Can You Build A Profitable SaaS In 7 Days With Just AI? My Experiment With Proof!

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1:31Head to granola.ai slash MBA and get three months free with the code MBA. That's granola.ai slash MBA and get three months free with code MBA. I spent 10 years of my life building, scaling, and eventually selling my software business Webinar Ninja. And to be honest, it was an absolute battle all 10 years. But I wanted to test myself. I wanted to see if I can do it again, if I can build a software that really rivals the industry leaders. But I wanted to do it this time only using AI. And one more thing, I wanted to do it in just seven days. I'm talking about a fully functional, fully deployed, ready to take payments app.

2:16I have to ask the question, is this even possible? This episode is about, you know, building with AI, and we're going to get into that. But it's really about can you build something under constraints? Can you do it under a ridiculous timeline? And maybe you can. I'm going to share with you exactly what I went through day by day for seven days so that you can follow along.

2:38Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week, and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. With this new wave of AI, you can pretty much build anything that you imagine.

3:16There's no shortage of ideas. You can go down rabbit holes. It could get really complex and overwhelming. But as someone who's built and sold a software business before, I'm gonna share with you what you should do and what you shouldn't do if you're thinking about doing this yourself. First things first, I had to work out, what am I gonna build? What is this app going to do? So I decided to build an app for creators that want to sell their courses, want to sell their products or coaching easily and not in a clunky, complex way. I decided to call it Nikki after my co-founder and wife, Nicole. So the goal is to make sure, number one, the product actually does what it says it's going to do.

3:51But number two, that it's an easy to use app that customers can get set up and running and sell their products in minutes. Our first step was to build out a plan. I knew that if I was gonna pull this off, I'm gonna need some help. So I called about a friend of mine, Chris Ashby, who's the best in the game when it comes to building with AI. So Chris, I'm so happy that I got to sit down and meet with you. Is it possible to build a SaaS product in seven days that's ready to be sold to customers? Yeah, 100 % doable. And I think this is like a huge opportunity in the application layer for AI is building apps that have agents built into them.

4:27And you've seen the success of apps like Cursor, like the web browser DIA from the browser. I think it's a really good idea. It's got a lot of potential and it's got an agent built into it as well. So that's great. So we built a plan for each day. This is where we ended up. So in day one, we're setting up and creating the foundations of the app. That means we're setting up the project with Leap, which is the software I used, and making sure that we integrate with OpenAI's API. Day two, this is all about user flows. We want to know what the user is going to experience when they're using the app.

5:00Day three, we're going to work on the AI sales page generator. Day four, we're building the AI pricing engine. One of the features in the app is that you can upload your product and then the AI in the product is going to tell you how you should price your product. Day five, UI and polish. Day six, we're going to test payments and we're going to make sure that we can onboard our customers. Day seven, the glorious day where we ship our product and demo it to make sure it all works. Sounds good in theory, but this is what actually happened. So day one didn't go as bland. I was blown away by how powerful AI was.

5:41This is like my first full day trying to build a product with AI. And what took me three or four hours of work would have taken a developer like a month to build what I built in three or four hours. I accomplished way more than I was expecting. The only thing I didn't get done was the branding at this point, but I got done pretty much all the bare bones of building an app, like being able to have logins, like authentication, being able to take payments so I can charge customers. I even had some of the basic database schemes built up and being able to create a product. So I had a lot done in just one day.

6:16So this is what I learned in day one. I learned that you need to treat AI like a highly skilled developer. And through my experience of building and growing Webinar Ninja, one of the things I learned is you need to give proper instructions. You need to know what you want so that you can tell the engineer, and in this case, AI, what you wanted to build.

6:39On day two, I decided to step away from the computer and focus on the user experience. I wanted to make sure that we had a seamless user flow from the moment the user signs up to they get a win out of the product, meaning they get what they signed up for. And in my case with Nikki, they wanna be able to create and sell a product as fast as possible. Even like Netflix, for example, when you sign up and you create an account, the first thing they do is they ask you what kind of movies you like to watch so that they can curate some suggestions so that you can have a great experience. You can do this yourself.

