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How a Non-Technical Female Founder Builds Frontend Using Claude Code

Nomiki Petrolla

Nomiki Petrolla

·16 min read

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My unfiltered journey to $1M ARR as a solo female founder.

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I don’t write code. But I build every screen my users touch. Here’s the exact process I use with Claude Code, GitHub, and Linear to ship product faster than most technical teams.

TL;DR: I’m a non-technical solo female founder building a tech platform from Ohio. I use Claude Code to build the entire frontend of Theanna, then hand it off to my engineers who connect the backend. This process cut our development time down from weeks to days. Here is the exact step-by-step breakdown of how I do it.

What You Will Learn in This Post

Key Terms Used in This Post

Claude Code is an AI-powered coding tool created by Anthropic that runs in your terminal and lets you build software using natural language instructions instead of writing code manually.

GitHub is a platform where developers store, manage, and collaborate on code. Repositories (repos) are folders that contain all the code for a specific project.

Linear is a project management tool built for software development teams. Tickets are individual tasks or features that engineers work on.

Frontend is everything a user sees and interacts with in a software product. This includes screens, buttons, navigation, and visual design.

Backend is everything that happens behind the scenes, including databases, servers, APIs, and the logic that makes the product work.

Local server is a version of your product that runs only on your own computer for testing and development. No one else can see it until you push the code to a shared repository.

I’m going to tell you something that most people in tech don’t believe until I show them.

I am a non-technical founder. I have never written a line of backend code in my life. I don’t know what half the variables in my own codebase mean because I didn’t write them. And yet every single screen, every flow, every interface that the founders on Theanna interact with was built by me.

Not my engineers. Me. A mom of four in Ohio who quit her job as Head of Product at an AI startup to build the platform that will help more women hit $1M in revenue than any accelerator in existence.

I build all of my frontend using Claude Code, GitHub, and Linear. And today I am going to walk you through exactly how I do it, step by step, so you can stop telling yourself that you need a technical cofounder to ship product.

Because you don’t. That narrative is dead. And I’m living proof.

Why I Started Building Frontend Myself

Let me give you some context first.

Theanna is an all-in-one platform for women founders building software companies. We take founders from zero to $1M ARR through a structured, milestone-based journey with AI-powered guidance, community, revenue tracking, and a BUILD interface that tells you exactly what to do next. We have over 200 women on the platform building real companies right now.

When I first started building Theanna, I did what most non-technical founders do. I designed everything in Figma. I would create detailed mockups of every screen, every flow, every interaction. Then I would write requirements documents to go along with them and hand the whole package off to my developers.

And they would not build it exactly how I designed it. Ever.

It was not because they were bad engineers. They are great engineers. But there is always a gap between a static Figma design and a working product. They would interpret things slightly differently. They would make decisions about spacing or layout or interaction patterns that were not what I had in mind. And then I would have to go back and explain what needed to change, and they would adjust, and we would go round after round until it matched what I originally wanted.

I was spending a massive amount of time creating Figma designs and requirements documents from scratch only to have the final product not match what I had envisioned. It was not a communication problem. It was a process problem. The handoff from design to development was inherently lossy no matter how detailed I made my documentation.

The core issue was simple. Engineers are not user experience designers. They do not think about how a flow should feel for the user. They do not know the nuance of how I want a button to behave or where I want a challenge prompt to sit on the page. That is not their job. Their job is to make the backend work, connect the databases, handle the performance, and make sure everything saves properly.

My goal was to cut the time I was spending on this process down to one tenth of what it was. I wanted to ship faster. Way faster. And I wanted to eliminate the gap between what I designed and what actually got built.

So I stopped designing in Figma and started building the frontend myself. And Claude Code made that possible.

The Core Principle: Pull Down, Don’t Create New

The single most important thing I learned is that you never want to create something net new when you have engineers already building a codebase.

Instead, I pull down my engineers’ existing code bases from GitHub so that I am building off of their frameworks. This means that when I do frontend work, all my engineers have to do is tie in the backend to the interface I have already created. The handoff is clean. There is no confusion about file structures or naming conventions because I am working inside the same system they are.

I do not touch the backend. Ever. I do not know how to do backend development and honestly I do not want to know. That opens a whole can of worms of trouble that is not worth my time. My time is best spent on the user experience, the product vision, and the interface. Their time is best spent on databases, APIs, and performance.

This separation is what makes the whole system work.

Step 1: Access the GitHub Repositories

Everything we build at Theanna lives in GitHub. Because it is my company, I have access to every repository that our developers are working off of.

Here is what our repo structure looks like:

  • Backend: All the database and API work that I do not touch
  • Frontend Users: The interface that our customers see and interact with. This is my territory
  • B2B Frontend: The admin side of our platform
  • Frontend Registration: How users go through the signup and onboarding process
  • Marketing Site: Our marketing website that I migrated over

Out of all of these repositories, the only one I am working in is Frontend Users. That is the code that powers what our founders see every single day when they log in to Theanna. Those are the screens I am building and iterating on.

