Nobody in the room had ever shipped software before. Not really.

Jessica Vasquez spent nine years in healthcare IT — supporting systems, not building them. Charity McGill called herself a "dangerous developer" — the kind who could make changes, but you'd want someone to come back and fix them. Shawn Wood had spent 40 years in HR and operations, with a career in music on the side and no technical background to speak of.

All three enrolled in Idea to App (formerly Prompt to Product), a Codefi AI skills course. All three shipped working applications. And on May 5, during Show Me Network Week, all three demoed live in front of an audience that kept asking the same question: how?

"There's no way I could have ever done this. I have no coding experience or anything like that at all. It was fantastic. I would have never considered doing it." — Shawn Wood

That's what the Builder Showcase was built to answer. Not a presentation about what AI can do in theory. A live demo of what three Missouri women actually built — from their own kitchens, in between jobs and overseas vacations and school district logistics — using the tools Codefi teaches.

Here's what they shipped.

Jessica Vasquez Built a Farm-to-Consumer Marketplace

Jessica started with a simple problem she knew from the inside. In southwest Missouri's Stone County, finding farm-fresh eggs, raw milk, or grass-fed beef from a local producer meant scrolling Facebook groups, asking neighbors, or driving 30 minutes and hoping. Even farmers couldn't find each other. A farmer Jessi met through the University of Missouri Extension had spent three years just trying to locate raw milk to buy.

So she built EggDrop — a live, operational marketplace connecting local producers directly to consumers. Real vendors. Real products. Stripe integration. Mobile-ready. An AI assistant named Clucky that flags allergens automatically as vendors list ingredients.

By the time she presented at the Builder Showcase, EggDrop was already live at eggdrop.farm, with real farmers selling ground beef, duck eggs, mushroom tinctures, and sourdough bread. She built in USDA certification tagging so restaurants and schools can find local, certified producers. She added gamified "egg credits" with Shopify print-on-demand rewards. She connected a 10-day weather forecast for producers who depend on it.

The hook: She started the course wanting to upskill for her day job in healthcare IT. She ended it launching a tech startup.

"This course has gone from just an idea I wanted to upskill myself. Now I'm starting a business — a tech startup — and this is live." — Jessi Vasquez

She built it using Replit, ChatGPT as a research assistant, and the structured planning process she learned inside Idea to App. She had no application development experience. She had a problem worth solving and the tools to do it.

Charity McGill Turned a Multi-Million Dollar Project Into a Weeks-Long Build

Charity had an idea. Her team had told her it was a three-to-five year project, requiring a team of five people and several million dollars — before they'd even know if it would work.

She walked into Idea to App and built a working version in six weeks.

Good Cents is an invoice processing platform for small retailers — built to solve a problem Charity knows intimately from years working as a product manager and business analyst in retail. When a shipment arrives at a small store, someone has to manually enter every product into the inventory system. Every SKU. Every price. Every item. It's tedious, error-prone, and time nobody has.

Good Cents automates it. A retailer uploads an invoice — or scans one — and the app pulls in the product data, cross-references it against Square inventory, flags underpriced items, suggests margin corrections, and tracks what the store owner is saving. During the Builder Showcase, Charity demoed a live invoice processing run, updating inventory counts in real time.

The pivot: She put the product in front of real users. Their feedback: too much. She rebuilt the UI — twice — and a third iteration is underway.

"I could have never done this without Idea to App and without the ability to change this rapidly with AI. Getting it in front of your users, getting that feedback — you're not $30,000 down the hole. You're a couple hundred down the hole. And then you pivot." — Charity McGill

She's since expanded the platform into Bus Buddy, a routing solution for rural schools, and is applying the same methodology in insurance. She now runs what she calls her own software company — built on a foundation of AI tools and a six-week course.

Shawn Wood Built a Touring Tool 10 Years in the Making

For a decade, Shawn Wood worked with independent musicians — booking house concerts, connecting artists with venues across the Midwest, taking calls from agents trying to route tours through Cape Girardeau and Springfield and Paducah. And for a decade, she watched those artists do it the hard way: Google Maps, spreadsheets, cell phones, a dozen different apps open at once.

"There has to be an easier way," she kept thinking. Then she remembered Codefi was right there in town.

She enrolled in Traction Studio AI first — going through the full validation process to confirm her idea had a real market — then started Idea to App. She finished the course from overseas, catching recorded sessions in the middle of the night during a 28-day vacation and staying caught up on class while traveling across time zones.

Map My Gig is the result. An artist enters their starting point, ending point, and a handful of anchor show dates. The app maps the route, surfaces suggested venues along the way — bars, house concert spaces, listening rooms — and matches them to the artist's genre and pay requirements. Shawn is manually entering 1,500 house concert venues nationwide because she doesn't want to scrape anyone's data. She integrated Stripe. She's building out the venue side of the platform.

By the time she demoed at the Builder Showcase, 70 artists were already using it. She'd made a last-minute change before the call — and broke something in the map — and laughed it off, mid-demo, like any founder would.

The moment: She said she's "created like four websites" since finishing the class. "It's addictive. I could sit and do this all day long."

"I would have never thought that I could do this myself, with no tech background at all. Idea to App was a lifesaver." — Shawn Wood

What This Actually Is

Garrett Duncan, who hosted the Builder Showcase and teaches Idea to App, said it plainly during the event:

"It enables people to do things they either didn't have the time to, didn't have the money to, or didn't have the capacity to prior to this."

Two or three years ago, getting a product in front of real users required a team, a timeline, and a budget. If users said "that's too much" — as Charity's did — you were already $30,000 deep with no easy way back.

A month ago, three Missouri women who had never shipped software built working, live products in a six-week course. One is already running a startup. One expanded her original build into multiple products across multiple industries. One has 70 paying-path users and is adding venues by hand because she cares about doing it right.

None of them started with technical backgrounds. All of them started with a problem worth solving.

The Same Starting Point Is Open

Idea to App — the course Jessica, Charity, and Shawn took — is the AI skills course Codefi offers for exactly this: non-technical builders, first-time founders, and people with an idea and no idea where to begin.

Missouri founders access it through Codefi Foundation. The path is the same wherever you're starting from.

Learn fast. Build right. Gain traction.