The Invitation That Collects Its Own RSVPs: Lyka Dabalos Built Imbitaryo With Claude Code

Every Filipino celebration runs on a number that nobody actually knows. A birthday, a wedding, a debut, a baptism, a fiesta: at some point the host has to call the venue or the caterer and say how many people are coming. Chairs are rented by the piece. Food is priced by the head. The hall is booked by capacity. And the number the host gives is, almost always, a hopeful guess wearing a costume of certainty.

Think about where that number comes from. Invitations went out through group chats and text messages and paper cards handed to relatives. Replies come back in the same scattered way: a cousin says she is coming, probably, plus her kids; an uncle says he will try; a friend reads the message and means to answer later and never does. Some guests reply for a whole household with one word. Some reply twice. Some do not reply at all and arrive anyway, because in the Philippines the celebration is the point, and the boundary between invited and welcome has always been a friendly one. All of this is warm and human and completely unmanageable, right up until the moment somebody has to pay for sixty chairs and food for eighty, or the reverse.

The host's real job, underneath the decorations and the lechon, is information work. Who is coming. Who is not. Who has not answered. How many seats each family actually needs. That information lives in five different chat threads and one notebook, and it changes every day as the celebration gets closer. The venue wants one number. Reality keeps handing the host a cloud of maybes.

This is the problem that Lyka Dabalos decided to remove. Not soften, not organize a little better, but remove, by building the one tool she wished every host had: an invitation that does its own follow up work. The invitation page collects the replies. The guest list tracks itself. The seats count themselves down. The host stops chasing and starts hosting again.

The result is called Imbitaryo, a name that plays on the Filipino word for invitation, and it is a live digital invitation and RSVP platform built by one person in Manila, in her hours outside a full time day job, with an AI coding tool called Claude Code doing the heavy lifting alongside her. It is the project she says she is most proud of. This post is the story of how it got built, and why the road she took to build it matters more than the tool she built it with.

The builder: client success by day, shipping by night

Lyka Dabalos is a Client Success Specialist based in Manila, Philippines. That is her day job: the person whose work is making sure clients are looked after, their questions answered, their day to day running smoothly. Outside work, by her own description, she builds websites, experiments with AI, and turns random ideas into actual projects. The word to hold onto in that sentence is actual. Plenty of people experiment. She ships.

She is profile number 2 on the AI Pro wall, the community showcase where her full profile lives at aipro.fm/lyka. The detail that tells you the most about her is this one: she asked for that profile herself, in the E2 Discord, and then earned it with the work she could point to. Nobody scouted her. Nobody handed her a spotlight. She raised her hand, and then she showed receipts. Keep that sequence in mind, because it is the same sequence as everything else in this story: ask, build, show.

Her working situation is the modern remote pattern at its most practical. She already works with a US based team, she is comfortable on US hours and on live sessions, and she works in English and Filipino. She is available part time at 16 dollars per hour, which is worth pausing on, because it sets the honest scale of this story. This is not a founder myth about quitting everything to chase a dream full time. This is a person with a real job and real bills, building real products in the margins of a working life, which is the situation most builders on earth are actually in.

Her toolkit is the current AI builder's stack, explored with intent for over a year: ChatGPT, Claude Code, Lovable, and Gemini. Note the verb. She has been exploring these tools for over a year, which in AI time is a long apprenticeship. The tools changed under her feet more than once in that year, as they did for everyone, and she kept building through the changes. That persistence turns out to be the whole story in miniature: the advantage was never a single tool. It was the habit of picking tools up, learning what each one is genuinely good at, and finishing things with them.

There is one more piece of her profile worth slowing down for, because clients notice it before they notice any tool: she is easy to work with across distance. She already works with a US based team, which means the time zone gymnastics that sink so many remote arrangements are, for her, just the job. She is comfortable on US hours and on live sessions, the video calls where real decisions get made and vague freelancers quietly disappear. She works in English and Filipino, which matters more than it sounds: half her world, the clients and teams, runs in one language, and the other half, the families planning debuts and weddings back home, runs in the other. A builder who can take a brief in English at midnight and understand, in Filipino, exactly why a grandmother's seat at the table is not a detail, is a builder with range that no certificate measures.

