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How to Build an App With No Coding Experience Using Lovable and Claude · App Minded

• Nina Kolari: you know, it starts on Father's Day in June. I'm gonna be also on a family vacation. This is a global competition. what the hell, I'll apply anyway. And I got in. And I have to say it truly changed my life. Planning with the end result in mind. And I think that's what's great about lovable is that you can have a vision and then you can use lovable to collapse that gap between The vision and the final product. Christina spent 48 hours building a complete, fully functioning web app. She had logging flow, features, member rotation, all of it. But she was missing one key thing, and that is something we're gonna talk about in today's episode. Christina joined Lovables She Builds Hackathon and built this web app in 48 hours with hundreds of other women around the world. She said it was a competition. But it actually was everything but a competition. And here's Christina to tell her story. My name's Christina Moore. I live in Carlsbad, California, which is just north of San Diego. I am a mom of three. I was laid off from my startup role ⁓ back in February. And ⁓ since then I have been kind of diving headfirst into the AI world. I know absolutely nothing about coding. I know nothing about web design. I know nothing about graphic design, user experience, any of it. But I am a really big platform nerd. I love a good tool. I love optimizing workflows for startups specifically. That was kind of my last, my last role. And originally I have a finance background. ⁓ so I'm coming into this ⁓ AI world and I'm kind of thinking this could be a cool transition for me to kind of get up to speed with what's happening in the tech world to ⁓ give myself a little hobby and tinker and build. And you know, I'm very much a ⁓ very I'm very much a If there's a will, there's a way, woman. I love to get my hands dirty. I, you know, I redid my kitchen cabinets one day and you know, things like that where I see other people do it and I think to myself, I think I could probably learn how to do this. and so I'm watching kind of the movements ⁓ as I'm catching up on on all of the activity on LinkedIn and being out of the active job search for Or five years, and I'm watching this AI gold rush that we're in. ⁓ and somehow the lovable feed came up, a lovable post came up on my feed about a hackathon. And I thought to myself, that's interesting. They say that it could be anybody who has building experience or doesn't have Vive coding experience and you know it starts on Father's Day in June. I'm gonna be also on a family vacation. This is a global competition. what the hell? I'll apply anyway. And I got in. And I have to say it truly changed my life. ⁓ so I ended up doing this 48 hour hackathon sponsored by Lovable. And ⁓ even more so than the build, I will say the build even more so than the build itself is the community that's come out of it. And the women that I've met and have become connected with have really been incredible ⁓ an incredible support network and I wouldn't have cha traded this experience for the world. Yeah. I I totally agree that hackathons can be completely transforming in so many ways. whether you win or not, just participating and pushing yourself for that usually very, very short time limit, you just gotta hammer it through. So so you got into this hackathon. ⁓ what did you build in the hackathon? So I had tinkered a little bit with finance apps with little kind of skills and prompts that I would have wished I had in my startup life in my five years ago if I could hit the rewind button. ⁓ and so I sort of always approached my AI tinkering that way. I had built a couple of sort of ⁓ more universal audience type of apps. ⁓ I had built in lovable once before. ⁓ but my real passion ⁓ and what I applied for for this hackathon was ⁓ a book club app. So I started thinking about I applied for this book club app because I started really thinking about what is the problem with book clubs. I've been a part of many book clubs. ⁓ they always seem to just unravel after a while. ⁓ and of course that happens with friendships, but you know, I have I have groups of women who I know still love books, even years later. And I know that they're still reading and I know that we have information and and things to share and community to build around it. And I thought to myself, what really is the problem with book clubs? I I feel like from being a host myself, it's been It's been the like kind of the administrative burden of hosting all these people, collecting RSVPs, ⁓ whether it's in your home or at a restaurant or a coffee shop. ⁓ you know, it's still a lot of wrangling. It's a lot of ⁓ making sure people know where to park, making sure, you know, everybody's contributing, making sure everybody's got the questions ahead of time. so it's it's really a lot of kind of logistical work that we have tools. to do, they're just all piecemeal and siloed. So often ⁓ these things operate in like one big chaotic group text or ⁓ you know, an evite over here and a Google Sheet over here. And I thought to myself, why can't I just build this all into one app? So that was my idea that I applied with and I was accepted. Yeah. So When you actually heard that you could accept it, what happened then? So I had actually seen on LinkedIn first some people I was following announcing they were accepted. And I said, Huh, that's interesting. I applied to that, but I don't remember getting an email about it or any any sort of notification. So I went I went digging around in my email and I saw ⁓ congratulations, you're in. And I said to myself, That's cool. And I closed it and said, I'll look at it later. And then I'm looking again at LinkedIn and people are making a big fuss about it. I mean, they're really, you know, like talking about, ⁓ I can't wait to build this. