Meerlume

I decide what we build and in what order, and plan the work week by week. Meerlume is for any bot a business needs, not just bookings, so I keep a close eye on tools like ManyChat and Typebot, and research the market to work out where Meerlume should go next. I set the pricing too.

I designed and built most of Meerlume: the builder, the shared inbox, bookings and calendars, and the connections to all five apps. I build with AI coding agents, mostly Claude Code. The agent writes the code, so most of my time goes into deciding how a feature should work and how it should feel.

Every change goes to a separate reviewer agent that hasn’t seen the work. If it finds anything serious, the agent fixes it and a new reviewer starts over, until a round comes back clean. Then the agent tests the feature, and so do I.

The original plan was to run the backend on Google Cloud, but its developer experience is miserable: endless setup, and a maze of IAM permissions to get through before anything runs. So I chose Railway instead. For a while Railway wasn’t reliable, and after a security incident on their side, I moved our backend services to AWS in October. The website runs on Cloudflare, and the database on Neon.

We went through a lot of names. I wanted a meerkat in it, but nearly every meerkat name was already taken. Legally we could have used some of them, but we wanted a name that was clearly ours. Meerlume was still free, and it stuck with both of us. I drew the logo, two rounded chat bubbles like the two sides of a conversation, and later refined it with Claude Code driving Affinity, the design app.

I design the product and the website: the landing page and its artwork, the builder and the dashboard.

I set up Meerlume’s accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and post reels there that I make with Claude Code and Remotion, which turns code into video. I made our launch video the same way, and I follow how the posts do in Metricool.

I also wrote nearly everything there is to read about Meerlume: the blog, the feature pages, the step-by-step guides with their screenshots, and the changelog, every week, so customers can see what’s new.

Some of the hardest work wasn’t code. I got Meerlume approved by Meta as an official WhatsApp partner, then through Meta’s review for Messenger and Instagram. We first applied to Lemon Squeezy, but it’s owned by Stripe and runs on Stripe’s systems, and getting a company from Armenia verified there was a wall we couldn’t get past. So I set up billing on Paddle, which also handles sales tax, and got us approved on Polar as a backup. And I set up our terms, the data agreement we sign with customers, and the email setup that keeps our emails out of spam.