259 - Best of 2025! No Code, No Problem: Building Apps and Websites with AI with Minh Nguyen

0:00I was talking to this guy the other day who was doing web scraping, spent$80 with Claude. I showed him Gemini, cost like five bucks to do what he had done. I was helping a friend who was building dog parks near me, and he was saying that it was going to take him 80 hours to gather the data needed to build this website. I was like, wait, I can automate this for you, man. We got it running. So I saved him 80 hours and he launched his website. I know a lot of people who are like, I have this idea for an app. And it's like, you're never going to do that because you would need an engineer or coder to create an MVP for you.

0:26But you can actually do that now.

0:31Min, I'm very excited. I'm excited to learn some AI today. You are coming to me from the capital of the world of technology, the Bay Area. Here's my first question. What tools do you use, LLMs, and for what? I use all the LLMs and they all kind of have different Excel at different things. I use them for different reasons. For coding, anything coding related, I'll use Claude because it's the best coding model for general purpose things but also just like research I'll use chat GPT especially deep research that's been like super helpful like I'm actually trying to learn a bit like quantitative trading right now like side project with a friend and I know nothing about it but like the deep research has been super helpful with that and then actually I feel like this is the one people sleep on is Gemini so for 80 % of use cases I actually feel like Gemini people who code it does it'll get the job done at just as good as the other models but at a tenth of the cost and people I feel like they don't know about Gemini they don't know how cheap it is so I was talking to this guy the other day who's doing web scraping spent$80 with Claude in one day and then I showed him Gemini switched over did just as good of a job but cost like five bucks to do what he had done no way yeah so why do you think people sleep on Gemini because almost everybody who I've spoken to has said like Gemini is not even on their radar two people have said one person one person that was their main thing and then another person was like I just use it for the Google suite so Gemini is actually good at two things okay one is a real big context window which means they can consume a lot of information so for example I think it has a million context window compared to other oh really yeah which only can do up to 200 ,000 so it can do like so So I guess if you translated, let's say ChatGPT can ingest 100 pages, then Gemini can ingest five times that.

2:26So 500 pages. That's just like it. Well, I just know Claude's context window is at 200 ,000. ChatGPT is around 120 ,000. I had no idea that Gemini's was a million. So I think it actually can even go higher than a million. But I think the cost kind of skyrockets up there. Or it goes up. And I haven't even... I've never needed above a million. So I haven't tried it. Yeah. So you are an entrepreneur. You're a coder. You've built a company called Cash On. That's right. Tell me just briefly what that does. Sure. Yeah. So Cash On, it's a Chrome extension that kind of hooks into Zillow. And usually what real estate investors have to do is they kind of browse Zillow.

3:07They copy and paste the data, like the price and the mortgage and interest and all that stuff into a spreadsheet and they run their analysis. So it probably takes about like five minutes per property, but you can only find like only maybe one in a hundred real estate investments or properties would be a good real estate investment. So my app does is it will grab all that data for you, analyze it for you, and then tell you which of the properties on the map are the best ones. It takes a process that can take usually months and compress it down into like a week or two. So that success story is just like this guy was looking for real estate investments for like two years, couldn't find anything.

3:46I worked with him for, we basically identified a market in two weeks. And then within a month he put in and got two offers accepted on two different properties. That's amazing. And it's a Chrome extension? Yeah, it's a Chrome extension. And I have a free tier that like is pretty generous and that people can try out. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. The cool thing, I didn't realize this, but there are some companies that are like eight, nine figure companies and they're just Chrome extensions. Yeah. No, I mean, which is insane to me. Yeah. Chrome extensions, I feel like I don't want to say they're slept on, but they have a specific kind of purpose and like superpower, which is that they help you pull in data from different websites really well.

4:25And yeah, no, I think definitely could probably be a lot more Chrome extensions in the world. Very true. Now I'm curious, the money question. How are you utilizing AI? Utilizing it for work? Are you utilizing it personally? did it build or at least help build cache on like curious to see your use cases so i pretty much use ai like all the time now i kind of mentioned the beginning but yeah it's like to learn new topics to do research to code i use cursor to code but maybe the thing that i kind of want to show you which i'm kind of excited about is i use ai now i built an ai powered web scraper yeah so this is kind of cool basically okay there's this concept called like directories that's kind of getting popular right now, like Greg Eisenberg, John Rush are talking about it.

