I run this custom protein blend company, started in my kitchen now doing around $15k/month on shopify which sounds great except i'm spending literally 3-4 hours every single day answering the exact same questions over and over. "how much should I take for muscle gain?" "can i mix this with creatine?" "When do I take it, morning or night?" "what if i'm doing cardio 5 times a week?" and on and on and on. The problem is my products are custom blends based on goals and dietary restrictions, so it's not like I can just write one faq page. Every customer needs slightly different guidance and they don't get that when they buy, so they email me constantly or just never use the product properly and don't reorder. tried hiring a va to handle it. She lasted 2 weeks before quitting because answering the same variations of "how much protein do i need" was rotting her brain. I can't blame her honestly. I looked into chatbots but the good ones are like $200+/month and the cheap ones are useless, they just frustrate customers more because they can't handle the customization aspect of what we do. What I actually need is an app where customers can punch in their stats (weight, goals, activity level) and it just calculates the right amount for them, tracks their daily intake, reminds them when they're running low so they reorder, maybe shows progress over time? basically automate all this repetitive education stuff. got a quote from a developer. $12,000 for an mvp. i almost cried. that's literally my entire profit for a quarter, i'm bootstrapped, there's no way I can justify that expense right now. So I started looking at diy options. tried bubble first because everyone always recommends it, spent an entire weekend watching youtube tutorials and fighting with the interface. I got something that kinda worked on desktop but it looked absolutely terrible on mobile and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do the macro calculations properly, like the logic just wouldn't work how I needed it to. tried adalo next, it was definitely easier to use, i actually got something working in a day or so. but then i realized once i get past like 100 customers actually using it the price jumps from $50 to $200/month and at that point i'm basically paying what the chatbots cost anyway. glide was way too simple for what i needed, couldn't handle the calculation complexity at all. looked at some of the newer ai coding tools because I saw people talking about them. tried cursor first but i opened it up, saw all these terminal commands and code editors and immediately closed it. way too technical for me. bolt.new seemed promising but every time i tried to test it on my actual phone through expo it would just break, like completely fail to load. eventually found vibecode through some Youtube video at like 1am (as you do when you're desperate). it's specifically for mobile apps and you basically just describe what you want in regular sentences. spent a weekend just typing out "i need a calculator that takes weight and activity level and suggests serving sizes" and stuff like that. Took me about 2 weeks of testing and rebuilding different versions. The app I have now is honestly pretty ugly, like clearly designed by someone who has zero design skills (me). it crashes occasionally. The ui is very basic. I still can't figure out how to add the progress photo feature customers keep asking for. BUT. it actually works.. customers can input their info, it calculates their recommended amounts, tracks daily intake, sends push notifications when they're running low on product. sent it to my existing customer list first. 67 people downloaded it, 43 are actively using it every day. and here's the crazy part, my customer support questions dropped by like 60%. SIXTY PERCENT. I'm spending maybe an hour a day on support now instead of 3-4. Also people keep sharing it with their gym friends apparently? which is bringing in new customers I didn't even advertise to. I didn't expect that at all. total cost is like $30/month in tools vs either $200/month for adequate customer support help or $12k for a developer. The app is definitely not perfect. still buggy. looks amateurish. missing features. but it's solving the actual problem which is me drowning in repetitive customer education. not sure if this is a long term solution or if i'll eventually need to pay for proper development once revenue gets higher. but for right now? It's literally saving my sanity. Anyone else running e-commerce with products that need a lot of customer education? How are you handling the support burden without hiring a whole team? Because I was absolutely drowning before this.