Use AI to build your ideas in less than 60 minutes

Every founder knows the pain: you can see the product in your head, but explaining it to a designer or developer? That’s where things fall apart.

For decades, the gap between visionaries and technical teams has been one of the biggest blockers to shipping great ideas. Endless Google Docs. Confusing sketches. Misinterpreted mocks. Weeks of back-and-forth. Frustration on both sides.

But for the first time ever…this problem actually has a solution.

In this episode, Micah and Alane break down why communicating vision is so hard and how today’s AI tools finally bridge the gap. From rapid prototyping in Gemini and Lovable, to low-tech hacks like Chrome Developer Tools, Mac Preview mockups, and Loom walkthroughs, you'll discover the new way leaders can turn ideas into clear, buildable prototypes without writing code.

They share real stories (including the infamous “wrong font dashboard column”) plus practical techniques any founder, executive, or product owner can adopt to get dramatically better results from their technical teams.

You’ll learn:

• Why vision often gets lost in translation
• The old ways founders tried (and failed) to communicate ideas
• The new AI-powered prototyping tools that change the game
• How to make sure your team builds what you actually want
• The simple processes that prevent back-and-forth, burnout, and wasted time
• Why showing—not just telling—is now the superpower every leader needs

If you’ve ever said, “That’s not what I meant…” during a handoff, this episode will change how you work forever.

Tools Mentioned in This Episode

• Google AI Studio: Lets you type out what you want and instantly see a working version of it, without needing to code
• Lovable: Turns your idea into a quick, clickable mockup you can share with your team
• Base44: Helps you create visual layouts so you can show, not just tell, what you want built
• Vibecode: Gives you a simple way to create or tweak app screens without touching any technical backend work

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you for supporting the podcast!

For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

Want more valuable content and helpful tips?

Explore our Courses/Programs:

• Complete our self-paced Process Mapping course

Enjoy our Free Tools:

• Free Asana, ClickUp, or Monday.com Selector Tool
• Get 25 Free Custom Automation Ideas for your Business

Connect with Us:

• Join our Community
• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel

Transcript

Micah Johnson (00:05)
So Alane on this episode, I would love for us to chat about a problem that we see over and over again that finally has a solution, but has been an issue since, I don't know, the dawn of technology, since there was leaders who were technical and non-technical. What I'm talking about is the gap between having a vision as a leader and then being able to try to communicate that with the technical team.

Alane Boyd (00:31)
Like how so? Like what, how you want it designed or the functionality? What are you thinking?

Micah Johnson (00:38)
all of the above. How do I as a non-technical leader actually communicate my vision?

Alane Boyd (00:39)
Okay.

Well, yeah, and I mean, this is something that was difficult for us for a long time because I'm not a technical founder. I dabble in things that I think are technical, but are really small scale ways of doing things. And, you know, I'm looking at something and I'm just like, I don't like it. And you're going, okay, well, what do you want it to look like? Yeah.

Micah Johnson (01:03)
Yes, we've.

We've definitely been there.

Alane Boyd (01:10)
So it's really hard because I lack the skills. So could definitely see where this is, you know, goes past just us, but I lack the skills to go in and design and build something exactly how I'm seeing it. So I had to learn how to communicate and I came up with my own hacks to do it, but with technology now there's so many cooler ways to do it.

Micah Johnson (01:31)
Yeah. And we see this across the board. So a lot of times I love your hack and we'll get to that in a second for sure. Cause I'd love for you to tell everybody about that. ⁓ but typically we see things with like people trying to make really long Google docs explaining every single aspect and then trying to take all their knowledge in their head and brain dumping that into a document and expecting a technical team to read every word like a

nonfiction novel and then be able to pull it all together. Or another path that we see a lot is just like sketches, sketches on a whiteboard, sketches on a notepad, take a picture with a phone and say, all right, here's my idea. Or, and sometimes this one does work, leveraging references across like other businesses. So, hey, kind of like this, but you know, kind of different too.

