Code is just another novel

The complete manual on how a non-coder built and shipped a real social platform with AI — from the first prompt to live payments, search visibility and native apps. Written in Lagos, Nigeria, free for anyone who wants to build.

The series

  1. Code Is Just Another Novel: How I Built an App With No Code — How a non-coder in Nigeria went from idea to working prototype using AI, Base44 and Supabase. The mindset, the mistakes, and a hands-on lab you can run today. (9 min read)
  2. From Prototype to Live: GitHub, Vercel and Supabase, No Code — A non-coder's step-by-step guide to taking an app live: move code off Base44 to GitHub, deploy on Vercel, wire up Supabase, and point your own domain. (10 min read)
  3. Add Google Sign-In to Your App: Supabase Auth Tutorial — Learn how to add Google sign-in, email login and password reset to your app with Supabase — a beginner-friendly auth tutorial for non-technical founders. (9 min read)
  4. Testing and Optimisation: Make Your AI-Built App Fast — Why your app is slow and how to fix it: test with Claude, cap image uploads, serve WebP, batch database calls and paginate feeds for a leaner build. (10 min read)
  5. Product Design for Humans: Safety, Comfort, Then Utility — Safety, then comfort, then utility — the order humans decide to stay. Lessons from building HVNG in Lagos: RLS, onboarding forms, block buttons and form psychology. (9 min read)
  6. Solving the Cold Start Problem: From Used to Loved — Your app can be perfect and still launch to an empty room. How Tinder seeded one side first, why I cut four pages of forms to two clicks, and what users love. (9 min read)
  7. Accept Payments in Nigeria: A Paystack Integration Guide — How I monetised HVNG with Paystack: subaccounts, split payments, webhooks, the Apple 30% rule, and the unit economics that keep the lights on in Lagos. (8 min read)
  8. Event Check-In, Search and Gifting That Win Businesses — How I made business accounts glad they paid: contextual search that finds them, offline event check-in that survives a crowd, lawful attendee CSVs and social gifting. (8 min read)
  9. Answer Engine Optimisation: Get Your Site Found by AI — Answer engine optimisation explained: llms.txt, sitemaps, structured data and how to get your site indexed by AI. A practical SEO guide for startups. (8 min read)
  10. Publish an App to the App Store From Nigeria With Expo — How to publish an app to the App Store from Nigeria: React Native and Expo from one codebase, Expo Go testing, TestFlight, and what the accounts cost. (7 min read)
  11. Seedance AI Video Prompting: The Director's Playbook — The real working manual behind professional Seedance prompts: motion hierarchy, camera language and continuity rules that turn AI video mush into cinema. (12 min read)
  12. Seedance vs Runway vs Dreamina: Best AI Video Model for Ads — Seedance vs Runway vs Dreamina, compared by a working director: character caps, strengths, compression rules and negative prompts that save your ad budget. (11 min read)
  13. AI Video Prompt Templates: Copy-Paste Library and Method — Copy-paste AI video prompt templates, the keyword clusters that control light and motion, and the Afrofuturist method behind cinematic AI ads from Lagos. (10 min read)
  14. How to Make AI Ads: 4 Real Brand Campaign Case Studies — Four real AI ad campaigns broken down — model routing, /100 producer ratings, dual-palette systems and filter-safe brand prompts you can copy today. (11 min read)

Learn it live

Everything in this series is taught hands-on in the PxLabs live weekend courses, and discussed daily in the PxLabs community. Companies can book enterprise AI training.

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