From Hotel CEO to AI Developer: How I Built a Job Matching Platform With Zero Coding Experience
By Marco · February 8, 2026 · 6 min read
In 2009, I graduated high school with no idea what to do with my life. A job at a small café changed everything — it sparked a passion for hospitality that would take me from Brussels to Switzerland, from managing a youth hostel to becoming the CEO of a small, family-owned Swiss hotel chain.
But the whole time, there was something else simmering in the background: a fascination with technology and a dream of building something of my own.
This is the story of how I finally did it.
The Hospitality Fast Track
After that first café job pointed me in the right direction, I moved to Brussels to study hospitality management. Degree in hand, I headed to Switzerland — and things moved fast.
First, I became General Manager of a small youth hostel. Then Director of Hospitality at a boutique hotel. Then assistant to the board of directors at a small Swiss hotel chain, where I eventually climbed to COO and then CEO — overseeing 5 hotels and around 100 employees.
I was running hotels, managing teams, negotiating with stakeholders. By any measure, I'd "made it." But every evening, I found myself reading about startups, tinkering with technology, watching tutorials about how software actually works.
The dream of building something on my own never went away. It just got louder.
The Problem I Couldn't Ignore
After stepping down as CEO, I wasn't sure what direction to take. I started applying for roles — and quickly found the process frustrating.
Keyword searches only returned the specific job titles I typed in. But what about all the other roles that might be a great fit for my profile? I had no way of knowing what I was missing. The job search dragged on. Rejections. Interviews that went nowhere. I never really knew which positions I should even be applying for with my background.
Then an opportunity came up in Australia, so I stopped searching in Europe. But the frustration stuck with me. If everyone keeps talking about a skilled labor shortage, why is it so hard to find a job that actually fits?
"OK, Let's Give It a Try"
I had no programming background. None. My technical skills were limited to being pretty good with Excel and knowing how to Google things.
But I'd spent 10 years solving complex operational problems in hotels. I figured: how different can it be?
The answer: very different. And also — surprisingly similar.
Running a hotel taught me to break big problems into smaller ones, to build systems that work reliably, and to focus relentlessly on the user experience. Those skills translated directly into building software.
I started learning. Not in a classroom — but by building. Every day, a little more. First a simple prototype. Then a database. Then an API. Then an AI matching algorithm.
The tool I used most? AI itself. I used Claude as my coding partner — pair-coding every feature, debugging every error, learning something new with every conversation.
What I Built
The platform is called AlmostHired. Here's what it does:
- Aggregates job listings from major European job sources — currently over 220,000 active listings across 15 countries
- Analyzes your CV using AI to understand not just your keywords, but your actual career trajectory, industry experience, and seniority level
- Matches you intelligently — not just "you mentioned Python and the job mentions Python," but real contextual matching. A hotel operations manager gets matched with hospitality leadership roles, not IT operations jobs that happen to share the word "operations"
The technical stack is something I never imagined I'd be working with: Cloudflare Workers, Supabase with vector embeddings, a two-stage AI analysis pipeline using Claude for intelligent scoring.
I built every line of it. With a lot of help from AI — but every architectural decision, every feature priority, every UX choice came from 10 years of understanding what people actually need when they're looking for work.
What I Learned
1. The best time to start is when you think you're not ready.
I waited because I thought I needed to learn to code first. Turns out, you learn to code by building something real. The motivation to solve an actual problem beats any tutorial.
2. AI doesn't replace thinking — it amplifies it.
Claude didn't build my platform for me. It helped me build it. The difference is crucial. I still had to understand what I was building and why. AI just removed the barrier of not knowing the exact syntax.
3. Domain expertise is your superpower.
Every developer can build a job board. But most developers have never run 5 hotels with 100 employees, dealt with the daily chaos of hospitality operations, or understood viscerally why a "95% match" that's in the wrong industry is actually worthless. My hospitality background isn't a limitation — it's the entire reason this product works differently.
4. Done beats perfect.
My code isn't elegant. A senior developer would probably cringe at some of my solutions. But the platform works, real people use it, and it solves a real problem. I can always refactor later.
What's Next
I'm currently pursuing an MBA in Business Informatics — bridging the gap between my business experience and the technical world I've fallen in love with.
AlmostHired is in beta, growing organically, and getting better with every iteration.
And I'm still working on it from Australia, where I'm spending 15 months working remotely — because if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the best work happens when you stop waiting for the perfect conditions.
If you're curious about the platform or thinking about building something yourself without a technical background — feel free to reach out. I'm happy to share what I've learned.