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm terrified. I'm so excited. All of the emotions. And so I went back to the email and I said, Huh, this is kind of a big deal. Yeah. And I ⁓ I said, this is kind of a big deal. And I researched a bit more. You know, Lovable is a very small company based out of Stockholm. It's really incredible what they've built. Yeah. And the name they've built for themselves. And this platform is just incredible. So ⁓ I really, you know, then the wheels started turning in my head. I hopped on with Claude and I said, Is this something I can really do? Can you help me? I I'm not sure where to start. I've I have no product experience. What would a real product developer do here? Yeah. So was ⁓ Claude your like a prep partner that kind of helped you to plan the whole thing? Yes. And it was almost like the stars aligned because about a week before the hackathon started, the lovable Claude MCP connection was released. And I didn't know what that meant before this. I did not know what the heck MCP was. now I joke that MCP stands for murder the copy and paste because you no longer have to no longer have to copy and paste a prompt one to the other. So in a simple in a simple explanation, it's just that they speak to each other automatically. Yeah. And so that was a bit of a a stroke of luck that that happened about a week before. And so yes, Claude was my primary prep partner. and I did tinker around a bit with different design tools. I made a couple of mood boards. ⁓ and I and I wanted to document on my Substack this building and public experience. So I really kind of started Planning with the end result in mind. And I think that's what's great about Lovable is that you can have a vision and then you can use Lovable to collapse that gap between the vision and the final product. Yeah. How did you use Claude? ⁓ was Claude really like how detailed? Were you in the chats with Claude on what are you actually gonna build? Was it also doing some of the coding or helping you with the code or was it more the design and the product questions? Both. Yes, both. So I started with I started with the design because in my brain I thought, okay, what what is the problem with looking at a chaotic Google Sheet or a a a ⁓ really chaotic group text. It's messy. It's ugly. People are copying, pasting different formatted texts and it's a just a complete disaster. I wanted it to really be aesthetically beautiful first and foremost. I really wanted it to feel like an experience over a utilitarian app. And so I always started first with the design in mind. I always wanted it to feel feel like a like a intimate dinner party with your closest friends. And not in an in an exclusive way, but in a an intimate, real like meaningful bonding way. And so I always had that as my primary goal. ⁓ I always had aesthetic, beautiful design top of mind. And from there I kind of worked backwards. And so I said to Claude, Okay, if I want the functionality to work like this, I want the host to log in, do these three steps, and then boom, club is ready to go. They can invite their friends. How do I get there? And so Claude really wrote up a roadmap for me of, okay, here's what we need to do. ⁓ I can actually prep the whole library of prompts that we're going to be sending to Lovable ahead of time. So nothing touched Lovable. until that clock started on the day of the hackathon and everything else was done in Claude, in Canva, in other tools outside of Lovable. Yeah. ⁓ I think you mentioned somewhere that ⁓ Claude even told you to go to sleep at some point. I am a utmost perfectionist. I and in this mission to make something aesthetically beautiful. That meant minimalist. That meant not having a single stray button or pixel anywhere. That meant it was clean. It was easy to see, easy to use, visible, obvious for people who just want to read their dang books and just want to hang out with their gal pals. Didn't want it to be in any way a barrier. And so I talked with Claude for a week straight on what do I need to do? Are you sure about this? Are you really sure about this? Are you really, really, really sure about this? And, you know, I said to Claude, you know, but wait, do I need a contingency plan? Because what if lovable did what if lovable, you know, reads my my prompt incorrectly and puts a button here and I panic and now I have to scrap and and start over? What do I do? And Claude said, Okay, I will make you a contingency plan. I will make you a risk register. I will do all of these things. And I didn't know what any of those were. Yeah. Over and over and over, you know, I iterated with Claude, ⁓ Claude, Claude is such a great partner if you instruct it to give you what you want back and how to communicate with you. I've always told my Claude to be brutally honest. I don't want you to sugarcoat, I don't want you to fluff. I don't want you to ⁓ be sick sycopanthic. ⁓ am I saying that correctly? ⁓ I don't want you to to to be my my buddy here. You are my workhorse. And so Claude you know, several times had to, you know, I would I would say, Okay, great, this plan looks great. Ten minutes later I would go back and say, But what about this? And finally Claude said, Christina, it's the middle of the night. I think you can rest. Your plan is great. And even, you know, after maybe the fourth time of of this of building a contingency plan for my contingency plan, you know, it Claude had told me, you know, finally, you are at the top 1% of hackathon participants in terms of pre-planning. This plan is solid. You can rest. And I said Okay, fine. After the fourth part of Claude told me, Go to bed, rest, I said, Okay, fine. So how did you feel? You had all that prep work and Claude saying like you're ready. How did you feel on the moment when the lovable hackathon and the timer starts and you can actually start building? How was it were you did you actually feel like, Okay, I'm prepped and I'm ready and it's gonna go smoothly or was it like I have no clue what's gonna happen? I did I did feel I would say I felt ready when the clock struck ten ⁓ one. I hit go, which was great. I will say that prepping with Claude, the most probably the most helpful thing for Claude, like I said, in addition to being brutally honest, was that Claude reined me in. ⁓ I had this vision for a full cycle app. I had a vision for a host side of the app. a member side of the app, they don't see the same thing. Once one meeting is done, the host automatically rotates to the next member. And so that was pretty advanced logic to have to build in all of the host functionality, who's willing to host, flipping it to the next host, and then switching their user status within the app to enable the other state. And so What Claude had done for me was said, you cannot possibly do this in 48 hours. Let's be realistic. What lovable needs according to their judging criteria and their submission requirements is a demo environment. And I said, okay, but I want this, this, and this. And so we had to have an A list and a B list. Yeah. And and a very far away wish list. I wanted a mobile app. I wanted you know, I wanted ⁓ algorithms to match people locally in like a almost like a Tinder fashion where people could, you know, say, Great, you have the same book club interests as me. Let's get together and form a club. I wanted it all. Yeah. And Claude said, Nope, stick to your demo environment. And which is hard when you're very passionate about something and you have a vision and this is your dream, it's really hard to hear nope. You have to trim it. You've got to leave stuff on the cutting room floor. and so when the clock struck, I said to myself, Great, let's go. And my demo environment was built in about three hours. And so then I s out of the forty-eight. Yeah. And then I said, Claude, what do I do now? Should I should I pull the things off the cutting room floor? Should I should I get them 'cause should I bring some of them back? Yeah and Claude t told me, Christina, you don't wanna do this. It's better to build a fully functional demo app than build a kind of a a half assed version of your your dream, right? That looks okay but doesn't function. Rather, stick to the fully built out demo shell that you can use and call it a f the the ⁓ VP, right? Yeah. You That's what that's the goal here. And so you should stick to that and build that out. And right now you've got it. You can walk away. Did you walk away? No. So what happened next? I said, Claude, this is great. The host side of the app was the demo sh the demo environment, right? So the host really walk the the full host onboarding where the host joined. ⁓ created preferences for the club saying, okay, great, we like romance novels and fantasy novels. Let's make our club around that. Let's name our club. Let's create a link for me to invite my friends and invite members. And ⁓ let's start to look at potential dates and book selections for them to vote on. That was it. That was the whole demo show. I said, Claude, this is great. But I think you're getting an incomplete picture. I really want to I really think that the member the member side of the app is actually more simplistic because the host needs to create all of these criteria and these preferences for the club. And the member side is really just the voting mechanism. So let's build that. And Claude said Are you sure? Because it's not as simple as just building that. They need to speak to each other. They need to be an ecosystem. The host sets the preferences, but that all flows to the member side. And then vice versa when the club rotates. So I said, okay, well, what am I gonna do with 48, 45 hours out of my 48 hours? I said, Claude, I'm bored. Let's do it. So so we rewrote the whole roadmap. We said, okay, let's pull from the cutting room floor the the basic member flow and get them to speak to each other and let's see what we can do. And at one point Claude said, Okay, you know, after an hour or so of rewriting the whole roadmap, Claude after you know, Claude said to me, Okay, I think we can do the member side within your forty five hours, let's do it. Yeah. So how did you piece that together? What was the missing piece to get the the the host and the guests to talk to each other? Yes. So I mean initially the demo environment Okay, so okay, so one of my let me back up. Part of the original vision was to in an effort to make the logistics part. of this easier for the host was to use AI to suggest books for the club based on the preferences, based on, you know, kind of the vibes that it got from the club members and say, I think you would like these three books. And I always wanted the members to be able to kind of override that, you know, if the AI suggested