#2296 The $7 Million Vibe Coded App

27:59Certain things like that I would always use. But there's sort of a category of things that no longer make sense. What about Intercom? You're not using that for customer support? I do use Intercom because their library for the chat bit in the app works really well. that's non-trivial to make that work but i don't use their ai thing and i answer many of the things that come in i answer on a website that i built for myself that hits their api and just gets all the tickets and i just answer it there because then i can kind of like layer on all my own stuff i see i didn't give any good examples for my thesis but i'll think of them while we talk and i'll jump in it appropriately and say oh yeah i just thought of it essentially what you're saying is where possible, I, Josh, like to build things myself instead of these tools.

28:53And if I have to, I'm picking the tools that I need to, but I'm not using them all the way. I'd rather make my own. And it's not that hard to make my own. That's right. Not as like a fetish, but as a like, because it's actually better. What makes it better in your mind is like, it seems like you have a customized way, for example, for chat. You don't want them to start to figure out how to answer in your place you haven't you have a thesis on how to answer properly yeah i'm trying to think of what a good example of this would be like you know a very basic example is like if i'm gonna send a a big email i don't need a like wissy wig editor to set up the email like the ai will just build out the code like hey i want to do an email about wave assistant which was an email that went out this morning about chat across all of your sessions, smarter search in the app.

29:51That all just kind of rolled out. And it ended up, you know, that email was written by an AI. It's an HTML email, but I didn't use any, like, service for it to actually make the email content because it's just easier to just do it in code. Anything that's sort of putting you, that's sitting between you and the code it's potentially going to just get in the way. You know, that's the thing that I'm noticing, like really up and down the size of companies that I've talked to. They're trying now to just create it themselves. And it's not about cutting out costs. It's not that intercom costs too much.

30:27It's that they want more control over the experience. And that even goes down to a consulting company I talked with that's creating their own Calendly because they need little bits of customization to them. All right, that brings me to my sponsor, Zapier. I mentioned that they're a sponsor. You said, I'm integrating them somehow into customer service. What are you doing with Zapier then? I'm integrating them into, so I get the, you know, you record in Wave and then you either read it in the app or it'll send an email or you can share it to Google Docs or Notion. And I built out a bunch of the share features myself on the tools, you know, OneNote, DocX, like Acrobat, like all the formats that someone would want.

31:10But I get inbound all the time, like, hey, I really would love for Wave recordings to land in my company's like CRM. It's this like esoteric thing that I never heard of. Do you have Zapier? And so I actually have a beta Zap or Zapier thing where once you set it up, every recording you do will trigger a Zap and it'll land that wherever you want. And it's part of a bunch of things I'm releasing in the next few weeks that include API access, MCP access. So if you want to ask one of the other AIs about your sessions, you can do that now. So it'll be API, MCP, and Zapier are going to kind of roll on the same day as part of a, like, take your data wherever you want to go.

31:59I think there is value in being the app that facilitates making the data. So you're doing the recording. It's creating data. Everyone seems to like it for that. But it's like then what happens? Like the next stage is what, you know, something has to be actioned. We're meeting. There's going to be some sort of output from that, either a to-do list or like action items or whatever, or it needs to land somewhere. We need, or I should say I need users to be able to get their data wherever they want as easily as possible. And so Zapier does a great job with that. They have the integrations with everything.

32:37So if you want to take your wave sessions to some esoteric thing that I never heard of, you can use Zapier for that. You know, I think the API access might be more useful, but for the non-engineer, Zapier is really the best. Yeah, I'm even finding that, frankly, if I use Cloud Code, it doesn't have enough connections out. And so what it'll say is just use Zapier and then get the connection you want. Just use the direct API. Here's the key. I mean, it's really like just one more story. I also use intercom for my dot for my like knowledge base, like the articles about all the features and my, you know, I used to write them and really slave over them and make them better and use AI to help make them better.

33:24But now it's like, hey, cloud code, you see that feature in the code over there? write the document about it and put it on intercom. And so now it's just like an AI is reading the code, understanding how the feature works because it's reading the code. Oh, wow. And then writing the article in the style of the other articles that it can also read. And then it's just like, I don't know, man, it's crazy. I know, it is incredible. And then it makes me wonder if everyone is going to be able to create or more people are gonna be able to create, what does it mean? Does it mean that people are going to start creating their own version of Wave?