The ladder, climbed in the right order

Most people who fail at building products fail at the ordering. They start with the biggest idea, the full platform, the thing that needs ten features and a payment system and a brand, and they start it before they have ever finished anything small. Lyka's path ran in the opposite direction, and it is worth laying out rung by rung, because each rung taught exactly the skill the next one needed.

Rung one: little apps for personal use. Small tools, built for an audience of one, where the only requirement is that the thing works and helps. No users to impress, no clients to manage, no money at stake. This is where a builder learns the raw loop of making software: have an idea, describe it, build it, fix what breaks, use it. Most people skip this rung because it looks unimpressive. It is actually where all the reps happen.

Rung two: websites and portfolios for friends. Now there is a real user who is not you, with opinions and deadlines and a phone full of photos they want on the page. Friend work teaches the skills solo projects cannot: asking what someone actually needs, translating vague wishes into a finished page, delivering, revising, and handing over something another person depends on. It also teaches the gentle politics of building for people you love, which is a preview of building for clients you have just met.

Rung three: the friend work became a business with a name on it. Built By Lyka is her web development brand, and we will come back to it in detail, because the way she runs it is a lesson in itself. For now, notice what the name does. A name turns favors into a practice. It gives the work a home page, a promise, and a price of admission: this is a real service that real strangers can hire.

Rung four: sharper tools, in a sensible order. She prototyped with Lovable first, the tool that turns a description into a working app quickly, which is perfect for testing whether an idea deserves to exist. Then she moved to VS Code with Claude Code, the setup where an AI agent works inside a real code editor, on a real codebase, under her direction. That order matters. Prototyping tools teach you what to build. A full coding environment teaches you how real software is put together, and it gives you a product you actually control: your code, your project, your decisions about what ships.

Read the ladder again and notice what is missing from it: any moment of waiting to be ready. She did not take a year of courses and then start. She started with what she could finish this week, finished it, and let each finished thing argue for the next, bigger thing. By the time she sat down to build Imbitaryo, she had already been a beginner, a freelancer, a brand, and a prototyper. The flagship product looks impressive from the outside. From the inside, it was just the next rung.

Imbitaryo, piece by piece

Start with what Imbitaryo is, stated plainly. It is a digital invitation and RSVP platform: a host creates an invitation page for a celebration, lists the guests, and sends out one link. Guests open the link, type their name, and reply. The platform keeps the guest list and tracks the responses. That is the whole product, and its plainness is the point. Every feature in it exists because a real host, at a real celebration, needed exactly that and nothing more.

It helps to split the product into its two sides, because an invitation platform is really two tools wearing one name: a tool for the guest, who wants to answer in ten seconds and get back to their day, and a tool for the host, who wants the truth about their own party.

The guest side: answer and be done

The flow on the guest side is almost aggressively simple. Describe the celebration, and the invitation page is ready the moment you save. The host lists the guests and how many seats each may fill, then sends one link. A guest opens it, types their name, and replies. No app to install. No account to create. No forms to chase.

Each of those no's is a design decision, and each one removes a specific way that RSVPs die in the real world. No app to install, because the guest who has to download something before answering will answer later, which means never. No account to create, because every password field is a small door closing. No forms to chase, because a form asks the guest to do homework, and a celebration invitation should feel like a gift, not an errand. What remains is the smallest possible act of courtesy: see the invitation, say your name, say whether you are coming. Ten seconds, and the information the host desperately needs is captured, structured, and stored where it belongs.

There is a deep principle hiding in that simplicity, and it generalizes far beyond parties. The person you need data from is doing you a favor by providing it. Every field you add, every step you require, every account you demand is a tax on that favor, and people pay taxes grudgingly or not at all. Lyka's guest side charges the lowest tax imaginable. That is why it works, and it is the kind of judgment no AI tool supplies on its own. Claude Code wrote the code. The decision about what the guest should never be asked to do was hers.

