Taking Our Own Advice – Download Our AI Playbook

Unprompted insights on how AI is transforming the way we work.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how AI is changing what it means to build, and how it gives small teams an unfair advantage to ship things that would have taken months or even years. So this week, we decided to do less talking and more showing.

Make sure that you stick around until the end of this week’s newsletter, because we’ll share the complete AI tech stack that we are using – it could completely change how you and your team work. 

For the past few months we’ve been working on our own app, Rulo, which sits somewhere between Partiful and Slack — built for groups that organize around skill.

We often tell our clients to start small and very specific with new products, so that’s exactly what we’re doing with Rulo. Since we both grew up playing racket sports, we’re bringing Rulo to market through an up-and-coming racket sport called padel, which happens to be the fastest-growing sport in the world right now (and genuinely fun).

People are pouring money into new clubs, courts, and infrastructure, but the digital layer is lagging. This makes padel the perfect pilot sport for our new app.

Just this week, we hosted our first event on Rulo, so it felt like the right time to show how we actually built it (entirely with AI tools).

Each group in Rulo (a Space) runs on a roles and permissions system that makes coordination scalable. Roles like Admin, Member, or Organizer define what actions users can take — like creating events, managing members, or sending announcements. This gives admins precise control over visibility and ensures people only see what’s relevant.

We built Rulo entirely with AI coding agents through Claude Code. Here is an example of a prompt that we would feed to our coding agent to generate the app’s backend logic and table structure:

“Create a roles and permissions model where each Space has multiple role types with defined capabilities and cascading permissions.”

From that, the agents produce the database schema and middleware, which we reviewed and refined through subsequent natural language prompts. Then we use prompts to design the front-end app screens.

Here’s a preview of how it turned out:

Rulo runs on two separate frontends (web and mobile) connected to a shared backend built on Supabase. This keeps data synchronized in real-time: update your skill level on web, and it instantly reflects on mobile; send a chat on iOS, and it appears in the browser immediately.

We integrated Supabase with Claude Code through a custom Claude MCP connection, allowing us to generate and modify backend logic directly from natural-language prompts. This setup enabled us to run AI agents in parallel across mobile and web, so that we could continue building fast while maintaining stability.

This setup worked so well for us, that Rulo is now actually available both in the App Store and on any web browser (in only a matter of months!) You can see for yourself if you are curious:

We’ve talked to a lot of people who play padel, and it turns out that organizing large groups to play together is a nightmare. Friend groups and college clubs trying to organize padel matches spend tons of time juggling tools for scheduling, sign-ups, and payments.

Rulo simplifies this by combining them all into one system. For example — group organizers can create and manage paid events directly inside their own Rulo group space, which has an embedded payment system so members can purchase tickets and reserve their spot. 

Here’s what this looks like in Rulo, where group organizers have already started to post event links on their socials, and use the calendar feature to show upcoming programs for their community:

This past Friday, we ran our own padel event at the newly opened Mink Padel club where every participant registered (and paid) through Rulo! We also launched Rulo with McGill University’s Padel club in Montreal, and within 2 hours they had sold out their first event on Rulo:

As always, we’re just a phone call away if you want to discuss the best AI setup for you.

Stay curious,

Julia & Russell