Michael Innamorato

A friend got bad news, so I built her a game. A helicopter flies in and drops off a tiny claw machine. She taps it, it grows, a song starts, and she gets four plays. Every play wins something I owe her: a coffee date, a pickleball date, Monza F1, unlimited shoulder rides.

One evening with Claude Code, on the same stack as this site. It lived at a hidden link on this domain until she had seen it, then it came down.

I wrote the spec, then built the whole thing with Claude Code in a single day: Next.js 16, TypeScript, Tailwind, GSAP for every animation, Lenis for scroll, d3-force for the skills web.

No templates, no stock illustration, no Lottie files. All thirty-plus scenes are inline SVG drawn by hand and animated with transform and opacity only, so they run at 60 fps on a phone.

The contact form, newsletter signup and analytics are wired to real services. The copy lives in typed content files, so changing a fact never touches a component.

For new analysts who get handed an AI project with no playbook.

CivicStack is the terms layer for public-sector sales: clause-level reading of the contracts that decide state, local and education deals, compared against what competitors signed.

My first wedge was tracking when government contracts expire. Six weeks of research showed a competitor already sold that for $500 a year, so I dropped it and went looking for what nobody had built.

Launch focus: New York City technology contracts.

My second product. Students swapped textbooks for upcoming classes so they did not have to buy expensive new ones.

My first product. A mobile app that matched students who needed a ride home for breaks and holidays with students driving the same way or living in nearby neighborhoods.

Riders split gas, nobody drove home alone, and people met friends both at school and back home.