The host side: the truth about your own party

If the guest side is about kindness, the host side is about control, and it is where the care in this product really shows. Open Imbitaryo as a host and the chaos of the group chat has been replaced by three clean piles: guests who confirmed, guests who declined, and guests who are still waiting to answer. Sorted for you. That sorting sounds trivial until you have been the person scrolling through two hundred messages at midnight trying to reconstruct it by hand. The still waiting pile is the valuable one, because it tells the host exactly who to follow up with, personally, while there is still time. Not a mass reminder blasted at everyone. A short list of names.

Then there are the seats. When a host lists guests, they also note how many seats each guest may fill, because a reply is rarely one person: it is a spouse, kids, sometimes a driver or a grandmother. Imbitaryo attaches names to every seat, and a seat counter counts down as people confirm. Sit with that detail for a moment, because it is the whole philosophy of the product in one feature. A headcount that says forty is a rumor. A headcount that says forty, with a name on every chair, is a fact. The headcount the host finally gives the venue is the real one, built seat by seat out of actual answers, instead of a guess padded by fear in one direction or the other.

The last detail is a quiet one: a private editing link for a co-host or planner. Real celebrations are rarely run by one person. There is a partner, a parent, a sibling, a hired planner, and the guest list lives in all of their heads at once. A private editing link means the other organizer can open the same living list and work on it too, without accounts or permissions or screenshots of screenshots. It is a small feature that reveals a builder who has actually watched how celebrations get organized, and built for the real workflow instead of the tidy imaginary one.

Imbitaryo is in beta, and it is free while it is in beta. Behind the beta sit paid tiers with names that tell you exactly who this product is for: Libre, Handa, and Bongga, priced in pesos. Libre is the free spirit of the lineup, handa means ready, and bongga is the beloved Filipino word for gloriously over the top, the full production. A wedding with a bongga tier is a wedding that means it. The naming is not decoration. It is a signal, sent in the customer's own language, that this product was built by someone from the same world, who knows that a debut and a barangay fiesta and a golden wedding anniversary are not the same event and should not be priced like one.

Step back and look at what she actually built here. A working platform with two distinct user experiences, guest management, seat level tracking, collaborative editing, and a pricing structure waiting behind a beta. Built with Claude Code, by a client success specialist, outside her working hours. A few years ago this was a small agency's quarter of work. The interesting question is not whether AI made it faster. It obviously did. The interesting question is what she spent the saved time on, and the answer is visible in the product: judgment. Which friction to remove. Which detail, the name on the seat, the private link, the three sorted piles, would make a host exhale. Tools compress the building. They do not compress the noticing, and the noticing is all over this product.

What the beta tells you

Imbitaryo is in beta, and free while it is in beta, with the paid tiers named and waiting behind it. It is worth reading that sequence as a decision rather than a delay, because the order she chose is the order experienced builders choose and beginners almost never do.

The beginner's instinct is to price first and learn later: set the tiers, build the paywall, launch to applause, and then discover what hosts actually needed. Her sequence runs the other way. The product is out, in the hands of real hosts planning real celebrations, while it costs nothing. What a beta buys a one person builder is the scarcest resource in software: honest information. Which features do hosts reach for without being told. Where do guests hesitate. Does the seat counter calm people down the way it is supposed to. Every answer arrives as behavior rather than opinion, and behavior is the only feedback that never flatters.

And the pricing is not an afterthought waiting for courage. The tiers exist already, named in the customer's language, Libre, Handa, Bongga, priced in pesos, simply standing behind the beta like staff waiting for the doors to open. That combination, free today and priced tomorrow, in the open, tells a host exactly what is happening: you are early, your celebration is helping shape this, and when it grows up it will cost money in a way you can already see. There is no bait in it and no switch. For a product built on trust between a host and their guests, that transparency about its own future is not a marketing choice. It is the same product value, applied to the business itself.

