SuriaSnap
Building and shipping a web application as business students with no CS background
Overview
SuriaSnap is a modern web application we built and deployed on Vercel. The project started as a challenge to ourselves: could we, as International Business students, learn enough about modern web development to ship something real? The answer turned out to be yes, and the process taught us more about product thinking, iteration, and deployment than we expected.
The Challenge
The primary challenge wasn't technical, it was mindset. Business students are taught to analyze, evaluate, and recommend. Building requires a different mode: make a decision, ship it, observe what happens, and iterate. Those two modes are in real tension.
We also had to navigate a steep learning curve with a modern stack (Next.js, Tailwind, Vercel deployment pipeline) while simultaneously trying to make product decisions about what the application should actually do and for whom.
The temptation throughout was to keep planning and research rather than build. Overcoming that tendency, choosing imperfect action over perfect preparation, was the core challenge of this project.
The Approach
- 1
We constrained the scope aggressively. Instead of building every feature we could think of, we identified the single most valuable thing we could ship and started there. This meant making uncomfortable tradeoffs about what to cut.
- 2
We used Vercel's deployment pipeline to get something live quickly, which created accountability. Once it's public, the bar for quality shifts. That psychological pressure was useful, it stopped us from over-engineering and pushed us toward practical decisions.
- 3
Every time we got stuck on a technical decision, we defaulted to whichever option was simpler to explain. Simplicity as a tiebreaker is underrated in product development.
Key Metrics
< 2 weeks
Time to Deploy
From first commit to live production URL
Next.js 14
Stack
App Router, Tailwind CSS, Vercel deployment
15+
Iterations
Commits and improvements post-launch
Lessons Learned
Scope constraint is more valuable than any individual technical skill
Shipping something imperfect publicly is more educational than perfecting privately
Business thinking (user value, prioritization) is a genuine advantage in product work
Simplicity as a decision tiebreaker produces better results than sophistication-seeking