Episode #33: From Chartered Accountant to Vibe Coder: Launching Golf Duels with AI

Hosts: Paul Rhodes (flying solo this week as Sean is off sunning himself).

Guest: Brandon Himsley (Chartered Accountant and Founder of Golf Duels).

What happens when a chartered accountant with zero coding experience, a golf obsession, and a few hundred pounds decides to build a mobile app? In this episode of CTRL-ALT-DEV, Paul Rhodes sits down with Brandon Himsley to unpack the incredible, warts-and-all journey of building and beta-testing his matchmaking platform, Golf Duels.

We explore how Brandon used a spreadsheet-driven financial mindset to architect complex app logic, how he bypassed early technical bottlenecks by "meta-prompting" multiple AI tools, and the brutal, humbling lessons he learned when trying to get real-world users onto a native app.

Key Topics & Highlights:

• The Excel-to-App Architecture: Brandon spent eight years qualifying as a Chartered Accountant, a process that taught him how to build massive, system-driven Excel models. He explains how building an app is essentially just creating a long, logical flowchart of processes, making his finance background surprisingly useful.
• The Prototyping Rollercoaster (Replit vs. Lovable): Brandon originally paid for clickable Figma designs but realized making them interactive was taking hours of tutorial watching. After trying Replit and finding it wasn't a fit for his needs, he pivoted to Lovable. In just minutes, he was able to convert his Figma mockups into a working mobile-responsive UI that felt like a real app.
• "Meta-Prompting" in Action: Brandon reveals his secret weapon: he had ChatGPT open on one screen to draft highly descriptive prompts, which he then plugged directly into Lovable on the other screen to generate clean results.
• TestFlight, Xcode, and Family Collaborations: Intolerant of web-app shortcuts, Brandon was adamant that his testers see the native Golf Duels logo right on their home screens. Since he didn't own a Mac, his dad stepped in, using Claude to navigate the dense, intimidating world of Apple Xcode to successfully deploy the prototype onto TestFlight and Google Play's Test Track.
• The Humbling Reality of the Beta Test: Brandon recruited 25 testers, primarily by messaging strangers selling clubs on Facebook Marketplace. He shares the humbling experience of waiting for users to log in, proving that onboarding friction (getting users to download TestFlight and sign up) is a far bigger hurdle than pixel-perfect button designs.
• Bottling the Ryder Cup Feeling: Brandon describes the vision behind Golf Duels: moving amateur golf away from passive, isolated leaderboards and turning it into face-to-face, match-play team combat. The beta successfully proved the core hypothesis—that strangers would meet at a random course, pay green fees, and play competitive league matches.
• The Next Big Leap (The Investor Hunt): While the prototype is a massive triumph, Brandon is realistic about the "under the hood" code quality. He discusses his active search for strategic investors and B2C scaling partners to help solve the "chicken-and-egg" density challenge and transition Golf Duels from a working prototype to a production-ready community platform.

Links & Resources Mentioned in this Episode

• Golf Duels Website: https://www.golfjewels.co.uk
• Golf Duels Instagram: Connect with Brandon and view beta highlights at @GolfJewels.
• Lovable: https://lovable.dev/ (The primary AI platform Brandon used to build the interface).
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/ (The design tool used to draft the initial mockups).
• Playtomic: https://playtomic.io/ (The paddle-tennis matchmaking app Brandon references as inspiration for local community density).
• Replit: https://replit.com/ (The AI development platform Brandon briefly trialed early on).