5:12The idea is if you consolidate information and put a website up, then people will go to your website and that traffic can actually generate you quite a bit of money. So I think the most, like, here's an example. Have you heard of AllTrails? Yeah, the app. The app, AllTrails. Actually, I guess that's not a good example because it doesn't agree across the internet. But let's take, for example, Yelp, right? Like Yelp is like, people most often use it as a directory for restaurants. I built, it's called pickleball courts nearby.com. And so people like they search it. And then, you know, there's like, I think the search volume is like 200 ,000 plus per month.

5:48And with that kind of traffic, you can generate like, easily, like, in the order of like five to 10 ,000 a month. And then the idea is, wait, so are you making money off of pickleball courts near me.com? Not yet. I'm just starting it up. And that's why I built this web scaper. So the idea is, I built a web scraper that will help me scour the web for PigWall Cords and tell you information like is it indoor? Is it outdoor? Is it, it can't be reserved? Does it have lights you can play at night and a bunch of other stuff. And actually I can show you what it looks like. Yeah. While you're pulling that up, I just found out about a tool.

6:24You're going to laugh at me. I'm sorry. It's called browse AI. Browse.ai. Yeah. Browse.ai. So apparently what it does, it's a little bit different, right? Yours is like a general use case of scraping. This is like, hey, this is the website that I want you to go and scrape specific data for. But I started thinking about this use case of using AI to go out and scrape information from the internet, as opposed to our current methods of going out and scraping information. Yeah. So actually the context is I was helping a friend who was building dog parks near me. and he was basically saying that it was going to take him like 80 hours to kind of gather the data needed to build this website to hopefully make something like two three five thousand dollars a month and that's kind of how I got into it I was like wait I can automate this for you man and then like it took me about a day or two but we got it running and yeah so I saved him like 80 hours and he launched his website and we're kind of seeing because I see it's kind of like a long game so we kind of see like the traffic that you're able to acquire but yeah so there's there's a lot of like potential with these directories but also just llm based web scraping because they can browse like humans and automate like what you're doing and extracting the information you need is it similar to programmatic seo yes yes so actually let me this will be just easier if i share my screen yeah i'd love to see it i'm like really new to all this stuff i mean i'm trying to learn as much as i can but programmatic seo has been really attractive to me because i like you're saying it's a long game yeah seo is a long game but programmatic seo is really interesting because it's a very long game but you're also you're like taking advantage of a bunch either different geographies or different verticals so i've been thinking about ai use cases around programmatic seo yeah so this i guess is like a pretty good example so this is my website pickleballcourtsnareby.com oh my gosh the programmatic is like you know for every state and for every city.

8:25So this is California, Irvine. There will be like a page and this is the kind of data extracted. So like this is actually Denver, Colorado. Yeah. Yeah. You can, it is you go to whatever city and then there's like a URL that's already been created. Right. So this is Texas, Dallas, and then all the data is here. And so then the idea is when you go to Google search and you know, like you search pickleball courts near me, this will say pickleball in Dallas, Texas. Okay. I have to update the SEO and text bit. AI generates this. But... So how are you using AI to generate the information for these websites?

8:59Okay. So that I can show you. Can you still see my screen? Yeah. Does it look at table 2? Okay. Yep. So what I first did is I used this platform called Outscraper. Speak my language, bro. I know Outscraper. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So I scraped Google Maps for all the locations that have Pickleball in the name or in the description. And then that gives me a list of all the locations. And it also usually comes with a URL. And so that's actually, let's just start here. So it'll come with, okay, not exactly what this table is, but it'll kind of look like this where, you know, you'll have the name of the pickleball court and the URL for like the website.

9:41And where are you, sorry, where is this table? I can't quite read it. It's a little bit small on my screen. Let me see if I can make it. Just for me, just for me, it's small on my screen. But is this like an Excel doc or is this, what platform is this in? So since I code, this is in my database, but usually it's given to you as a CSV that you can open up in your Excel sheet. Yeah. I didn't know if you'd put this in like an Airtable or something, but this is in your coding database. Probably could work with Airtable too. But yeah, this is in my own database because I'm trying to build like a whole website.