34:02Does it mean that companies are going to start to do it? Or is it just that we'll always have both? We'll have what we have now with SaaS, and at the same time, people create their own software in addition. What do you think? I think there will be more software. So, I mean, Wave doesn't have to be a team of 50 people, venture capital in an office. It's me in the downstairs apartment in my building. I think there'll be more software. I mean, I had this thought in the shower. I'm in New York where we recently had a ton of snow. And I have young kids who I knew were going to want to sled. And I didn't currently have snow boots or pants for the snow.

34:48I left it upstate at my other house. And I bought on Amazon, like, very cheap boots, you know, and they were great. They were, like,$40, and they were great boots. The pants were similarly great. So I felt, like,$100 on very, very useful things. And I wonder if software, it's like making apparel is, like, a solved problem. Like, we know how to do that. We do it overseas. The supply chain is there. They make the boots really cheap in every size. They ship them. They go to Amazon. I pick the boots based on where I could get it the next day in my size. And I got them for really cheap. I sort of wonder if software might be similar and that it's cheap to make.

35:33There's a ton of it. None of it is huge. The boot brand is unknown. My kids and wife made fun of the way the boots looked, but boy, did they do the job. And so I wonder if software will have a similar kind of thing where there's just a lot of it. There's a lot of options. Which one you use doesn't really matter. Like the boots are the boots. The AI recorder is the AI recorder. And you might have one that you like better, but at the end of the day, it's like, they just do it. The barriers are so low that there could be many options for everything you want to do. And so to me, what I'm doing looks more like running a corner store that I work in full time.

36:14And I I sweep out at the end of the day myself and I'm the shopkeep and I lower the gate at the end of the day. Like that's more the mode that I'm in than like a high tech software company because I'm working alone. I do it to make money. This isn't an equity play. This is to make money now as a business. I'm the business owner. I'm the small business owner. So I'm always on. I'm always thinking about it. That's okay. That's what I want to do. That's what I like. And it's sort of more like that. I just work on the, I have a shop in cyberspace, if you will. and I sell things to a small number of people, relatively speaking, but it makes plenty for me and for my family.

36:51Like it covers everything. And so that's more, that's the mode. It's not a big company. So like, what does AI allow? Anyone with agency can go and do something that's still a very small percentage of the population. It's still not most people. It's not everyone. It's not even most people. It's like a subset similar to who could do it before. You know, but you don't have to be an engineer anymore. I feel like it's going to be a little bit like YouTube where before really good videos would only come on television and movies. And then eventually you end up with all these creators and some of them are Mr.

37:26Beast and some of them are doing it just for themselves because they like having family videos. And they're more creators. Okay. Do you think this could be a billion dollar business? Do you think this is the Sam Altman one person billion dollar business direction? Well, I can also answer this the way that I always do, which is, so I think that it's usually framed as one person unicorn and unicorn refers to a company worth, you know, the billion dollar mark. Not, no one will ever value this because I'm not going to raise money. So there's no way for this to be a unicorn in that sense, which is a lot of vanity and kind of like what investors are willing to pay.

38:07It's a great signal for sure. but it's part of a scheme that I'm not part of right now. You know, I think what you're asking is like, what is the natural limit of something run by one person? And I think it's probably quite a bit more than what I'm doing. I guess what I know, I think the way I would put it like this before, you're a runner. I love how on your website you show your latest run. So beautifully done. Oh, thank you. Before I, and I, and you make me miss New York. I see that your last run was through Central Park, man. And that's so good. I remember before I ran my first marathon, I met a marathoner and I said, how do you even do it?

38:43And he said, the way you do it is you have to imagine that you're going to go more than a marathon. Do an ultra so then the marathon doesn't seem so big. It turns out that's not the way that I think. But it gave me a sense of the headspace. What I eventually had to think was I'm going to run a marathon as a way of getting me to even run to 10K. I'm wondering, do you have any number in your head that says, this is what I'm aiming for. Even if it means that I'm not going to run my version of a marathon and have a unicorn, I'm going to figure out what the 10K is that comes from that. What do you have in mind?

