Unlocking the Power of Micro Apps

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0:35We feeling five guys or the Cheesecake Factory? Both. Earn up to$120 a year in statement credits of participating partners. Up to$10 each month when you pay with the Amex Gold Card. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash explore-gold. Enrollment required. Terms apply. Welcome to the podcast. Today, Jamie and I have recently seen a really interesting article over on TechCrunch. It's called The Rise of Micro Apps. How non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them. This is something that Jamie and I have both been doing over the last week. So we're like, we have to create a podcast about this.

1:05And I also think for anyone listening, this is 100 % what you should be doing in like two situations. It's so cheap to do. It works so well. If there is an app or service that you use, a software, and it doesn't have all the features you want, I literally, I'm kind of the worst because I've been in software for the last 10 years and I'm used to building things. So if there is like a feature I want, I will go find the CEO of the company or the CTO. I'll find the personal email and be like, hey, could you please add this list of features that do these things. And actually responses, you'd be surprised by the responses.

1:37Typically what the response is though is, this sounds awesome. We'll put this on the roadmap. Next quarter, I think we'll be focusing on this. We have this other big initiative we're doing right now. And I totally understand that. But what you can also do is go to Base44 or Lovable or Emergent. And in probably one day, build the functionality that you need with that thing for a couple hundred bucks. So you're going to spend a couple hundred bucks. You could fully build an app that has all the features. So anyways, today on the podcast, we're gonna be talking about that. I'm gonna give you an example of someone that I've used for that.

2:08But before we do, we're gonna make a plug for our school community on where we teach you how to do this. So Jamie, tell them about it. Yeah, so we traditionally on our school community, AI Hustle will teach you different ways to make money using AI, how to grow your business, do marketing and content creation, things like that. We are starting a new series over there specifically on vibe coding, how to build apps and websites that rank in AI search, that are standalone companies. I mean, you can do so much with value coding. We believe it's the future. It's where we think the most dollars and money and attention are going to go with AI in the future.

2:45And we think that there's a huge opportunity right now for you to make money. So our community is over 300 people strong. It's$19 a month. You can lock that price in today as it will go up in the future. And we release bonus content over there each week. We have over 60, 65 videos right now. But moving forward, we're going to focus on this vibe coding concept. So if that interests you, you should definitely go check it out. But let's talk about, yeah, this idea of a micro app. Because basically what Jaden said, someone else did, someone named Rebecca Yu. It took her seven days to vibe code her own dining app.

3:23So it sounds like she had her own restaurant. Yeah, and she wanted to make an app. and instead of paying someone to make it for her or to pay for an expensive service, she just made one herself by Vibe Coding. So it's called Where to Eat. So it looks like it's maybe like a marketing tool for her business or something. So Jane, what do you think about all this? So I think that this is really interesting and I also worry that people are going to start doing this the wrong way. If you're not a developer, so the most famous Vibe Coding tool out there is called Cloud Code. It's what I've used at AI Box, my startup for the last year.

4:01My CTO is, you know, he crushes it. And it's basically like a code portal that gets into our code base and you can make changes and it builds all the stuff. It's amazing. It's like 10xing any engineer. You hear about it a lot on Twitter or X. And what I worry is that people that are not coders will try to go straight to using Cloud Code and become very frustrated because it still has to like work through a terminal. And it's like, it's still for developers. what I would recommend if you are not a developer is using emergent base 44 or lovable personally I'm using lovable and the reason why I would recommend using one of these platforms specifically lovable right now is really amazing is because they will set up the back end they will set up the database they will set up the logins they will set up the stripe payment integrations and they will do all of the ai model connections if you don't really understand how that works you don't have a developer account with open ai to go get an api like they will take care of literally everything for you.

4:53And all you have to do is talk to it and it will build it for you. So that's just my one piece of advice. And of course, we have a whole course on that over on the school on our school community, if you're actually interested in doing that. But like, I highly recommend trying it out. Just don't get stuck trying to use like cursor or cloud code if you're not a developer. That's my only main piece of advice. One thing I wanted to also mention that I think is really cool is I have a friend recently and I actually have a whole bunch of experiences like this. So, I mean, this is kind of cool. She built like this.

5:25She vibe coded this like eating app. And Jamie, you vibe coded a bunch of really cool tools. Tell us a little bit about your most recent vibe coded tool you made. Yeah, so I've done two different vibe coded tools that I'm using as lead magnets for my realtor business and website. I'll share my screen if you're watching this. But the first is a, it is a deal analyzer for short-term rentals. So if you have ever, you know, wanted to get into short-term rentals, but you don't know how to analyze the properties because there's a lot of nuances, you know, vacancy, you know, seasonality, all kinds of stuff like that.

6:06There's lots of nuance there. So I'm going to share my screen and show you that. But basically it's a really simple slider tool that will allow you to, you know, put in your purchase price, down payment of a property, and it'll kind of spit out a thumbs up, thumbs sideways, or thumbs down if you should make an offer on that property. So pretty exciting, but in order to analyze it, you have to give me your email address. So then I know you're an interested potential customer of mine. All built into my website, all vibe coded. So I basically just told the tool what I wanted it to do and it did it for me.

