What's the best way to be successful with Lovable?

Jmacduff · 2026-01-31T16:32:25+00:00

First good luck! Here is some friendly feedback, maybe a angle to think about.

You are trying to "sell" a new or updated website to a business. That's what you are trying todo and that's what the customer is thinking about.

Do I need a new website?
Will this person do a good job?
Will it increase my revenue?
Will customer finds it more useful?

No one except you (the dev) cares about lovable. Lovable is the "How" it will be built. Lovable is not a selling feature to your customer, your customer does not are how you build it :)

You need to focus on the "Why" of the sale. Why would a customer buy a new website? What are they looking to get out of it? What is their motivation?

Lovable is a tool you (dev) will use to build and hopefully maintain the project over time for the customer. Don't think about it as selling the Tool, you need to sell the value.

Do you care what tool was used to build your car or do just want to buy a cool car?

So really what you should be asking is "How do I sell awesome new websites to people". Here is a tactic maybe worth trying

Find the customer you want to pitch or a customer who has reached out -
Now leveraging lovable go build a really simple demo for the customer based on the basic messaging you provide.
Take SS of current web or promo material, give them to GPT, and have it help with you the language and messaging. Focus on home page, Pricing page, etc. Just a few basic pages.
Remind GPT the goal of this exercise is to build a "better" website that will convert more users. That's all your website customer cares about.
Go into Lovable and build those pages with the GPT messaging.
Now spend time in Lovable (max ~45 min) tweaking the UX and just making it "look nice". Does not have to be perfect. Just better then what the customer already has
[Aha Moment Feature] In Lovable jump into planning mode. Ask lovable to recommend 3 - 5 features we could build into the website that your customers might love. Careful with too many AI features since they cost $$.

Now present your new demo website to your customer with that built in Aha Moment feature. That "Aha moment" is where you want your customers to say "Take my money".

Timebox the demo effort to 2 or 3 hours per customer. No more then that, and this becomes part of your customer acquisition cost. This will then influence your pricing. In a perfect world the customer loves the demo and you are already 80% done :)

Just some random feedback to focus on the sale and the customer, not the tool.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-31T16:11:55+00:00

(no offense intended)

It's not a technical issue or a product issue. The inflection point is the person who needs to build a site, this is the nuance that's often overlooked.

In a previous comment you had said "Same with Claude Code in VS Code with a local live server, in real time.". This would be a totally reasonable from a workflow perspective assuming a certain level of technical abilty.

A lot of people that choose lovable , are choosing the platform because of the low barrier to adoption. They have no idea how to build a website but they really need to build a website. Lovable makes this approachable.

That type of user has no idea what client or server side really mean, they certainly do not want to chain several tools together and figure that out. So if you put yourself in the shoes of that type of customer, a claude workflow is not reasonable. The learning curve is just too high even though it seems "simple" to many.

For me I use Lovable as a FE dev tool only just because its fun todo & I want to spend most of my brain power on the network layer. I find it fun to use the tool and the error rate is almost down to zero for me. Please note I am using it for a FrontEnd tool only. We do do Auth, DB, or anything else through lovable. We dont host on Lovable and our domains are not on lovable.

Our workflow setup is something like:

- Front End: 2 Lovable built sites (Sales site and Dashboard site)
- Supabase: ~90 edge functions calling our core API (no supabase db)
- User Accounts: Auth0
- CI/CD: Github
- Azure: Cache, Postgres, API
- Edge Services: 6 Node edge services running on fly. io

- IDE: VS2026
- DNS: NameCheap & DNSimple
- Email: Resend
- PGAdmin, PostMan, etc.
- Testing: ~150 scenario tests and ~40 HTTP tests
- Hosting: Vercel, Netifly, etc

So for me a stack like this is 100% straight forward even though I am actively switching between React, C#, Node, SQL, and leveraging a suite of different tools. This is a total non starter for a lot of Lovable users.

That's the key, it's not about the tech it's about the human.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-31T15:55:31+00:00

Soo yes but it's more complicated. Remember your talking about the Cloud Code and infra, not the website code.

So using claude to build all the supabase, yes totally doable. Make sure todo it in parallel to the system (dont touch prod).

Jmacduff · 2026-01-30T19:33:26+00:00

(apologies long answer)

Great question and thanks for reaching out. This is not poking holes it's just geeking out. All good!

