Developing AnchorPoint: Our Military Family Story (Part 1)

There’s a moment right after the PCS orders drop when everything feels electric. You’re going somewhere new. A fresh start. A chance to explore, to build, to belong. Then reality sets in.

For my wife Anna and me, that moment came in early 2024. We were celebrating our wedding with friends and wrapping up our time at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois when Anna, my beautiful wife and an Air Force physician, got her orders. The year-long assignment in Kunsan Air Base in South Korea was just what we put in for: a jaunt across the world, a short remote assignment somewhere fun and exciting- maybe it’d be challenging, but it was an adventure.

Unfortunately the time was anything but ‘fun’; eventually leading to medical issues, stress, hospitalization, panic and finally an emergency evacuation off the peninsula to get us back stateside safely. In the middle of it all we were expected to choose where CONUS we’d be heading: Nellis AFB outside Vegas, McGuire AFB in New Jersey, or Moody AFB in Southeast Georgia. Knowing nothing about any of them, with limited sleep, long nights spent in hospital waiting rooms, and frantic packing to meet a flight we chose… knowing nearly nothing at all.

We’d both grown up around the military. Anna had lived abroad for nearly all of her life, and I was no stranger to that world myself. I thought I knew what to expect. But nothing prepares you for the quiet, creeping anxiety of sitting on a 13 hour flight staring at a map of a place you’ve never been, trying to imagine your life there.

Where should we live? What’s the base really like? Will we find our people? Is there even a decent coffee shop nearby (more like a bar, for me). What do people do for fun? How is it, really, on the ground?

We had the same questions every military family has. And like everyone else, we turned to Google, Reddit, Zillow, and Military OneSource. We cobbled together fragments of information—some helpful, some conflicting, most of it sterile and detached from the reality of daily life.

That’s when I realized: this was nothing like our happy-go-lucky jaunt in Korea where the ‘unknown’ was the fun for us. We weren’t just moving. We were leaping into the headfirst into a new life and essentially hoping the net would appear.

The PCS Reality

PCS season is equal parts excitement and whiplash. One day, you’re settled. The next, you’re scanning Zillow listings for houses you’ve never seen, in neighborhoods whose names you can’t pronounce, in a city whose vibe is a total mystery.

Anna’s career meant we had to go where the Air Force sent us. No questions, no negotiations. And as her husband, my job was to help make it work—to help find us a home, a community, a rhythm Even with all my professional experience—as a former attorney, a software project manager, a marketing strategist who’s built and scaled tech products—I felt completely unequipped.

We weren’t just looking for data; there was data everywhere! We were swimming in information, conflicting data too- “Live North of the city, South is where all the murderers are.”, says MilGirl228. “No way! North City has no restaurants or food, if you live in the South of the city just pick a good neighborhood it will be fine! We’ve lived here for 10 years and never even bought doors for our house it’s so safe!”, says “LunaticLvr171”

Great. Maybe we just live East and buck all the trends.

The Gap We Discovered

We tried everything.

Google gave us SEO-optimized listicles and outdated base guides. Seriously, Google your base and find some blog from 2010 talking about how Cingular Wireless is building cell towers nearby so it’s offering great jobs for male spouses.

Reddit offered fragmented anecdotes—some gold, some garbage.
Zillow showed us houses, but not communities.
Military OneSource had resources, but not resonance.

None of it answered the questions that really mattered:

Is this a family-friendly area?
How’s the commute during peak hours?
Where do people hang out on weekends?
Is there a sense of community here, or does everyone keep to themselves?
Seriously, where do we live? Should we rent, or buy?
Is this town bike friendly? (I mean… I don’t care but my wife does).
Will I find work there? Anna will be plenty busy at work seeing patients… what about me?

We weren’t alone. Every Reddit post fundamentally had the same struggle: they’d all done the same frantic digital scavenger hunt, piecing together a blurry picture of their next home from shreds of intel scattered across the internet, then they posted a compiled assemblage on Reddit with the idea that the internet will respond to correct negative information faster than it will respond to an empty query.