Hold the scale of all this steady, because the honest telling matters. This is one person. One platform, in beta, built part time around a full time job. There are no claims here about thousands of users or a company in the making, and this post will not invent any. What exists is finished, public, and working, and the road it stands on, apps, friends, brand, prototype, flagship, is fully built underneath it. Beginnings that are real are worth more than middles that are exaggerated.

Built By Lyka: a brand for nervous people

Before Imbitaryo there was the brand, and the brand deserves its own chapter, because Built By Lyka is a small masterclass in selling to the customers everyone else talks down to. Her web development brand, at builtbylyka.com, creates websites, portfolios, and simple web apps. That is the what. The how is the interesting part.

Her homepage speaks directly to the nervous first time client. Its opening question is the one that client is already asking themselves: need a website but don't know where to start? Everything about the offer is shaped to lower that person's blood pressure. She turns your ideas and information into a website you can call your own. No tech skills required on your side. No confusing process. And a turnaround she quotes plainly: 2 to 7 days.

Unpack that promise, because it is doing four jobs at once. First, it names the customer's actual fear, which is rarely price. The first time buyer of a website is afraid of looking stupid, of being sold things they do not understand, of a process that drags for months and ends with a site they cannot update and a developer who has vanished. Second, it removes the skill barrier entirely: your job is to have ideas and information, her job is everything else. Third, it removes the process fear with a flat denial: no confusing process. Fourth, it puts a number on the wait. Two to seven days is a promise a nervous person can hold onto, and it quietly excludes the months long saga they were dreading.

Notice, too, how the brand grew, because she tells it plainly: little apps for personal use first, then websites and portfolios for friends, until the friend work was a business with a name on it. That is the oldest and most reliable way a service business has ever started. You do the work for people who trust you. The work turns out well. The circle widens. At some point the volume of trust needs an address, and the address is a brand with a homepage. There was no launch event, no rebrand, no big reveal. The business precipitated out of finished work, the way crystals form when a solution gets saturated. If you are waiting for the right moment to call your side work a business, her answer is that the moment is when the work already exists and only the name is missing.

The small apps are not a footnote

It would be easy to treat Lyka's smaller projects as trivia next to the flagship, and it would be a mistake, because the small apps are the engine room of the whole story. They are where the finishing habit was built, one shipped thing at a time.

The Learning Parent helps parents learn, grow, and navigate the journey of raising confident and capable children. Its first ebook is out now, and its title is When Money Gets Tight. Consider what that pairing says. The audience is parents. The first piece of content is not about theory; it is about the moment every parent knows, the month the money runs short and the household still has to be run with steadiness and grace. A builder who thinks like a client success specialist builds for the hard week, not the highlight reel. And notice the shape of the project: an app and a book, software and content, each feeding the other. That is a product instinct, not a hobbyist's doodle.

Alongside it, Cute Cal Guide and Cozy Coin Diary are also live. The names alone give away their nature: small, friendly, single purpose tools, the kind of thing a person builds because the idea amused her and the build was within reach. That amusement is not a weakness in the portfolio. It is the mechanism. A builder who ships little things for the pleasure of it keeps the exact muscle that client work and flagship products depend on: the ability to go from idea to finished, working, public thing without the process collapsing somewhere in the middle. Most people's side projects die in the gap between starting and finishing. Hers keep landing on the far side of that gap, in public, with names.

There is a selection effect worth naming here, because readers planning their own first build often get it backwards. They ask: what is the biggest, most impressive thing I could attempt? Lyka's portfolio asks a different question: what can I finish, ship, and learn from this month? Imbitaryo did not come from skipping the small questions. It came from answering so many of them that a bigger answer became possible. The small apps are not the warm up act for the real work. In every way that matters, they were the real work, done at a size where failure was cheap and finishing was learnable.

The day job is the same job

Now for the half of the story that a pure product narrative would leave out: the day job, and why it is secretly the same job.

