Lex Deak

While his friends were out playing ball, Lex Deak was faxing purchase orders to China. He imported mini disc players and sold them from his childhood bedroom for £500 a piece. Before that, he sold sweets on the playground for extra pocket money. Entrepreneurship wasn’t something Lex stumbled into; he inherited it. His mother was widowed young, but picked herself up and started the UK’s first female-only taxi company.

“I took a lot of inspiration from my mother. She took control over her life by starting her business. Entrepreneurship became our way of thinking as a small family.”

Lex has built more companies than most people have ideas. Nightclub events. Property businesses. A boutique hotel in Marrakesh. A family social network featured on Dragon’s Den.

The Frankenstein problem

But every time, he faced the same frustration. He’d come up with an idea and then pass it off to engineers, and somewhere in that handoff, the thing would change. “The distance between your idea and the realization of it becomes so stretched, you end up with this Frankenstein’s monster of other people’s ideas,” says Lex.

He felt this acutely building Basket, a wishlist app that grew to 350K registered users and £5M in funding. People signed up and used the app but it didn’t have the features that kept them coming back daily. He knew exactly what the roadmap looked like to make the product more engaging but too much was getting lost in translation. Every quarter the distance between his vision and what the engineering team could ship grew wider.

One night, sitting at his kitchen table, he started taking screenshots of the Basket app, page by page. His plan was just to build a prototype with Lovable. He’d bring it to his team to show them his vision and they could move forward together.

“It’s not a prototype”

What happened instead was a month of working until two or three in the morning, every night. “It didn’t feel like work at all. I was so invigorated by my ability to have an idea and bring it to life I couldn’t stop building,” he says. One feature led to another: virtual try-on, an AI shopping assistant, price watch. Things he’d assumed would take months of sprint cycles were coming back in hours.

Lex describes hovering over the enter key after a complex prompt, certain it couldn’t possibly return what he’d asked for, pressing it anyway, and getting something better than what he’d written. “It’s addictive. Your imagination is the only limit. You’re like — more. Bigger.”

The Basket team started wondering where he’d gone. When he surfaced and showed them what he’d built, the response from the team was: “Nice prototype.” Lex told them it wasn’t a prototype, it worked.

His engineers were reluctant. “You don’t undo a decade of muscle memory overnight,” says Lex.

He carved out a couple of days for each engineer to build their own projects with Lovable. No deliverables, no pressure. Just time to feel it out for themselves. “That mattered more than any demo I could give,” says Lex. “A lot of what people thought they knew about vibe coding was already out of date, even from six months prior.”

They came back wanting to build more. Together, they rebuilt the entire product from scratch. WNTD was born.

A shopping app that knows your style

WNTD is the shopping companion Lex always imagined. Judging by the early numbers, consumers had been waiting for it too. Two weeks after launch, 5,000 users had already joined and were driving 200,000 in-app events daily. A month later, users have doubled to nearly 10,000 and in-app events have grown fivefold.

Here’s what’s inside:

• Outfit saving: Spot something on Instagram, in a store, or on any website and save it via a Safari or Chrome extension or scan the physical barcode. Everything lands in WNTD, ready to shop anytime.
• Price tracking: WNTD monitors prices and sends a notification when something drops. It shows 12 months of history and flags whether it’s a good time to buy. It also searches resale platforms to surface alternatives or better prices on saved items.
• Virtual try-on: Combine up to six items into a look and see it in the “Magic Mirror” before buying anything. Share it with friends and run a poll to get a second opinion.
• AI styling: Every save, search, and skip builds a picture of shoppers’ taste and shapes recommendations over time. With around 1 billion products in the catalogue, the AI stylist never runs out of ideas.

“It’s the most personalized shopping experience on the planet,” Lex says. “And we’re adding new functionality every day.” When creators asked for a way to earn affiliate commission on their shoppable collections, he had a working prototype ready by that afternoon.

Lex stripped out every third-party dependency and built them himself with Lovable: customer engagement, mail, analytics. None of the existing tools were quite right, so he built better ones. “I’m almost as proud of the back-end admin portal as I am of the consumer product,” says Lex. He’s saving £25–30K every month by using admin software he built himself.

Raising the next round and expanding beyond fashion

Lex has a £3M term sheet from the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster and is raising another round. The next six months are about driving user adoption and building new categories beyond fashion and beauty into every corner of retail. The longer-term vision: a platform that reshapes itself around each user who opens it.

“The delta between my ideas, my vision, and what we can bring to life,” he says, “has basically disappeared. There has never been a more exciting time to be a founder.”