10:07Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the idea is you get the pickleball court or the location that has these sports complexes and then you get the URL of these Pickleball Court locations. And what I do is I use this open source software called Firecrawl. And what it'll do is I send it to this URL. So let's say activityreg.com. And I say, okay, I need, let me show you the information I grab. So I say, okay, I want Pickleball Courts and I want it to look like this. So I want the URL. I want the email and the contacts. I want to know the phone number. I want to know the address. So this one has a bit more like address and stuff.

10:52And so I gather all this data or so I tell it I want this data. So then what it does is it goes to the website and then it crawls it until it finds the data needed. And then it gives it back to me in the format I need to show to my website. So the software you're using, is that AI? Yes. So it's AI enabled. Okay. Previously, if you were trying to scrape, you'd have to hard code everything. Like, for example, you can only like go to eBay.com and say like, okay, for this product, this is where you get the email and this is where you get the address or like whatever. But now it's AI, it can, no matter where it is on the page or even if it's on like a different page in the website, it can decide like which one to go to.

11:31So usually actually what happens is it goes to a website and then I get all the links on that website. and then i'm like okay this is the home page and these are the 100 other links on this website and actually you can see it in here fire call maps so okay again i'm really stupid and i'm just trying to like yeah process through this the reason outscraper is able to get all the information that it does from google is because google probably has some standardized way of gathering and displaying information so yes because because outscraper had all this information before AI, right? And they're able to do that because it was predictable.

12:09You could hard code and pull all this stuff. Exactly. Now what you can do with that website information using context is say like, go find me the phone number or whatever. Exactly. And you don't have to tell where it is, but it knows what a phone number looks like. So it's going to go through and like make a decision. Oh man. Yeah. How cool. Exactly. Actually. Yeah. So you nailed it basically since people, they like, you know, they either submit their business. Well, they usually, Yeah, they usually submit their business and they fill out the information, right? And then I'll scrape it from Google Maps because it's always in the same place in the same format.

12:41But what happens if it's not in the same place in the same format? Then you need a human to go do that. And so previously, like, a job like this would have taken many people many hours, like, months, you know, to scrape it. In my database, I have 16 ,000 pickleball cords. like if you say okay let's see 16 000 and let's say it takes five minutes per that's 80 000 minutes so that's a thousand three hundred hours so that would be like half of a working year it's more than half of a working year exactly and so yeah with ai i kind of just let it run in the background it'll take me about seven days i'd say but i don't have to do anything okay and actually what i've noticed is it actually does a lot better than a human too because it's just like Like with AI, you know, you're paying, you're basically getting like a college level graduate and all you're doing is like pulling data out.

13:35So it's not hard, right? It's just if you read it and then if it exists on the page that AI can definitely grab it. Whereas a human might miss it. Or a human might be like, that's good enough. That phone number might work. And they're just trying to get to the next thing as opposed to getting it right. Have you messed with operator? I have. I have. So you know how slow operator is? right when it's like it's going and executing a task and it it's slower than the human would actually do it is it the same with this technology is it is it just slow that way it takes seven days or is it just a massive data set it's just a massive data hey i don't know if you remember this but when we started this podcast we entered into a social contract i would spend time energy and money producing this podcast interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business.

14:23And you would like, subscribe, and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value. But I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. So I think with Operator, I think it will get faster over time. But it's still slower now because it has to be kind of a generalized use case. Yeah. I also bet operator is like in a sandbox where they don't want to give it total rain to do whatever.

15:01Actually, my guess is it actually could run faster, but it would cost OpenAI more. So I think they purposely rate it. Oh, that makes sense. That's my guess. But yeah, so since like for me, I just need to get the job done as fast as possible. I can let it run for as fast as possible. I'm actually more limited by the computer I run it on. and so i could technically like you know rent a computer in the cloud and how much coding does it take to do what you're doing like if i wanted to go not scrape all the pickleball courts i wanted to go scrape all of the cupcake businesses in the united states you know what i mean yeah okay i know the software now fire call like could i just go do this or like what would it actually take for me to do it.