To get started, I connect via terminal to pull all of these repositories down to my local dev environment. Once that is done, all of the code bases are lined up on my machine and mapped to their respective repos. I can see every project, every work tree, every file that I need.

Step 2: Open Claude Code and Talk to It in Plain English

This is the part that changes everything for non-technical founders.

I open Claude Code and I just start talking to it. I tell it what I want to work on using normal, everyday language. I do not use developer terminology. I do not reference specific files or functions or variables. I literally cannot because I did not write the original code and I do not know what those things are called.

So here is what I do instead. I say something like “I want to work on the challenges feed and add new functionality. Can you pull the page that I am referring to?” And then I attach a screenshot of the page I am talking about.

That is it. Plain language and an image.

The screenshot is the key. Because I am not using the language that developers use when they reference code, the image gives Claude Code the context it needs to go find the exact file and component I want to work on. It matches my screenshot to the codebase and pulls up the right thing every single time.

This is incredibly powerful for someone like me. I do not need to know what a component is called in the code. I do not need to know which folder it lives in. I just show Claude Code what I am looking at and say “let’s work on this.”

And it finds it.

Step 3: Preview the UI on a Local Server

Once Claude Code finds the right page, I say “show me the UI.”

What happens next is that it spins up something called a local server. This creates a working version of the frontend that I can see and interact with right in my browser. The URL at the top says “localhost” because it is literally running on my computer only. No one else can see it. My engineers cannot see it. It is completely private and it is my sandbox to experiment in.

This is where the real work happens. I tweak the layout. I redesign elements. I rearrange things. I add new functionality. I test different flows. I keep working and iterating until the interface feels exactly right and looks exactly how I want our founders to experience it.

I want to emphasize this point because it matters. The engineers are not user experience designers. They do not know how I want the experience to feel for our users. They do not know what makes sense in the context of our founder journey. They did not go through the 15 years of product leadership experience that I bring to this.

Before I had this process, the conversation with my engineers was always the same. “What do you want the experience to look like? Where do you want this element? How do you want it to work?” And I would try to explain, and they would try to interpret, and we would go back and forth for days.

Now I skip all of that. I just build it. I create the entire experience exactly how I want it. I design the interface. I decide how every interaction works. And then I hand it off.

Step 4: Create the Ticket and Push to GitHub

When I am happy with the frontend, I tell Claude Code that I am ready to commit.

I give it the exact ticket number from Linear, which is where we manage all of our development projects. So I will say something like “I am ready to commit this. The ticket number is THE-836. I want you to push this to GitHub so my engineers can see the code.”

But I do not just push the code. I also have Claude Code create an entire prompting system for the ticket. This is a detailed description of what the project is, what the requirements are, how everything should work, and what the engineer needs to know to connect the backend. All of that gets pushed directly into the Linear ticket.

So when my lead engineer Ameesh picks up the ticket, here is what he gets. He gets a complete Linear ticket with a clear description. He gets a link to the GitHub pull request with all of my frontend code. He gets detailed requirements for how the backend needs to connect. And he gets a working visual reference because I have already built what it should look like.

He clicks the GitHub link and sees my code. He audits it to make sure I am using the right files and code bases. Then he takes my frontend and aligns it with the backend. He makes sure everything is working in the database, everything is saving correctly, he fixes any lags, and he handles all the performance optimization.

That is the stuff I do not touch. That is his expertise. And because I have already handled the entire frontend and provided clear requirements, he can focus 100% on what he does best.

The Results: From Two Weeks Down to Two Days

Let me tell you what this process actually looks like in practice.

For our challenge prompts feature, I built the entire frontend in Claude Code. I designed the interface, created the flow, decided how users would click through and identify what they want to work on. I pushed it to GitHub with a detailed Linear ticket and sent it to Ameesh.

He had zero questions about the frontend. None. Not a single Slack message asking me what I wanted something to look like or where I wanted a button. The ticket had everything he needed.

We pushed that feature to production in less than two days.

Before this process, that same feature would have taken two weeks of back and forth. Minimum. That is not an exaggeration. I have lived through enough of those cycles to know exactly how long they take when the communication is not clean.

Think about what that means if you are a founder trying to ship fast. Two weeks becomes two days. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a fundamentally different speed of building.

Scaling This to Bigger Projects

Small features are one thing. But this process scales to massive projects too.

Right now I am redeveloping the entire frontend interface of Theanna. New screens. New flows. More intuitive navigation. A complete visual refresh that is going to impact every single page our users interact with.

For a project this big, I do not create one ticket. That would overwhelm any engineer. Instead, I create a master ticket in Linear called “Frontend Refresh” and then I break it down into individual tickets for every single page.