Alane Boyd (02:27)
Yeah, there's one that's so vivid in my memory. my goodness, this is when we had GoFanbase and we had built Catalyst, the software platform. And we already had the data for an idea that I wanted to add to, I think it was our dashboard. And I just wanted the data that we were already collecting on the backend, I wanted it to show in the dashboard. And so I just took a screenshot and I didn't worry about finding the right font.

Micah Johnson (02:34)
Mm-hmm.

Alane Boyd (02:54)
And I'm just like, add a column here and name it this. And Micah, was the, like, it didn't match any of the other UI they took from literal words that I was saying and putting it there. And I was so pissed. going, did they even think about it? Well, it's not that they don't think about it. They're, they want to make me happy. And if I did it that way, that's how they wanted to give it to me. And so I really had to learn how to communicate and not that I delivered it.

Micah Johnson (03:15)
Yes.

Alane Boyd (03:24)
wrong in that instance, but I needed to communicate this is my mockup. Please match the UI. I'm just trying to show you like the data that I'm wanting to show.

Micah Johnson (03:34)
Yeah, and it is that gap because typically technical teams, engineers, developers, they are more literal, I would say, than average. But what they are missing is all the knowledge that you have. So you looked at you and we've got this demand. We've got these clients that are looking for X, Y, and Z. We've got this data. Can you just do this?

Alane Boyd (03:44)
and then

Micah Johnson (04:00)
And I'm sure as you worked with that, you sent this over with the best intentions going like, they're going to totally get this knock it out of the park. It's probably a five minute change and it'll be nice and easy. And instead you got stuck in this like back and forth loop of holy crap. Now, like we're just going around in circles and all I want you to do is add this one thing to the dashboard.

Alane Boyd (04:22)
Yeah, yeah. They added it. It just didn't match the rest. I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay, guys, let's learn. going to try this again. But yeah. So let's talk about Micah. You've been really experimenting with different technologies and I've gotten to watch you do this. And it is really cool because even though you are a technical person, you still have to communicate to other team members on what your vision is. And without

having to get in the weeds and build it yourself. So you wanna be able to quickly prototype things or get things that are in your head out to the other team members so that they can execute.

Micah Johnson (05:00)
Yeah, yeah, I think as a leader, we all have the superpower of being able to look at something. And you were alluding to this a second ago, Alane, immediately identify whether this is right or not. Now, we might not always be able to articulate why we feel it's not right, but we can look at it and go, I don't like that. Or we need to change something in this. And what you're talking about that we've been experimenting with,

is the AI tools that are out there now. So things like Vibe Coding tools like Base 44 and Lovable, and even Google Gemini has a whole app builder component to this. I mean, more recently than not, had to, well, we're adding a new addition to our website. We have a lot of workshops, a lot of mastermind events coming up. We have a lot of cohorts coming up, and we needed a way to easily communicate that.

I have that vision in my head of what an event calendar should look like on our website. And it includes things like being able to search, and a little mini calendar, and a list of the events, and clicking into the events and get the details, and the requirements of being able to link directly to an event so that we can promote it. And all of these things are bumbling around in my head. But if we were to send that to our web development team and say, hey, can you create an event calendar, I can guarantee

It is not coming back looking like how we want it to look. And the features are going to be different. And the layout's going to be in a different order. And so in lieu of me writing the actual thing myself, I went over to Google Gemini, went into app mode, and just started prompting, just started explaining to Gemini, hey, create me a basic event calendar. And in like 30 or 60 seconds, I had a complete layout.

Alane Boyd (06:29)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (06:56)
The amazing thing with this is I didn't just have to end there because it's building an app. I don't have to worry about the backend. I don't have to worry about the code. I just have to worry about the experience that I want people to have. And I could immediately look at that and go like, all right, this is cool. And I think even as I was building it, I was sending you screenshots, Alane and go and like, check this out. And then in the time I was sending you screenshots, I'd get another idea.

Alane Boyd (07:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I remember you saying like, I just added a search bar at the top so you could search for the types of training that you wanted. now I added a filter to the left hand side so you can just filter based on certain things. So you really were getting it to a certain point and then reprompting it. Okay, like I'd like a filter on the search or something like that. So it was awesome.

