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BikersBuddy is a motorcycle community and marketplace I built, hosted, secured and performance-tuned from scratch. Here is the story of how it came together.

The idea

Bangladesh has a huge motorcycle culture but no dedicated platform for riders to connect, buy, sell and share. I saw the gap and decided to fill it.

The tech stack

The web platform is built on a custom full-stack architecture. I handled everything: server provisioning on a VPS, Nginx configuration, SSL, database design, backend API, and frontend. Performance tuning was a major focus — Core Web Vitals scores matter for SEO and user retention.

The mobile app

I built the BikersBuddy mobile app using Flutter and Dart, using Cursor and Kiro as AI-assisted development tools. The app is cross-platform (Android and iOS) and is published on Google Play Console. Building a mobile app as a primarily web developer was a steep learning curve, but AI-assisted coding tools made it significantly faster.

Lessons learned

Building your own product is completely different from client work. There is no brief, no deadline, and no one to tell you what to build next. You have to make every decision yourself. It is harder and more rewarding than any client project I have worked on.

If you are a developer thinking about building your own product, my advice is: start smaller than you think you need to, ship early, and iterate based on real user feedback.