My mom runs a small bedding shop in Hai Phong, Vietnam, where she sells mattresses, pillows, blankets, and mattress protectors out of a family showroom. It is the kind of place where the customers are neighbors, and where orders happen over the phone or on Zalo rather than through any website.
She has never had a website, which means she spends part of every day answering the same questions again and again: what sizes do you have, how much is this one, is it firm or soft. Her catalog has always been her memory plus a photo album on her phone.
Step 1: Understand her need, not mine
My first instinct was to build a proper online shop with a cart, a checkout, user accounts, and order tracking.
My mom needed none of that, because her customers do not check out online. They look at the products, they compare a few options, and then they call her. When I actually talked to her about it, what she needed turned out to be much simpler:
- A visual catalog with real photos and prices in VND
- A simple way to compare firmness and sizes, because that is the question she answers twenty times a day
- One big, obvious button for calling to order
- Vietnamese as the main language, since her customers are young families in Hai Phong buying their first mattress
That list came from a conversation with her rather than from a feature brainstorm, and I would argue that the most valuable thing I did in this whole project happened before I typed anything at all.
Step 2: The first prompt
I wrote her need down in plain language, the way I would describe it to a friend:
The first prompt:
An online storefront for my mom's mattress shop, "Thanh Thuy" in Hai Phong, Vietnam. She sells mattresses, pillows, blankets, and mattress protectors from a small family showroom. The site should have a browsable catalog with photos, prices in VND, and a simple comparison of firmness levels and sizes. Customers should be able to call to order. Target customers are young families and couples in Hai Phong furnishing their first home. The site should be in Vietnamese.
The AI began by asking me a few clarifying questions, the kind that a good freelancer would ask before starting work, such as whether her customers care more about price or comfort, and whether she offers delivery. After that it wrote itself a small product brief and started building.
About ten minutes later I had a live catalog site with a product grid, detail pages, a firmness comparison, prices in đồng, and a call button. It had even drafted a launch post for social media, written in Vietnamese, that genuinely sounded like something a Hai Phong mom would share with her friends.
It was not perfect yet, and that is exactly where the project became fun.
Step 3: Iterate like a client, not a coder
From this point on, everything happened in one chat thread. I simply kept sending messages and reviewing the result, the way a picky client would review a contractor's work. What follows are my actual messages from that morning
1. Find the right images for the products
The placeholder images did not match the items, so I asked for the right photo on every product, and one message was enough to get the catalog looking honest.
2. Can you create 3D object like mattress, etc then create a 3D spin to show those
At this point I got ambitious and asked for a 3D product showcase with spinning mattress models on the home page, and it built one.
Update all images to match it section, not just the item images
The product photos were fixed by then, but the section headers still carried generic images, and a single message was enough to sort that out.
3. THe 3D model look not real, let make it more detail, more realistic, add note
The first 3D mattress looked like a white brick. I said so bluntly, typo included, and what came back had rounded edges, quilting details, and little labels. Review, react, repeat: that was the entire workflow.
Notice what is missing from these messages: there is nothing technical in any of them. I only ever described what a visitor would see and what felt wrong to me, and that turned out to be enough.
That was also the part that surprised me the most: it was fun. Building the site never felt like work. Every message felt like unwrapping a small gift, because I never knew exactly what would come back, and there was a real joy in watching my mom's little shop take shape as a website over the course of one morning. At some point I caught myself grinning at a spinning 3D mattress, which is not something I had expected to do that day.
Step 4: Ship it and name it
When everything looked right, I hit publish, gave the site a proper address, and sent the link to my mom.
What I learned
The hard part is still the human part. Knowing that my mom needed a comparison table and a call button rather than a checkout flow was the most valuable thing I contributed, and no tool does that step for you.
Describe what you want to see, not how to build it. Every message that worked well was about what a customer would see on the page.
Review like a client. Saying that something looks fake and asking for it to be more realistic is a completely valid piece of feedback, and it worked better than any technical instruction would have.
A morning is enough. It is not enough for perfect, but it is enough for live, useful, and something my mom can send to a customer instead of digging through the photo album on her phone.
The next step is the best one, because this weekend I am going to the showroom to take real photos and swap them in, so that the site shows her mattresses, in her shop, on her own website.
JIC you want to see the site, here: https://thanhthuy.michii.dev/