absolute, you know, Absolutely the wrong version of books or, you know, whatever happened, ⁓ or they just weren't interested. I always wanted them to be able to kind of override it. And that was one thing that Claude said, do not do that. ⁓ it builds in a very comp it builds in a layer of complexity that I don't think you have the time to do. ⁓ but what we can do is build in some of these basic AI features. And this is really what I think sets the app apart from other apps that are out there is it uses AI to help relieve the burden. There have been other apps out there that use AI, ⁓ almost like there was one that sort of uses it like in a Spotify fashion that at the end of the year it said, Great, here are some of the books. Maybe you could benefit from reading a couple more thrillers, you know, in your mix, something like that. But not to not it with the intention of taking the burden off of the host for planning purposes. And so part of it was you know, wherever a host might get stuck, naming the club, for example. I built in an AI tool to suggest a name for your club based on a little you know, you type in a little prompt. We are a group of three moms, we live in San Diego, and you know, this one is a teacher and this one is a lawyer and ⁓ you know, give me a really funny cheeky name for the three of us and boom, like the the Mama Witches Club, you know, whatever it comes up with. So yeah, ⁓ I thought that was really fun. ⁓ the other piece of the AI call is the book suggestions. So saying, okay, ⁓ you know, you said that you like romance and fantasy. Here are three. ⁓ you know, maybe that two of them are romance and one of them is fantasy. So I'm giving you three books for you all to vote on as sort of a starting point. ⁓ I think you would like these. And the other place was for once everybody had settled on a book and voted and there was a successful book, ⁓ to create a sort of little post package of, okay, here's your list of names, here's who's coming, here's who's bringing what. ⁓ if you want to get fancy, ⁓ you know, this book is about a lake romance. ⁓ let's, you know, do little canoe boats as decor or you know we can maybe have ⁓ have snacks that are somehow you know water related right ⁓ so kind of like building in some sort of like Pinterest ish inspiration ⁓ for the host in this nice little host package that they could then download as a PDF. ⁓ that was one of the one of the AI polls there. and then the last place was finding a mutual date. So setting up in a sort of like a doodle way. ⁓ you know, a member would say, Okay, I'm available on Thursdays, but not on Tuesdays. And then another one ⁓ said either day would work. So then it would suggest ⁓ days on the next Tuesday, about a month out for everybody to meet, and then they could all vote and say, Great, that works. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ How are you managing your data? Because there's a lot of data, the user data, and I guess you've got to store all the books that I read. How how are how are you managing that with Lovable? I honestly don't really know how Lovable is doing it. It's doing it for me. ⁓ I know it used to be super base. ⁓ and I, you know, I think one of the good things about Lovable is that eventually if I do need to have bigger database capabilities outside of the superbase in the lovable cloud, I can do that ⁓ by migrating the app entirely off of lovable. ⁓ but for now, all of that form data, all of the the book data all lives within Lovable's database. Yeah, yeah, I thought so. And that's I think it's very, very good move for anybody who's non-technical who doesn't want to learn also database, because that's a whole nother thing to learn. So and I think Lava Bull is phenomenal in that like app in a box setup that you can really build anything. It's it's really, really amazing. So let's go back. You you are now enhancing the app in within the still in the hackathon. How much did you actually build in those was it 45 hours that you had left? Like did you actually transform the tool the app completely still because you had the time or how far did you get yes so it's so the hackathon started at about ten o'clock on a Sunday which was Father's Day here in the States and ⁓ I said to the family I said okay I'm gonna go hole up at a coffee shop and so I spent those initial first three hours or so at this coffee shop and ⁓ you know, I I cranked away with my two monitors and my, you know, my ergonomic mouse and I kind of looked probably really silly in this coffee shop for hours on end. But ⁓ yeah, I I built I built in the coffee shop. I actually part of the prep was to build out a schedule where I made sure I ate, I made sure I slept, I even made sure I just stepped away. From the keyboard for 10 minutes to you know, move my legs or, you know, a little bit of self-care had to be built in because I said I said to myself, okay, this this neurotic per perfectionist in me, my toxic trait, ⁓ is going to make me want to pull two double all-nighters. Yeah. What do I do? How do I manage my time? How do I take care of myself? And so we ended up building out this schedule of okay, here are the different phases. Build this feature out first. And when you've when you've done that, great. That's one chapter we can close, put intended. and then we move on to the next. And so that was great because I could then kind of see the vision and the map in my head. And if I was ahead of schedule, I felt like I could relax. And so I actually built in a schedule of six hours of sleep. Six hours of