A free weekend, a real problem, and forty-eight hours to ship.
Lovable gave out free credits for a weekend. I had about 48 hours and a frustration I'd been sitting on for months.
I was using an iPhone and a Windows laptop — no shared ecosystem, no AirDrop, no Handoff. Moving text between devices was a constant small annoyance that added up: draft messages I'd written on my laptop that I needed on my phone, links I wanted to open elsewhere, notes I'd typed on a computer I didn't own, with no email or WhatsApp logged in. The usual workaround was emailing myself. Which was embarrassing in 2025.
Only people outside an ecosystem know this pain. Everyone else has AirDrop and thinks the problem is solved.
The idea was simple: paste text or drop a file, get a short link or a QR code, open it on the other device. No login. No app install. Files delete after 30 days. That's the whole product.
The flow
The flow is four steps and it stays that way intentionally. Any more friction and you'd just email yourself.
01
Paste or drop
Text or file, on any device
02
Get a code
Short link or QR code
03
Scan or type
On the other device
04
Done
Arrives and deletes in 30 days
Paste or drop
Text or file, on any device
Get a code
Short link or QR code
Scan or type
On the other device
Done
Arrives and deletes in 30 days
I spent the first half of the weekend figuring out what to cut. The first version had accounts, history, and a dashboard. None of that survived. The simpler question — what's the minimum that makes the pain go away — turned out to be a better design brief than the feature list I started with.
The constraint that shaped everything: No login required. The moment you add auth, you've added friction that competes with just emailing yourself. Without it, the entire value prop is one gesture: paste, scan, done.
How it was built
Built entirely in Lovable using the free credit window. Supabase handles storage and the 30-day deletion. No backend I wrote myself — which at the time was the only way I could have shipped anything. That was over a year ago. The code hasn't changed. It still runs.
Built with
Lovable + Supabase
Vite, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn
Time to ship
One weekend
Free credits window, real constraint
Retention
30-day auto-delete
Files and text gone after a month
Auth required
None
No account, no login, no friction
ClipSync isn't the most technically impressive thing in this portfolio. It's here because it came first — before any of the workflow tools, before this portfolio existed, before I knew how to code (still mostly true, don't check).
The lesson it taught me was also the one that shaped everything after: the best product brief isn't a list of features. It's a single honest sentence about what's painful.