39:13Yeah. I mean, I think running, particularly as someone who got into it late in life, I had no high school running record. So I, in the last five years, have run as well as I've ever run, half marathon, marathon, as well as I've ever done. Not good in the sense of all runners, but good for Josh Moore. So, you know, it's related in that I sort of relish doing better than I've ever done in the past. And so I would like the numbers for this year, both on my running and on the business to be best ever. last year was best ever business, not best ever running. Those things are related, unfortunately.

40:00And when it's 20 degrees outside, I can't do much running anyway. But I would just like it to grow. I think I have, yeah, there's no grand vision. I mean, it's seven last year. I'd love it to do 10 this year. That would be great. I don't think I'll be able to do that, but let's see what happens. I'm just kind of enjoying the process. I'm unlike venture-backed startups, which have been exclusively where I've worked for the last couple decades. And those situations to me feel very focused on an outcome, like Uber especially. And I didn't join Uber even knowing what employee equity was. Or like I knew what it was, but it wasn't the focus.

40:43If it had been, I probably would have negotiated a better deal. but it was just sort of like, cool. And I get stopped, but like, this is cool because I get free Uber rides and I'm the boss of a small part of the store. Those are the two things that I liked a lot. When you're focused on the equity bit, it's sort of like, someday we'll do X and you do your math of like, well, I own this much and we'll suffer this much and how much will I make? And that's very nice. But that is a future focused situation that I'm really not in right now. Right now it's just sort of like I'm running a business. I want to run it as well as possible.

41:16I'd like it to be bigger than it is now, but it's so that I can make more money now, not so that my stocker, I'll sell it someday. None of that is really in focus because I don't think it's a sellable business. And I think, you know, if you'd asked me right after Uber what I want, a lot of us would say like, we want to like own a small SaaS business. It's like, well, great. I do that now. I looked at buying one. I almost bought one for like gym equipment. I was going to buy this e-commerce business that made gym equipment and sell it on their own website and on Amazon and all this. And it's like, I'm really glad I didn't do that.

41:54This is way more my mode. It is so beautiful to watch it get built in public. Let's close it out with the last segment of this conversation, which is how are you getting customers? And I wonder if you could take me through like the first customers, which sounds like it was your friends who were willing to give you feedback. But then the next and the next. And then what works for you? So right now it's Apple Search ads and Google ads for iOS and Android respectively. And I haven't been able to get meta ads to work in more than a year. Every few months I dip back in, I spend a bunch, and it fails.

42:29And there's a bunch of reasons for that.

42:34Competition, my ads are stale. And I think most of those are both symptoms of a larger issue, which is that I'm just not that interested in doing it. Um, and I, every so often a few times a year, I'll bring on a new agency. We'll get up and running. They're like, we'll for sure be able to make this work because my metrics are pretty good. Like if someone installs, there's like a one in 10 that they're going to give me money. And that's like, I'm told is pretty high for this sort of thing. And so like, so I need more installs, you know, and so I'll do between 800 and, and, and a thousand installs a day.

43:10And I think a lot of that is coming from app store search. You know, on the app store, I have a 4.9 star, like 11 ,000 reviews. So it just comes across as trustworthy. And on Android, it's getting up there, but not quite as good. So there's got to be a word of mouth element that I'm not really measuring. There's got to be some natural search. The ads in those two places are probably helping. but it's mostly, uh, yeah. And then really good retention. I mean, well, actually not really good, but some kind of retention so that most of the money that comes in every day is renewal money. You know, most people are, I know you've changed your flow.

43:56I've done some research on how you change your pricing. You've said in the past that it was too complicated, or maybe it was like Claude, as I was analyzing it said that you shifted from complicated, simple. I imagine that most people are doing annual subscriptions with you, right? But that's where the majority of the revenue is anyway. It's where most of the revenue is in terms of like, I just looked at this. It's actually split a third, a third, a third, weekly, monthly, and annual in terms of people. But in terms of dollars, it's obviously way more unannual. But like, yeah, I mean, what's so weird, there are some things about the App Store that are just like the way things are.

