3 features, 3 weeks, 0 engineers
Context
“Great idea. No sprint capacity. Maybe next quarter.” Sound familiar?
At a startup, often there are multiple ideas worth testing that can't compete for engineering time. Lovable changed that equation. These are three features I took from concept to production, the only engineering dependency was adding a button that opens the webview.
QR flyer customizer
Every Modak user has a payment link, but a raw link or QR code isn't very useful if you're a kid with a lemonade stand and no phone to show it on. Many of our users are under 13 and don't have their own device - they need something they can print and tape to a table.
🔧
The build
Mobile-first webview. Started in Figma, moved to Lovable, iterated until the flow felt right. Worked with a frontend engineer to connect the real payment link as a URL parameter.
🧚♀️
The details
Emojis as the customization layer - lemons for lemonade stands, guitars for bands, sports for coaching. Simple to build, infinitely flexible.
👀
Back office
Password-protected admin route to monitor usage - who's creating flyers (parent vs kid), completion funnel, preview of each flyer.
The feature didn't produce a measurable spike in payment link transactions - volume remained stable.
New use cases unlocked
But we discovered how users actually use Modak in the real world: birthday gift collection, dog walking, lawn mowing, weekend markets.
These use cases now power our marketing communications.
🏆
Also... a proud moment
This was the first Lovable-built feature at Modak to reach production. This is more common every day that passes, but I will forever remember this feature.
Other Lovable builds
Same speed, same minimal engineering dependency. Built with the growth lead, Nicholas Maskrey.
Gifts
Social gifting to test network effects. Customizable cards for moments like Graduation, Father's Day, Get Better Soon. 4 reveal mechanics including scratch-to-reveal and a bouncing 3D gift game. Individual or group walls.
I also built a full back office to preview every gift, track creation and send funnels, and moderate content, because they're kids and sometimes things get out of hand.
Network effects haven't broken through yet, but users are requesting the ability to attach money - exactly the V2 we'd planned.
Sender POV
Contributor POV
Receiver POV
Games
A retention and network effects play based on the insight that gaming merchants are our kids' top spending category.
9 games (casual + financial literacy)
3 with multiplayer via shared room codes
No Modak account needed to join, a subtle acquisition lever.
Global leaderboard drives engagement. Kids push to break into the top 50. Some are deep into it... I'm rank 725, which tells you how much they play.
Retention is strong, kids keep coming back to climb the leaderboard, but like Gifts, the network effects lever hasn't broken through yet. A V2 hasn't been prioritized, but the data on what games drive the most engagement and which multiplayer modes generate invites is there for when it is.
Multiplayer experience
How to make it look like your app: connecting back to the Design System
For Gifts and Games, I fed my DS component documentation to Lovable through a Claude-generated .md file. The output was noticeably more faithful to our design system than the QR Flyer had been - the design system case study paid off immediately.
Why this matters
3 features. 2 people: a designer and a growth lead. 2 days, 1 week, 1 week. The only thing we needed from engineering was a button in the app that opens a webview. Everything else (front-end, back office, backend, deployment) was built by us using Lovable, Claude, and Supabase.
None of these projects have produced a breakout growth moment yet. But that's not the point. The point is that we can go from hypothesis to real product in days, put it in front of real users, and learn from actual behavior, not assumptions.
The QR Flyer showed us how kids use Modak for side hustles.
Gifts showed us users want to send money through cards before we built it.
Games showed us which mechanics drive daily retention.
This is what it looks like when a designer can build, not just design.