sleep. Okay. The first night, of course I didn't do that. I was so ramped up. I was so amped up. We had group chats going with other hackathon participants where we were hyping each other up. We were, you know, people were falling and we were picking them back up and people were saying, I don't know how to do this. What the heck? Lovable. Somebody help me. And and we really had this community of People building together. I went into this thinking this was a competition. I was thinking, these people are gonna be cutthroat. They're not gonna be helpful. They're gonna say, you're, you know, you're in it on your own. Figure it out. And it was the exact opposite. People were loving each other. They were supporting each other. They were saying, ⁓ you're stuck, ⁓ you're getting an error. Here's what you should do. Or here's the quickest way to get an answer from from the lovable dev team. and it was truly incredible. But ⁓ but yes, I had to really build in a schedule and build in phases because without that, I didn't know everything was just an open door for me. I needed to be able to see things happen in a systemic, systematic way where I was able to do things in phases, build a feature, pause, build a feature, pause, and then go to sleep. Like Claude told me. Yeah. And if we ⁓ go back to the let's say last three or four hours of the hackathon, which are usually the critical, how did that go? Were you still working on the product or were you just, you know, tying loose ends at this point? I was in the very final hours when I I think when I think when I finally I finally said, okay, this build is good. I can stop here and the morning, because I had until it was for exactly 48 hours, so I had until 10 a.m. was the actual submission time frame. And so, you know, when I woke up that last morning, so let's see, Sunday all day, Monday all day, and then Tuesday I had just the morning to submit. So that morning, I I kind of I kind of just went through the app as if I were a user. I had I had a good night's sleep. I had a fresh set of eyes. And I went through and I tried to do like one very final polish. And so I went through it as if I were an outside user. And I said, Okay, if if I'm an outside user, if I've never seen this app before, what's my reaction? What does my gut say? Where should I be clicking? Is anything confusing? ⁓ and I wanted to give it one final polish. ⁓ and so those last couple of hours were really just like, can you change the color of this button? Or ⁓ you know, whatever whatever it was. ⁓ even even some ideas that were like, maybe in the future it'd be really cool to have email notifications at this step and this step and this step. and let's just table that for future features. ⁓ because they actually made us stop building on it for the week during judging. And so of course, as I'm doing this cold walkthrough, I'm noticing lots of things that I wanted eventually. And so I kind of used that time to do a very final polish, a very final emergency friends. Anybody who's available, can you please click through this and just see what happens and and give me your gut instinct? ⁓ And of course, I was never 100% satisfied. I still went on later to build a lot and change a lot. ⁓ but that little final polish I think gave me a lot of kind of like little edits that helped the flow and I wasn't able to see when I was when I had tunnel vision, when I was in the build itself. And so kind of getting a n good night's sleep, waking up, having a couple hours before hitting that final submission button ⁓ did give me. some time to to give give that that very final polish. Yeah. How did it feel when when it was time to submit? You know, well like you're looking at the times like, okay, it's it's now or never. How did that feel? ⁓ you know, I did the submission I did the actual submission materials pretty early. ⁓ the hack this hackathon did not require a demo video, which was interesting because ⁓ initially I I thought to myself, okay, that's interesting. I totally expected some sort of loom or some sort of recorded Zoom video where I'm doing a demo. and I think a lot of people were dreading it because they're, you know. They've got no sleep, they're running on fumes, and they don't want to be on camera. Yeah. And, you know, but I thought kind of thought the opposite. I kind of thought, well, wait a minute, that was my opportunity to really put a narrative to my demo to really explain how it's intended to be used. And I felt a little bit like I'm giving them the link and walking away. What do you mean? ⁓ It's in their hands now. ⁓ so I really felt a sort of like loss of control. but I prepared this of course, I prepared the submission materials far ahead of time because I didn't need the fully built app to submit. I I needed the set of questions, I needed the ⁓ the link with the demo login, but that's all I needed. And so I was able to build that. early on and so when the time came I was ready to submit. and I think that was I think that was probably a ⁓ maybe a unique feature of this hackathon specifically, not requiring a demo video because I think a lot of people maybe panic at the end of a hackathon because they've got to quickly throw together a demo video when they are running on fumes and they are, you know, not their best self. So ⁓ so that's kind of how it went for me. Yeah. Yeah. Demo video that is often unfortunately recorded at the last hour is the hardest part you can do in a hackathon. So ⁓ so I I totally get that. But it's also a good way to explain the app and why why it exists. ⁓ but