Creating Aha! Builder: Concept to Code, No Engineers Required

What does it take to build an AI app builder specifically for product managers—not engineers—inside an already crowded market?

In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Brian De Haaff (CEO and Co-Founder), Chris Waters (CTO and Co-Founder), and Sarah Moisan-Thomas (Senior Product Manager) about Aha! Builder, Aha!'s AI-powered app builder built for product managers. Aha! is a fully bootstrapped, profitable, remote-first company that has served product teams for over 13 years without a single salesperson.

They walk through Aha!'s five-step product discovery framework—spark, paper prototypes, proof of concept, early access, and general availability—that led them to Builder. They share why their first version, built on containerized Ruby on Rails infrastructure, proved too wasteful to scale, and how they rebuilt it on a single-instance, multi-tenant architecture using V8 isolates. Along the way, they explain their approach to deterministic guardrails for things like authentication, SSO, and databases, and how a multi-phase, multi-agent pipeline generates a design system, a prototype, and a working application in minutes.

You'll hear how they think about the line between what AI should build and what should stay deterministic, how they handle enterprise concerns like SSO and PII, and why they believe knowing what to build—not how to build it—is where product managers will increasingly add value.