As a Client Success Specialist, Lyka's work is the care and feeding of other people's operations. Her operations portfolio presents that second practice plainly: admin support, CRM management, and customer experience, handled with precision inside the client's existing tools, with GoHighLevel, ClickUp, and Slack among them. The pitch underneath the list is systems thinking, and it is worth quoting in spirit: notice what is slipping, flag what needs attention, keep the day to day running. That sentence, written about client operations, is also a perfect description of what a good product does. Imbitaryo notices what is slipping (the unanswered invitations), flags what needs attention (the still waiting pile), and keeps the day to day running (the seat counter, quietly counting down). She did not learn product thinking from a course about product thinking. She practices it forty hours a week on other people's businesses.

The overlap gets more direct. Through her role at AI for Business, she works with AI agents and automation for business workflows, including a ClickUp automation, using ClickBot, that collects and organizes form submissions, reducing manual work for the team. Picture that workflow for a second. Form submissions arrive messy and scattered, the way RSVPs arrive in group chats. The automation catches them, organizes them, and turns them into something a team can act on without a human copying and pasting at midnight. It is, structurally, the Imbitaryo problem wearing office clothes: scattered human replies, gathered into one reliable list, by a system that does the chasing so people do not have to.

This is the part of her story that deserves underlining, because it breaks the usual script. The usual script says the day job is the obstacle and the side project is the escape. In her case the day job is the training ground and the side project is the proof. Client success taught her where processes leak and how much a leak costs the people downstream. Automation work taught her that a well aimed small system beats a heroic human effort every time. Building for friends taught her delivery. And the building, in return, makes her better at the day job: a client success specialist who has personally shipped products reads a client's workflow problems with a builder's eyes. The two halves are not competing for her hours. They are compounding in the same person.

The pattern underneath

Pull the whole story apart and a simple machine appears, one that has nothing to do with invitations specifically and everything to do with how ordinary working people become builders in the AI era.

First principle: every product in this story began as a watched annoyance. She watched hosts drown in scattered replies. She watched nervous clients stall at the starting line of a website. She watched form submissions pile up in a client's workspace, waiting for a human to sort them by hand. In each case the move was identical: do not start with a technology, start with a leak. Find a place where information or effort drips away, where a person repeats a task that a small system could hold. The leak is the specification. Imbitaryo is, at bottom, a bucket placed under the exact drip that ruins party planning: the unanswered invitation.

Second principle: the ladder is the strategy. Personal apps, then friends, then a brand, then prototypes, then a flagship with a proper codebase. Each stage is small enough to finish and big enough to teach. Notice that the ladder also manages risk in the way a working person needs it managed. Her income never depended on the next rung working out. The day job paid the bills while the rungs accumulated, which meant every project could be chosen for learning and fit rather than desperation. A builder who does not need this month's project to save them can afford to build the right thing slowly. Part time is not a diluted version of building. Done her way, it is a financing structure for patience.

Third principle: tools are chosen, not collected. Over a year she explored ChatGPT, Claude Code, Lovable, and Gemini, and the mature pattern in her work is a division of labor: Lovable to prototype, to find out fast whether an idea has legs; VS Code with Claude Code to build the real thing, where control matters. That pairing is the practical answer to the question beginners always ask, which tool should I learn. Her portfolio answers: learn what each tool is for, prototype in the fast place, build in the serious place, and let the project, not the hype cycle, decide when to move.

Fourth principle: the human skills were the product skills all along. Client success is the discipline of noticing what other people need before the need becomes a complaint. Read Imbitaryo's host side again with that lens: the sorted piles, the names on seats, the editing link for the planner. None of those are technical features first. They are courtesies, discovered by someone whose profession is paying attention to how people actually behave when they are busy, stressed, and planning something they care about. The AI wrote code at the speed of typing. The courtesies came from a career.

Fifth principle: finish in public, where the evidence can pile up. Her apps are live. Her ebook is out. Her brand has a homepage with a quoted turnaround on it. Her profile on the AI Pro wall exists because she asked, and asking worked because anyone could click through and check the work behind the request. Public finishing does two jobs at once: it forces the last ten percent that private projects skip, the polish, the naming, the actually letting strangers use it, and it turns each finished thing into a standing argument for the next opportunity. A private project teaches only its builder. A public one teaches its builder and then goes on introducing her while she sleeps.