6:40So, and then I'll share one other, this is a room restyler app that I built. And this one I'm pretty excited about too. This one is more on the design side. So like if you, you know, part of what we try to sell as our value is if you are trying to set up an Airbnb or something, the design is really important. So you can see what our signature style is by uploading a picture of a room and it'll restyle it using generative AI. So if you can see that picture there, it's really cool so it blurs it out the after image and if you want to see it you have to give me your email so again another lead magnet tool so these both took me not much time at all I think in one day I had both tools developed.

7:25Wow that is I mean honestly that's pretty amazing. One thing that I will say that I have also that I did because I was like I was like man this is so amazing it's so crazy everything that you can do with this and I wanted my wife to actually try this. So my wife is currently pregnant, four months pregnant. We're due in June. So for those that didn't know, we're excited. And in the past, she's had this like contraction timer. So like when you're going into labor and you're having contractions, you have to kind of time how far apart your contractions are to know when you should go to the hospital.

8:03And so she used to have this app in the past that did it, but it didn't have all the features. Like there's a few things she didn't like about it. But so I gave her lovable the other day and was like, hey, you should like just rebuild it how you want. And in two hours, she built a full contraction timer app with like history. She put meditations in there, affirmations. You could upload like all of these different features. And you're able to like click and it will track everything that's going on. Anyways, in like two hours, she built this full app. So that's amazing. Like anyone. And this is what I love with these kind of tools is everyone has like different needs or thoughts or tools.

8:37And like, I would never have thought in a million years to build a contraction timer. That's just not where I would have ever thought to build something. But like, she will. And so I'm excited. I think there's we're gonna see a lot of cool innovation and a lot of cool tools coming out because people with all sorts of backgrounds are gonna be able to build these tools that traditionally, you know, weren't out there developing software. Okay, I have one other really crazy story for you from a friend of mine from Arizona. Or that's how I know him. But anyways, this is Tyler Lieber. he has a executive assistant company.

9:08So he's got like virtual assistants in the Philippines, and he'll help help get you an executive assistant. In any case, he said, he posted this on LinkedIn, he said, we're replacing our$12 ,000 or$12 ,000 HubSpot subscription with lovable. We've had a startup discount with HubSpot, and they've been great. But the discount is dropping every year. And I can't justify the cost of$1 ,000 a month anymore. Went through other options exhaustively and honestly quite nothing hit the mark for us our tech lead has already built out the coconut hub for us it's like a report tracker using lovable he knew he could build something custom for us that we could consistently or constantly improve so in 45 days we are ditching hubspot and launching coconut os check back in 45 days to see if we're still alive i think he's being facetious but this is what's very interesting to me he is replacing a 12 000 a year expense of HubSpot.

10:00And by the way, my first company I worked for when I graduated college, they were spending$60 ,000 a year on HubSpot because they just had a lot of contacts. And HubSpot is just a freaking expensive software. No shade to the HubSpot team if you want to sponsor the podcast, but it is expensive. And yeah, it costs$12 ,000 a year. I mean, you're spending$1 ,000 a month on this thing and you're able to go build this completely, clone it and build it in lovable. And I 100 % think people can and should do this for your companies and your projects. If you have a software that costs a lot of money, clone it in Lovable and use it.

10:37And also, you could then go sell it. And what's interesting for him is, you know, I don't think he's going to go head to head and compete with like HubSpot per se. But what he could do is create a tool that's really useful for executive assistant companies and say, look, we have an amazing thing. It only costs you like, you know, I mean, he's paying$1 ,000 a month now. maybe he could say it's$100 or like$50 or$25 a month and go sell it to a bunch of people in his very specific niche. And he can actually make money beyond just saving money. He can also make money reselling this to his small niche because he's going to add a bunch of different features and things that maybe weren't in HubSpot or in some of these other softwares that are just specific for what he needs to do with maybe time tracking or other elements of his business.

11:17And you can also start rolling together a bunch of software. So like what's cool is if like in your specific vertical, like for me with podcaststudio.com, I've went and cloned Spotify for creators. So it's like a Spotify distribution platform. But then I've also went and like cloned Adobe Audio Enhancer. So it has like an audio enhancer built in. So all the parts of my workflow that I used to do to publish podcasts, I have like five different companies, I've pulled them all into one platform. And now it's just like the best platform for this specific vertical. And I think we're going to start seeing a lot of people build tools like that with Lovable.

11:48yeah it's it's all super exciting i think there's a lot of opportunity here it has me you know reinvigorated my interest in ai and just how i can use it to grow my business and you know make money i think there's just so many so many opportunities here so if you would leave us a rating or review wherever you're listening we'd really appreciate those leave some feedback and if you want to join the conversation check out our ai hustle school community and you can take a deep dive into some of these strategies that we're using to build software and get ahead of 99.9 % of other people. So thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

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