What happens when a product manager who has shipped plenty of products, but never actually built one, decides to build a full app himself with AI? You get BaseLodge: an AI camping trip planner, two real users, zero dollars of revenue, and a notebook full of lessons. Here's what I learned.

Table of contents

Why I built a camping app

I am a product manager. I started in mechanical engineering, went to Stanford for environmental engineering, and somehow ended up building software products, most recently building product for Flodesk. I have shipped plenty of things in my career, but always with engineers doing the actual building. So this year I gave myself a challenge: find out whether a non-developer like me could build and launch a full-stack app from scratch, with AI as my co-pilot the entire way.

The app is BaseLodge, an AI-powered camping trip planner. Picking camping was not random. If you have ever tried to book a campsite in California, you already know the problem.

So how did it go?

<aside>

Users gained: +2. Money made: $0. Money spent: $371.

Believing I was a developer for a day: priceless 😎

</aside>

Woof. Not exactly the $1M ARR overnight everyone will tell you is possible now with AI. For me, the most important lesson was reiterating just how hard building good products can be. AI is another helpful tool in the toolbox, but not a catch all solution. The next sections share a bit more about the journey, enjoy.

The problem: booking a campsite is broken

Here is the question I started with:

Why is it so hard to plan a camping trip?

The pain is real and easy to find. Campers routinely have to book months in advance, only to watch sites sell out within minutes of release. Recreation.gov and ReserveCalifornia are riddled with glitches, lockouts mid-checkout, and 8 a.m. release scrambles. And the cruel twist: plenty of "fully booked" campgrounds sit half empty because of no-shows, while bots snap up the good sites before a normal person has a chance.

On top of the booking mess, the planning is scattered everywhere. People juggle Google searches, TikToks, group texts, physical notebooks, and shared Google Docs just to organize one weekend.

I did not want to guess whether this mattered, so I tried to validate it before going all in:

• Ran a user study to see how people actually plan trips and where they get stuck.
• Read through reviews and forums. I fed Reddit threads, TripAdvisor reviews, and forum posts into AI and let it surface the repeated patterns of frustration instead of trusting my own hunch.
• Scored each problem using the framework below.