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 APPBeanpresso, coffee journaling for people who take their beans seriously: https://beanpresso.com
MY REFLECTIONSI 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
LINKSDarshan on LinkedIn: / darshangajara Product Disrupt, Darshan's design learning resource: https://productdisrupt.comDarshan's site:
