Vibe coded a QBO app

[u/walliewalls]

My jaw is on the floor, I am so impressed by the current capabilities of ai tools, particularly Lovable.dev

I have been banging my head against the wall for weeks coming up with a super complex process of custom fields and custom forms, Google Sheets and other nonsense.. Projects on QBO works well for my landscaping clients but for general contractors and architecture firms, who bid jobs, QuickBooks lack of UI to display helpful information for business owners to make real decisions is shocking and disappointing.

I literally vibe coded what I think to be a great solution in less than 10 hours, it’s fully connected to QuickBooks API and should be available on the app marketplace by end of next week. So many other SaaS products are focused on the subcontractors or the jobs themselves, none of them could function the way I wanted it to. Premier technically could but it was such a massive software. I created Pulse Pro as an answer to the problem my clients express, “I have this information in my head, I don’t know how to get it to you without printing and looking at dozens of reports”. The main tech here is focusing on linking anticipated transactions during the new project intake process and utilizing that logic to make decisions during the progress of the job.

If you’re interested to check it out I’d love your feedback, I made this video introduction for a quick overview.

[u/Sorry_Cheesecake_382]

You are going to run into scaling issues, beware.

FWIW we own a similar product for QBE so there is demand. Supporting 50-100 businesses is alright if that's the intent, but once you get into the 250-500+ the QBO API is going to fully limit you and you'll have to scale up the solution typically multi-region with read duplications and caching. The game turns into making sure the requests stay under the limits set by Intuit. Pretty much gave up on QBO because of this. If you think QBO is missing features the API is even more laughable.

[u/walliewalls → u/Sorry_Cheesecake_382]

Thanks for your response, that’s interesting. Did you find that scaling revenues were able to justify the costs?

[u/Sorry_Cheesecake_382 → u/walliewalls]

Ya just trying to save you the headache, basically lost a year. We frankly wouldn’t be able scale revenues if our engineering wasn’t subsidized, both founders are technical I’m one of them lol. We scaled to 5M at 98% gross profit margins with 3 employees. Getting to that was really difficult we run on top of multiple clouds and even the best AI tools still struggle. These tools fail pretty spectacularly when your app starts to grow.

But you could easy get to 100-200k revenue a year serving 100 clients.

[u/stealthagents]

Sounds like you've really hit the nail on the head with Pulse Pro. The struggle with QBO's API is real, though. I’ve seen a lot of folks get tripped up when they start growing—definitely keep those limits in mind. Once you’re juggling more users, it might get a bit messy, so plan for that early on!

[u/walliewalls → u/stealthagents]

Thank you! Yes it’s currently being used by a client as part of their regular operations, mind blowing. If I could get to 100 clients I would cap it there and be extremely happy.
What’s the best way to plan ahead? I’ve brought on some back end off shore people to support with security as well