I built Kiwie Visas, a booking and payment system for a solo immigration consultant, because I know exactly how many business owners run. It's usually one person, a phone full of WhatsApp voice notes, and no time to tell a serious applicant apart from someone who was never going to qualify.

Mrs. Adaeze Okafor is the hypothetical owner I built this for: a one-woman visa consultancy in Abuja. About 60% of her enquiries aren't eligible yet, but she still answers each one herself, roughly 12 hours a week. A third of her free calls end in no-shows. A third of her bookings come from family abroad paying for relatives back home, often missing calls to timezone confusion.

I built Kiwie Visas close that gap: the homepage FAQ already screens off some people who'd never have been a fit, so Mrs. Okafor isn't spending time on questions the site already answers. From there, a client answers a few honest questions, gets screened before they ever reach her, picks a slot shown in their own timezone, and pays a flat deposit through Paystack, all in under five minutes, without a single message exchanged yet. If they're not ready, they get a mail with a free prep guide to help them stand a better chance. Once they are booked, reminders, confirmations, rescheduling, and no-show follow-ups all run on their own. On her side, she gets a notification once someone booked an appointment. She can manage everything: bookings, leads, and exactly how many hours the system saved her that week from her dashboard.

To see the owner's side yourself: log in at kiwie-visas.lovable.app/owner/login with judges@kiwie.co / KiwieJudges!2026#Visa. Payments are in Paystack test mode (no card needed), just select "Success" on Paystack's own test screen.

Challenges I ran into: The UI took a lot of iteration to get right. My first pass worked, but it didn't feel premium, so I went through several rounds of visual polish (color, spacing, the status screens) before it felt like something a real business would put its name on. The trickiest technical issue was payments: I'd set up Paystack with a live secret key instead of a test key, which made test payments hang indefinitely with no clear error. Once I caught it and switched to a proper test key, everything worked fine.

What I used: Lovable for building the entire thing, including Lovable Cloud for the database, authentication, and server-side functions; Paystack for deposit payments; Resend for every email the system sends (confirmations, reminders, reschedule links, no-show follow-ups); and GitHub for version control on the project. Lovable made this build genuinely seamless; going from a single prompt to a working, production-shaped app in one day, then iterating on security, automation, and cool design is not something I could've done this fast any other way. And credit to Contra for the free Lovable credits that made this build possible in the first place.

Just joined Contra and now I’m staring at my profile like… 👀😂

I’m new here — any advice on how to get my first clients and start earning on Contra?

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