Lessons for side project builders

If you are holding a day job and a head full of project ideas, her story compresses into a working method:

• Start with a leak you have personally watched. If you cannot describe the annoying moment in one sentence, you do not have a product yet, you have a theme.
• Climb in order. A tool for yourself, then work for friends, then a name and a homepage, then a prototype, then the real build. Each rung is finishable, and finishing is the skill everything else stands on.
• Make the ask effortless for the other person. Guests reply because replying takes ten seconds and demands no account, no app, and no form. Whatever your product asks of busy people, tax it as lightly as Lyka taxed hers.
• Put names on the seats. Prefer facts over estimates wherever your product touches the real world: the named guest over the padded headcount, the quoted 2 to 7 days over the vague promise to be in touch.
• Speak to the nervous beginner in their own language. Her tiers are Libre, Handa, and Bongga, priced in pesos. Her brand opens with the customer's own anxious question. Clarity in the customer's words beats cleverness in yours.
• Let the day job teach. The automation she built at work and the platform she built at night are the same idea in two settings. Your job is showing you real leaks every day. That is market research you are being paid to receive.
• Ask, then show. She requested her AI Pro profile herself and backed the request with shipped work. Visibility follows evidence, and evidence is just finished things, accumulated.

None of this requires quitting anything, raising anything, or waiting for permission. It requires evenings, a ladder, and the discipline to finish at each rung before climbing.

Why this belongs at Starvard

Starvard exists to make world class learning free, and to show what learning actually does when it lands in a real life. Lyka's story belongs here because it is the curriculum walking around in a person. In a little over a year of exploring AI tools, a client success specialist in Manila built a service brand for nervous first time clients, a shelf of small apps and an ebook for parents, an automation practice inside her day job, and a flagship platform that fixes one of the oldest headaches in Filipino social life. No hype anywhere in it. Just a ladder, climbed in order, with the receipts public.

It also belongs here as a correction to the loudest story in technology right now, the one where AI either replaces everyone or makes everyone a founder overnight. Her version is quieter and truer: AI made the building cheaper, so the valuable part moved. It moved to noticing, to judgment, to knowing that a seat needs a name on it and a guest needs a door with no lock. Those are learnable things. That is the good news this university is built on, and her portfolio at aipro.fm/lyka is the syllabus.

If you are a builder at any rung of this ladder, or a client who has been nervous about starting, come and meet people like Lyka where she asked for her profile in the first place: the E2 Discord. Join us at e2.life/join, bring the leak you have been watching, and find the builders who will help you place a bucket under it.

Watch

Building a Full-Stack App With Claude Code: Planning & Coding by Danzzy Tech World: a full web app planned and built with Claude Code in the open, mistakes and judgment calls included, which is the closest watchable cousin to how Imbitaryo itself got made.

I Vibe-Coded a Profitable SaaS in 72 Hours by Mark Khramtsou: one solo builder takes an AI assisted build from idea to launched product at speed, a useful contrast in tempo to Lyka's slower ladder, with the same underlying lesson: shipping beats planning.

Scale Your Business Through Productizing Your Services with Brad Hussey by Josh Hall: a web designer explains how he turned freelance services into packaged products with clear prices, which is precisely the move Built By Lyka makes for first time clients.

Sources

Lyka Dabalos, AI Pro profile number 2: aipro.fm/lyka. All biographical details, project descriptions, pricing, and availability in this post are drawn from that profile.

Built By Lyka, her web development brand: builtbylyka.com, source for the brand's offer and its quoted 2 to 7 day turnaround.

Imbitaryo, her live digital invitation and RSVP platform, is named here as her flagship work, as listed on her profile; product details, including the Libre, Handa, and Bongga tiers, are as described there.

Reporting source: the E2 Discord AI Pro profiles, the community maintained profiles of working AI builders, of which Lyka's is one.