Impact
Before Build an App in a Day™ existed, the gap between "I have a business idea" and "I have working software" meant months of self-taught coding or $60,000 to $100,000 in contracted development. For most people, the idea just died. Build an App in a Day compresses that gap to one Saturday. 97% of participants finish a real, working app during the single event day. 100% finish eventually, with post-event support for the few who need it. No one leaves stuck. A nurse with an idea for a scheduling tool ships it that afternoon. A realtor with a listing comparison idea deploys it by dinner. A small business owner with a bookkeeping headache walks out with the app that solves it.
And it compounds. Every participant leaves with The Luigi Method™, the framework to build as many more apps as they want, forever. The second app takes a day. The third takes a weekend. The tenth takes an afternoon. Each person becomes an ongoing source of software in their community, their business, their industry.
Michigan gets the first regional version of this. A distributed monthly pipeline of real, shipped applications built in cities like Traverse City and Ann Arbor, expanding into other Michigan communities, instead of ceding AI-era company formation to Silicon Valley and New York. The model is already being validated at the institutional level. Build an App in a Day placed Top 10 at U of M's ClawCon competition out of 375 companies. The alumni flywheel is visible in real time. Lindsay Joseph walked into our inaugural event having never written a line of code, built a tool her company still uses, came back to the next event as a judge, and paid for three of her teammates to attend. BedConnect is now a top-four PitchMI finalist competing for $1,000,000. That pattern repeats with every event.
The reach widens with access. We've already awarded 10 scholarships totaling $3,735 to participants who couldn't otherwise afford to attend. Two recurring paid B2B partnerships extend Build an App in a
What I'll do with $5,000
$5,000 moves Luigi Solutions from 1 event every 6 weeks to 1–2+ events a month. The event itself works. 97% finish a real app in a day, 100% eventually, across 2 sold-out events. The bottleneck is throughput.
Organic already outperforms. Three news features, 90+ waitlist, 100+ active inbound, zero paid ads. We double down on what's working.
Where the $5,000 goes:
Primary business laptop: $1,300. My current machine is 6 years old and caps local capacity. A modern 16GB laptop runs the full workload: AI agents, dev environment, video editing, Mac Mini coordination. One upgrade roughly doubles daily output.
Claude API credits for AI agents: $2,450. Already running cold email and LinkedIn content agents. This scales them and funds two new ones: a lead qualifier for the 100+ inbound list, and an event ops agent for onboarding, reminders, and follow-up. Once the agent suite runs 24/7 on the Mac Mini, the sales and ops layer stops being a bottleneck.
Video editing + content production tools and equipment: $1,250. 20+ hours of raw event footage becomes the clips, testimonials, and case studies that feed LinkedIn, press, and event marketing. More content in, more demand out.
Total: $5,000. Every line grant-compliant: software or equipment.
Outcome: within 6 months, Luigi Solutions runs 1–2+ Build an App in a Day™ events per month on infrastructure one founder can operate. That's the foundation for the $30,000–$50,000+ monthly milestone, which 3–4 events per month unlocks.
Quick Bio
Kalob Hagen, 26. U.S. Army veteran, Interlochen MI. Founder of Luigi Solutions and creator of Build an App in a Day™. 12 years in tech, starting as an RJG mentee in Traverse City at 14.