Johanna Abzug, a 38-year-old freelance product designer, created an AI-assisted online marketplace to sell her family's belongings before relocating from Texas to Madrid for political reasons. The platform, named 'Sale Away', was built to facilitate the sale of over 200 items after she found traditional methods like Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp to be inefficient and frustrating.
Faced with the urgent need to generate cash from valuable possessions before the international move in 2021, Abzug turned to the no-code platform Bubble to build a working prototype. The system allows users to create a personal inventory and host scheduled, time-limited "pop-up sales" shared within their personal network, with offers expiring after 24 hours to encourage buyer commitment.
A Transactional Solution to a Personal Problem
The core innovation of Sale Away is its offer-based negotiation system, which separates price haggling from direct messaging. Unlike traditional platforms where initial contact is via chat, buyers on Sale Away submit offers on single or multiple items, and communication only begins after a price is agreed upon. "The idea is to separate the transactional part of selling items online from the direct message part," Abzug explained in an interview with Business Insider.
After an initial successful test sale—where one buyer purchased over $1,000 worth of items—Abzug moved to Spain and paused the project. However, the desire to see it completed led her to rebuild the platform three years later, this time leveraging advanced AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, which she credits for making the development process more accessible. "That technology has grown so much... It's been such a great way to carry out the ideas that I have in my head," she stated.
From Prototype to Passion Project
Abzug, who is also a mother to a six-year-old and is taking Spanish classes, describes building the platform as a satisfying creative outlet that "scratches a different itch than designing things." She emphasises that this is the first utility-focused project she has built and attributes its feasibility to what she calls "vibe coding" with modern AI assistants. The platform's name was inspired by the musician Enya.
The designer's initial motivation was deeply personal, stemming from a desire to leave Texas following the birth of her child. "I decided this would be the best thing for our family. That was my main objective for over a year: getting us all moved," she recounted. The logistical challenge of liquidating a household's contents efficiently became the catalyst for the digital solution.