I wrote 2,746 prompts, went to bed at 3am and rebuilt b2bmarketing.com

We went live with b2bmarketing.com in the first week of March. Within three months we'd outgrown it. Popularity and engagement were part of it, but the bigger driver was that SEO and AEO have moved so fast our requirements simply surpassed what the site could deliver.

So we decided to rebuild it. A website that was a mere few months old.

As real B2B marketers, this felt like a prime opportunity. Use the latest tools. Put AI to the test. Build it ourselves.

Which is how I ended up down a rabbit hole.

I rebuilt the entire website in three weeks, with no developer ever touching it. It took me exactly 2,746 prompts to get the new www.b2bmarketing.com to where it is today.

What did 2,746 prompts actually look like? Five-hour prompting marathons. Turning in at 3am on a regular basis. Lots of sitting there for three to five minutes at a time while it contemplated my question and its answers. Lots of learning how to revert. And lots of screaming when I realised that reverting changes your code, but any changes to your Supabase databases are permanent.

And here's my honest take: I think Lovable is up there with the introduction of the iPhone in terms of how influential it could be.

It's not all magic

Lovable isn't without its limitations.

I got into countless arguments with it. My favourite genre: me explicitly telling it not to do something, repeatedly, and it then apologising profusely when I discovered it had in fact done the thing I explicitly told it not to do.

Some of its default designs? It presented options that Mr Clippy and Microsoft WordArt would have been proud of (IYKYK). And it made fundamental design decisions that were just plain wrong.

The time it takes to hear back on prompts shouldn't be underestimated either. It requires real discipline to work on your next prompts while others are in action and to only queue them when the time is right, because firing them early will trample the prompts still running

And, right now, you really do still need programming experience to get the most out of it. In my teen years I programmed C++, Java and MATLAB, but I haven't touched code for 20+ years, so I'm still a newbie to the new stuff.

BUT. If you have some semblance of skill and know what good looks like, this is a remarkable example of what you can achieve with a fraction of the resources.

We've built a whole new feature-rich website and a full custom CMS. For context, the last major website I signed off as a CMO of a £500m revenue firm cost £50,000, took six months, involved a whole team, and that was considered extremely cheap for what we got. This one took me three weeks, involved no one else touching code, and cost less than 3% of that budget.

3%.

Why this matters for B2BMU

This new skill is pushing B2B Marketing United even further. We're not a boring publisher trying to milk the community. We're the global home ground for B2B marketers. We do, not just get others to talk about it for free (or a fee).

We now have five products in active development at the same time. I can't name them yet, but my word, if we pull them off, B2B marketers' careers will really benefit. We are a start-up, and the opportunity technology is presenting to us is crazy.

I'll give you a prime example.

The speaker problem

When planning our 24th June 'Marketing Magic in the Age of AI' event at The Magic Circle (some tickets still available), we wanted to find the right speaker.

The speaker websites we looked at? They looked like they were indeed created in Microsoft Publisher. Ugly and unwieldy. Functionally cumbersome.

So me, being me, I thought: I wonder if I could build a better one. Not a team. Not an agency. Me. Just me. Using AI.

This isn't a world I'm new to. I used to manage some of Sir Ranulph Fiennes' commercial affairs, negotiating sponsorship deals, getting him out of bad ones, securing movie deals with Hollywood studios and even creating a Great British Rum. As a professional services CMO, I've hired talent for campaigns including Pierluigi Collina, Sir John Hurt, John Lithgow and Sir Patrick Stewart.

It took me one week to build the next generation of speaker search website: The Shortlist: Speaker Agency. One week. Yes, there will be a few niggles (tell me if you find any), but it is a massive step up. It lets event managers and marketers find the perfect speaker, panel moderator or awards host at the click of a button. All optimised to the hilt for SEO and AEO. Next time you need the perfect speaker for your event, give it a try!

What I'd tell a fellow marketer about prompting

If you take one practical thing from this, take this: be very clear in your prompting and leave no room for error.

Describe in as much detail as possible where you are in the project, what you are looking at, what is not working or needs to change, and exactly what you want the program to do. Whether that's presenting options, fixing something, or how it should smoke test the results. The biggest lesson of my 2,746 prompts was learning to tell it absolutely exactly what I meant, negating any risk it could misunderstand me.

The point

Two platforms, built super quickly, by one person who has been improved by AI, delivering something great for a fraction of the cost, with a pipeline of other ideas and prototypes to build next.

THIS is how AI can improve marketers.

Not AI-powered copywriting slop.

Onwards!