I Made a Web App with Replit, and I Can Barely Code (pt. 4)

Lindey Hoak
Oct 14
3 min read

It's time for a web app intervention.

To see where this started, check out part 1, or here's a quick summary:

TL;DR: A recap of parts 1-3

Despite no software development skills, I was able to design a functional website from scratch.
All the heavy lifting was performed by Replit's AI Agent, an overly confident optimist.
The idea: A web app to connect business professionals for lunch called Superior Network
The outcome: A project full of so many features that it lost its core purpose.

When we left off, Superior Network was finally starting to look like a real web app. I brought it to John, and he hit me with a new development:

"I don't know what this project is about anymore. This web app doesn't seem to know what it is or does."

Product Management

John was right. In our excitement to push the limits of AI web building, we’d flown too close to the sun, and abandoned any real plan in the process.

I needed a product manager, someone to help Superior Network find its footing again.

Enter Trevor, a BearPeak PM. You can find more about the great work he does here. Trevor and I jumped on a call and we quickly found the issue: Superior Network had never really had product management at all.

"What does the app actually need in order to work?" Trevor tested me.

"Well," I thought about this. "It needs to connect people within a close vicinity of each other. And it needs to be able to book a meeting between them. That's it." "My thoughts exactly. That's the core. My advice would be to take all of the extra features away, but just for now. Focus on the product's core and get it out there to test users. That matters more than whether a chat page works or meetings can be auto-scheduled for users. When you build a core product, you need to learn to block out the requests for more content. Block out your users, builders, and even managers, and just build the features that have earned their place; just the ones that deliver core value. Then, as users test your MVP, you can start to re-integrate those cool but unnecessary features."

It was a simple and humbling lesson that I think everyone needs to revisit sometimes. As a designer, I can very quickly get caught up in details, and as a designer with the new freedom to build a unique site with just myself and AI, I had thought, "why not see what it can do?"

And I certainly had tested its capabilities. But if we were going to take Superior Network seriously, publish and market it as a real web app, it needed to return to the basics.

So Will I Build a Web App with Replit?

Can this designer actually bring the MVP across the finish line? Can she strip away all the shiny-but-broken features without mourning the hours spent building them? And once it’s reduced to bare bones, will Superior Network even work?

Tune in next week for part 5, the finale of this app-building story.

Want to skip ahead to a spoiler by exploring the final product? You can check out Superior Network now!