15:42So Firecall handles the scraping for you and gives the website in a format that the LLM can do. And if I guess if you were going for like an MVP, let's say, you know, like I just want to grab the data only for cupcakes, don't need a generalized kind of scraper. You could probably get that done if you're an engineer, a software engineer, you could probably get that done in like a day, a day or two. If you didn't, kind of depends on how good your prompting is, but I think you can still get it done and i would say like a couple days yeah i think well i think the thing with prompting from a non-engineer's perspective is just like you could probably try everything you could within like three days and then if you it's more like either you'll get it done in three days or you're not going to be able to get it like you don't know how to prompt it in the correct way i feel like oh i see what you're saying yeah i'm just thinking for a business owner who's like let's say i have i have a pe firm and i'm rolling up cupcake shops and i want to know who all the cupcake shops are that are owned by mom and pops.

16:39And it's like, Oh, okay. I wouldn't get all the information from Google, but I want you to find the specific owner. I don't know some use case where you're scraping data. Like how would I do that? Would I just go to fire call and say, this is what I want, or do I have to build an app essentially to run fire scrape on? I think specifically for this use case, there isn't a product that kind of exists yet that can do end to end i'm actually i am planning to release this as like kind of paid product but it will cost a bit of money because just for reference so for the pickleball data set if that will cost me like at least 150 i'm only halfway done and then it also cost me seven days of running my own computer but that's nothing yeah no it's nothing compared to like if you had hired someone like a VA for like 10, 20 bucks, like 20 bucks an hour.

17:32Cause that would take them 55 days, which is like be way more money. But yeah, I think for someone just trying to get it done, I would say give it a shot. Like I think with AI, you definitely have a good chance at getting it done. This is just maybe on a little bit more on the technical side and I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent confident, but I feel like you get as a business owner without any coding knowledge. I think you get pretty far. No, it's, it's weird because this last week, like I had never done anything even remotely technical. And in the last week I've like JSON is, I know what it is.

18:07I don't necessarily know like the definition behind it, but I know what JSON is. I've written a Python script in Google collab, which I was then able to like take my files and condense them. And I was able to get my transcripts cleaned up. And I was like, this is freaking amazing. I don't know what I did, but I know that AI wrote it and it gave me the output that I wanted. You know what I mean? So have you heard of bolt.new and lovable and that lovable? Yes. Yes. I've heard of lovable, but bolt.new. Very similar to lovable products that will help you build websites without any coding knowledge.

18:42But my physical therapist friend, he's been trying to pitch me on this idea for a while to help like people kind of self-diagnose themselves. And I was like, all right like i kind of gave him a couple steps to do beforehand before i'm like okay before we can work on this together but he was like no i don't want to do all that so he just went on he's like i want to just do this myself so i was like okay if you want to do it try using lovable he used it and he built like a product that without ai probably would have taken me like a solid month with ai probably like uh like a couple days but he was able to build like 80 of a working website with just like a couple bugs to help people self-diagnose themselves like for physical therapy like kind of pains no way and that blew my mind because it really he's had like a bunch of ideas over the years and never been able to pursue them and now he can and so yeah i mean how many people i i know a lot of people who are like dude i have this idea for an app like what would you think if they tell you the app and it's like yeah you're never going to do that because you would need an engineer or coder or somebody to create an MVP for you.

19:46But you can actually do that now. I know. It's crazy. Actually, it's like you guys be on an MVP now, I would say. There's like small kinks here and there, but it's definitely working. It definitely gets the job done. What's the difference between Bolt and Lovable? I think they do the same thing. I think they're just competitors. What about Replit, Bolt, and Lovable? I haven't actually tried Replit. I've only seen videos of it. I think it falls into a similar category. My guess, though, is that Replit would be a little bit more powerful. What about Cursor? Cursor is definitely like... Okay, so if I put it on a spectrum, full software engineers for people that don't know how to write any code.

20:25Lovable and Bolt are on the side of not... For people who don't know how to code. Cursor is definitely on the side for people that do know how to code. And I think Replit's in the middle. I think. Because I feel like with Lovable, I kind of had to help my friend debug a bit. it didn't let me edit anything in the ui it it's really designed for people who just cannot code and just want the ai to do everything but with cursor on the other hand like you need to know how to like set up your environment you need to like know like what to tell cursor but it's way more powerful if i wanted to build an app would i would you recommend i try lovable or bolt i would just say lovable because i now i actually have experience with it but from everything i've heard their equivalent products or like they're very similar i want to try it like next week i want to try to build something yeah dude i think you're gonna kind of be blown away i'd say so yeah another friend had like another idea that he's been like kind of trying to pitch me to build like this like reddit analyzer and then he just built it without me because he didn't need me anymore and i was like this is awesome right like it's hard to say no to your friends but yeah that now that they can go do it themselves it's awesome okay if i were to build some product for myself.

