How to Build Something Lovable

By Felix Haas

Hi, I'm Felix. A designer, founder, and investor. Over the last few years I've worked inside Lovable, made angel investments in 30+ companies, and spent most of my time thinking about one question: what does it actually take to build something people love?

Early in my career, a design mentor introduced me to a framework that changed how I think about products. It's called the Hierarchy of User Needs. A pyramid, originally conceived by designer Aaron Walter, that describes the four levels every product moves through on its way from existing to being loved.

At the base: Functional. Does the product work? Above that: Reliable. Does the product work consistently? Then: Usable. Is the product easy to use? And at the top, the hardest and rarest layer: Pleasurable. Does it make people feel something?

Most products never make it past the first two levels. They work, more or less, but they don't delight. They don't get recommended. They don't get missed when they're gone. The reason is almost never technical. It's that the people who built them stopped once things worked and never asked what it would take to make someone actually love it.

For most of startup history, even reaching "functional" was hard. It took a lot of time, tons of engineers, and initial capital most founders didn't have. The pyramid felt like a luxury, something you thought about once the product was stable, the team was in place, the funding was secured. Well, today with AI, that has changed completely.

AI has erased the cost of the bottom three layers: functional, reliable, usable. A first-time founder with a clear idea can reach all three in a day. The technical barrier is basically gone, which means the only layer left that actually differentiates a product is the one at the top.

Pleasurable. The layer that turns users into fans, and fans into the people who tell everyone they know.

That layer has a name now. It's called Lovable.

This playbook is about building all the way to the top of that pyramid. It's written for first-time founders, but also for anyone who has an idea and has been waiting for the right moment to start. That moment is now, and it's closer than you think.

The Idea

Start with a problem worth solving all the way.

Most ideas get stuck at the bottom of the pyramid because they were never grounded in a real enough problem to begin with. Founders build something functional, it works technically, but nobody loves it, because nobody desperately needed it. The pyramid only matters if the problem underneath it is real.

The question I ask every founder isn't "what are you building?" It's "who desperately needs this?" Those are different questions. The first is about the solution. The second is about whether the problem is real enough to justify building all the way to pleasurable. A mediocre problem will attract mediocre engagement no matter how well-designed the product is.

In the best case, you are the person with the problem. You've felt the friction yourself. You know the pain precisely, not in the abstract. That specificity is what drives the product decisions that get you from functional to lovable, because you know exactly what "right" feels like.

The AI era opens up a specific category of ideas worth getting excited about: problems that always existed but were previously too expensive, too slow, or too complex to solve. Legal help for small businesses. Personalized tutoring for every student. Medical guidance for people without access to specialists. These weren't new problems. They just had no viable solution until now. If you can find one of those, a real problem made newly solvable by AI, you have a chance to build something that reaches the top of the pyramid for a market that has never experienced it.

A few things that separate ideas worth pursuing from ones that aren't:

It's genuinely new. Not 10% better than what exists, but fundamentally different. The best ideas usually sound strange at first. If everyone immediately agrees it's a good idea, there's probably not much edge in it.

It gets stronger with scale. Feature-level advantages erode fast now. What compounds is trust, community, proprietary data, and distribution. A product people love generates its own momentum. Ask yourself: if this worked, would people tell their friends? If the answer is uncertain, the idea might not be strong enough.

You can describe it in one sentence. Not because simplicity is a virtue for its own sake, but because if you can't say it clearly, you probably don't understand it clearly yet. Clarity of thought and clarity of speech are the same thing.

Force-fitting yourself into a startup without a real problem to solve almost always ends in something that reaches functional and stops there, because there was never enough conviction to go further. Go work on things you find interesting. Notice what's broken. Ideas come from proximity to problems, not from trying to have ideas.

Try it with Lovable

Validate your idea in minutes. Describe your concept and get a working prototype you can share with real users.

"I'm building an app that helps freelancers track unpaid invoices and send automatic reminders. Create a landing page with a sign-up form and a demo of the core feature."

The Builder

For most of startup history, "who's building this?" meant "who's writing the code?" That question determined everything: who you co-founded with, how long things took, how much money you needed before you had anything real to show. That's over.

When the bottom three layers of the pyramid, functional, reliable, and usable, can be reached in hours with AI tools, the critical question changes. It's no longer "can we build this?" It's "do we know how to make this lovable?" Execution has been democratized. Taste hasn't.

A founder with strong taste who knows how to direct AI tools can now build real product and push it all the way to the top of the pyramid, not as a workaround, but as a legitimate strategy. What matters is whether you can look at something and immediately know if it's right. Whether you can feel the difference between a product that's usable and one that's pleasurable. Whether you can iterate toward something that makes people feel something.

That's a design skill. It's the ability to care about the right things at the right level of detail, and it's learnable.