I created a project in Linear and set up the master ticket as the overview. Then I am building each page individually in Claude Code, making sure it looks and works exactly how I want. Each page gets its own ticket with its own requirements and its own GitHub push. My engineers can then pick up tickets and mark them off as they go.

This is probably about a week of my time because I am chipping away at it between everything else I do. But the payoff is enormous. When I hand this off, there will be zero ambiguity about what the frontend should look like. My engineers will be able to work through it systematically without needing to come back to me with questions every five minutes.

We are also working on automating even more of the handoff process. My engineer Ameesh is working with our team on automating a lot of the pull requests and merging so that instead of someone having to manually edit things and push them to the next person, it happens automatically. The goal is to reduce the development cycle even further.

The Exact Toolkit I Use

For anyone who wants to replicate this process, here is exactly what I use:

  • Claude Code by Anthropic: The AI coding tool that lives in my terminal and lets me build frontend using plain English and screenshots. This is the backbone of my entire process. I talk to it like a human and it writes the code
  • GitHub: Where all of our code repositories live. Every developer on my team works off of these repos and this is where I push my code for engineers to review
  • Linear: Our project management tool for development. Every feature, bug, and initiative gets tracked here. It is built for software teams and it is fast, clean, and exactly what we need to keep everything organized
  • Theanna: The platform I am building all of this for. The all-in-one platform for women founders building software companies from idea to $1M ARR

That is four tools. Claude Code to build. GitHub to store and share code. Linear to manage projects and communicate with engineers. And the product itself that I am building every single day.

What This Means for Non-Technical Founders

I am telling you all of this for a reason.

The narrative around non-technical founders needs to change. For years the story has been the same. You need a technical cofounder. You need to learn to code. You cannot build a real tech company if you cannot write software yourself.

That was true five years ago. It is not true today.

And we are making it even easier for the founders inside Theanna.

New: Dedicated Engineering Support Inside Theanna

We just brought on Kyle Cupples as our educational full stack engineer. Kyle is the founder of Code Untold and he is now running four educational workshops and dedicated tech support calls every single month inside the platform. That means our founders get hands-on technical guidance and real engineering support without having to pay out of pocket for expensive consultants, bootcamps, or freelance developers.

This is the kind of infrastructure I am building at Theanna. I do not want our founders to feel like they are on an island trying to figure out the technical side alone. I have been that person. I know what it feels like to not know what you do not know and to have no one to ask. Kyle changes that for every woman on our platform. They get direct access to a full stack engineer who can walk them through their technical questions, troubleshoot their builds, and teach them the skills they need to move faster.

Four workshops a month. Tech support calls. All included in their Theanna membership. No extra fees. No upsells. Just the resources they actually need to build.

This is what it looks like when you stop gatekeeping access and start building real infrastructure for women founders.

The tools exist right now to do this. Claude Code lets me talk to my codebase in plain English. GitHub lets me collaborate with my engineers seamlessly. Linear keeps everything organized so nothing falls through the cracks.

My engineers focus on what they are best at. I focus on what I am best at. We move faster than we ever have. We build better than we ever have. And nobody had to ask anyone’s permission to make it happen.

If you are a woman sitting on an idea right now telling yourself that you cannot build it because you are not technical, I need you to hear me clearly. That excuse does not work anymore. The tools are here. The process works. The only thing standing between you and building your company is the belief that you cannot.

Kill that belief. And start building.

This Is Just the Beginning

This blog post is part of my journey to $1M ARR with Theanna. Every week I am going to share the real numbers, the real process, and the real lessons from building a tech company as a solo female founder.

If you are a woman who wants to build a tech company without writing code, without needing permission, and without waiting for someone to fund you, Theanna was built for you.

And if you want to follow this journey, subscribe to this blog. I am sharing everything. The wins. The losses. The revenue numbers. The experiments. The stuff that most founders never talk about.

Because being bold and thinking different are not always welcome. But I have never needed to be liked. I just need to keep building.

BE OK WITH NOT BEING LIKED AND KEEP FUCKING GOING.

Nomiki 💜

Key Takeaways: How Non-Technical Founders Can Build Frontend

  • Use your engineers’ existing codebase: Pull down their repositories from GitHub instead of building from scratch. This keeps your work compatible with their backend
  • Use Claude Code to build frontend with plain English: Describe what you want in everyday language and attach screenshots. Claude Code will find the right files and write the code
  • Preview everything on a local server before sharing: Test and iterate on your own machine until the interface is exactly right. Nobody else can see it until you push it
  • Push code with detailed Linear tickets: Include clear requirements, the GitHub link, and a full description so your engineers can connect the backend without back-and-forth
  • Break large projects into individual page tickets: For major redesigns, create a master ticket with sub-tickets for each page so engineers can work through them systematically
  • This process cuts development time by up to 90%: Features that previously took two weeks of back-and-forth now ship in under two days

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