We Turned a Seven-Year Dream of Helping Immigrants into Reality in Three Hours with Lovable

The Story of How HelloUSA Was Born in a South Miami Studio I had always heard about hackathons in the way people talk about marathons: inspiring, ambitious, and definitely for people with more technical endurance than me. Culturally, hackathons always seemed like these electrifying, caffeine-fueled gatherings where engineers spun ideas into software at dizzying speed. I could prototype concepts. I could sketch systems. But the idea of sitting shoulder to shoulder with real developers, racing a countdown timer? That felt like a different universe. All of that changed in Miami. The first-ever Miami Homebase Hackathon took place during Art Basel, a week when the city feels like it’s vibrating with artistic experimentation. The event was powered by a partnership between Lovable and DeepStation.ai, organized by Kaila Love and supported by Cache Corps. Kaila, known professionally as “The AI Homegirl,” has become one of the most trusted guides for small businesses looking to adopt AI. She’s a rare mix of technical depth and community warmth, a person who can teach you how an LLM works while making you feel like you’ve been invited into something bigger than yourself. The venue she chose — The Dock at The Lab Miami — was perfect. A bright, open coworking space with industrial beams, rolling whiteboards, and the kind of informal seating that encourages people to cluster around laptops. It felt alive even before anything started. By the time teams began setting up, the room was already humming with possibility. A personal highlight before the hacking began was meeting my AI TV Starship cohost, Rick McCawley, in person for the first time. We’d spent hours together on livestreams, but shaking hands in a real room was something different. We teamed up with Oscar, a friend of Rick’s who could code in the traditional sense but was new to Lovable’s approach. We didn’t know it yet, but our mix of backgrounds — Rick the designer-storyteller, Oscar the classically trained coder,…