21:36Yeah. Is there, are there like some parameters you would give me or some framework you would give me to identify like, yeah, like what's a good, what would be a good use case? Yeah. Okay. The best projects to start are app ideas where you don't need to aggregate data from across the internet. Let's say these calorie tracker apps, for example, where like the user can like input the data themselves and you can kind of like do everything within the app, then those would do well. But the moment you kind of need to reference other data sources, you're kind of getting into a part of software engineering that is harder because you need to rely on other services.

22:14So maybe you can build that's like completely wholly encapsulated in your app. Okay, so I have like 130 podcast episodes. And let's just say that of the 130 podcast episodes, it distills my philosophy on many things. that would be a good use case for building sort of a closed system. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have to, it's not going to go out and pull a bunch of data, but it's the Nick deal analyzer for, you know, for, for all intents and purposes. Is the idea to like kind of advise, like if it's something that's a good podcast idea or not, or. Yeah. It could be like, Oh, I'll give advice on your business.

22:52If you're trying to scale or if you're, or Hey, I want to buy this business. What do you think of the multiple? or, hey, I want to start a business. What do you think of this idea? Potentially, it just gives you feedback, right? But I guess that's just a chatbot, right? That would be a chatbot. But you would be surprised how helpful that is. I feel like in this kind of age where you can build anything, you still need a lot of knowledge to do things well. So I'm working with like a bit of like, he has a YouTube channel and he helps with like advice on like programmatic SEO and like trying to decide which websites to build.

23:26But he has a lot of knowledge. in his head that would take a long time for you to kind of comb through YouTube videos, a lot of articles to kind of understand. So I'm actually building something like a chatbot, but basically you give it an idea and then it'll just ask all the questions that he would ask and then assess your idea. And, you know, he doesn't have the time to meet with a hundred people, but now this chatbot can. So I still think that's really useful. So how would I do it? I want to, I want to like walk through this because my problem is that the context window, even if it's a million tokens, is call it 20 podcast conversations.

24:05And I've got 130 of them. Yeah, that'd be probably not feasible. So I would say I would start with, and this is kind of how I'm approaching it, is you probably have a framework to analyzing if a business is going to be a good idea or not. Like probably like, what's the monetization model? How are you going to do distribution? Like all these things. And then also you can like then assess, if that monetization model will actually work out enough. I'd say take your framework the way that you would... Define a framework if you don't have one already, but take your framework and code that into a chatbot.

24:38Or it could take 10 episodes that I really liked and clean the data, get rid of the timestamps, get rid of ums, ahs, get it down to a point where I can fit it into a context window, and then just say, hey, help me codify my deal analysis. And so that's actually what I did for my friend that I'm trying to build like a chatbot for. I took like five of his YouTube videos. I threw in a chat, GBT. I threw the transcript in. There's like these free services that like YouTube to transcript. I threw it in and then I was like, okay, tell me all the best practices and tips that I need to follow when trying to choose a new SEO website to build.

25:18And then I spit out like pretty much like everything he said. It was like 20 to 30 things. I then encoded those 20 to 30 things into questions and like criteria to analyze and that's how I made the chatbot and like yeah so you could apply that same thinking give an AI your audio files say like what are the most important things to analyze and how do you analyze it what are the criteria to make something good or not good it needs to be improved yeah see what it spits out and then codify that into the app yeah that is really interesting that That would be really, really interesting. I love that.

25:55This was amazing. This was my last call of the week. And definitely of the 30, this is the top three. This is the top three. Very, very good. I'm glad, man. All right. Hopefully you liked that episode. And if you've made it this far, you're either really committed or you're stuck doing yard work and you can't actually skip on your phone. So while I have you, the show is growing, but I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please help me grow the show? I want to reach more people. There's a couple of things that you can do. Like and subscribe is the simplest thing. Obviously, you want to get notifications for when the next episode is coming out.

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