7:10You have two options. You can go classic and just use paper and pen, or you can do what I did. I used my iPad and I drew out each flow. So each step I wanted to make sure is clear and mapped out. And then when I was done with each flow, I just screenshot it and I upload it to the AI building app like Leap, for example, so that the actual AI knows what you're building. It has a blueprint of the build. Let me give you a quick rundown of my tech stack, the tools that I use to build my software. First thing was leap.new. This is like lovable, sort of like a geeky version of lovable, so that you can create apps using AI.

7:47The next thing is GitHub. GitHub is a code repository. This is a technical term, but basically your code has to live somewhere on the internet so that the world can access it when you're running your app. The next thing that I use is Stripe, and Stripe is a payment processor. If you can't collect payments, you don't have a business, so you gotta be able to take money from your customer's pocket to your pocket. Another tool I use is called Cursor, and it's like a secondary coding tool that would allow me to fix any bugs that I saw in Leap. I also use OpenAI's API. By the way, OpenAI is the company that creates ChatGBT, and I use basically their software or their code so that I can create my own AI features in my app.

8:28So for example, if I wanted my software to use the power of AI to create copy for a sales page, I don't need to create that AI magic. I can just borrow the magic that OpenAI already created through their API. The next tool is one of my favorite tools of all time. It's called Whisperflow. And basically it allows me to just talk instead of type and you can use it on your phone, you can use it on your laptop, you can use it on your computer. And it allowed me to quickly prompt the AI without having to type and make typos and all that kind of stuff. It's super simple and super easy to use. Two more tools.

8:59One is called Mux, which is a video hosting tool. And the last tool is actually ChatGBT. Now, it's funny to hear me say this, but ChatGBT is one of the best co-pilots when you're building an app because you can actually ask Chat to build the prompts for you that you want to put into your AI building tool like Leap or Level or whatever you're using. Today's episode is sponsored by Square. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. Square works for one-location shops, mobile service businesses, and multi-location franchises.

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12:06I was having a lot of problems in day three as I was developing and building the app using leap.new. Now, leap is a great tool, and it does a lot of things well, but I was getting a lot of bugs, and these bugs were not easy to fix. It was almost like it was building on bad code. I really felt frustrated because I started to first feel like I'm not gonna hit this deadline. I'm not gonna be able to build this in seven days. I thought to myself, do I need to start from scratch again? Do I need to start using something else to make this possible? And I had that feeling of sunk cost, like, oh man, did I just waste two days of my life?

12:40And am I behind by two days? But at breakfast, I sat down and I decided, no, I can't think this way. I got to pull this off and build a strong app. So I decided to switch apps. I started using a software called Windsurf. It's basically like a code editor using the power of AI. So it's a lot more flexible, a lot more powerful. Yes, I still had bugs, but the bugs were fixable. And I was able to get over those hurdles. When you're building any app, you're going to have bugs. There's no doubt about it. But the question is, is that are you going to be able to fix those bugs fast enough to keep your momentum going?

13:15The biggest lesson of day three was not to worry about the past, not to worry about your sunk cost, and to just admit to yourself that, hey, I need to do this all over again. I need to build from scratch, but I need to do it right. As I wrapped up day three, I was a bit behind, but that's okay. I kept moving forward. Day four, I was tired. I was frustrated. I felt like I was really working against time. I was making up for lost time, and I didn't know if this was really going to work out or if I was actually going to pull this off. But I had a little bit of a glimmer of a hope because Windsturf was working better, and I was able to make some progress, faster progress than I was doing before.

13:56So after a nice break and I jumped back onto the computer in the evening, I started to realize that this actually could be possible. I was making progress. I was building the app out. The features were starting to flush out. And I really started seeing a functional app on the horizon. So I started to feel pumped. Sometimes you're going to hit some brick walls and you can get frustrated and you can really start to lose hope. But when you step away for a moment, you get perspective and you start feeling re-energized to get back into it. But this got me asking a big question. Do I want to do this long term?