44:34and had, and since I had never really done any work there before, I'd, I had been working for, for app companies, but not app subscription companies. And the whole idea of an annual subscription still makes no sense to me. I would never buy it in annual search or anything. Like, I don't know what I'm going to like in a year. Right. I feel like monthly is the right thing. But it turns out people love their annuals. So I started focusing on that and their trials. I I didn't like trials. Everyone loves their trials. I'm like, all right, I'll do trials. Sometimes you don't because I think on annuals where you give right now a three-day trial, no trial on, I don't know if you do weekly or monthly.

45:12You've been experimenting with it. Yeah, I think that makes sense. People say, I'm going to try it, get the free three days. Yeah. I mean, the three days was such a stupid decision. It should be seven days. The whole app is very, all the business, all the activity is during the week. We'll do big recording days every weekday. If it's a snow day, a little less. And it's like federal holiday, a little less. Weekends are dead. So seven days is a more natural experience. It's a full lap around the week in your job. I'm going to make the change soon. I've just done very little optimization of that stuff because I find it so unpleasant to work on.

45:49Nothing wrong with it. It's where I started. I did the marketing and ops. That was my job. Every job I've ever had has been in that sort of thing. but I just like, there's so much more dopamine in making new things. I just try to keep making new things. And you know what? I don't think at levels, you did that from what I'm seeing levels. You are more of an operations person. When I see you, I've heard you, I've read you now so much. I've been intensely in your world. When I see you light up, you light up from customer service where most people want to throw up from it. You, you get excited about the building of it, but yeah, now that I'm actually talking to you about marketing, I thought you'd be jazzed about it.

46:23You are not. No. Watch out. It's not the support either, but the support is the first line of defense. It's where I learn about bugs. It's where, you know, you're hearing what people want. If you're not talking with users and look, I know I'm supposed to like invite a bunch of users onto a zoom for a half hour and like watch them use the app. I'm not doing that. I just, I can't, I can't do that. But the customer service is like, you know, that's where it gets real. That's everyone who's had a problem. and that's a useful group to talk to and on good days that channel is very quiet and on bad days it's not very quiet um you know what i mean what's the microsoft tool that lets you see how people are using your app you're not using something like that yeah i am i have i have sentry that like reports every problem that anyone has whether they know it or not but like you know and then i have a sort of a circle of people that i know from the real world who i gave free access to for forever and one of them sent me a text last night i was in bed she used to work for me at uber and what time was this i'm just looking at the text it was 9 15 p.m i guess i hadn't seen the text until i was in bed i get a lot of sleep by the way i was in bed and i saw a text she's like did you change something on the like on the line spacing of the summary because it's making me go i was like oh you're right i did sorry and then i fixed it um but there's just like little that would never come up in like a a bug report i changed how markdown is rendered in the app for a reason that's not that interesting but yeah the line spacing.

48:15And I even noticed, and it's just like, when you work alone, I like notice things and don't, but it doesn't always register because there's no other voice, you know? So it's very, very useful to just have people in the orbit saying things. And in the absence of people I know, I rely on support channels. So then, all right, I just want to linger on this for just a little bit longer to understand how you're getting users. Is it then the tools that you mentioned earlier where you've got pod.wave.co where I can have you give me summaries of my favorite podcasts. I don't have to listen to them or you have one for YouTube.

48:50Those work. What's working for you? Why? Basically, I'm trying to say, why are you getting so many users as a vibe coder when other people aren't? Dude, I wish I knew. So WavePod gets a ton of traffic. This was all like, I thought of this. I did. I was like, this will get, and then I'll like, every time a summary is made, it'll store that forever. And then it'll register for SEO. I was like, that's a really smart idea. And I do get a couple thousand visits a day from that now. And I have 550 folks who like, who like signed up, it's all free, but they signed up and added series that they want. And anytime that series has a new podcast, It transcribes and summarizes it and then emails it to them.

49:38But it gets a lot of visits to their website, but none of them are actually Wave user. Like they don't convert. I see. So I don't know. I don't know exactly what. I don't know the answer. What about virality? Other note-taking apps? You do that. Well, I just, so in the early days, the only answer I could come up with, and there was There's a time where we did, it was a couple of years ago where meta ads worked super well. And I grew from like a millionaire to like six in like four months. Like it was crazy because it was a first of its kind thing and it just crushed it on meta. Now there's 40 million of them.

