274 - Best of 2025! No Code, No Problem: Building a Startup with Lovable AI with Corey Pierson

0:00I am using AI to help build a SaaS application. I am not a developer at all. I don't know how to code at all. But with the new AI tools out there, as long as you can prompt and connect out, you can get pretty far. I did all of this from prompts. So you create all of this in Lovable, upload it to GitHub. How does that work? I just hit publish and it pushes it straight to my GitHub repository. And then from GitHub, it goes to Vercel for the interface to host. Corey, this is freaking mind-blowing, man.

0:35All right, Corey, I am stoked to talk to you today because I'm going to learn about AI. I want you to just briefly give me, what's your business? What are you using AI for right now? I am using AI to help build a SaaS application. So I am not a developer at all. I don't know how to code at all. But with the new AI tools out there, as long as you can prompt and connect dots and you're a little bit tech savvy, you can get pretty far. So what is your background? I'm in big tech. So I've done this a while already. So I'm the project manager, a product owner, right? I manage all of the smart developers, architects, and engineers.

1:19and then I put the fairytale business ideas together. The fairytale business ideas? Yeah, so they come up with real crazy things and then we work with the developers and we say, hey, can we do this? How long is it going to take? And I'm that project manager that understands both sides of the technology and the business, but I'm not a developer, right? I don't code. I don't do databases. I don't do any of that. I do... Did you have any coding experience? No. No, okay. Okay. This that we're looking at that you built, where did this idea come from? What was the genesis behind it? Yeah. So the whole premise of trying to launch a startup, right, is to solve a real world problem and then to figure out how to scale, monetize, onboard, all that, right?

2:07I found an extremely interesting niche that was a real-world problem for us. And with my background, I knew I could potentially turn it into something larger. And it has started to scale pretty well. Let's describe the idea really quickly. What are we looking at on the screen? Yeah. So for pet owners, one of the biggest issues is documentation and where they keep all of the records for their pets, whether that be their vaccination records, whether that be when they went to the last vet visit and then being able to share those. So if they go to the groomers or the trainers, they always ask for their vet records, right?

2:57Are they vaccinated? Can you prove that they are? If you move vet locations, getting your old records and actually keeping them, that's not an archaic folder, piece of paper somewhere, right? And you transfer vets, none of that historical data comes over, right? Vets are very independent and there is no central network for them like that. A lot of vets aren't connected. So the thought is for pet owners, they now have a centralized platform that they're able to not only keep their documents, they can share them. They can create a shareable link. They can email them. They can set reminders. They can put all the information about their visit that went in.

3:40Right. What was their medication last time? What was the what this doctor say? any of your travel documents, you can have it right there on the go and not worry about paper and where's it at. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's the same, it's the same problem with patient information for humans. A hundred percent. Right. It's like, Hey, how do I get all of my records to my current provider? And then not only how do I get them to my current provider, how do I get them in a format that they're going to be actually able to access it and read it and digest it and all of those things. So except this is the use case for pets.

4:15Okay. Amazing use case. And we're looking at the homepage right now, manage pet records, care reminders, digital document storage, et cetera. How did you build this? I built all of this in lovable AR. Lovable. Okay. Why lovable? So there's a couple of different softwares you could use. Cursor, Replit, lovable. I'm trying to think if there's anything that I'm missing. There's probably more that I'm missing. There's bold.new, there's Windsorfer, right? There's a handful and I've used them all, right? So the few caveats with that is with Cursor and with Windsor, you still have a coder interface. You still have to go in and work with the code, right?

5:02Like massage so it's not natural language like lovable is it is but lovable is more of a prompt to go and and cursor is a more granular level of lovable right lovable is made for someone like myself cursor is made for a rookie developer who can open up the ide and actually get in there and do some work right that's not me this is really all prompting i did all of this from prompts geez louise yeah so so with that i mean and here's the like here's the home page right and then you can click on this and it literally will show you like another view of the dashboard and then i have actual screen captures of what my dad and this is fully operational so i'll take you through the dashboard as well right hey i don't know if you remember this but when we started this podcast we entered into a a social contract.

5:59I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like subscribe and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value, but I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for on Apple or Spotify, it would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. Oh, so I'm looking at a live version of this. This isn't like a mock-up.

