“Shipped an AI-built marketplace platform in 4 months. I can talk about what actually happened, not what AI could theoretically do.”
I'm Mark Barnett, founder of OzStorehouse, a free marketplace platform for makers and independent sellers on Australia's NSW Central Coast. I'm not a developer. I spent 25 years in telco and six years in engineering leadership across Amazon and AWS, then in 2024 I built OzStorehouse from scratch using AI as my coding partner, no dev team, no agency, no six-figure build cost.
It didn't stop as a personal project. It's grown into a live, multi-tenant platform now hosting 23 local sellers across 26 markets, all on a permanent zero-fee model. That's the part I think makes for a genuinely useful conversation: not "AI is going to change everything" in the abstract, but what it actually took to go from an idea to real infrastructure other small businesses now depend on, day to day, mistake by mistake, using tools that didn't even exist five years ago.
I'm a good guest for conversations about building and shipping with AI as a non-technical founder, what it's like running a real platform solo without a team, and where I think AI tools are headed next, especially the gap between generic AI-built output and the genuinely unique solutions that come from years of hard-won domain experience. I bring specific stories, not talking points, and I'm happy to go deep on the technical build, the business model, or the human side of growing something from nothing.
Where Central Coast makers, collectors and independents sell the right way. No fees, no checkout, just real conversations.
Central Coast events, markets and market stalls — plus garage sales, all near you on one map, with an optimised route to visit them all.
