- Charbel X
- Posts
- First AI Full-Stack App Maker, UX for Customer Acquisition, OKRs and more
First AI Full-Stack App Maker, UX for Customer Acquisition, OKRs and more
AI coding is great. But now there's something greater.
Charbel Zeaiter
November 26, 2024
Good morning,
We’re officially less than a month away from the Christmas-holiday season, and as much as our bodies are ready to slow down, the world of design and tech is doing anything but.
One of my favourites today is some recent research revealing that astrocytes,(star-shaped brain cells) play a crucial role in memory storage, and altering them can cause specific memories to fade. This discovery suggests that, much like how we might selectively forget the stress of Christmas shopping (or worse, the Boxing Day sales), our brains can be fine-tuned to let go of certain memories.
Ready for the future? It’s getting faster each day, it seems.
Charbel
Founder of Velvet Onion, Faster Zebra and more to come …
Today’s Highlights
AI: The World’s First AI Full-Stack App Developer
Design: How to Leverage UX as a Customer Acquisition Channel
Science & Tech: Controlling Memories by Manipulating Non-Neural Brain Cells: Breakthrough in Treatment for Disorders like PTSD
Founding: Launched a Website for your Startup? Competitor Landing Pages will Guide a Great Deal
Product: Objectives & Key Results (OKRs): Meaningful Insights on Progress OR Merely Pushing Out Numbers by Filling Templates
Today’s AI image: Software Dev Firms: A Forecast
Quote for the day: From a Beloved Poet and Playwright
AI
The World’s First AI Full-Stack App Developer
A new player has entered the coding scene, and if you're not careful, it could have the competition sweating bullets. Meet Lovable, the "world's first AI full-stack engineer." It’s not just a buzzword — this thing just snagged the #1 spot on Product Hunt, and the reviews are downright jaw-dropping.
Wait, hold up. Full-stack engineer? What does that even mean?
Here’s the deal: When you’re building a legit app, it’s not a one-person job unless you’re some kind of coding wizard. You need a team, or at the very least, a couple of specialists.
Enter Lovable, who does all of this in one go. Seriously. You simply tell it what you want to build in plain English, and it creates everything. Want a user login? One click. Need data storage? One click. Looking to accept payments? You get the idea.
Early adopters are backing up the hype. One user even launched a startup that cracked Product Hunt’s top 10 — using only Lovable.
There's something about Lovable’s approach that sets it apart. While others are making AI coding assistants, Lovable seems to have figured out how to actually build complete, functioning apps.
Why is this a big deal?
If you're someone who’s ever been bogged down by the complexity of app development, Lovable’s here to make you rethink your whole process. It’s the no-fuss, simple solution that’s already delivering results — and that’s something worth getting excited about.
Happy coding, mates!
Also in AI
Design
How to Leverage UX as a Customer Acquisition Channel
Traditional CAC focuses heavily on marketing and sales, ignoring a key element: the User Experience (UX). While marketing attracts users, it’s UX that keeps them around.
Poor UX leads to churn, wasting all the marketing spend that brought users in the first place. So, if users leave due to a bad experience, you end up shelling out more for new customers.
UX's Crucial Role in Acquisition:
Good UX, especially in onboarding, is a major factor in user retention. A well-designed onboarding process helps new users see value quickly and stick around, reducing churn.
Time to Value (TTV):
TTV measures how quickly users get value from a product. Faster TTV means higher satisfaction, reducing CAC and boosting customer loyalty. Canva’s quick value delivery through guided experiences is a great example.
Long-Term Benefits of UX Investment:
Investing in UX leads to compounding benefits: better user retention, more word-of-mouth referrals, and a lower overall CAC over time. For example, every 100ms improvement in page load time can increase conversion by 1%.
Strong UX leads to better customer lifetime value (LTV), meaning users stay longer and some even advocate for the product, further reducing acquisition costs.
Companies that prioritise UX over simply pouring money into marketing see sustainable, long-term growth. It’s not just about attracting users — it’s about creating experiences that make them want to stick around.
Also in Design
Science & Tech
Controlling Memories by Manipulating Non-Neural Brain Cells: Breakthrough in Treatment for Disorders like PTSD
While we’ve known for years that memory’s stored in the brain, scientists have been scratching their heads over how it happens. For a long time, we thought neurons were the sole memory keepers, but turns out, astrocytes (fancy non-neuron brain cells) also have a say in the matter.
