🛠️ How I Built It: Andrew Golden’s $600 Engagement Platform

Stephen’s note:
As a former HR tech CEO, I spent years (and lots of money) developing functionality that Andrew Golden built in two weeks for under $600.

Let that sink in.

OAuth integration. A live dashboard. A real system deployed with SSO and IT support.

Mind blown.

If you want a peek into the future of enterprise software development, this is it. And we’re only one interview in.

🌲 The Redwoods & The Big Idea

Before we get into APIs and dashboards, a detail you’ll appreciate: when I sat down with Andrew, he had just celebrated his 8-year wedding anniversary with dinner in the redwoods.

That’s Andrew in a nutshell. Deeply human. Grounded. And yet somehow balancing a CPO role, a PE-backed business transformation, and vibe coding his way to a working HR platform in nights and weekends.

This is exactly why we created How I Built It.

Every week, we’re pulling back the curtain on real HR leaders building their own systems — AI-first, product-led, custom to their orgs.

And Andrew Golden, Chief People Officer at RetailNext, is our first story.

“For years, HR leaders have been forced to buy platforms that never fully fit and cost 10–20x more than they should,” I told him. “You flipped that script.”

❌ The Pain

RetailNext had just been acquired by private equity. Efficiency and ROI were now the marching orders.

Andrew put it plainly:

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“We had just been acquired [by private equity]… I wanted a way to collect data that my leadership team would actually believe in.”

The problem?

Vendor demos were all the same - unnecessary feature upgrades with quotes landing in the $15k–$20k annual range.
Engagement surveys were also believed to be ineffective. The concern was that these surveys were generic scores that didn’t drive leadership action.
Trust gap. Leaders didn’t believe the results or see value in the output.

So Andrew did something most CPOs wouldn’t even consider. He decided to build, not buy.

🎙️ Join the Ask Me Anything with Andrew Golden

Andrew’s ready to share his secrets with you and wants to open up the playbook.

👉 Register for next week’s AMA via Luma

Bring your questions. Learn how he did it. See what this means for the future of HR tech.

(Spots are limited — save your seat today.)

⚒️ The Build

This is where it gets fun.

Andrew didn’t just hack together a Google Form. He built a full system with five distinct features.

Step 1: Start Simple

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“I started by building a really simple survey builder… then I had to build a question bank and template builder.”

Feature 1: Question Bank & Template Builder
Feature 2: Survey Answering Component

Step 2: Make It Useful

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“The analytics dashboard was next…I was able to build out exactly what I wanted to see / hear”

Feature 3: Analytics Dashboard

Step 3: Handle Scale & Security

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“The biggest challenge was OAuth through Google SSO so I knew it was really my employees responding.”

Feature 4: User Management & Permissions (synced with HiBob)
Feature 5: Google OAuth (SSO login + validation)

This last one floored me. At my HR tech company, SSO integration was a multi-quarter roadmap item. Andrew did it in a sprint.

🧰 The Tech Stack

Notebook LLM → synthesized academic research on organizational effectiveness
Claude → PRDs, feature docs, troubleshooting, text analysis
Replit → development + hosting environment
Google API → secure OAuth login
HiBob API → employee data integration
Claude API → qualitative text analysis

💡 The Wins

Total investment?
~$600 + 2.5 weeks.

What he got back:

Real adoption. Managers engaged with the results (instead of ignoring vendor reports).
Clear outputs. According to Andrew, the new platform “gave my HR team marching orders… managers were more engaged… we’re now working on 2–3 major efficiency projects we would’ve never with a traditional survey tool”
Budget efficiency. Saved $15k–$20k annually in vendor spend.
Credibility. This has changed leadership perspective and they’re now looking at other AI opportunities in HR.

My big reflection: the unit economics and savings are insane. This just can’t be ignored and that’s why everything is about to change.

🔄 Reflection & Lessons

Andrew was candid about what he’d do differently:

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“The possibilities are crazy… you can get really far with just a first PRD push.”

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“I’d recommend researching testing frameworks and unit testing… it would’ve saved me days of fixing things that broke.”

He also emphasized the partnership:

His Site Reliability Engineering team helped with Google OAuth + security testing.
Without them, shipping securely would’ve been much harder.

Lesson for every HR leader reading this: start small, iterate, and don’t overthink it.

🚀 Wrap & What’s Next

What Andrew built for 5% of SaaS cost is a template for every HR leader stuck between vendor lock-in and doing nothing.

And this is just the start.

Next up in How I Built It: more scrappy builds, more lessons, and more proof that HR can — and must — build its own tools.

👉 If you haven’t already, subscribe to Field Notes so you don’t miss the next drop.
👉 Register for Andrew’s AMA next week and prepare to have your mind blown.
👉 ✉️ forward this to a CPO or HR leader who’s still struggling with AI.

Bold takeaway:
If you’ve got $600, an LLM, and the curiosity to try — you can build what vendors charge $20k for!!