Jessica Vasquez had chickens.

Organic, non-GMO, pasture-raised hens in southwest Missouri's Stone County — the kind of eggs people drive out of their way to find, if they can find them at all. She sold locally, but the process was exactly what you'd expect: word of mouth, Facebook groups, hoping the right person happened to ask the right question in the right county feed.

It wasn't just her. Every week she saw the same posts cycling through local Facebook groups. Where can I get goat milk? Anyone know a farmer selling grass-fed beef? Has someone found real sourdough bread around here — not from a store?

A farmer Jessica met through a University of Missouri Extension event told her it had taken three years just to find a local source of raw milk to buy. Three years. By word of mouth. In Missouri.

"The problem is discovery," Jessica said during the Builder Showcase in May. "You would have to either go to Facebook Marketplace or just ask around."

She'd been thinking about this problem for a while. What she hadn't been thinking about was building the solution herself — until she enrolled in Idea to App.

Nine Years in Healthcare IT. Zero Experience in App Development.

Jessica's professional background is in healthcare technology — clinical application support, electronic health records, physician IT systems. She holds a master's degree in healthcare administration and is Lean Six Sigma black and green belt certified. She manages an automation task force using robotic process automation tools. She knows technology. She knows how to solve problems.

What she didn't know was how to build an application from scratch. "I did not have any experience in application development or coding," she said plainly. "My specialty has always been solving problems with creative solutions."

She enrolled in Idea to App not because she planned to launch a startup — but because she wanted to stay current in a field moving fast. She needed to understand what was coming. She figured the course would give her that.

She didn't expect it to give her a business.

"I originally enrolled to upskill myself. I know I work in technology. Modern AI is coming and I have to adapt. What started off as professional development is now — I'm starting a business. A tech startup." — Jessica Vasquez

The Idea That Kept Getting Bigger

She started the course with a different idea entirely — something in healthcare, a field she knew well. But she realized quickly that she wasn't the right person to solve it. "I'm not an expert in that field or industry enough," she said. "I need to work on something I'm familiar with."

So she went local. Literally. She had chickens. She knew the problem. She started small.

What happened next is a good illustration of what happens when you give someone the right tools and enough space to think. She used ChatGPT as a research assistant — bouncing ideas, mapping features, designing the blueprint. She was on the free version, which meant hitting usage limits. And those forced pauses turned out to be exactly what she needed.

The insight: "It was in those moments of stepping away that new ideas popped into my head that I hadn't considered — or a more efficient way of designing it. I went from 'let me try to build an app to help me sell eggs locally' to an online marketplace platform that could literally change how farmers get direct access to consumers."

Inside the Idea to App course, the planning got sharper. Garrett Duncan — her instructor — built in structure for the parts non-technical founders often skip: security considerations, infrastructure checklists, prompting frameworks that force you to think through what you're actually building before you build it. She said the collaboration with other students in the course was just as valuable as the curriculum.

"The courses were super easy to understand. Garrett brought in live examples. We learned things — like questions about security when prompting and designing — that I never even considered."

What She Actually Built 

EggDrop is live at eggdrop.farm. Not a prototype. Not a concept. A functioning marketplace with real vendors, real products, and Stripe payment processing.

Farmers and producers sign up as vendors. Consumers search by location — within 20 miles of their zip code — and find what's available near them. Ground beef. Duck eggs. Farm-fresh chicken eggs. Tiger's milk mushroom tinctures. Grass-fed roasts. Sourdough bread from a real baker who uses the simplest possible ingredients.

Jessica built in features she didn't plan at the start — each one driven by a real need she discovered along the way.

Clucky: An AI assistant built into the vendor onboarding flow that analyzes ingredients and automatically flags allergen concerns — dairy, tree nuts, gluten — and suggests safe tags before a product goes live.

USDA certification tagging: Added after a bar owner told her he couldn't find a local, certified beef supplier. Now restaurants, hospitals, and schools can search specifically for USDA-certified producers.

The Hen House Pass: A subscription model for consumers to set up recurring orders from their favorite producers — weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Egg Credits: A gamified loyalty system where consumers earn redeemable rewards. Jessica connected it to Shopify's print-on-demand API — so when someone redeems credits for a branded item, it gets printed and shipped without her touching it.

10-day weather forecast: Built into the vendor dashboard because farmers need it and shouldn't have to switch apps to check it.

Temporary stock photos: Linked to Pexels via API so that when a vendor joins but hasn't uploaded product photos yet, Clucky adds a placeholder and sends a gentle nudge to upload a real one.

She also built a full executive dashboard for herself as the platform owner — transaction data, subscriptions, promo code management, live listing oversight. She built it the same way she built everything else: describe what she needed, iterate with the AI agent, test it, fix it, keep going.

"You can make it happen. I hope this inspires you all." — Jessica Vasquez

What It Actually Took

Replit as her build platform. ChatGPT and Claude as thinking partners. The Idea to App course as the structure holding it all together. And a willingness to sit with an idea long enough to let it grow past its original shape.

She didn't have a technical co-founder. She didn't hire a developer. She didn't wait until she understood everything before she started. She had a problem she knew from the inside, the tools to start building, and a course that taught her how to ask the right questions.

"AI is a tool and it's going to unlock creativity," she said at the end of the showcase. "All you've got to do is have an idea. Talk to it about it — and then just try it."

EggDrop is still growing. She's onboarding more vendors. She's refining the consumer experience. She's thinking about what comes next for a platform that started as a way to sell a dozen eggs in Stone County and became something that could change how small producers reach their market across Missouri.

See it for yourself: Browse the marketplace at eggdrop.farm, or watch Jessica tell the story herself in Codefi's Builder Showcase recap on YouTube.

Start Where Jessica Started

Idea to App is the Codefi Foundation AI training course that takes non-technical builders from idea to working application. No coding background required — just a problem worth solving and a willingness to build.

Missouri founders get sponsored access through Codefi Foundation. The next cohort is forming now.

Find out if it's right for you at codefiworks.com

Learn fast. Build right. Gain traction.