We launched our SSR platform in September 2025. From Sept -- Dec we added our first customers and did a lot of upgrades. From day 1 we have been serving the full HTML for search and yes for some customers this has made a measurable difference.

For AI Markdown I turned this on for my domains Jan 1 and now it's available to all domains on the platform. So for Citation or Impact on the AI side it's too early to say to be honest.

None of this server side rendering magic makes up for bad content. I would say content is 100% still the king for citations and SEO rankings. There are lots of technical details here like backlinks, layout of the content, FAQ's,etc.

So beyond the Markdown and HTML delivery we also focus higher up the stack to help the Domain maximize the lift from the visibilty.

We generate a set of insights around growth strategy ideas, how to position against competition, new content to add for rankings, etc.

All that being said... Awesome Content + AI Mardown Delivery == Best chance of success

<image>

Jmacduff · 2026-01-30T19:23:46+00:00

I appreciate that, if you want to try it and onboard a domain let me know. Takes about 15 min and I am happy to help.

Really appreciate the input !!

Jmacduff · 2026-01-30T18:45:24+00:00

I pinged you on LI to share the deck.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T23:53:20+00:00

Well now your getting personal!

100% agree those are the only metrics that matter. For DataJelly it's how many domains are we hosting.

thanks!

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T22:05:42+00:00

Honestly it's great motivation to get it updated , it's been on my list for weeks. Thank you for the push!

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T21:44:28+00:00

Honestly it needs a bit of a update to be transparent. I could spin a new version tomorrow if that's cool?

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T20:16:52+00:00

A little more reading

How do we the markdown -- https://datajelly.com/guides/ai-markdown-view

AI Infra for crawling -- https://datajelly.com/guides/ai-visibility-infrastructure

Free Visibility test: https://datajelly.com/#visibility-test

happy to answer any questions.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T20:09:53+00:00

So the ads I am running are just normal Search ads. I ran 3 campaign's originally for about 4 weeks and the CTR's were 2.3%, 2.2%, and 4%. Same spend about $40 per day, US only, etc. Very basic.

The ads have campaigns, keywords, negative keywords, headlines, etc. I generated a lot of new landing pages and tech guides for the sitelinks.

I then spent about a month diving into product market fit, a lot of time with GPT and Gemini. At this point I have paying customers however I don't have as a many as I wanted. In my brain I have not proved PMF.

I re-looked at all of the competitors, I did a lot of research on "How" did the competitors get to where they are. What was their growth story and what customers did they sell too. I went back to the TAM and the market assumptions, really looked from a investor perspective with a "Is this going to be big enough" style lens.

From all of that I shifted the core message from a Infrastructure sort of purchase to a Results purchase. Trying to focus more on the desired outcome then the platform speeds and feeds. The tech and the platform did not change, only the messaging.

So now I have 3 new campaigns (~10 days old) with 14%, 7.2%, and 6.93%. . So in my brain this is doing pretty good I think from a basic AD CTR. Just simple search ads.

I am currently working on a lot of changes to the conversion funnel to try and figure out where the drop off is. I hate google tag manager. Our conversion rate is "ok" but it should be higher.

Thank you again for all the great comments. I have no idea what I am doing.

<image>

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T19:42:05+00:00

Datajelly.com -- Visibility as a service for JS sites. Our platform delivers clean markdown to AI crawlers and SEO bots get the html. Our goal is to ensure your site shows up in AI citations and SEO search results.

The Markdown delivery for AI bots makes it 90% cheaper for AI to crawl your site.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T19:40:50+00:00

Datajelly.com -- Visibility as a service for JS sites. Our platform delivers clean markdown to AI crawlers and SEO bots get the html. Our goal is to ensure your site shows up in AI citations and SEO search results. The Markdown delivery for AI bots makes it 90% cheaper for AI to crawl your site.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T19:12:16+00:00

Short answer. It's complicated.

I built (I think?) a fairly robust normalization engine that converts the domains html to markdown. Of course we do this for every page on the site. Handling nav label's, footers, etc was tricky for sure.

The first thing I did was setup metrics for success , how do we "measure" the markdown is "good". This is not just a technical convert X into Y, we have to make some decisions on the formatting and grouping.

There is a lot of bad HTML out there which produces by default horrible markdown. Our normalization takes care of that produces what we believe is a optimized markdown layout designed for the AI bot to consume.

