TL;DR

Plot twist: I forgot three apps. 🤦.

Plot twist: I forgot three apps. 🤦

When I listed my vibe-coding projects, I completely missed the ones I built for my yacht club. Maybe because they felt less like „tech projects“ and more like „helping out at the club.“

But they deserve their own story. Here’s the Sunday bonus edition.

Sometimes you build the right thing at the wrong time.

Last year, I built a complete digital drink tracking system for my yacht club, the Wiesbadener Yacht Club (wycev.de). OCR for paper tally sheets. OTP login. Inventory management. The works.

It never went live. 🚫

Why? The club wasn’t ready. The paper tally list had worked for 40 years. Why change?

But here’s what DID launch:

The Hafenfest Shift Planner. 🎪

Same vibe-coding approach, different problem. And suddenly — adoption.

Let me show you what I built (solo, with AI):

📊 The Scale

  • 4 event days (Friday to Monday)
  • 12 shifts + setup/teardown
  • 44+ volunteer positions to fill
  • Real-time coordination across the entire festival

🔗 Zero Friction Design

No app download. No account creation. No password.

Just one link — shared via WhatsApp group.

Click, enter your name and phone, pick your shifts, done.

Everyone gets a personal link to manage their registration. Add shifts, remove shifts, download everything as a calendar file (.ics) that syncs to your phone.

👀 Transparency That Motivates

This was the game-changer.

The public view shows EVERYTHING:

  • Which shifts still need people (green)
  • Which are full (red)
  • Which are overbooked with extra helpers (purple)
  • Progress bars for each shift
  • Names of everyone who signed up

When people see their neighbors volunteering, they volunteer too. Empty shifts create social pressure — in the best way.

🍺 The Beer Keg Leaderboard

I didn’t plan this. Users asked for it.

We displayed all donated beer kegs with sponsor names. Suddenly everyone wanted their name on that list.

It doubled our donations.

🤖 AI Bridge: Analog Meets Digital

Not everyone is digital. Some people signed up on a paper list at the club house.

So I added AI image recognition (Claude). Snap a photo of the handwritten list → AI extracts names and shifts → suggests registrations.

No manual data entry. The analog folks are included.

📱 Overbooking? Yes, Please.

Full shifts aren’t locked. They show „full, but registration possible.“

Why? Because at volunteer events, it’s better to have too many helpers than too few. Cancellations always happen.

The Results:

✅ Zero paperwork for organizers

✅ Real-time coordination

✅ Full access logging

✅ Happy volunteers with calendar reminders

✅ Successful Hafenfest 2025

The Lesson:

You can’t force digital transformation. But you CAN find the ONE feature that makes people WANT to change.

The drink tracking system had better tech. The shift planner had better psychology.

Sometimes the app that doesn’t launch teaches you more than the seven that do.

Next up: I also built a complete competition management system for motorboat slalom races — replacing 193 Excel sheets with VBA macros with a real-time web app featuring millisecond timing. But that’s a story for another post. 🏁

This is part of my series on vibe-coding — apps I built with AI, apps I forgot (literally), and apps that taught me more by failing than by shipping.

#VibeCoding #DigitalTransformation #BuildInPublic #NoCode #AI #ChangeManagement #YachtClub #WYC

This post is part of my series on vibe-coding and building apps without traditional coding skills. All articles in the series →