6:32No, this is live. My website actually just went live this morning. Congrats. That's awesome. Yeah. So I own petdocument.com is my domain. Awesome. Yeah. Great domain. Yeah. So, I mean, you can - Jeez. Secure your document. So like we're looking at all of these options. Is there a sign-in? Is there like a portal? There is, right? So I can go here and log in. I'm going to log in under the test account. And you created the portal within Lovable. Lovable created the portal for you. Yeah. So here's your dashboard once when you sign up in my service. Right? So you can, and this is my test environment, right?

7:14But like, so here's my dashboard. You can click on your pet. You can get their health information. You And this was just the overview dashboard, right? And then you go over here. You can see your documents here. You can go on your health check. You can select what animal it's for. You can add vaccinations. You can add your medical tracking. Here's your... This is a very robust site. I have a referral program built in. So when you go to sign in, you can give them a referral code, right? How long did it take you to build this? Building is relative, right? So the idea started back in November, December of last year, a list of about 12 to 14 different ideas that I had.

8:08And then I started to kind of narrow those down to what I could actually do within myself, right? Like what's in my scope? What am I actually capable of doing? And then January of this year, this idea really started to get some traction in my head, like just by talking to a few people and this and that. And they're like, OK, OK. So I spent January basically thinking about it, planning it. I spent February doing market research and design. Like, how did I want this to look? Right. Like what's, you know, I wanted the premise of this is you should be able to click on a pet and then have all of your information right there about your pet.

8:56And using some of my corporate stuff that I know, I do product, right? So I know how things should look, how they should feel, what's the flow. And then I spent the whole month of January, or I'm sorry, the whole month of March building. so jeez louise so i'm rough just you so you didn't have anybody come in that was like hey i need you to just take a look at the code and fix some stuff up so that was actually what i did the last week right so the last so i know this is all my coat right is what determined yeah but knowing that i'm making a real product with a real paywall is a little bit scary for me because I've never done it.

9:41So I did pay a dev to come in and actually make sure Stripe was hooked up appropriately. My backend authentication was correct. There was no crazy API keys exposed anywhere that shouldn't be or secret keys. He was pretty impressed with how far, I mean, like I said, I did 99 % of this. The last was connecting strike. This is incredible. I mean, this is like a real robust website that has functionality that you vibe coded in essentially a month. Yes. Yes. With no technical background. Zero. For people who don't know lovable, what you can do within lovable is basically prompted and say, Hey, this is what I'm looking for.

10:25You're using natural language to write the code for your websites. So at the same time, there's still a lot that it spits out that you don't really understand that you need to be able to have some technical background. And so, for example, hey, I've got to hook up the payment processor. Yep. Hey, I've got to make sure that the emails go somewhere. I've got to have some API integrations, yada, yada, yada. For me, I'll use Lovable, but then I'll use another LLM to kind of walk me through how to write the prompt for Lovable or fix the problem. Did you do the same thing or did you do everything in Lovable?

10:59I did do a little of both, right? So there is some planning that kind of goes into the prompts, right? And kind of how you want them built in phases. So I do use Gemini and ChatGPT to kind of walk through, here's the premise of what I'm trying to do, right? Here's the feature that I want. I also found in Lovable, it's extremely helpful to use the chat only feature. because then it understands your whole project and you can have a conversation without it making any edits. Really? Yep. Can you show me what that looks like? I sure can. I've built a couple things in Lovable, but I'm still just learning it and trying to understand how to actually utilize it to its full potential.

11:47Actually, that was one of my last prompts on this was just kind of talking to it. If you're just listening, Lovable has the prompt text interface And then to the right on the screen, it will show you a preview of what the page looks like. And so he's showing that right now. So here is a good question. I asked, what is the main tech stack this is built with? And it literally walks through all of it. Right. And then my last question was, is my sitemap accurate? So I'm starting to ask. What is that asking? What does that mean? Is your sitemap accurate? Yep. So what it includes, right? So your site map is for a lot of your SEO type stuff to make sure that your site is either indexed properly, the pages are showing correctly.

12:36So you can see right here what's correctly included. It responded well. And then it suggested a few things on what might be missing. And so with the things that were missing, what did you do with that? Were you like, yeah, go ahead and fix these? Nothing yet, actually. That was literally just my last, I'm showing you, right? Like this is a lot. No, it's amazing. It's amazing. But I mean, it's not hard to literally, all you do is go from this mode and just click this chat only. And now you can just ask it questions like, give me five more ideas. And it's literally going to produce five more ideas for this website.