The new technical literacy for founders isn't a programming language. It's the ability to think in systems, direct AI with precision, and never settle for the layer below the one you're aiming for. Someone who has this can reach pleasurable faster than a team that doesn't, regardless of how much code they can write.

When I back founders I look for: unstoppability, determination, and the resourcefulness to find a way through rather than around. And increasingly, taste. The refusal to accept "it works" as the finish line. The founders I most want to partner with are the ones who are visibly uncomfortable shipping something that's only functional. Some people have that quality. It's hard to describe and impossible to fake.

A few other traits that matter more than people think: responsiveness, because how fast someone replies tells you something real about how they operate under pressure. Communication, because founders who are hard to talk to are almost always bad founders. And genuine passion for the problem, not the startup, because the latter runs out and the former doesn't.

On co-founders: choose with more care than feels necessary. You want someone you've worked with before, whose judgment you've seen under pressure. Startups will dip below zero at some point, and history with a co-founder is what keeps both of you going. If the chemistry is right, a great co-founder multiplies everything. If it isn't, they drain it. Going solo is hard but survivable. The wrong co-founder often isn't.

Try it with Lovable

You don't need to code — just direct with taste. Tell Lovable how it should feel and watch it build.

"Redesign my dashboard to feel like Linear meets Stripe — minimal, precise, obsessively clean. Use a monospaced font for data, generous whitespace, and micro-animations on state changes. No rounded-everything defaults. I want it to feel like a tool built by someone who cares about every pixel."

Build Before You're Ready

The fastest path to the top of the pyramid is to reach the bottom as fast as possible.

That sounds obvious, but most founders spend months trying to make functional perfect before showing anyone. They're optimizing the wrong layer. The bottom of the pyramid is just the foundation, and the sooner you get there, the sooner you can start building what actually matters.

Lovable takes a description and turns it into a functional, deployed web app in hours, with no coding required. You get a real URL that you can send to real users today. That's your new starting point. The goal is to get functional out of the way fast so you can spend your time and attention on what gets you to lovable.

The methodology is simple but requires discipline:

Build only the core loop. Every product has one interaction that, if it works, proves the idea. Find that and build only that first. Every feature beyond it is time you're not spending on making the core experience feel right. Resist the urge to build the full vision — functional first, then up the pyramid from there.

Ship before it feels ready. The moment you have something that demonstrates the core value, even roughly, share it. The instinct to polish before showing is almost always wrong at this stage. You can't learn what needs to be lovable until people have used something that works.

Let every user conversation move you up a level. Each session with a user should produce a specific change, not a note for later, but a real change that day. The first conversations will tell you about functional problems. The later ones, if you're listening carefully, will tell you what it would take to make them love it. That progression is the pyramid in motion.

Know when to stop prototyping. Rapid prototyping has one job: get to functional fast and start learning. Once you understand what users actually want, you're no longer prototyping. You're building toward lovable.

Try it with Lovable

Turn user feedback into shipped changes in minutes. Paste what you heard and let Lovable fix it.

"Users told me the onboarding is confusing. Simplify it to just 3 steps: pick a goal, connect their account, and see their first result. Remove everything else."

Make Something People Love

Functional is the entry ticket. Lovable is the goal.

Most products stop too early. They reach usable, people can figure them out, nothing is broken, the core job gets done, and the team declares victory. But usable isn't memorable. Usable doesn't get recommended. Usable doesn't make someone feel like the product was made specifically for them. Pleasurable does.

So how do you actually get there? Well it comes down to three things.

Give your product a personality. The most memorable products feel like they were made by a person, not a committee, or even worse by a single prompt. They have a point of view. They're warm where you'd expect cold, playful where you'd expect serious, direct where you'd expect corporate. Walter developed this idea at Mailchimp, where the product's voice, wit, and warmth became as distinctive as its features.

Ask yourself: if your product were a person, who would it be? That question should shape your copy, your design decisions, and the small interactions that most products ignore entirely.

Make it feel human. Emotional design is fundamentally about making users feel like there's a person on the other side. This shows up in the details: an error message that's honest and a little warm instead of cold and technical, an empty state that encourages instead of just saying "nothing here yet," an onboarding flow that feels like a conversation rather than a form. These moments are where usable becomes pleasurable. They cost almost nothing to build and they're the things users remember.

Design for memory. Emotional experiences create stronger memories than neutral ones. The moments that surprise, delight, or move someone a little are the ones that stick, and the ones they tell people about. This doesn't mean gimmicks or forced animations. It means finding the one or two moments in your product where something unexpected and genuinely good can happen, and making those moments count.

The practical work underneath all of this is a loop: talk to users, watch them use the product, find what's sub-par, fix it, and repeat. The early iterations move you from functional to reliable to usable. The later ones, if you stay close enough to your users, move you to pleasurable. AI tools have made this loop faster. Use that speed to go higher, not just to go faster.

