Lieke’s story
Lieke is an HR consultant. She had a problem she encountered with every client: teams that didn’t know how to give each other feedback. She built a tool in Lovable where teams could share anonymous feedback and create action plans together. In three weekends, she had a working prototype.
It looked professional. The flows worked. She had 120 people on a waitlist. But she didn’t dare launch.
The roadblock
Lieke knew something wasn’t right. Not the design. that was good. Not the idea. 120 waiting people were proof of that. But she sensed something fundamental was missing. Something invisible.
She asked two agencies for a quote. One wanted €9,000 and 6 weeks. The other €16,000 and a “discovery phase” of 3 weeks before anything would happen. Both wanted to start from scratch.
Through a tip from another founder, she found LaunchStudio.
What we found
Lieke’s frontend was excellent. Professional design, logical flows, clear value proposition. What was missing was the foundation: secure login, data isolation (team A could read team B’s feedback), payments that weren’t actually connected, and secret keys that were visible in the code.
We built the foundation. We didn’t touch her frontend.
Day 1-2: Production Plan. We analyzed Lieke’s code and identified 11 issues: 4 critical (open database, payments not connected, secret keys visible, no secure login), 7 important.
Day 3-8: Backend build. Secure login with password reset, data isolation per organization, payment integration that actually works, secret keys moved to a secure location.
Day 9-12: Deployment. Live on Lieke’s domain, secure connection, error monitoring, automatic backups.
Day 13-14: Testing with 5 real users. Two minor bugs found and fixed. Everything verified in production.
Day 15-21: Lieke sent her waitlist the invitation. 47 of the 120 people on her waitlist became paying customers in the first week.
The lesson
Lieke’s product wasn’t blocked by a bad idea or a bad interface. It was blocked by an invisible gap she couldn’t bridge herself. The agencies wanted to rebuild her product. We only built what was missing.