50:16So the ads don't really work anymore. But what I used to think, and I think this is still somewhat true, is that if you're good, things might work out. I know it's sort of trite and maybe even not true, but I do kind of think that the internet is good at servicing quality. Like it's good at servicing quality. You know, the app works, you know, and people seem to like it. I get bad reviews. I get like, this app is buggy. And like, I might say like you're using an iPhone 13 or using like a Xiaomi Android phone or something. And it's like, oh, sorry. But. I do tend to agree with you. And the one piece of evidence I would put up is Cluelly.

51:10Their videos are so good on TikTok. They're so good at getting attention. And their stuff is so in the way and, in my opinion, uncaring about the user experience. I don't know if you brought them up on purpose, but they recently came into my hate bucket. Why? Well, they have a mobile app that looks just like mine. It just does the thing that my app does, and they price it exactly the same. You know,$139.99 annually is very much alike. That sounds right. And that's how much they charge. And there's a lot about their new – I think they're a stunt looking for a product. um i thought their original idea which was like screen recording with excess information so like you're interviewing me right now and it's transcribing it's saying hey entry you should ask him about this yes that's cool it doesn't seem like they actually ever did that it seems like they're really good at stunts like maybe i should maybe i should buy them or something but like they're good at getting attention which by the way is more important than making a good product.

52:16So, you know, good for them that they worked that out. I don't know, we're going to find out where it ends up, but I think that this is the two polar opposites. On your app, everything is well cared for, you care about customer experience and so on. On theirs, they have a good concept and it's another good marketing and another good marketing technique. And I wish that they would just focus on the one thing, like you said, just show me the transcript on my screen and then on the left, do the other thing, which is like recommending stuff. And I guess that's what you're saying. You want to be in the world of, I want to understand what my customer needs are and just keep building to that.

52:50And the way that you know what new features to add is you keep checking in with customer service, seeing what people are asking for. And that's how you go from in-person to phone to meetings or whatever the truth is. Yeah. I mean, on a bad day, I say to my wife, like nothing I've built in the last year has mattered. Like I nailed it with the first thing and everything I've done since then has been a waste. And there's like, we're taking a dark turn for the end of the interview. I think that there is some truth to that. They're like, oh, let's do phone and let's do meeting bots and let's do widgets so that people can just tap to record and let's do like export to Evernote because some people still use that and let's do export to Notion and let's do public URLs that you can just share on a website.

53:40And let's do, you know, all this stuff. And it just like almost hasn't mattered. Because like the core thing, no, no, no, no. I just want to tap a button and have it record. And then it does that magic summary thing. I don't know how you do that, but it's amazing. I'm like, oh, that's all you want. So like sometimes, yeah, just nailing the product is kind of it. But I am trying to diversify. I think the whole thing is at risk unless I do other stuff. So I'm trying to do other stuff. Because Apple is going to eventually add it in. All right. That's what you meant, right? No, just because there's, well, Apple, I mean, there's a ChatGPT version of Wave that just like records background audio on your computer.

54:26And I was like, whoa, this is done. And the iPhone can record phone calls now. That's a thing now. But it hasn't mattered. people just use the thing that they want to use i don't know all right let's close it out with profit i've asked you you're profitable and i did the thing where i asked the question badly and so we were able to skip past it roughly like where's profit right now uh you know gross was like seven and then apple and google take a bunch of that so let's say like you know like five lands and maybe I keep three or something like that. That's boss. That's killer, man. Yeah, it's working out.

55:07Yeah. It's working out. But everyone's like, oh, no, it's all that Uber money. It's like, no, no, no. It's new. No, this thing. The most esoteric problems in the world. It's like, no, I want you to know that I got rich twice, not just once. I need you to know that. I'm very insecure. I need my. I'm just kidding. The people who know this space are watching and have you, I constantly see you on lists. People are so excited that I was going to have you on because you are doing the thing that everyone else is aspiring to do. You're building the company individually, using AI and showing other people how it's done.

55:44And I really appreciate you coming on here and chatting with me. And I hope to go on with you at some point.