Stay close to your users for as long as possible. Do the support calls. Do the onboarding. Sit in their office. The gap between usable and lovable usually lives in the details you only find by watching someone use your product in real life: the moment of hesitation, the small confusion, the thing they don't say but you can see.

Invest in your taste as seriously as you'd invest in any other capability. Use products obsessively and notice what makes the good ones feel different. Develop strong opinions about what should and shouldn't exist, about what good actually feels like. The founders who reach the top of the pyramid are the ones whose internal bar is high enough that they can't ship something they don't love.

Ask yourself these questions regularly: Do users come back without asking them to? Would they be genuinely upset if this disappeared tomorrow? Are they telling people about it? If the answer to any of these is no, you haven't reached the top yet. Keep going.

Try it with Lovable

Add the details that make people love your product — personality, polish, and micro-moments of delight.

"Add a celebratory animation when users complete their first task. Make the empty state feel encouraging instead of empty — add a friendly illustration and a clear first step."

Momentum

A product that reaches the top of the pyramid generates its own momentum, and that's not a coincidence. It's the mechanism.

Functional products get used. Lovable products get shared. The difference between a company that grows organically and one that has to buy every user is almost always whether the product made it to pleasurable. People don't tell their friends about things that work. They tell their friends about things that made them feel something.

This is the growth insight that most playbooks miss. The best growth strategy is a product people love. And I have seen that at Lovable first hand. Everything else, SEO, referral mechanics, onboarding flows, landing page variants, amplifies what's already there. It can't create what isn't.

That said, amplification matters. The AI era has expanded what's possible here. Growth experiments that used to require an engineer and a sprint can now be built and tested in an afternoon. Run more experiments. Kill losers fast. But always ask: are we building on top of something lovable, or are we trying to grow something that hasn't earned it yet? The answer changes everything about how you should spend your time.

Find one metric that, if it's moving, means things are working. Not vanity metrics, not signups that don't convert or pageviews that bounce, but the number that maps directly to real value being created and real delight being felt. Put it somewhere everyone can see it. Talk about it every week.

What doesn't work, and wastes enormous time: press launches, conference appearances, and partnership deals with large companies. These feel like momentum. They almost never produce it. The path is the same as it's always been: build something people love, get it in front of people manually, and let the product do the rest.

Two words I come back to more than any others: focus and intensity. Say no to almost everything. Don't move to the next thing until the current thing is lovable. When you find something that works, go harder on it. The founders who build great companies aren't the ones who had the most ideas. They're the ones who had the discipline to see one through to the top of the pyramid.

Try it with Lovable

A product alone isn't enough — you need a brand. An MVP brand is values made visible: a name, a point of view, a feeling. Build yours alongside the product, not after.

"Create a brand identity for my invoicing app for freelancers. Name: Kasso. Values: independence, clarity, respect for people's time. Design a landing page with a bold wordmark, a single brand color (deep teal), a manifesto section that says 'You did the work. Get paid for it.' and a waitlist signup. No stock photography — use clean typography and whitespace to feel premium and opinionated."

The One Job

Your job as the founder is to make sure the product keeps climbing.

The pyramid never stays where you left it. As you add features, scale the team, and move faster, the default tendency is to slide back down toward reliable and usable, away from pleasurable. Entropy pulls products toward functional. Leadership is what holds them at lovable.

More specifically: set the vision, make sure everyone understands it, hire people who raise the bar, raise money when you need it, and never let "it works" be the finish line. And increasingly, direct AI. Not just use it, but direct it with taste. Know which decisions AI should accelerate and which still need your full judgment. The founders who move fast without losing the feeling of the product are the ones who've figured this out.

On hiring, the first thing I tell founders is don't. With a small team and the right tools, you can do what used to require twice the people, and a smaller team stays closer to the product, which keeps the quality of judgment higher. Before any hire, ask whether the work could be done by someone already on the team with better tools.

When you do hire, hold the bar absolutely. Every person you add either raises or lowers the product's ceiling. Hire people who have taste, who feel the difference between usable and lovable and can't settle for the former. Trust your gut. If you have doubt, the answer is no.

Your Move

You've heard the philosophy. Now here's what to do this week.

Closing

I've watched hundreds of founders go through the 0-to-1 journey. The ones who made it weren't necessarily the smartest or the best funded. They were the ones who refused to stop at functional. Who kept asking what it would take to make someone love this. Who stayed close to their users long enough to find out.

The pyramid is still the whole game. What's changed is how fast you can reach the bottom of it, and therefore how much time and energy you have left to climb to the top.

AI gets you to functional in hours. The rest is judgment, taste, and the conviction to keep going until you've built something people love.

That's what Lovable is for. That's what this playbook is about.

Start today.