How it started
My brother and I wanted to buy our family Christmas gifts and didn't have the money, but we knew PCs. We started answering people on Reddit and Quora who wanted to build one, then offered to plan the whole build.
How it worked
- A client shares a budget, what they'll use the PC for and how they want it to look
- We recommend a compatible parts list and explain the tradeoffs
- After the build, we get on a video call and walk them through it
We charged a small fee, a percentage of the build budget, and earned affiliate commissions on parts.
Automation
Most of the work was matching the same inputs to compatible parts over and over. I built a small Python and SQLite tool that took budget, performance priorities and appearance preferences and generated a starting parts list, which we then adjusted by hand.
What I learned
Customers rarely describe what they need in spec language. “I want to stream and it has to be quiet” is a requirement, and turning it into a parts list was most of the job. The same is true for enterprise software.
About the demo
The part picker is a rebuild for this site with a small made-up parts catalog. It isn't the original tool.