Lovable to Launchable
You built a prototype. Maybe in Lovable, Glide, Replit, or something similar — one of those new platforms that lets you turn ideas into apps without hiring a full dev team. And it worked. People used it. You proved the concept.
But now it’s groaning under its own success.
- Screens load slowly.
- The backend feels fragile.
- Adding a new feature means fighting the platform instead of building momentum.
Or maybe you’ve just closed a round of funding and need to figure out how to make your prototype real — to take what worked and evolve it into something that can live in the App Store, run offline, and keep scaling as your user base grows.
That’s the moment when you move from lovable to launchable: when you stop asking “can I make this work?” and start asking “how do I make this last?”
This post explores a path that makes that transition smoother. It’s an approach we use at Concise Consulting to help founders and small teams evolve prototypes into production-grade apps without losing speed or clarity. The ideas here apply to many tech stacks, but to make it concrete, we’ll use an example migration: turning a Lovable prototype into a Flutter app that’s fast, offline-ready, and friendly to both developers and AI-assisted tooling.
The Happy Path
At the center is a lightweight architecture called Concise MVVM — the name comes from its focus on writing less code while still getting the job done well. It stays lean enough for small teams yet structured enough for production, and prioritizes clarity and ease of understanding above all. It’s powered by a few tools that work together seamlessly:
- Supabase – your familiar backend for authentication, data, and APIs.
- PowerSync – provides an offline-first local database that stays in sync with Supabase.
- Drift – makes that database subscribable and type-safe, so the app reacts automatically to data changes.
- MobX – handles reactive transforms, keeping business logic and UI updates declarative.
Together, they form the practical toolkit that makes Concise MVVM work well in the real world.
Data flows naturally from Supabase → PowerSync → Drift → MobX → ViewModels → Flutter UI — reactive end-to-end.
This combination gives you:
- true offline capability with the local database as the source of truth
- minimal boilerplate thanks to declarative, reactive state management
- and a structure that’s easy for humans and AI agents to navigate safely
Why Architecture Matters
When an app grows beyond its prototype stage, the challenges shift. Early on, speed of creation matters most — can you get something in people’s hands quickly? Later, the focus turns to speed of iteration — how fast can you learn, refine, and deploy without breaking things?
That second kind of speed depends on architecture. There are several popular architectural choices you could make for Flutter: BLoC, Clean Architecture, or Riverpod for instance. Each has its place, but for small teams moving from prototype to production, they often add more overhead than value.
Good architecture doesn’t slow you down; it clears the runway. With a structure like Concise MVVM, each layer has a single responsibility:
- Services handle data and networking, exposing clean reactive streams.
- ViewModels transform that data into what the UI needs — simple, declarative, and testable.
- Views (Flutter widgets) just render state and handle user interaction.
The “Concise” in the name isn’t just marketing — it’s the core philosophy. You write less code because each piece does exactly what it needs to, no more. A ViewModel is just a class with reactive properties, not a bloc with events, states, and transitions. A Service is just a class that fetches and transforms data, not a repository wrapped in an interface wrapped in a factory. This simplicity makes the code easy to understand: when you read a ViewModel, you know exactly what it does. When you need to change something, you know exactly where to look. Less code means less to maintain, less to test, and less to understand — but you still get all the benefits of clear separation and reactive updates.
Because everything is reactive, your app behaves more like a living system than a collection of function calls. When something changes — data, connectivity, or configuration — the right parts update automatically. Less wiring. Fewer surprises.
This clarity also makes your code AI-friendly. Large-language-model copilots or agents can navigate your project without guessing. They can safely add features, refactor services, or generate tests because intent is explicit and boundaries are clean. The same structure that helps a human teammate onboard quickly also helps an AI one.
Accelerating the Development Loop
Here’s where architecture and AI start to reinforce each other.
- Predictable patterns mean LLMs can generate useful scaffolding: new view-models, mock services, or test stubs that match your conventions.
- Reactive design makes generated code safer — less hidden state, fewer side-effects.
- Typed data models from Drift and Supabase reduce ambiguity, improving code suggestions and refactors.
- Automated tests (often AI-generated) verify changes continuously, keeping the loop tight.
Together, these shrink the distance between idea and iteration. What once took a sprint can often be explored in an afternoon.
From Prototype to Product
The beauty of this path isn’t that you skip rewriting — it’s that you aren’t starting from zero. Your prototype already proved what matters most: the idea works, users engage, and the backend and data model exist. That’s real traction.
When you rebuild in Flutter, you’re not throwing that away. You’re translating it into a system that’s maintainable, scalable, and ready for growth. Your backend (often Supabase) stays in place. Your data schema and business logic guide the new architecture. Your design and user flows provide the blueprint.
From there, the upgrade looks like this:
- Keep using Supabase as your backend and source of truth.
- Add PowerSync to make it offline-first and reliable on mobile.
- Use Drift and MobX for reactive local state and declarative updates.
- Wrap it all in Concise MVVM to keep structure clear, logic testable, and AI-ready.
So yes — it’s a rewrite in code, but not in spirit. You’re evolving the same product, preserving what you’ve already learned while gaining full control of your codebase and your future.
It’s a happy path because it works with you, not against you. You can start small, deliver early, and grow confidently — from that first lovable proof of concept to a launchable, maintainable product.
Building fast is good.
Building clearly is faster in the long run.
What’s Next
In an upcoming post, we’ll look at a minimal working example of this stack in action — a Flutter app that syncs data with Supabase, works offline via PowerSync, and updates instantly through MobX and Drift, all structured using Concise MVVM.
It’s a short demo, but it shows the principle that guides every project at Concise Consulting: clarity and velocity aren’t opposites — they’re partners.