business. It is a project.

Attention is the thing in short supply now. Not ideas. Not code. Attention.

And the people I built Kasi Move for are not sitting on my website waiting to be impressed. A kota vendor is cooking. Up before the sun, on their feet all day, phone time is TikTok and WhatsApp between orders. If I want them, I have to go there.

This is my real day, not a theory.

I open TikTok and find food vendors. I watch each video to the end, because my comment has to be about their actual food: "Your food looks proper! How are people ordering from you?" The target is twenty a day.

TikTok does not let me put a working link in a comment. A link in my bio needs 1,000 followers, and I am not there yet. So the comment has one job: make the vendor curious enough to talk to me.

Two days later, I send the same vendors a direct message. "I left a comment on your post." In the DMs, the link works.

Then it moves to WhatsApp. And if they say yes, I set up the stall myself: the menu, the photos, the prices. I am setting up the first hundred stalls with my own hands, because that is where you learn what the next thousand will need.

Every name goes into a spreadsheet: commented, replied, ad sent, explainer sent, stall set up, paid. Before I write to anyone, I check the sheet so nobody hears from me twice.

Most evenings, the replied column looks exactly how I left it in the morning. That is not the system failing. That is the system. The work is showing up again tomorrow.

My customers were never coming to my website. I wanted vendors to find me there. They live on TikTok and WhatsApp, so that is where I sell.

The platform makes the rules. No links in comments. No bio link before 1,000 followers. I learnt those the slow way, and they decided what my first move could be.

Nobody buys from an introduction. The first message is a hello. The sale lives in the follow-up.

No advert can set up a stall. The first customers come by hand. It is slow. It is also how you find out what people actually need.

Their pain writes the pitch. I do not explain apps to vendors. I say: you keep 100% of every sale, no commission, ever. They already know what the 30% feels like. When your pitch answers a pain they already carry, you don't have to be clever.

AI built the app with me. It helps me write the comments and keep the sheet. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But AI cannot make a vendor trust me. Trust is built one conversation at a time. It is slow. Right now, it is the whole job.

That is why, when we train entrepreneurs at kasiAIhub, we don't start with the tools. We start with your customer: who they are, where they are, and how you reach them. The tools are the easy part now. The customer is the hard part.

Building the app took weeks. Getting it to customers takes longer.

If you are building something right now, plan for that. Half of your energy makes the thing. The other half finds the people. Most of us only plan for the first half.