Astrocytes Get Active
Over the past couple of decades, researchers have figured out that astrocytes can trigger neurons to fire up and even hold onto memories.
Some astrocytes are specially programmed to handle specific memories—imagine them as little memory file cabinets.
Memory on the Mend or MIA
A bunch of mice were used as test subjects for these experiments. Here’s where things get wild—when they turned off the astrocytes tied to a specific memory, the mice completely blanked out on that event.
But they didn’t lose their minds entirely—the rest of their memories stayed put. Essentially, they became a bit forgetful, but not brainless.
Flipping the Forget Switch
And just to prove they’re not completely evil, the team managed to bring the memory back to life by firing up the engram neurons. So, it's like having a “forgotten” memory, but with the power to press ‘Ctrl+Z’ and bring it back when needed.
Future Fixes for Overactive Memories
Looking ahead, this research could be a game-changer for treating conditions like PTSD, where memories are overactive. But there's still a mountain of brainy stuff to figure out before we can start tapping into astrocytes for therapeutic breakthroughs.
Also in Science & Tech
Founding
Launched a Website for your Startup? Competitor Landing Pages will Guide a Great Deal
When you launch a startup, initially almost every competitor of yours is a few steps ahead. They’ve been in the game longer than you have been. Hence, there’s a tonne to learn from their accomplishments and mistakes.
Here’s how you can squeeze out valuable insights from their landing pages:
Play around with keywords:
Enlist the keywords most relevant to your offer that your target audience most likely searches for regularly.
Search them up and the top websites that appear in the SERP (organic ones) are unquestionably your competitors.
Now crawl through their webpages and spot which keywords they rank for and how. Use tools like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest to get a more in-depth analysis of their traffic sources.
Scrutinise their copy, content and headlines:
See how and where they carefully use the right combination of words to convince both their potential customers as well as the search algorithms.
Learn how they communicate with their audience. The tone. The vocab. The form.
Is their content brief and crisp, delivered straightforwardly through email newsletters?
Or is it long and detailed, delivered in an academic manner through blog posts and papers?
Or is it fun and engaging, delivered in a witty tone through text, imagery and videos?
Become their customer:
Engage with their content, marketing channels and even product. You learn a tonne about a brand when you interact as a customer and take notes as a competitor.
Also in Founding
Product
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs): Meaningful Insights on Progress OR Merely Pushing Out Numbers by Filling Templates
The practice of tracking OKRs yields nothing useful most of the time. Why? Because in most companies, teams fill OKRs with a superficial intent of formality and always anyhow come up with a bunch of meaningless numbers.
They try hard to somehow prove on the paper that they fulfilled the “objective” they were assigned. Most often these objectives are shallowly set with no rational relevance to the team’s work.
The examiners of these Key Results stay satisfied with business-as-usual metrics. Means “all’s good until everything’s normal and mundane.”
Such OKRs are merely meant for reporting stats. Nothing else.
OKRs to track real success
The foremost element taken care of is the Key Results. The KRs that actually paint a picture about the team’s functioning.
For example, a typical OKR would define vaguely an objective like “improving website metrics.” The Key Results would include tracking metrics like total website visits per month and average session duration.
No apt link between what is being done, what is to be achieved and what is to be done in order to achieve it.
Adding some purpose to it, the objective can be specified a bit more as “driving sustained engagement and higher-quality traffic to the website.”
Key Results could include “increased organic website traffic by 20% through SEO improvements.”
OKRs when prepped with genuine intent of measuring progress always act as a strategy guide to teams for plotting their next move.
Today’s AI Image
Software Dev Firms: A Forecast
Source - DALL-E
Quote of the Day
From a Beloved Poet and Playwright
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
Oscar Wilde
What we’re working on
 Velvet Onion & Friends We’re in the process of rebranding Velvet Onion & Friends. Why? It’s an important stage in our evolution, and deepens the link between agency, product & education. |  We’re at the final stages of planning for our pilot program. Working name is “99 Problems But A Pitch Ain’t One;” cute for internal projects, not sure it’s the name. Coming soon! |
