Hey all, I’m Nejat, an experienced product designer from Turkey.
I’ve been sitting on this idea of a Jiu-Jitsu focused map where you can browse gyms in Istanbul and get more information compared to Google maps, only to lower the entry barrier for the sport a bit more.
Whenever I thought about it or brainstormed with my co-founders (a small BJJ gym here in Istanbul) it usually ended with “we’d need a developer for that though”.
I studied software engineering and worked as a jr dev for a year so I have technical background but I can’t really code any project from scratch. The only other community project I built is BJJ Resources, which is a simple directory site built in Framer. I have decent experience with no code tools but this one was a bit more complex to be built with such tools.
About a month ago, I just wanted to see what this “vibe coding” is about and how capable the existing tools/models are. I wasn’t really expecting much, I thought it would require a lot of configuration with map service APIs etc. Also, I always thought even though it’s AI assisted, I would still need to write the code. After trying lovable, bolt and v0 with the same basic entry prompt, I decided to stick with v0 since that produced the best looking UI as a baseline.
I honestly didn’t really have any solid plan for this project. I normally would sit down, brainstorm and explore the design side of it but since it was supposed to be a test, I dove head first without expecting much. Aside from tweaking some values in the code here and there, I didn’t have to write any code.
Fast forward +300 iterations, I published the website last week so I figured I might post in this community as well: Istanbul BJJ Map
The most challenging part of this project (other than getting accurate info from gyms) was the URL routing. At first, v0 just built it with simple modals and I thought it would be fine. As it came closer to the finish line, I realized I will need proper URL paths for the gyms, both for SEO and better analytics. One thing that I knew was I didn’t want gyms to have their own pages, I still needed the profile to open in a modal when the link is visited. I was naive to expect that it would be an easy switch but I was very very wrong. Got help from Claude, broke a lot of things, fixed many bugs but it’s working properly in two languages now (TR and EN).
Vibe coding genuinely brought back my entrepreneur spirit back. The best that I could build on my own was marketing websites with fancy animations but now I feel like I can build pretty much any idea of my own. Maybe not the next facebook or airbnb but I never had such ambitions anyway.
It’s truly an eye opening experience as a designer to explore possibilities with real, working prototypes especially when you do it by just describing the steps. Lucky for me, this project doesn’t contain any sensitive data so I didn’t really have concerns regarding security (maybe I should be? idk, let me know if you have any warnings for me)
I’m already working on 2 other projects, one of them being an internal CRM. Definitely gonna build many more!
