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WorkflowspiedinoPlaybook

I'm not a developer. I used Claude Code to build my uncle a local sales dashboard with one-click PDF export.

My uncle manages sales performance at a pharmaceutical company. He regularly needs to see how each of his reps is doing against budget, then present that in person, often while traveling — using data that comes out of the company's existing sales system as an export file. I'm not a developer. My background is marketing and communications. When he asked for something to help with this, the obvious answers were generic BI software or hiring someone to build a tool. Instead I used Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, and directed it in plain language to build a small custom web app myself. The requirements weren't things I guessed at — they came out of an actual conversation with my uncle. The data is sensitive pharma sales figures, so the app had to run entirely locally in the browser: no server, no upload, works offline. The input is whatever Excel or CSV file he already exports, dragged into the app — not a live connection to the system, on purpose, so nothing sensitive ever leaves his laptop. The output had to be both a dashboard he could explore and a one-click PDF export formatted as slides, because he needed something to put up in a room, not just a screen to scroll through alone. Below is roughly how I approached it with Claude Code, the actual instruction I'd give if I were starting over, and an honest read on where this stands right now — including the part that isn't tested yet.

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AutomationpiedinoPlaybook

The prompt I use to turn "no website found" into an email opening that doesn't sound like a mail-merge

I do freelance web design and small-agency work on the side — video, social, copy, strategy — and after enough of these pitches I landed on a simple thesis: the easiest lead to convert isn't a business with a site that might want a redesign. It's a business with no site at all, or one that's broken, or one that's clearly been abandoned. Which means the whole pitch lives or dies on how specifically you name the gap. I built a small tool to find these businesses: it pulls local businesses by category and town from OpenStreetMap's free public map data, then actively checks whether each one has a real working website instead of trusting whatever OpenStreetMap has on file. That catches both directions of error — a business OpenStreetMap doesn't know has a site, and a domain that's registered but dead. It scores each business 0-100 on how convertible the gap looks, labels it HOT/WARM/COLD, and generates a short dossier plus a draft email for each one. But the piece of this worth sharing on its own, whether or not you ever build the scanning part, is the writing step. Once you have three plain facts about a business — its category, its town, and what the check actually found about its website — the job is turning that into a first paragraph that reads like you looked at that specific business, not a template with the name swapped in. That's what the prompt below does. The prompt doesn't care where those three facts came from — you can type them in by hand. The steps below are how I use it, and the prompt itself is the reusable part.

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