okay, so now you've finished the hackathon and you just have to wait. I guess, for lovable to go through their process and Wait for the results. So Well, so one of the great things about this experience was early on, there was an there's another participant named Nicole, who I hope you v I very much hope you meet one day. She's an incredible force. But she's really ⁓ a community gal. She's a magnet. And she reached out early and said, ⁓ to me and a couple of other folks, you know, do you wanna get on a group chat together? Just, you know, so we can We can learn about what e what what other people are building. We can learn about ⁓ other people's projects. We can learn about you know where we come from, ⁓ what tools we're going to be using, how we're prepping. Maybe we can offer some mutual support. And right away I said, yes, yes, yes, please. I don't know anybody. I don't know I barely knew what lovable was a week ago. I would love that so much. How can I help? How can I be your partner? And so she and I really kind of took the lead in forming this community of ⁓ we had a WhatsApp, we I still have the WhatsApp chat of about 40 people or so. and at one point, ⁓ I built out like a notion kind of landing dashboard to centralize all of the different tools and information that people were sharing. and so ⁓ Where was I going with this? What was your original question? ⁓ I'm waiting. We're waiting. Yeah. So as we're waiting for the results, the WhatsApp is just going off the rails. I mean, people are like, When are we gonna find out? Does anybody know what time? Are we going to have an announcement? Are we gonna have like an awards ceremony? I said, Yes, I wanna have an Oscar party. Like, can we please like? ⁓ and we're all rooting for each other and we're all thinking. I wonder if it's going to be this person who wins, or ⁓ I wonder if you know, because there there are all kinds of builders in the room. There were all kinds of people. there were there were the extreme introverts who were like, you know, they didn't they didn't s say a peep. They were just there to kind of see what other people were doing and talking about. And then there were the real extroverts like Nicole, like myself, who were, you know, asking, Does anyone need help? Are you stuck? How can I help you? I got some time. I just finished. Let me do a demo of yours. and so we're all waiting and we're all hyping each other up and we're saying, ⁓ I wonder who's gonna win, I wonder who's gonna win. And and I think that was that was a real bonding moment because there were so many emotions in the group of ⁓ I'm so afraid. I ⁓ I'm I feel like I messed this up and ⁓ I just had to submit it in a rush and I don't know if I did it correctly, and ⁓ I think I missed the deadline and ⁓ you know, somebody, you know, the site crashed on me. ⁓ while I was mid submit. What do I do? And, you know, five of us, you know, were like, ⁓ if Lovable doesn't let you in, I'm gonna go after them and I'm gonna I'm gonna raise hell. ⁓ so we did, you know, there were a couple of people who really got stuck. and they did make it through. So we were very happy. and yes, waiting. you know, at the on the edge of our seats for let's see, we found out that the hackathon ended on Tuesday, so it was one week. We learned on Monday. We were told Monday. We weren't told a time on Monday when we were going to hear back, but we were told Monday the results will be released. ⁓ and Lovable has this Discord channel that they they set up a couple of different ⁓ topic channels, one of them being ⁓ of course, this hackathon specifically. And so The Discord was getting hammered like, what time? When you know, can I still make an edit? And, you know, so everybody was ⁓ panicking. There was panic, there was excitement, there was joy, there was pride, there was fear, there was all of the above emotions. ⁓ and so it was it was a hard week and that's really when we sort of leaned on each other for for support and reassurance. Yeah. And Then you got the results. And what was your result? So we got the results. I believe the winners were announced early, earlier than the rest of the community. Because one of the great things was Lovable actually provided detailed feedback. And that was great. As well as during the build, we could go into the Discord and we could say, Hey, does anyone have a marketing background? Could you look at this and see what you think? How can I do this better? and that was amazing to have live feedback. But then we also had feedback at the very, very end in the submission portal where Lovable came back and said, ⁓ you know, your app is, you know, does it meet the criteria? Is it user-friendly? Is it are there clear call to action buttons, you know. It does it really solve the problem that you originally identified. is it accessible? ⁓ you know, all of the other criteria that they used. And then that was the basis for the feedback. So the feedback was, you know, a couple of paragraphs of love this, this is a great app, didn't love this part, didn't love this part. Yeah. So you've got a lot of ⁓ feedback. from people. I is after the hackathon you said you have edited the app since. ⁓ is a lot of the feedback you got from during the hackathon, from the community and lovable itself. Is this these are the things that you implemented afterwards then? Yes, so So the people that I the people, the audience that I initially identified as someone like me, a busy woman, a working mother, maybe, someone who feels like they don't have enough me time, enough friend time, enough