Moggoyan: My First Real Project Built with Claude

Why I Started This

My fiancée draws. Not just as a hobby — what started as a cute side hustle doodling her plushie characters eventually became her full-time job. As her Instagram following grew, so did the merchandise. Prints, stickers, who knows what else. And for a while, Excel was holding everything together.

Then it couldn't anymore.

I want to pause here and say something honestly: being an artist in Singapore is genuinely tough. The hustle is real, the margins are tight, and every hour she spends manually tracking stock is an hour she's not creating. So when I saw an opportunity to actually help with something concrete, I jumped at it.

The project: build her a point-of-sale system with proper inventory tracking. Automated stock deductions on every sale. Low-stock alerts without anyone having to babysit a spreadsheet. Simple idea. Except I had no idea how to build it.

Enter Claude

A friend introduced me to Claude around the time I was scratching my head figuring out where to even begin. And I'll just say it — it genuinely changed how I think about making things. I've never looked at building a project the same way since.

What I appreciated most wasn't Claude spitting out code at me. It was that I could explain my situation like a normal person and get a useful, structured response back. For example: I needed to pick a database. I knew nothing about databases. So I told Claude exactly what I was working with — small business, low startup costs, low traffic for now, and ideally something that could eventually connect to an online storefront. I asked it to list the options with pros and cons for my specific situation.

It did exactly that. No fluff, no assuming I knew what I was doing. Based on what came back, I went with Supabase. (I'll do a proper write-up on Supabase separately — short version: it worked out fine and wasn't as scary as I expected.)

The Domain Name Moment

Next question was hosting. Same approach — I gave Claude my constraints and asked it to walk me through the options. Google Sites came up as a reasonable starting point. Easy to set up, familiar interface, low cost.

But as I got into the actual setup, I hit a small but important realisation: I needed a domain name first. Choosing a domain name after you've already started configuring your site is a headache I'd rather not give myself. Reversing that setup would have been annoying.

Here's the thing though — for us, picking the name was easy. The business already had one. So that part took about five minutes.

And just like that, Moggoyan.com was born.

I'm not going to pretend I wasn't weirdly emotional about it. Paying for that domain felt like I'd made something real. Like I'd given the project a name and an address. I told my fiancée and we both laughed at how much I was making of what is essentially a twelve-dollar-a-year purchase. But honestly? It felt like a big deal.

What I Actually Built

The core of Moggoyan is an admin inventory webpage that serves as the backbone of the POS. Every sale deducts from inventory automatically. No more manually updating stock after a booth or an Instagram sale. The system handles it.

That guiding principle — inventory first, then POS — shaped everything. Claude helped me think through the architecture in plain terms. I didn't need to already know what I was doing. I just needed to know what problem I was trying to solve, and Claude helped me figure out the path.

We've been running it for a few months now and it's holding up. Not perfect, there are still things I want to improve, but it's genuinely being used and genuinely saving her time. That part still feels good.

What I'd Tell Anyone Starting Out

After going through this whole process, my honest recommendation for the order of operations is:

1. Get a domain name first. It's cheap, it shapes everything downstream, and it makes the project feel real. Don't skip this step or leave it for later.
2. Choose and set up your database. Know your constraints before you pick — traffic, budget, future integrations all matter.
3. Then build the website. With the domain and database sorted, you're building on solid ground.

Claude was useful at every stage of this, not because it did the work for me, but because it helped me ask better questions and understand the trade-offs. For someone without a technical background trying to build something real, that kind of structured thinking partner is genuinely valuable.

Moggoyan exists now. And my fiancée doesn't have to touch a spreadsheet anymore. I'll take that as a win.