35 Products in 12 Months: What Building on Lovable Taught Me About Speed
The surprise of idea-to-prototype velocity — and why product thinking is still the real bottleneck.
When building becomes effortless, the real bottleneck isn't code anymore—it's how clearly you can think about what matters.
When I built my first project on Lovable, I expected the usual learning curve. Tutorials, docs, a few frustrated evenings. What I didn't expect was to have a working prototype before lunch. That first experience completely rewired how I think about building software. Not as a months-long engineering effort, but something closer to writing a brief and watching it come to life. I remember thinking, "What the hell just happened?"
Over the next twelve months, I shipped 35 products. Not 35 sketches or wireframes — 35 functional applications, each solving a real problem I'd identified. Health trackers, e-commerce platforms, educational tools, community apps. The velocity was unlike anything I'd experienced in two decades of business operations. And I've operated in environments where speed matters — P&Ls don't wait for you to finish your sprint backlog, right?
But speed alone isn't the lesson. Let me put it this way: what surprised me most was how removing technical friction changed what I chose to build. When your prototyping cost drops to near zero, you stop filtering ideas through an "is this worth the engineering investment?" lens. You just build it and find out. Some of my best projects — Baby Meal Planner, GrowPal — started as "let me just see if this works" experiments. No business case. No ROI model. Just curiosity with zero downside risk.
So here's the thing I keep coming back to. The real bottleneck was never the code. It was product thinking. Number one: scoping the right problem. Number two: defining the right user. Number three: cutting the right features. Those skills from years of corporate strategy, running P&Ls, and evaluating businesses — that became my actual competitive advantage. Not the tech. The ability to think clearly about what to build matters more than ever when building itself becomes effortless.
I mean, if there's one takeaway from shipping 35 products in twelve months, it's this: the constraint has shifted. We're no longer limited by how fast we can build. We're limited by how well we can think. And that's a much more interesting problem to solve.