AppDirect is a B2B commerce platform serving millions of subscribers, and its teams are constantly looking for ways to move faster without piling work onto engineering. “AI has completely transformed the way that we think about work,” says Laura Stevenson, Senior Vice President of Marketing. “And Lovable has been a big piece of that shift.”
AppDirect's marketing team's non-technical users have vibe-coded over 200K lines of code this year, building 11 projects with four being live in production to-date. Two of these projects are projected to save AppDirect over 120K in software and development costs in their first year. On the whole, AppDirect has over 80 applications currently being built on the Lovable platform, spanning every major functional group in the company: Sales, Finance, HR, Operations, Marketing, and Development.
“Lovable is a key tool in our toolkit today,”says Jeffrey Leggo, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Digital Strategy. “The biggest value for us is unlocking the potential of non-technical teams and defraying the cost of engineering.”
Saving tens of thousands of dollars and months of work
AppDirect first discovered Lovable when they had an urgent need to rebuild a website for an acquisition, Broker Online Exchange (BOX), a leading retail energy network. With their CEO’s recommendation, the product marketing team used Lovable to prototype a new BOX site end-to-end in a matter of weeks. After some light engineering work, it was productionized and running on Vercel, the team’s hosting platform of choice.
“We could have paid an external company $80,000, and it would have taken six months,” says Laura Stevenson, Senior Vice President of Marketing. “With Lovable, it took less than one month.”
What really proved the long-term value of Lovable, though, is how it’s allowed technical teams to maintain and add to the BOX site to this day. “The marketplace managers build out the content using Lovable, check it into our code repository, and the development team reviews,” Jeffrey explains.
Product marketing even used Lovable to develop a back office tool that functions as both a CMS for the site, and a CRM. “It’s been invaluable. We're doing lead capture, platform signups, and capturing resumes from people that are signing up,” Jeffrey says.
As Jeffrey explains, “Lovable fits a happy medium: it’s easy enough for non-technical users to build, and it has enough sophistication for technical teams to come in and help with any roadblocks.” As a result, it’s helped break down the barrier between non-technical teams and code, ensuring that the people who built the content can also maintain it.
Redesigning the incentives and promotions page
When a partner uses the AppDirect marketplace, they have access to a wide variety of special incentives and promotions offered by different vendors within the market. “Originally, this was a flat PDF file,” Jeffrey says. “Then a product marketer within our team used Lovable to reimagine it as a fully interactive website.”
“It’s amazing,” Jeffrey says. “We embedded it into the marketplace as a page within our software platform, too.”
With Lovable, the team can build entire websites and applications, all without involving engineering resources. “Simple SaaS applications can dramatically improve a partner experience,” Jeffrey says, “but we never would have been able to allocate engineering resources to it previously.”
Now, the team is even targeting rebuilds of the SaaS apps their team uses. “We can replace a SaaS tool that we're paying $35–$40,000 a year for if we can build something internally that meets our use case,” Laura says. “We don't need everything that the SaaS app does today. We just need it to meet our specific business needs.”
Event coordination without the pain
Jeffrey’s team manages all of the content for the breakout sessions at AppDirect Thrive, the company’s annual conference.
“Last year, we had six to eight different spreadsheets managing data across all of our different teams,” Jeffrey says. “We had to coordinate with design, with the web team, with the team maintaining our mobile app. It was painful. I kept thinking, wouldn’t it be great if this were all just in a SaaS app?”
So Jeffrey and his team used Lovable to build a new app that managed all the breakout sessions, allowing them to sort speakers by status, session, and companies, and track whether they had each speaker’s logo.
Now, the team can work on event content and give other teams the ability to review event materials before they publish anything. As content is published, the team can keep track of everything through a calendar that updates as the schedule changes and even flags conflicts.
“Previously, when a speaker would cancel, or a new speaker came in, rearranging the schedule would be half a day for us,” Jeffrey said. “We've saved weeks of labor this year. With Lovable, we can short-circuit tedious projects that we were previously managing in spreadsheets.”
Transforming the way AppDirect thinks about work
Lovable usage is spreading up and down the company, from the leaders of non-technical teams to prospective hires.
“There are a lot of non-technical users digging into it, getting their feet wet, and starting to unlock productivity gains with it,” Jeffrey said. “I see sales teams and non-technical people in our business solutions consulting group building things, too.”
Lovable usage has become so important that the company has built AppDirect Portal, a Lovable account offered to candidates interviewing with AppDirect. Candidates use Lovable, Supabase, and Devs.ai to demonstrate their skills.
“We challenge them to get all three of these tools working together to build against what they perceive as a big problem in the marketplace space so that they can demonstrate their capabilities to us,” Jeffrey says. “It’s the linchpin in our interview process right now — we see it as future-proofing our workforce.”