of an identity of my own outside of being a mother, outside of being an employee. I love books. I use books to I use books to go into another world temporarily outside of my own that I then use to reflect on my own experiences. I love books because they really it scratch a part of my brain that I can't get it's a it's it's a form of my own therapy, right? And so that's why I love books. The audience that I imagined was kind of those regular everyday users. What I was getting from the lovable community and this WhatsApp group and these fellow builders was all kinds of different people from all kinds of backgrounds. People who you know people who wanted to do virtual clubs, people who ⁓ wanted in-person clubs, but maybe not at their homes, they didn't have the space, they live in a tiny New York apartment. Whatever it was, people with marketing experience, people with with with engineering experience, people with all kinds of different skills that were not necessarily intended as being my original audience. And so those additional perspectives were so valuable. and even if they didn't read, even if they didn't love books as much as I did. I really valued their opinions because they gave me insight that I wouldn't have gotten if I had just done a beta launch and had my friends join and test it for me. Yeah. And so one of the feedback items I got right away, and I can't believe this happened to me because one of my best friends who I hosted a book club with, ⁓ shout out, shout out to you, Kimmy, if you're listening. She's a product ops manager and she tested my app and we looked at it together. And of course, I looked at it with maybe four or five people during the build. And one of the pieces of feedback that I got that none of us caught was I didn't have a landing page. I didn't have a home page. I had I had a very beautiful Intro page with an animated graphic that was just screamed sophistication. And it felt like a really beautiful old library. And it felt like a cozy fireplace. And it felt like something I had to be a part of this intimate club and click through to the sign-in page. Boom. I was locked. So the The feedback I got was I don't have a landing page. And I thought to myself, ⁓ my God, are you kidding me? How did I not do that? Because the very first thing when you go to a website, you go in and you say, What is this product? What does it do? What is the problem? What does it solve? How much is it? And none of that was on there. And it was just a landing page that said, log in. And so did not win. I got an honorable mention and one of the feedback largest the the most glaring obvious feedback that I got was you don't have a landing page. And I said, Okay. Well, and so after I got up off the floor, after I after I kept reading the the email that said, You didn't win, but you got an honorable mention because immediately I opened it and I said and it said, You didn't win. Here are the winners. And I thought, ⁓ good for them. Okay. And so I went back and I read the detailed feedback. And then I went and then I moped a bit. And then other people were in the WhatsApp group were going, You got an honorable mention. That's a big deal. And I said, ⁓ I did. I did. I was busy crying. Didn't even notice. So the feedback that I got That was so helpful, beyond helpful. I mean, you ri it's really easy to get tunnel vision when you're in the middle of a build. It's really easy to not zoom out and say, I don't have the most basic piece of my website. And so I was really kicking myself after that. And of course that was the first thing that I fixed. ⁓ and so you know, you still see the the beautiful landing page, but now you scroll and then you see the This is what the club is for, this is the problem, this is how it works. ⁓ and do you would you like to be a founding member? So it is in beta mode right now. I do have ⁓ I do have fifty founding member spots. and this is great timing to be interviewing this doing this podcast because ⁓ I am trying to recruit some founding member clubs ⁓ before August first. So awesome. Awesome. So in now that you mentioned it, ⁓ where are people gonna find your app? Yes, so right now it is a web-based app. It is at SwanSociety.app and eventually I'd of course love to have ⁓ a mobile app, but at the moment while we're in beta, ⁓ it is that web based app and you can find it you can find it there. I will also be sharing quite a bit on my personal Substack about building in public, ⁓ about the experience, about the community that I've built. And I'm excited to share the journey more and yeah, hopefully you'll see more. I'll post on Instagram as well, kind of about the build itself, the woman behind the app. how I got here and I hope everybody enjoys following along. Yeah, I bet. And what is next for Christina? For me. I I'm looking to find so so as I as I kind of as I kind of transitioned into this AI era, ⁓ I'm learning that a lot of organizations A lot of companies, including startups, especially startups, who are trying to operate very lean, trying to be scrappy, trying to do a lot with very few resources, AI is very important. Yeah. And AI can really move the needle for early stage startups. And it can really help with automations, with Being a force multiplier with a very limited staff. And so my next move is to, and I'm taking my time doing this because I really want to find a great mutual fit. But I'm it's kind of made me change my perspective on my career trajectory because I really now see myself a bit more as a generalist, as somebody who can who has