No one was turning data into lived experience unless you already knew what to ask.

Why We Built AnchorPoint

Out of that frustration, AnchorPoint was born.

I didn’t set out to build an app, to be totally honest. I set out to solve a problem-for us, and for every family facing the same blind leap. The mission was simple: help military families show up informed, confident, and connected and make powerful decisions with clear, practical, human-centered guidance.

AnchorPoint isn’t another database. It’s a translator. It takes raw data—neighborhood details, school ratings, local insights—and turns it into something useful: a snapshot of what life actually feels like in a new duty station and then it does this in the way only the 2025 world can; by grabbing HUGE amounts of this raw data and passing it into the synthesis tools we’ve grown to call ‘AIs’. In reality, they’re systems that parse huge datasets and turn them into human-readable insights (when they have good information). A few years of playing with AIs and LLMs professionally had me realizing already that I had the two pieces of the puzzle: lots of data, and a way to parse it.

My Journey (Chris’s Angle)

Now, full disclosure: I’m not a software developer.

I’m a lawyer by training (JD, Duke—go Blue Devils), a marketer and software project manager by trade. I’ve led wildly cross-functional teams (find someone else who has worked with 3D modelers, C++ developers, geothermal energy engineers, social media marketers, and video production teams all on the same project- I’ll wait), built go-to-market strategies, and shipped SaaS products. But I don’t write production-level code. My technical skills begin and end with a solid grasp of HTML/CSS, legacy knowledge of PHP from when the whole internet ran on PHP (sorry about that), and just enough JavaScript to be dangerous.

I do have extensive experience in selfhosted systems (shout out to my peeps over at r/selfhosted). I roll my own systems on my homelab server and expose them to the internet for my friends/family to use all the time. With 50TB of storage in a ZFS array under a Proxmox host, I know my way around the hardware and server-side of systems… but I’m still not a developer.

So how did I build AnchorPoint?

I vibecoded it.

Using AI models—Cursor with Roo Code, OpenRouter, LibreChat to walk through problems, generate prompts, and turn code I didn’t understand into processes I did—I architected and integrated a full-stack system: a React/Vite/Tailwind frontend connected to a custom-built API proxy, which talks to a Perplexica instance running on my cloud server with SearXNG for real-time search and citations.

Translation: I acted as the product manager, system architect, creative director, QA engineer, and AI whisperer. I broke down the problem, wrote the specs, directed the AI, and glued the pieces together.

This isn’t a story about a developer building an app. It’s about a military spouse living in a place without a lot of options using every tool available to solve a real problem.

The Bigger Picture

At its heart, AnchorPoint isn’t really about technology so much as it’s about empathy.

PCS moves are disruptive enough, and trust me- we know it. Families shouldn’t have to arrive in a new place feeling lost, isolated, or unprepared. Hell- in our case we were running away from a hurricane, buying new cars, living out of the base TLF (Temporary Lodging Facility, eg. the base ‘hotel’) that had just been decimated by Hurricane Helene, and then panicking in between about our respective healthcare issues that arose in Korea! When and how would we have had time to research and learn? What family does? We deserve to step off the plane—or out of the car—with confidence. With a plan. With a sense of belonging already beginning to form.

That’s what we’re building toward: not just an app, but a resource. A community. A way to make sure no one has to piece together their new life in the dark.

So… yeah, we did the damn thing

We built the tool we wish we’d had. And we’re just getting started.

AnchorPoint is live now—a working MVP, built from the ground up by a military family, for military families. It’s scrappy. It’s real. And it’s already helping people.

In the next post, I’ll pull back the curtain on how exactly I built a functioning software product without knowing how to code—using AI, workflow mastery, and a whole lot of stubbornness.

Because if I can do it, so can you. But most importantly together we can make PCS season a little less chaotic—and a lot more human.

Stay tuned.
—Chris

Posts in this series

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