Micah Johnson (07:44)
Yeah, and I continued to iterate maybe, I think it was less than an hour I spent on this. And it was filling in placeholder images, placeholder data. I didn't have to write any code at all. I didn't have to come up with any example data. But most importantly, I could use it. Like I could click around and go, yes, this is what I'm looking for. This is what I need it to be. Or,

Wait a second, the search bar doesn't make sense in the sidebar. It actually makes sense in its own section at the top. And then I can move the filters in there as well. And why do we have the call to action button at the bottom of the description and force people to scroll down? So then I'd prompt, move the call to action button under whatever element, like the main image or something like that. And in five or 10 seconds, it's moved up. Change the color of the call to action button. And I could so quickly iterate.

that, like I said, within an hour I had a working version. Then I could send the share link to you and Beau and say, Hey guys, what do you think of this?

Alane Boyd (08:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, it was super cool. And what I love is that sometimes we get obsessed about the time that we as founders have to put into the planning of it. But it took you an hour playing around this around with it. Beau and I took a second to look at it, give feedback. And then you were able to take that and send it over to our web developer. And she's been off to the races. No questions.

Micah Johnson (09:18)
Yeah, yeah, literally it's a working version of what we're looking for. And it's a single link that she can access and interact with herself. So instead of like, well, do you want this blue or do you want this orange or do you want this in the sidebar? Do you want it in its own section? And that whole very expensive loop that you get in whenever you're working with the development team, regardless of the technology.

It is she can answer all of her own questions immediately by just interacting with this prototype. And we're not standing up hosting. We're not doing any of that. It is insanely fast. And that changes everything.

Alane Boyd (09:48)
Mm-hmm.

yeah, and anybody at this point can prompt in those two solutions, lovable and was it Gemini was the other one you said you did? Yeah, so it works off of prompting, so it's so simple.

Micah Johnson (10:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. So that's the newer AI-powered way to do it, or one way to do it. Alane, you came up with, and I don't know if it was from the dashboard experience you shared earlier, but you've come up with your way that's also worked really well even before AI. Do you want to share a little bit about what you're doing with that?

Alane Boyd (10:36)
Yeah, well, it just sounds so elementary after we just went through these cool ways of doing it, probably so. Yes, I'll share. So, okay, let me say this. Doing it with lovable or Gemini is a much more sophisticated way of getting to your desired outcome. But for things that...

Micah Johnson (10:40)
We should have presented yours first.

Alane Boyd (10:56)
I might already have seen an example online of what I like and I want to mock it up for our use case is, Micah, and I say this often, I think the greatest thing I've ever learned from you, from a technical skills wise is learning web developer tools.

Micah Johnson (11:13)
Yeah, in Chrome.

Alane Boyd (11:15)
In Chrome, yeah, so I use Chrome and it's just so cool what you can do. I showed it to a client the other day, we needed to do a mock-up and I was like, well, hold on a second. Let me, I'll show you this and their mind was blown. But if you just learn some basic HTML or just a little bit of coding, you can see where you need to edit words on a page, ⁓ different little things. So I usually will start there with Chrome Developer Tools, edit some words, make it look,

how I wanted to, and with that, it's really just visible, just at what you're seeing in that moment. If you refresh or you leave that tab by exiting out of it, it's gone forever. It's just a visual for you to see. And then my second hack is Mac Preview. I am a master of mockups in Mac Preview.

Micah Johnson (12:04)
yeah, I wondered if you were gonna mention this. You are like,

Apple should hire you to promote Mac preview because you have so many solutions and ways to use this thing.

Alane Boyd (12:17)
I cannot tell you how many times I said, I did that in Mac preview. And I'm so fast at it, just with copying and pasting and squares and different things. But it's really the low tech skills way of putting together mockups with those two software platforms.

Micah Johnson (12:34)
So I think what all of these examples that we've given have in common is that as leaders, we're not just telling, we're actually showing. And we're doing this in super, super quick ways. So not massive design mock-ups that take weeks and months to develop. It is, let's get into Chrome Developer Tools. Let's change what we're seeing on the screen.

