How I Built a Multi-Jurisdiction Legal Document API in 30 Days (Solo Founder, AI-Assisted)"

Introduction A friend of mine lost $15,000 on a freelance web development project ast year. The "contract"? A WhatsApp conversation. No written scope. No payment terms. No recourse. Just trust. And disappointment. When I started researching, I discovered something shocking: 2 billion people negotiate business deals over informal channels — WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, email. Especially in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. And there are zero tools to formalize those agreements. So I built Ebenova.dev — a legal infrastructure API for informal commerce. 17 days ago , I had an idea and no code. Today , I have: ✅ Live API platform (27 document types, 18 jurisdictions) ✅ 1 paying customer (thank you, Klauza!) ✅ 5 beta API users ✅ 1,000+ API calls ✅ npm SDK published ( ebenova-legal-docs ) ✅ 0 downtime In this article, I'll walk you through: The technical architecture (Vercel, Upstash, Anthropic, Node.js) Four key challenges I faced (and how I solved them) Lessons learned as a