Scratch Your Own Itch, Then Ship It

Carova is a stretch of the Outer Banks with over 20 miles of beach accessible only by four-wheel drive (4WD) - there's no road in. Getting there and getting home requires driving on sand during low tide windows, and getting the timing wrong has real consequences. My family runs a vacation rental there, and my mother-in-law was fielding the same questions from guests constantly: when can I drive, and is it safe right now?

There was no good answer. Tide charts exist but they don't account for weather conditions, fog, or the actual drivable window around a low tide. She was answering these manually, over and over.

I was taking a vibe coding course to sharpen my technical skills, and a beach conditions tool started as a homework assignment. I showed it to my mother-in-law. She loved it immediately and saw real value in it for her guests. That was all the validation I needed. I decided to build it into something real, leveraging AI tools (Claude, Figma Make) to do it.

This wasn't a side project for the sake of having a side project. There was a real user (my mother-in-law, and by extension every guest at Carova Cottages and the broader Carova 4WD community), a genuine gap in available tooling, and real stakes. Generic tide apps don't know what "drivable" means on a 20-mile stretch of beach with no road access. I did.

The scope was clear: build something purpose-built for this community, not a wrapper around a tide chart.

Tide recommendation engine: WorldTides API, 1.0 ft threshold, Easiest/Easy/Moderate drive condition categories based on how far the tide is from that threshold

Weather conditions scoring: Open-Meteo integration with fog flagging, wind direction and speed warnings, visibility scoring - because a drivable tide in a nor'easter is still a bad idea

Round-trip planner with Google Maps: accounting for beach driving times that vary depending on the time of year, tide windows, live traffic on the hard road, and exactly when you need to leave to make it back safely

Google Calendar integration: the decision I'm most proud of

On the calendar feature - I had originally designed a "Save This Tide" functionality, which let users bookmark tides they were planning around. But I kept running into the same problem: conditions change. A tide I saved today might look completely different tomorrow. A saved tide with no context could give someone false confidence. There were too many ways for stale data to mislead a real person making a real decision. And updating the tide information for saved trips in real time led to a host of UX complexity (What happened to my saved trip? Why does the trip I planned not land in a good driving window anymore?) that became a can of worms.

So I scrapped it and went simpler: let users save trips directly to Google Calendar, with a built-in disclaimer to always check current conditions before heading out. It's a more honest product decision - it doesn't pretend the app knows the future. It also takes advantage of something users already have and trust, sends them reminders automatically, and required no custom notification infrastructure on my end. The Google Cloud setup was involved, but the user experience landed exactly where I wanted: click a button, your entire trip is on your calendar.

Live at tiderunner.app with real users from the Carova community

Full launch stack: SEO targeting niche Outer Banks keywords, GA4 analytics, Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, Buy Me a Coffee monetization

Built, maintained, and iterated entirely solo: every decision from product to infrastructure to legal compliance

What I'd do next with a team and resources: expand to other 4WD beach communities (there are dozens along the East Coast with the same problem), build a community conditions reporting layer, explore partnerships with vacation rental platforms serving beach communities.