Alane Boyd (12:46)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (13:00)
Let's take a snapshot of the screen or a screenshot. Let's load that into a Mac preview. Let's add arrows and annotate what we're looking for or just replace the things however you want it to look. Or let's leverage AI. We're all showing so that we can get the idea across so much faster.

Alane Boyd (13:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the visuals are so helpful. you know, one of the other things that we do to Micah is we record a Loom video walking through our idea. So even with my hacks of developer tools and preview is the end result. I always record a video to go over to our development team so that they can hear what I'm thinking. And I will even say like, I am not

Micah Johnson (13:36)
Yeah.

Alane Boyd (13:51)
like sticking to this exact design, I'm trying to communicate what my vision is. Please use our UI, our design toolkit, know, whatever it might be. But I can then put in what is really important to me from a visual standpoint and what are things that maybe are there that are nice to haves or I'm not super stuck on how this looks like, please use your creative vision for this. But they could hear that from me. So they know what's important.

What's the overall objective that I'm trying to get to? Because a lot of times what I'm putting together isn't 100 % of what I'm looking for. Like, I'm not the creative one. I hire those people. So please put your creative strategic mind behind it, but this is the overall goal that we're trying to achieve.

Micah Johnson (14:37)
I love that. think Loom is so, Loom or any similar platform screen recording like that is so, helpful. think, I'm so glad you brought that up too, because eliminating that takes out a big chunk that is needed for this type of stuff. You can still have the prototype, but if you're not explaining why you chose to do the things that you did in the prototype, the mockup, the web dev tool screenshot, whatever it is,

Alane Boyd (14:43)
Right.

Micah Johnson (15:06)
the team you're handing this off to misses it. And there's some situations where you want to go beyond the loom and you might have an official like internal kickoff meeting and just do the handoff where you can have a conversation like this. Like, Hey, Micah, this is what I'm thinking. And set aside 30 minutes and go through the prototype or go through the mockups to actually communicate and enter interact right away and nip all those questions in the bud because.

If you think about it, a developer team is going to start at the beginning. Or I would say a technical team period is going to start at the beginning. They're going to ask you one question. You answer that question, they get a little further. They're going to ask you another question. You answer that, they go a little further. And that cycle sucks. We all hate that cycle. The technical team hates it, and so does the leadership team. And it's slow and burdensome. So nip all that in the bud, shoot a loom, or have a meeting. Man, I'm glad you brought that up.

Alane Boyd (16:02)
Man, and you know, I hate meetings. So what I love about, I am not a fan of meetings, but yeah. So we can, if we have the mockup and we do the recording, the video recording, then most of those questions get answered and we spend so little time on calls. Like, absolutely. If a team member needs to get on a 30 minute call and we knock things out, like, okay, yeah, I'm on board. I don't want to go back and forth.

Micah Johnson (16:05)
I didn't know that.

Now you tell me.

Alane Boyd (16:29)
and our project management system, or even worse, in Slack. Like, let's get those questions answered, but what I'm trying to do before the handoff is, you have trained me very well, Micah, to get those thoughts out ahead of time, articulate my vision so that when I hand it off, the team member has what I'm thinking, the requirements of what is the task or the project.

and they can go and do it without having to be on a call. That is the goal. Now, does it work 100 % of the time? No, that's okay. I'm not gonna foreshadow everything that we're gonna run into, especially in development. There's gonna be things that you run into with some questions, but my goal is to get all of this out of my head and have them with the vision so that they can knock it out of the park.

Micah Johnson (17:16)
Yeah. Yeah. And if we think about it, that takes them away from being mind readers and into solving technical problems, which is why we hired them in the first place. If they're using all their energy and doing all the work to try to translate, well, that's a poor use of their time. If they're looking at the mock-up, the prototype, reviewing the loom, even during the kickoff call, they should be asking those technical questions like,

Do we need an upload size limit, or where are we getting this data, or what happens when somebody does x, y, or z? That way, you as the visionary can answer that. And it's not this like, didn't think of that, or now we have to go into some real heavy testing into this solution, because we never even talked about that, because they spent all their time just translating what we were looking for. And so I just absolutely love this whole concept of the tools that we have now.

