From Idea to App in 30 minutes with Lovable
The Fastest Way to Bring Your App Idea to Life
Ever thought about turning your morning coffee time into a productive app-building session? Today, we're diving into how I went from idea to app with Lovable.dev in just a few sips of coffee.
I’ll walk you through the project I built and show you it’s possible without coding at all.
What is Lovable.dev?
Lovable.dev is a user-friendly tool that turns your ideas into working apps. No coding required.
Describe your idea in plain language, and Lovable.dev’s smart AI does all the heavy lifting to build a fully functioning app for you.
Finding the idea - Simple Accounting App
My business accounting needs are about as simple as they come. A few domain names, hosting expenses, and not too much in the way of revenue just yet.
Spending $20/mth just doesn’t make sense for an online accounting solution.
So why not create a super simple accounting app and avoid the monthly fees.
The prompt
Write a basic easy to use accounting application for my small online business. I don't have complicated needs. Just need to be able track expenses and income, and generate the income statements, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. Have a nice easy to use modern design interface.
Before Getting Started
There are 3 extra services I used as part of this project. Supabase is required, but the other 2 are optional if you are thinking of trying this out for yourself and want to keep things simple feel, free to skip them.
Supabase: The backend database and user authentication for the system. (Free tier available)
Vercel: The hosting service for the application. (Free tier available)
Github: Repository to hold the source code for the project. (Free tier available)
I chose to use Vercel and Github so that I can make some future modifications to the code myself and can point it to its own domain name in the future. But if you’re not technical, these are indeed totally extra steps that aren’t required.
Walkthrough the Lovable Prompts
After the basic prompt to get started, Lovable will take a few minutes to pump out a lot of code. From there I took the following steps:
Connect the app to a Supabase database (button will be on the top right of the page. A guide walks through the process).
Prompt lovable with: “Let's add user authentication to this project”, then give it permission to run updates to the database.
Add in the reporting functionality that wasn’t included in the first-shot prompt:
”Implement Reports page and functionality. There should be 3 reports available (balance sheet, income statement, cashflow statement).”
Income Statement Report page Important step: Once everything was setup and looking the way I expected, it was important to run this prompt: “Ensure that users can only see their own content and not that of others.”
This sets something up called “row-level security” where users are only allowed access to their own data and not the other user data stored in the system.
Note: You might run into an error every now and then. There’s usually a “Try to fix” button that will generally guide the AI to a workable solution. If you encounter this don’t fret!
Final Touches and Launch
That was it for the prompts! Painless right? Just 3 more steps while enjoying the last few sips of coffee:
I hit the GitHub button to transfer the code there to a repository on my account there
Logged into Vercel and clicked “Add New Project” and imported the project from GitHub
Added a DNS entry to make the site available at beancounter.dougkeefe.com
Wrap-Up
We just built an app over a coffee! With Lovable.dev, turning ideas into useful apps has never been easier.
I highly encourage you to check this out for yourself even if you’re non-technical… especially if you’re non-technical. You’ll feel like a magician!
If you have any questions or want some help with your app, feel free to send me a message or connect with me on Substack
Until next time, happy building!