13:23and then it's going to have like a implement plan button and it'll just go through and start doing stuff. What is lovable built on top of? Is it open AI's interface or do you know? I don't, I think it's, I think it's clawed or it's like backend or something, but I'm not sure. Yeah. But I mean, I mean, you see right here, right? Let me think about some additional premium features it'll literally walk through and suggest them and not only suggest them but then walk through and actually bullet point out what they're going to do and then at the very bottom of this you just have an implement plan button so it'll walk through and it'll you know marketing brand tools advanced business analytics it just it helps brainstorm ideas right within it and then you can tell me more about number three, right?

14:21Or you could sometimes just get hairy and say, do it all. You know what I mean? I talked to somebody before who is a coder and they said something, dang it, I can't remember exactly what the term is, but it's like, in order to get another coder kind of caught up to speed on the way the website's built, there's this thing, it's like notes or like, I don't remember what the term is, but you can produce it to give to somebody so that they can take a look at the website and like quickly sort of just understand how it's constructed. Correct. Yep. So those are like the, like the read me files and the GitHub.

14:54Read me. That's right. That's what it was. Yeah. Read me stuff. So if you go to my, the GitHub repository on this, right? Like it'll have a whole read me section that lovable is clearly laid out that another developer can come in behind and know exactly what's happening. So you create all of this in lovable, upload it to GitHub. and then correct how does that work yep so so up here there's a there's a button and i just hit publish okay and it pushes it straight to my github repository okay and then from github it goes to versell for the interface to host it you don't do anything with it on GitHub.

15:41That's just where it's stored. GitHub's the middle person for the storage of all the code. Roll back different branches. I can do different things within GitHub. So I can make, like right here, as you just saw before I asked this question, right? I literally switched branches to start testing new features so it doesn't impact my main site, right? So think about like a parent-child hierarchy within the folder structure. It's saying, my main site's good. I just made a clone off of it. And now I'm going to start trying new things. If it works, I'm just going to push it up to the main, which will then push it out to my website.

16:25Is this the first thing you vibe coded? Start to finish? Yes. Start to finish? Yes. Okay. Yeah. I've done handfuls of, I mean, I've been a level user since like day one. Okay. So I'm familiar with it. I built, we'll call it a dozen other little side things and little stuff, but nothing to this full. I mean, this is a full platform, right? Like you can upload documents, you can take pictures, you can share them. There's a support channel built into it. Like, I mean, this is a full functional service. This is incredible. Of the LLMs, which one is your preferred LLM? Depends what you're trying to do.

17:08Okay. Walk me through. So for example, if I need something down, dirty, and quick, I'll go to Gromp. He's pretty straightforward. He doesn't give you all the fluff with it. ChatGPT is really, really good now for being able to multitask, right? So you can give it numbers, pictures, view a canvas, and then go right back to a conversation, right? There is no bouncing back around. I really like the new updates they've done. Are those the main two? Grok and ChatGPT then? Those are the two LLMs that you're working through? I do use Gemini every now and then for some deep research stuff, but I'm not a heavy user of Gemini.

17:52Okay, that's fair. And I don't use perplexity at all anymore. When you got stuck on things here, what LLM did you use to actually fix it? ChatGPT. ChatGPT. So I told it the issues I was having, a copy of the error message, and then what type of prompt to redirect it to fix it. Because the issue is, right, like it's all about prompt engineering and not being a coder. I don't necessarily understand or know why it's getting hung up or what it's hallucinating on. So you need someone to like tell you what's happening. Yeah, exactly. But if I could prompt it accordingly or point it in the right direction, that's huge.

18:37So it's truly about how you direct these chats. It's amazing. Corey, this is freaking mind blowing, man. This is awesome. So petdocument.com. Yep. And man, it's live. I can't wait to see the next thing that you build. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing this. Appreciate it, man. Appreciate the time. All right. Hopefully you liked that episode. And if you've made it this far, you're either really committed or you're stuck doing yard work and you can't actually skip on your phone. So while I have you, the show is growing, but I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please help me grow the show? I want to reach more people.

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