pr somebody who has proven to take new tools to learn about brand new skills that are scary and intimidating, take them and learn them and use them and build something. And I've proven that I can do that. And so in my next role, I really am looking at a more of a generalist type of ops role where I can use AI. Where I can use all of these varied skills, my finance skills, my people skills, my ⁓ my my tool obsessed brain to really find a new startup that I can help build from scratch, but this time using AI. Yeah. I think in in early on you said you were not technical and you know, didn't know what MCP was and How would you rate yourself now after going through the experience and building the app? How technical would you say you are? I would say that I am certainly much more even before this, I am certainly much more technical than a lot of people my age. I know that's a generalization, so I d I'm sorry I'm sorry to insult anybody ⁓ who's also my age, but ⁓ you know, I I do have ⁓ the limitations of my own experience and my own career path. And ⁓ you know, the majority of my technical experience is in fintech is in finance. And the coding world is completely foreign to me. And that's a whole other kind of specific subset of technology that I was never exposed to. And so I would say that I am I am very I was very technical to start in terms of The the learning curve has always been pretty short for me. I've always been able to latch onto a new technology and learn it if I set my mind to it. ⁓ coding is one of those things that it's it's a completely different language that you can really you I I guess there's a higher barrier of entry, right? It's not in plain language. It is another language entirely. And so I would say that coming out of this, I am far more technical than I was when I started. a lot of it is that a lot of it is that I now understand how how a lot of coding systems interact with each other. I did not learn about the code itself. I did not learn coding language, and I don't think I ever will. But I think that's the amazing thing about this experience is I don't need I don't need to learn the code. I have a translator, I have tools, and I can do it in plain language. Yeah. So it's really, really cool. It is. I totally agree. I think once you build your first app and you realize like I could actually build this. It really changes something in the brain. And it's like the mind goes into what what what else can I build? Almost. ⁓ so what do you think? Are you gonna continue building the Swan Society or are you thinking about maybe something else? Or what's your app plan? I would love to keep building. I I certainly am going to ⁓ I'm going to learn a lot from this beta launch. ⁓ I hope to have that open for a couple of months so that people really get the full at least one cycle of their book club operations going and are able to see that actual rotation mechanism. ⁓ so I think for beta mode, it'll be there for a couple of months. But eventually, yes, I would really love to launch it fully. and have real life users. ⁓ and I hope to I hope to be able to bootstrap it. ⁓ so that's my goal. ⁓ in terms of building other apps and other tools, I have not I would love to. I have not found, I have not come across any major ideas there of a dream app that I have next. ⁓ I will say that in addition to looking For another full-time role at a startup. We are ⁓ some of the alumni are planning on forming a women's collective for AI learning opportunities, for community building, and other people that are interested in doing something like She Builds that we did ⁓ and act as mentors for other people in the community. ⁓ so I'm excited to see how that shapes out and then also for the full app to launch and maybe who knows I'll build something else soon. Cool. Awesome. ⁓ thank you so much for sharing your story. I saw your post, I think it was that you got the honorary mention, you posted on LinkedIn and that's how I connected with you originally. ⁓ ⁓ I think hackathons are amazing and what you built in forty eight hours is truly it's a great app. I I did go dig into there and ⁓ it's it's truly I think life changing for many. And ⁓ I know the community in Lovable is amazing, so it's a great achievement for you to, you know, keep and go forward and ⁓ whatever comes next, it's a springboard for the next thing. And that is a wrap for today's episode. Huge thanks to Christina for sharing her story. If your book club isn't as great as it could be and you could use an app that helps you manage the book club, find Christina's app at SwanSociety.app. I'll leave a link to the website and the landing page in the show notes as well. And Christina said something very important in this podcast. She was able to build very, very quickly. But not because Lovable was amazing. Lovable is absolutely amazing. But she was able to build so quickly because she spent weeks preparing what she would be building. And that I think is the key here. The planning process you do before you hit lovable or write a line of code or anything is all about what the app is, who is it for, and what problem does it solve. Christina spent most of her time doing that and only a few hours actually executing. And preparation is not the opposite of speed, but preparation allows you to build really, really fast. If you loved hearing how Christina built her app in Lovable, there's other lovable builders coming along as well, along with cursor builders, claude builders, and anything and everything in between. So in the meantime, keep shipping.