14:28Do I want to build this app and sell it for the next 10 years? On day five, I really focused on the UX and the UI. That's user experience and user interface. Now, this only works if your app actually works. You need to make sure that your product does what it promises to do. And then once you have that nailed, you can then focus on how does the customer experience the product? are they able to use your product without any instruction manual? They're able to know what the next step is intuitively. And this is where I really focused on in day five to make sure that each step is super clear. On day six, I had one goal.

15:10See if I can break this product. If I can get the product to cough up an error or some sort of bug. And if it didn't, I was successful. That entailed making sure that I can sign up. I can make sure that the customer's onboarded properly. but also that I can charge properly. Now, I need to charge the customer. That's one form of payment. But then the customer also needs to charge their customer because they're selling products and services through the app. So as you can see, it's complex. And that's why it's so important to test. Quick tip when it comes to testing. When you test your product, make sure that you test in different ways.

15:43Don't just repeat the same steps over and over. Maybe skip a step. Maybe change the order of what you do in each step because you might find the software will cough up an error when you do something a little bit different. So you're really trying to break your product, really trying to almost hack it to make sure it doesn't fail under any conditions. In 24 hours, I was planning to go live and I wasn't 100 % sure it was going to work.

16:12Day seven, the big reveal. Was I able to pull this off? I'm happy to say after seven days, I was able to build a app that rivals some of the biggest players in the game. That's great. And I'm happy and I'm proud. But I want to share with you how I was able to make this happen. And it really is just one word. Focus. I was able to focus for hours on end, certain pockets of the day. So I spent three or four hours in deep work with no distractions. I'm talking about notifications off, earphones on. So for each day, I had one core goal, and I wanted to make sure that each day didn't go by without me ticking that box.

16:52And because of that, after the seven days were up, I had a fully functioning app that was amazing. I can't wait to show you. Now, if you're listening to this episode right now, this next part is best viewed on YouTube, where I walk you through a demo of the app that I built, Nicky, over the seven days of the experiment. You're going to absolutely love it. If you want to check it out, head on over to YouTube. The link is in the description, or you can go to 100mba.net slash YouTube. But for now, here's what happened and my final takeaways from this experiment. The question I keep getting asked is, when can I buy Nikkie?

17:27What is it for sale? And in order for me to answer that question, I got to share with you my three biggest takeaways from the seven-day challenge. The first takeaway is AI is more powerful than I ever thought. I mean, this is absolute insanity, what AI can do. The second takeaway is it's incredibly fun. AI is magical. It's like having a genie grant you wishes. You just type in a prompt and tell it to build you something and it builds it. So here's the thing. Building a product is exciting. It's a lot of fun. But building a business is something completely different. It's a lifestyle choice. And I lived that lifestyle for a decade.

18:05And I don't want to do that for the next 10 years again. I want to go all in on media, on our podcast, on the YouTube channel, and building great content and less is for you. Every opportunity has a cost. Everything in life has a cost. So you got to ask yourself, are you willing to pay that cost? Are you willing to dedicate the next decade of your life building a great business? Because that's what it's going to take. So as good as Nikki is as an app, I'm not selling it. But damn, it was a lot of fun to build. This whole experiment taught me so much about AI, but it also taught me about myself.

18:37You know, we answer the question, can you build this app? We're using AI in seven days. But the question that you need to answer is, should you? Maybe the answer is yes for you, but it's a question that you need to answer. I had a lot of fun during this seven day experiment. If you want me to do another one on something else, let me know in the comments. Thanks for tuning into this special episode of the$100 MBA show. Now, this was a different kind of episode, but I hope it was valuable. As I said, you can check out the demo of the Nikkie app by going to our YouTube channel and jumping ahead to see the fruits of my labor during this seven day experiment.

19:15I would love to hear your thoughts. Why don't you go over there now, comment on that video, tell me what you think of how the experiment went and what you think of the app Nikkie that I built. We'd love to hear from you. if you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start grow and scale your business the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app the one that you're using right now whether it's apple or spotify or ever you listen to podcasts by hitting subscribe you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show it's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business.

19:54And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.