Starting a website for a Ukrainian Verein

By Georg Malahov

It started back in September. Someone I know passed my name along, and a woman from a Ukrainian Verein here in Germany wrote to me — they wanted a website of their own. A Verein is the German form of a registered association, the «e.V.» you see at the end of a name: from sports clubs to volunteer fire brigades, half of German public life runs in that shape. We talked, I named a price, they went off to discuss it — and then it went quiet for a long while.

Last week the Verein wrote again: we can set a date. Half a year had passed, so the context had drained out of my head — I didn't remember the details, or what I needed to ask, or which documents to request.

I prepared for the meeting together with Claude — the AI agent I do almost everything with these days. We set up a Miro board (Miro is an online whiteboard service) with a plan: what to bring, what to ask, which documents are needed for what. Claude gathered all the publicly available information about the Verein — down to the name of the person who heads it and how many members it has — and laid it out on the board. We went through fonts and a palette, and it quickly sketched a mockup of roughly how the site would look.

The meeting itself was about collecting requirements. I showed the mockup, we settled on fonts, settled on a domain, thought through the timeline: what happens in what order, who needs what from whom. The interesting part came afterwards. I recorded the audio of the meeting with my own Call Copilot — the extension that records and transcribes calls — downloaded the transcript, dropped it into Claude and asked it to update the board. It carried everything over step by step: what we discussed, what we didn't, what we concluded, what new input had come up. Then I recorded a short video on how to work with the board — how to leave comments, how to upload files — and invited the people from the Verein in.

The whole thing came out so clean and professional that it surprised me. I'd want someone to work with me like that — point by point, with the entire history of the project in one place.

Two things came together for me in that day. First, an unusual job: not a startup, not a business, but an association of people who need a place on the internet — and it came through friends, not through the market. Second, a new way of running a project: all the communication, requirements and decisions live on one board, and the agent helps keep it current.

Next up, I wait for documents and copy from the Verein, and sit down to the technical part and the frame of the site.