TIKITA TOLLEY
Building Systems
I am quite literally in the middle of nowhere, in a cabin, coding all day.
- 18 months ago, Jack and I co-founded Daeda Tech, got married and then left England for SE Asia.
- 4 years ago I taught myself to code, catching the curve of learning just before AI got good.
Opus/Codex is now at the point that writing code is a waste of time.
I've heard I'm in a bubble, but as I type in 2026 I have released a hubspot app, a chrome extension and an MCP before March.
We are approaching a time when bringing an idea to life will be less like clicking
around a screen and more like carving clay;
the future is limited by, as my husband says, imagination, magic words and the willingness to add friction into your life.
Physics Dropout
As a kid, I was pretty fascinated with space. This led eventually to physics. I had planned out my life path to be an astronaut or at least try.
But when I excitedly arrived at university to do my life’s dream I realised I was so burnt out I would never achieve it. So I dropped out to take a gap year and upskill.
The Gap Year and a Half
One module at uni I failed was programming. So at the beginning of my gap year I started to learn to code. My aim being by the end of the year to be able to build the connect 4 game from the programming module. I got a job at McDonald’s and at the same time met Jack at salsa dancing! He became my mentor in code and accelerated my learning.
I decided to tutor maths and physics to boost my personal statement for when I returned to uni, but ended up loving the job - and by the end had 11 students. Jack and I then decided we would take this gap year opportunity to see a bit of the world. I left McDonald’s and tutoring and we headed off to Thailand.
Travelling Asia
We ended up doing a trip for 5 and a half months from Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. I documented it all on YouTube. Everyday was filled with coding small projects, achieving the connect 4 build, my 1st attempt at a full stack app, and physics study preparing for my time at Manchester uni.
The 2nd Uni Experience
When we arrived back in the UK and moved to Manchester, I was finally on the ball, winning a scholarship for being top 10 in the year. But over time I became disillusioned. I realised 1: uni isn’t what is used to be, and 2: my dreams had changed. So I dropped out a 2nd time to pursue the adventure of building apps in SE Asia instead.
Founding Daeda Tech
My husband and I co-founded Daeda Tech, building apps for HubSpot users, in 2024.
As of 2026, we’ve shipped a mix of apps and chrome extensions. Our flagship app is Daeda Essentials, and my main builds are Clean Dial, Auto Associations Pro, and Dynamic Dropdowns, with our biggest release coming up now with the Daeda MCP Pro server.
Building Daeda Tech
While my timeline page shows all my projects, it’s since founding Daeda Tech that I’ve learned the how to build a working app that users rely on: shipping a full-stack product with payments, marketing, brand, and customer support.
My first real test was a Stardew Valley GPT — it grew faster than anything I’d built, tying with the top Stardew GPT on the ChatGPT store with 1K chats and a 4.2 rating, before OpenAI took it down for “violent content” (almost certainly a Reddit hater whose appeals I couldn’t win).
I spent a few months deep in the Shopify space too - Daeda Wishlist, a Recently Viewed Products extension, merchant forums - and learned a lot before deciding it wasn’t the right fit.
The HubSpot pivot is where things clicked. Jack had been building there from the start of the year; we joined forces halfway through and I went from co-building to solo-shipping fast - culminating in Dynamic Dropdowns, built in a week with installs in the first few hours of launch. Cursor Aura and Convert Time came out of this stretch too, free chrome extensions that’ve had daily installs pretty consistently.
Exploring Hardware
I’ve always collected old tech hoping to build something cool but never had the mindset of “you can just do stuff”. Once I finally switched my mindset, I started my first hardware project as part of the robotics society back in Manchester, a buggy robot which I got moving but couldn’t finish because the development board broke.
My current hardware focus is getting light to dance to sound and sketching out plans for an esp32 custom wrist watch. I’ve been documenting the Sound Reactive LED Build Log build on this site, and talking about all apps and hardware builds on my substack: Code & Solder
A Focus on Continually Learning
This journey has flipped my understanding of the world on its head, and 2025 was the year where I questioned a lot about my life’s purpose and the weirdness that anything exists at all. I began to explore philosophy of life and history, writing what I thought about in my Curious Descent Substack. I came to the conclusion that my ideas on happiness and life were too focused on the future - there was always the next goal to reach; but life is happening right now and to experience the great range that life can offer I believe is its purpose. I’m now attempting to focus purely on creating, apps or systems or art, and reducing time spent consuming unless it’s peak content. But there is a weird focus on progress as a civilisation, it seems to be trained into everyone and I’m noticing the lifecycle of an idea is continually shortening. I’m writing a piece on substack about this - i’ll link it once it’s done.
The Future of Skill
As I said at the top of this page the future of work is looking less like clicking and more like shaping clay. There’s a lot of talk about how AI will replace the professional jobs - this is only half true. If I kept writing code in 2026 I’d already be behind the average software dev, but to stay above the average, all you need to do is reshape your workflow to reflect and iterate on how best the AI can complete a task. In all areas of entrepreneurship, the curation of better systems is the only differentiator in whether an individual is still useful. That isn’t to say if you can’t use AI there wont be a job - sales people or anyone who can talk very well to their fellow Man will never be out of a job. I’m seeing health retreats, social media breaks, human only experiences etc popping up more and more. This is a super key job for the whole globalised/homogenised world because without these people who create moments for humanity, I’m not sure where the wheels of progress are taking us. Each day I try to improve my systems and I’m writing about my Systems Philosophy as I build it - the way I approach my workflow, how I use AI and how the world will change.
If you relate, come join the convo
- Code & Solder - App/Hardware build logs
- Curious Descent - Philosophy & big questions
- YouTube - Project videos
Cursor Aura — Chrome extension adding a glowing cursor for presentations. 815 peak users.
Clean Dial — HubSpot workflow app that formats & verifies phone numbers across 245 countries.
Dynamic Dropdowns — HubSpot app that turns any text property into a dropdown — eliminating messy CRM data like "New York" vs "NYC".
Convert Time — Chrome extension that converts any time on a webpage to your timezone on hover.
Sound Reactive LEDs — ESP32 hardware project making light dance to sound. in-progress hardware build.