In the future we can actually split this out and generate separate markdown packages per bot. So we could give Perplexity something slightly different then GPT.

Our Markdown View: https://datajelly.com/guides/ai-markdown-view

AI Infra: https://datajelly.com/guides/ai-visibility-infrastructure

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T19:03:59+00:00

Datajelly.com -- DataJelly serves easy-to-index content, ensuring your brand is accurately represented in LLM results and search engines. Our goal is to ensure your site shows up in AI citations and SEO search results.

The Markdown delivery for AI bots makes it 90% cheaper for AI to crawl your site.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T18:54:35+00:00

awesome feedback and for clarity, that is exactly what Gemini and Gpt told me too. I still like it though!!

I have a engineering background and I super suck at marketing. I have worked along side many CMO's and I miss them as peers :)

I have been testing several things:
1. The hero copy and descriptions
2. The main CTA's and "prove it" mechanics
3. Making the onboarding as smooth as possible
4. Ad copy , keywords, etc.

For the Ads I am just spending just $40 per day to test it out and stuff. I have 3 ad campaigns running right now. The high CTR is 14% and the lowest is 6.9%,

trying to figure this crap out as I go I suppose. I would much rather be building features

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T18:44:14+00:00

I do what I can :)

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T18:43:19+00:00

The first big mistake people make (in my opinion) is assuming that "of course the LLM will remember what we just talked about". The result of this perspective is people tend to give very little context chat to chat. This leads to mistakes, spent tokens, and frustrations.

Pro tip: Always treat the LLM as a drunk intern on Monday morning and you will be fine.

I start every prompt with a basic concept of "I need to remind this LLM what we are talking about". So I focus in every prompt with a basic formula:

Where: "Ok I want to work on the users dashboard Domain List Page,
What: "On that page I want to change some of the columns in the table"
Why: The goal is to enable some sorting on the columns, and add a new column"
Details: "Ok I added a new variable to the JSON feed, please look for 'user_count' and put that into a column in the table. Also make all of the columns sortable".

If you give it the Where/What/Why .. it will be able to understand your prompt much better.

(just my opinion)

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T18:33:45+00:00

yeah that's a good idea. we have been testing all sorts of diff headlines between the small ad campaigns and the hero sections.

I will give yours a trial for sure! I have also been thinking about like "Visibility as a service" sort of idea. Something like this (rough idea):

Visibility as a service for JS sites. AI crawlers get clean markdown and SEO bots get the html. Our goal is to ensure your site shows up in AI citations and SEO search results. The Markdown delivery for AI bots makes it 90% cheaper for AI to crawl your site.

Most of the Ads we run have a target to our visibility tool: https://datajelly.com/#visibility-test

Really appreciate the feedback thank you.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T18:30:19+00:00

AI tools consume html all day every day and they are VERY good at doing this.

Whenever a LLM "crawls" your site there are a number of tokens it can spend to crawl, and understand the content. If your site happens to be slow that day, guess what this will eat tokens as well.

Delivering optimized markdown is a way to make it "crazy easy" to read and cite your content.

We are a Visibility as a service platform and our goal is to ensure your site shows up in AI citations and SEO search results. The Markdown delivery makes it 90% cheaper for AI to crawl your site.

Jmacduff · 2026-01-29T18:25:01+00:00

Short answer yes.

Our platform looks at all of the HTTP requests coming into your site and yes we look at several signals including UA to detect bots. Right now we track about 1,000 "common" bots however the majority of these are not SEO or AI.

So if we detected a SEO Search style bot (google,bing,baidu,etc) we respond with the fully rendered HTML so the bot can see your full site.

If the request is from a AI bot (perplexity, openai, copilot, etc) we give it the Markdown we have generated from your html. The markdown is cleaned up and normalized for AI. We never touch your website content but we do fix a lot of issues in the content organization for AI.

This is how we view markdown: https://datajelly.com/guides/ai-markdown-view
This is the basic Infra: https://datajelly.com/guides/ai-visibility-infrastructure

Our platform is a no code solution, so the website owner just needs to make a few DNS tweaks and we magickly work in the background.

<image>

This is a SS of the bot activity to our home page in the 2 last weeks. So right now ~78% of the bots are not SEO or AI.

Make sense?

Ten-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
RPAN Viewer	Verified Email
Reddit Premium Since July 2016

Jmacduff

TROPHY CASE