Alicia Dahling shipped her app from her iPhone during SF Tech Week
Allison Esposito Medina, Founder, Willa · Published October 21, 2026
An accountant built a tool that gives numbers an art director. She launched it from her phone, because her laptop was on a plane to El Salvador.
Alicia Dahling is a revenue recognition accountant who runs her own consulting practice. She is also, by her own description, a bit of an absent-minded professor. Both facts matter to this story.
She flew to San Francisco last minute for Tech Week to hang out with the Lovable Discord super champions. One of them, Carol, had overpurchased in the city and needed to borrow a bag for her swag and extra Sephora on the flight home to El Salvador. Alicia and a friend ran over to Carol's hotel early in the morning with Alicia's TUMI backpack and a spare suitcase from Chinatown. Alicia forgot one of her pink Macs was still in the backpack.
So she went to the Creative Data Hackathon with the Lovable Discord team and no computer, and no time to go back for her other one. Instead, she opened MindStudio's Remy app and built Plotpost end to end from her iPhone. "Mobile-first," she posted afterward. "Under duress."
Plotpost turns questions and data into illustrated stories, with the sources and underlying data kept visible. You ask about any number, or send it a spreadsheet, a PDF or a photo of a chart, and it comes back with a poster. Cala handles the fact finding, Krea does the illustrations. The point, Alicia says, is to make information easier to understand without hiding the evidence.
"The numbers speak for themselves" only works if someone is listening. Give the numbers an art director. Keep the proof in view. I'm still an accountant, after all.
None of this is where she started. "I came to AI from accounting, not engineering," she wrote in August, when she earned the Claude Partner Badge for Claude Code from Anthropic. Eight courses, a scenario-based capstone, graded on real client deliverables like deployment docs, security questionnaires, custom commands and hooks. Not multiple choice. It certifies what her practice does: scope, deploy, configure and run Claude Code end to end for teams whose adoption stalled at "we tried it once."
She credits the Lovable Discord for a lot of it. People sharing screens, breaking things and fixing them in real time, and taking what they learned straight into their own projects. A few months in there, she tells people, is worth more than most courses.
A few weeks before Plotpost she sat in on a live session where someone built a truck commercial with Claude Code driving Blender and Higgsfield making the video. So she made one for her own truck, starring her three Frenchies. Three things she kept: talk to the agent in plain English, don't send anything to the expensive video model until you've approved the preview, and use your own photos. Her real truck looked better than anything pulled off the internet.
Tools used
- MindStudio
- Lovable
- Claude Code
- Krea
- Cala
- Higgsfield
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