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The real skill with AI tools isn't prompting. It's knowing when to stop prompting, when to step in, do it by hand, and hand the result back to the machine.
Darshan Gajara is a design leader who actually ships. His latest is Beanpresso, a coffee journaling app built in Lovable, launched, and refined in the wild. In this episode he shares his screen and walks through the whole build, the real project, the prompt history, the dead ends, and the moments a designer's eye had to take over, from first idea to live product, plus how he's approaching monetisation and marketing as a solo maker.
We get into:
- Starting in Lovable and only bringing in Figma once the idea took shape, "give it a designer's touch"
- Why you don't need to design whole flows anymore: get one page right and Lovable infers your design system
- The handoff problem: screenshots plus precise description, component by component, down to corner radii
- The SVG trick: when the animation kept breaking, he built the UI by hand, named every layer, exported an SVG and told Lovable to animate exactly that
- "I'm still a designer": choosing to do the branding by hand, and why some things are better that way
- Monetising a side project: premium taste insights, and a roaster marketplace his own users suggested
- Marketing by making: free tools, a Berlin coffee guide the roasters reshared, and an AI writing setup trained on his own style
GET THE APP
Beanpresso, coffee journaling for people who take their beans seriously: https://beanpresso.com
MY REFLECTIONS
I share my personal takeaways from each episode in the d.MBA newsletter, what I actually learned and what I'm stealing for my own builds: https://d.mba/newsletter
LINKS
Darshan on LinkedIn: / darshangajara
Product Disrupt, Darshan's design learning resource: https://productdisrupt.com
Darshan's site: https://darshan.design
d.MBA, business education for designers: https://d.mba
00:00 – "They just keep banging their heads, burning through tokens"
00:36 – Who Darshan is, and what this episode is really about
01:36 – Interview starts: scratching his own itch.
05:51 – App demo: scanning a bag, community feed, taste stats
10:51 – Validating the idea (and why the existing coffee apps weren't good enough)
14:12 – Version one: built straight in Lovable, no design
15:54 – The prompting workflow: voice notes → Notion AI → Claude → Lovable
18:21 – Why he dropped the native app and went web
19:33 – Mood boarding with Variant, and finding the visual language
23:54 – Naming it, and why AI is terrible at logos
27:15 – What AI is good at, and what he had to do by hand
30:45 – Taking the design back into Lovable, component by component
33:27 – Building new flows once Lovable knows your design system
36:36 – The SVG animation trick
38:27 – Don't expect one tool to do everything
42:06 – Monetisation: premium stats and a roaster marketplace
45:45 – Distribution: small free tools, Instagram, and SEO
49:15 – Where to find Beanpresso and Darshan
