Thinkific, an all-in-one knowledge commerce platform, was founded 13 years ago and has since expanded to a place where anyone can productize and sell their knowledge through courses, communities, memberships and more. A company with this kind of staying power only thrives by shifting to new demands and adopting new technologies as they arise. AI is no exception.
When Darren Guarnaccia, VP of Product, joined the company in 2024, he helped lead a significant repositioning and retargeting effort, complete with a new strategy and a new ideal customer profile. They had the path, but AI was the accelerant.
The team started asking big questions about how they could grow faster and iterate better, Darren says. “How can we leverage AI to build faster and de-risk innovation quicker? How can we validate ideas and stress test crazy concepts in a low-risk, low-commitment way? And that's when we stumbled upon Lovable.”
Rebuilding the core user experience
Thinkific, as part of its new strategy, is completely re-envisioning its core experience: the course creation workflow.
Thinkific, like any company that’s been around for more than a decade, has accumulated design debt over the years, and with a new strategic imperative to deliver an “Easy to use, beautiful, world class UX”, in 2025, Thinkific embarked on a journey to rebuild its core learner experience. The team soon found itself stymied by traditional design tools, however.
“There's an infinite number of ways that somebody could build a course,” says Maggie Fu, Senior Experience Designer. “This is where Figma really has limitations.”
With Figma, Maggie couldn’t build an end-to-end prototype that included the interactions and user flow all mapped out. The team couldn’t let users run free and learn from how they used the prototype.
Requisitioning developer resources was impractical because the team needed fast iteration cycles, not long-term solutions. “It's very expensive to have engineers do that,” Darren explains.
In short, a step was missing between concept and delivery. Typically, teams would build simple, static versions of their design, gather feedback, and then jump directly to production code.
Lovable enabled the Thinkific team to build the bridge between. “I see Lovable as the crucial missing middle step between static prototypes and the full production version,” explains Chris Powell, Product Manager on the project.
Iterating with richer, faster feedback
The team had a vision, mocks, and wireframes, but with Lovable, they transformed their sketches into fully functional prototypes that users could interact with, providing the team with deep, rich feedback.
“We can prototype the future in a really quick, high fidelity way that allows users to interact with a living, breathing version of what we want our platform to look like,” Chris says.
All the team has to do is:
- Upload an image of the mock-up
- Tell Lovable to turn it into a prototype
- Prompt Lovable to fine-tune the interactions they want
Designers and PMs run more usability cycles in less time, without pulling engineers off roadmap work.
“This was the one solution that was really friendly for product managers and designers,” Maggie says. “It’s the cheapest solution for us to get something closer to our vision, to get it out and test rather than involving engineers.”
Maggie attributes the spreading usage of Lovable within Thinkific to its conversational interface. “It's very friendly and you can just describe the changes that you need,” she says. “Even if you don’t know any code, anyone can get started with just a screenshot.”
Testing the future before committing to it
Maggie breaks down the benefits of bringing that experience forward into two categories: Faster testing and more complete feedback.
Since product managers and designers can spin up prototypes without involving developers, Lovable speeds up the testing process. “We run a bunch of usability testing within a shorter amount of time compared to previously, without Lovable,” Maggie says. “This really helps us have more cycles, refine the designs, and get more feedback.”
As testing gets faster, Lovable simultaneously expands the scope of what the team can test. “With traditional mockups, you're so focused on testing a small set of features on the screen, and you miss out on the story,” Maggie says. “Once you give somebody something clickable, something they can freely navigate around, you get a bigger picture of what that end-to-end experience is and where the issues are.”
The results:
- Faster time to beta with the new experience: “Lovable enabled us to begin our private beta roughly 3 months earlier than we otherwise would have, because we were able to put a fully functional prototype in the hands of our customers much sooner. This accelerated the feedback cycle significantly, and gave far far more lead-time to respond and adjust to feedback,” Chris says.
- Less busywork for designers. “Lovable probably saved us something in the region of 5 working days of design effort by not having to continually stitch and re-stitch clickable prototypes together in Figma. Having one ‘source of truth’ prototype in Lovable that could be updated in minutes really streamlined our internal workflow.”
- More confidence in the end product. “Using Lovable for usability testing got us to an average success rate of 94% for task completion, but more importantly we had a much higher degree of confidence in the results, because of how close the prototype was to the real production experience.”
Building your own disruptor
“We've just scratched the surface on what we can and should be doing with these tools,” Chris says. “I’ve always loved the idea of trying to build the competitor that's going to disrupt you before it’s too late — with tools like Lovable, product managers and designers are now able to bring to life and socialise these ideas super fast, and without disturbing the developers.”
Going forward, Thinkific plans to use Lovable for sharing and validating even bigger bets. “We want to be able to quickly spin up even our craziest ideas; ultimately we will use Lovable to demo our long-term vision for the product as a whole,” Chris says. “Eventually, those ideas trickle down into the roadmap for the core product.”
With Lovable, Thinkific can be its own disruptor, its own instigator for evolution. “This ability to lead from the future, to create a future state and work backwards from that, is powerful,” Darren says.
