My Take on 6 Weeks in a Vibecoding Accelerator: Week 1
Accepted into the Lovable accelerator, Shipped - 6 weeks to vibe code an app and ship with $3mill worth of tools, giveaways, weekly lives with experts in start-ups, weekly fireside chats for bonus info, a community of others building in the program, and a chance to be seen by investors...how did it go?
📆 Week 1
Getting the hang of it. I won't lie, social/community apps tend to overwhelm my ADHD brain. Too many notifications - lots of people talking at once - hard to find or differentiate what is important and what isn't. I don't know what it's like for someone who can filter noise, but I take it all in at the same time and that means - I shut it off.
The community was set on the Circle app, which was new for me. A bit like a less developed Slack or Discord.
Sidebar-I hated both Slack and Discord when I first was introduced, but I learned how to use them in a way that worked for me and now I love them - depending on who runs the server.
Circle, at least in this context, had very few ways to customize. The notifications were excruciating. You would go to a channel to make a post and then it asks you where you want to post. I'll take a wild stab and say the channel I'm currently in.
So needless to say - it was something I spent as little time in as possible. There was a lot of confusion on how things were running - what our homework was for the week - how we gained points - and the big question most of wanted to know - When do we get $3 million of tools? The accelerator was new for Lovable as well, so there were a lot of kinks they were trying to figure out along with all of us. Communication was challenging, but it was a lot to handle for just 2 people. I can't remember how many they said they let into the program, but I swore it was something like 4,000. Which definitely made me feel a little less excited to be accepted. In fact I think the person who was the outward facing media person told us after we got in that almost everyone was accepted that applied.
I think, to be perfectly honest, that caused not just less excitement but smelled like a big marketing ploy. Not only did they accept almost anyone so it definitely knocked down the "chosen" part of the experience, but we also had to get a paid subscription to the app in order to stay in the program. 4000 x $25 - lots of $$$$. Now I start questioning the $3 mill worth of tools. There's no way they are giving 4000 people that much in free stuff right? Even after acceptance into the program the website still said they hadn't finished their deals with the partnerships so hadn't announced what these tools were.
That said, I wasn't going anywhere. Worst case scenario, I pay for yet another AI, but I make something really cool. Best case scenario, I pay for yet another ai, make something really cool, get grants, get investors (if I want), and $3mill worth of tools. I was willing to take the risk. The worst case was still pretty great.
Sometime in the week we were told that once we turned in our first week, the tools would be released to us. Find out what we got in my week 2 post.
I was sitting on a problem that needed solving for a while, so I was down to get something awesome made. If you know my background, you know I've co-founded a start-up and heavily involved in others. I love them. The thought of doing one on my own was something I didn't think was attainable. Until now.
I work with AI on the reg, so I already knew the most important thing for me to do, once I had the general outline of what I was building done, was to get that backend set. It's much harder to do after the fact. I knew this was going to be SaaS so I knew I needed to set up for potential tiers, conditions, etc. Week one's homework was to get a waitlist set up, but if you want to ship in 6 weeks making the kind of app I wanted to make, I made the waitlist my last priority.
I had this idea of how AI would help configure for my users - depending on their needs, so I tried to create an onboarding chatbot. It wasn't AI really, it was just kind of logic based, so not exactly what I intended, and it didn't look like how I had imagined. Wasn't as clean. Felt distracting. Not to mention, since I didn't have the actual mechanisms set up that it was going to be, the onboarding couldn't really do anything yet. But I got the minimal up for the end of week progress report. I made a screen record of what I had working and got my waitlist put up.
I will admit, I was baffled by the waitlist because we weren't on our final urls, so I wasn't comfortable with putting out the work-in-progress. Instead, I made the waitlist on my other site and just barely mentioned in socials. So the other part I failed to mention (to you) - the biggest part of this program was trying to get us to build in public. It's the latest and greatest in the start-up world and I understand why. But I don't like posting - I wasn't sure what to actually say - and my least favorite thing is making a video with me talking. Shocker, I know. So, that is why you are seeing this on the backside of the program. I have more time to think about what I want to say. I feel it's easier to be honest knowing there's light at the end of the tunnel, and I can blog it and maybe video it - when I get over myself 😳 Below was my week 1 progress report. If I figure out how to add a video in the blog without slowing it down dramatically you’ll see it here. Otherwise, image a very generic AI built site with generic colors and a chatbot asking a bunch of questions with a dashboard behind it with mock data. If you’re curious what it looks like now and want keep up with the progress, check it out: Invoiceabill.
"I was able to get the database configured and ready for users, I got the logic in for the ai chatbot, and we got a barebones of what the app will look like. We got our landing page set up to join waitlist for beta users and should be able to convert that in the next week or two hopefully to paying customers. We announced our waitlist on social media so we should be getting a good list going in the next couple of days. It helped to see what others have done for landing pages and just overall marketing - helps take me out of the scared to try to the just ship it mentality."
Week 1 vibe-code app build screen record.
