Sidequests
Things I built
on my own time.
I build things on the side because I'm genuinely curious and I like making things. Some of these started as experiments, some as solutions to problems I personally had. Some made money, some didn't, all of them taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way.
QUEST / 001
PadelGuide
Content × Affiliate × GEO Lab
I play padel twice a week and kept seeing the same problem: people struggle to find the right racket. No good resource existed. So I built one: a padel blog covering racket guides, player profiles, and technique breakdowns.
Became an affiliate partner with Padel USA, Amazon, and Padel Nuestro. Thousands of visitors, a few hundred dollars in affiliate revenue. But the more interesting thing: I can see in Google Search Console that traffic is being referred directly from ChatGPT and Claude. PadelGuide became my live lab for understanding how content gets cited by AI, which eventually led to building the GEO Analysis Tool.
QUEST / 002
GEO Analysis Tool
Generative Engine Optimisation
As AI search eats traditional SEO, most content teams have no idea how their pages perform in LLM outputs. I built a tool that scores any web page across 25 checks (citation hooks, content structure, technical access, entity clarity) and returns an AI-citation readiness score in under 60 seconds.
The framework is grounded in Princeton and IIT Delhi GEO research. Built the automation on Make.com and Airtable, integrated payments, and charged real money for it. Made a few hundred dollars. Used it on PadelGuide first. Now other people use it on their own content.
QUEST / 003
Mahjo
Multiplayer Mahjong PWA
I learned mahjong recently and went looking for somewhere to play online. Found three or four apps, all with terrible UI, poor experience, and a $7/month paywall. The gap was obvious. So I built a better one: a PWA for multiplayer mahjong sessions, designed from scratch.
I had never written a line of code before this. Built it entirely through Claude Code and Codex, learning as I went. Currently in beta: 50+ testers, strong qualitative signal. People are saying they'd pay for it, and I'm pricing it below the competition to make it accessible. Launch coming soon.