Prompt Playbook: Getting ready for revenue PART 1

Imagine this moment: someone opens your AI tool, uses it for five minutes, and says "I need this. How much?"

Then a few moments later your phone buzzes with a Stripe notification. "Payment successful: £29." Then another. Then another.

It's exciting. Exhilarating actually.

The most I’ve woken up to (so far!) is $100,000 in Stripe notifications overnight. Believe me…it does not get old!

It's also bloody terrifying. Because suddenly you're responsible for keeping a business running, managing costs, and making sure customers get what they paid for.

That's fine. We're ready for this. This is what we’re here for. And this is what we’re prepping this week.

Let's get started

This is a business

We need to start making money. This is a business, remember? But because we've built an AI tool, we need to be smart about it.

Runaway API costs can destroy you overnight. Thankfully, API costs are (very) cheap compared to what we'll charge, but we still need to put proper controls in place.

To put this in perspective: let’s say your API costs are ~$0.013 per generation (about 500 words in your particular product). You might be able to charge $39/month for 100 AI generations to your customer. Your API cost per customer is roughly $1.30/month. If they max out their usage, that is. So you're charging $39 for $1.30 worth of API calls.

That’s a 97% margin. Plenty of wiggle room.

The API costs are negligible compared to what people will pay for a working solution to their problem.

But we need to work out how much we are charging and how much access we provide to make this work. We then need to have user authentication (basically: user accounts) and billing.

This leads us to the most technical week we'll do for the whole summer camp. Sorry, there's no way around this! I’ve protected you until now.

From Fun Toy to Real Business

Right now, your AI tool is an open playground. It’s just a link that you’ve been sharing out. Anyone can use it, try it, break it. That's perfect for beta testing, but terrible for business. We’ve got to adapt it before we go wide with our launch.

To turn this into a real business, we need to restrict access and charge for it. No more free rides. People value what they pay for.

Today we're adding the velvet rope. User accounts mean we know who's using our tool, we can contact them, and we can control their access. Tomorrow we add payments. By Thursday, we have usage limits to protect our costs. We’ll build each step by step.

Step 1: Understanding Your Database Backend

Before we dive in, quick explainer: your AI tool has two parts. The frontend (what users see and click) and the backend (where data gets stored and processed).

Think of it like a restaurant. Frontend is the dining room and menu. Backend is the kitchen and storage room.

This is the case for most software, including your tool. We (as users) normally only see the frontend. So the backend stuff can be confusing if this is your first time encountering it.

In Lovable, Supabase is your backend. It's a database that stores user accounts, tracks who's paid, remembers usage limits. Without it, you'd need to build all this infrastructure yourself, which would take months. You can obviously use another database but if you’ve built in Lovable then it’s far simpler - just a few clicks to connect.

In Lovable, look for the Supabase button in the top right corner. Click it and follow the connection instructions. This gives you user authentication and database features. It’s a native feature so pretty simple to add. Here are the official instructions and contact Lovable support (or chat to ChatGPT) if you run into problems!

Step 2: Add User Authentication

Now for the main event. You're telling Lovable to add an authentication system to your tool.

I need to add user authentication to my AI tool. Requirements:

1. Signup page with email and password
2. Login page with email and password
3. Only authenticated users can access the main AI tool
4. Redirect unauthenticated users to signup page
5. Simple user profile created automatically after signup
6. Clean, simple design that matches my existing tool

Please set up basic authentication with Supabase. 

We'll be adding payment processing later. For now focus on the above.

This will get Lovable to build out your basic systems for user creation, sign in and content restriction. This might take a few iterations. Lovable might ask follow-up questions or need clarification. That's normal.

Notice right now I’ve asked it to hold on payment processing. The reason is we want to get each component working properly first before adding more complexity.

Step 3: Test Your Authentication

Once Lovable has implemented the authentication, test these scenarios

New User Signup: Access the page in Anonymous/Incognito mode. Can you access the signup page? Can you create an account with email/password? Are you automatically logged in after signup? Can you access your AI tool?

Existing User Login: Can you log out and then log back in? Does the login form work correctly? Are you redirected to your tool after login?

Database Check: Check your Supabase dashboard. Go to the "Table Editor" section. You should see user profiles being created.

Useful - you can make “test” accounts by using your email+sometext.

For example if your normal email is jim@theoffice.com

You can set up aliases (distinct accounts) with jim+account1@theoffice.com, jim+test4@theoffice.com etc. etc. Just add + and then whatever you want and it’ll count as a different email.

You will hit issues during this process. That's normal. Use ChatGPT to help debug problems, just like we did during MVP week. Remember to be specific about error messages and what you were trying to do when things broke. Add screenshots of what you are seeing or use ChatGPT’s video mode to show it exactly what’s on screen.

Your Deliverable Today

By end of day, you should have

• Working signup page

• Working login page

• Anonymous users blocked from your AI tool

• User profiles created in Supabase database

Build in Public Content

Share your progress

"Day 31 of AI Summer Camp: Adding user accounts to my AI tool.

First time building something like this. Thankfully Lovable + Supabase making it easier than expected. Still expecting to learn a lot of technical skills this week!

The unglamorous but essential part of turning a demo into a business."

What's Next?

Tomorrow we add Stripe payments. Authentication today, monetisation tomorrow. We’ll keep building step by step by step! We’ll get you there! You're now 24 hours away from having a system where people can pay you money to use your AI tool. That’s pretty cool eh?

Keep Prompting,

Kyle