A step-by-step guide to building your own identity store.
You do not need to be a developer. You need a computer, some patience, and a willingness to look at your own data honestly.
A personal recommendation engine. You feed it data about your life -- what you buy, listen to, read, watch, run, research -- and it builds a model of your taste. Then it recommends products that match that model.
Every ad platform does this already, but for advertisers. This does it for you. Same technology, opposite beneficiary. It runs as a website. You can share it, keep it private, or just use it as a personal reference for what you own and what you might want next.
A computer
Mac, Windows, or Linux. You will be running terminal commands.
Node.js
Version 18 or later. Download from nodejs.org.
A GitHub account
Free. You will fork the repo here.
A Vercel account
Free. This is where your site gets hosted.
Claude Code
Build conversationally instead of editing files manually.
2-3 hours
For the initial setup and data import.
Fork the repository
Go to the GitHub repo and click Fork. This creates your own copy.
https://github.com/dominicbuckland-del/domshop
Clone it to your computer
Open your terminal and run:
git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/domshop.git cd domshop npm install
Start the dev server
npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.
Replace the products with yours
Open data/products.ts. Each product has these fields:
{
name: 'Your product name',
oneLiner: 'One sentence about why',
whyILikeIt: 'The longer story',
price: 2999, // in cents
link: 'https://where-to-buy.com',
category: 'work', // work, play, health, mind, etc
image: 'https://your-image-url.jpg',
recommendedBecause: 'Why the algorithm surfaced this',
}Photograph your stuff, upload images, paste the URLs.
Update the algorithm data
Open data/algorithm.ts. Replace the data sources with your own. Start with Level 1 manual imports -- you do not need live integrations to launch.
Deploy
npm install -g vercel vercel deploy --prod
Free hosting, free SSL, instant. If you have a custom domain, connect it in the Vercel dashboard.
The quality of your recommendations depends entirely on the quality and honesty of your data. Here is how to export from each platform.