Most product tours show you the highlight reel. This is the other thing: a straight account of your first ten minutes, waits included, so nothing surprises you.
Minute 0 to 1: pick a template
You land on the template gallery. Each one is a finished app, not a mock-up: screens, sign-in and a working backend. Recipes, a job board, an expense splitter, a community app, about two dozen of them. Tap one, watch the preview, tap “Make it mine”.
Minute 1 to 2: name it, colour it
You give it a name and then you pick a colour. We will not let you skip the colour, and that is deliberate. The preview repaints in front of you, light mode and dark mode side by side, and somewhere in the tapping between ocean and ember it quietly stops being our app.
Creating it is free. No card, nothing to cancel.
Minute 2 to 5: it comes alive
This is the first honest wait. Your app is getting its own backend: a database, accounts, file storage. On a good day it takes about a minute because we keep warm ones ready. On a slower day it can take two or three. Either way you can watch the preview boot in the browser, sign into your own app, and poke around while the paint dries.
Minute 5 to 8: put it on your phone
On Android, you press one button and get an install page with a link and a QR code. The link always serves the newest version, so it is also the link you send to friends. One honest footnote: the newest Android phones sometimes add a one-time 24 hour wait before they will trust a new developer, which is Google’s rule, not ours, and it only happens once.
On iPhone, Apple only lets apps install through a developer account, so that path asks you to connect your own. It is a one-time setup, and the honest advice is: start on Android if you can, feel the thing on a phone, then decide if the iPhone route is worth it to you.
Minute 8 to 10: change something
Open the chat and ask for a change in plain words. “Make the buttons rounder.” “Add a notes field to each recipe.” New accounts start with five free credits, which covers your first few changes; after that, changes cost credits that track what the computing actually costs us. You watch the edit land in your app.
One more honest footnote: on the free plan your app’s backend takes a nap after an hour of quiet, and the next open wakes it in about a minute. Paid plans keep it awake much longer.
That is the whole first ten minutes. The reel is real, it just has two footnotes.