Alane Boyd (18:05)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Micah Johnson (18:13)
to be able to let technical teams, and there's a lot of discussion out there of like, well, what's the developer is going to do when AI writes all the code? They're going to do the actual development work. Still, there's still the backend. They're still knowing how all this works. They're still making sure that authentication is working properly. There's still all of this stuff that they have to know. Their job might be easier, just like a lot of other roles are easier because things are being generated faster from AI.

Alane Boyd (18:39)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (18:42)
copywriter can still write better, copy, even assisted with AI, just like a developer can write better code essentially just do more from the tools that they have. So yeah, I don't know. It's pretty exciting times that we're living in all of this.

Alane Boyd (19:02)
Yeah, development, just I like that comparison. Having AI assist in development is just like AI assisting in any role. You still want a human, you still want them to be the ones leading it. There's going to be parts that they're going to be a better human to be a part of that process. But there's certainly ways to explain things or even people like me that can't code and I need to articulate things.

I mean, one of the mistakes, just to close this out, my biggest mistake thinking back of communicating to designers and developers, and even now I've just gotten a lot better. My biggest mistake is when I'm like, Hey, can you go do this? And I'm not telling them what I think because when they get something back to me and I'm like, Whoa, this is not at all what I was thinking. It's not just that they did it wrong. And now I need to consume more time.

for them to do it, they just put what they thought was a good idea into that. And you always having to go back to them and say, you got it wrong. Even if you're not saying you got it wrong, but you're telling them they gotta redo it, you're telling them that you got it wrong. That starts to burn them out. That starts making their value decrease because they're not knocking it out of the park, which is what most people wanna do. They want to do a good job. And if you can't tell them what you want,

Micah Johnson (20:21)
I think that's a super valid point.

Alane Boyd (20:24)
they're not gonna be able to do a good job most of the time because then you're gonna go, oh, that's not what I was thinking at all. And I don't wanna be that kind of leader anymore. I wanna be like, this is what I'm seeing. You take it and run, make it as good as you want to. And most of the time they do even better because they've got the basis, they've got the foundation of what I'm looking for really solid.

Micah Johnson (20:31)
Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I couldn't have said that better myself, Alane. I wasn't even thinking in that regard as we started this conversation. But you're absolutely right. That's so demoralizing to be told, great, but can we also do this and this and this? And they have to change all the stuff that in their mind, they're probably like, Alane is going to love this. And then Alane doesn't love it.

Alane Boyd (21:10)
Yeah, this is gonna be a wrap soon.

Micah Johnson (21:13)
I mean, there's been times that you and I have had that conflict where I'm thinking, my God, Alane is going to be so wowed. She's absolutely going to love this. And I'm so excited to share it with you. And you're like, you know, I don't really like it. And I and I'm. Well, that too, I was trying to not throw you fully under the bus, but it was it was I remember there's a few times where you would say stuff and I'm like, ⁓ I can surprise her. I can.

Alane Boyd (21:28)
And it works, I'm like, I hate this.

Micah Johnson (21:41)
build something that will totally solve this problem. But I didn't have enough information coming from you to fully solve the problem. I just jumped in as a technical person and went, well, I can fix this. it took us a lot to figure out, how do we communicate? How do we structure this? And that's what we're talking about today. I think maybe kind of a final thought on my side for this is, looking into the future,

Alane Boyd (22:01)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (22:09)
This isn't technical people getting less technical. It's the fact that as visionaries, technical or non-technical, we're just getting better tools to express our ideas more clearly. And I would reiterate, our superpower is we know what it should look like. We know what it should act like. Now we can finally show it.

Alane Boyd (22:29)
Mm-hmm.

That's perfect. think that's a perfect way to end the episode. And we'll link to the tools that Micah mentioned in here if you're wanting to start prototyping or playing around with the AI to help you create mock-ups and prototypes.