Stole an Idea, Built It in 12 Hours, Sold for $15K in 8 Days (Exact Playbook)

0:00Today we've got Josh on the podcast. He's going to tell the story of how he vibe coded an idea he got from ideabrowser.com and then sold it in eight days for$15 ,000. It was a roller coaster journey. And the reason I want him to have him on the pod is I want him to teach you how you could do the same. And I just thought it was a really interesting story of how someone could take something from zero to one and this whole age of ideas with AI. Enjoy the episode.

0:40Josh, welcome to the pod. And I can't wait to hear what you have to say. Thanks for having me on, Greg. I'm pumped to talk shop. All right. So maybe walk us through how this whole thing happened. Cause it's a crazy story. It's absurd is what it is, Greg. Like, I don't know if you're numb to it, but like, as an, I was telling this to, uh, I went for coffee this morning. I was telling this to like a barista and he was like, that's insane. Like guy, guy steals an idea from the internet and then like ends up like flipping it for $15 ,000. Like what kind of world do you people live in? That's right.

1:19Yeah. Yes. What world do we live in? Like there's, yes, we're in some sort of weird unicorn bubble. I feel like this entire story can be told in tweets. And so that's sort of what we're going, I'm going to attempt to do here. You posted on, what day was this? July 14th. This is 10 days ago. you tweet the about an ai agent that finds expired.com domains so i um i did not see this tweet initially however someone who follows me did they they just tagged me with some you know with an emoji and uh and then i replied that i had plans this week because i i saw that tweet and knew that like it was going to eat at me and then i tweet let's see where is it oh that i'm building this yeah so this is what the next day which by the way you know you know what you did here i don't think a lot of people realize is you committed you you made yourself on the hook for doing it right you publicly said i'm doing this thing yeah i that's um that's my addiction to twitter so um i i just have to like it's a that's great content right like if i if i say i'm posting about it.

2:37So like, um, my previous startup was called bare metrics, like a business analytics platform. I sold it back in 2020. Uh, but like in 2013, 2013, I think I had a very similar tweet where, uh, Stripe had just started. Like they were still at really early days. Nobody had really built anything on their API other than just like integrating it for payments. But as far as like apps built on top of Stripe. Nobody else had really done anything. So like I made a tweet that said something like SAS or like Stripe analytics, a company. Um, I'm building it tonight. Like coffee brewed. This was like at like 7 PM or something.

3:19And, um, and that was the kind of thing that like I, you know, over the course of about two weeks or something, I built this tool that ended up like i sold for like millions of dollars back in 2020 like but that that resulted in this or it started the impetus for it was this tweet that i made and so like i find myself doing that a lot habitually where like if i think of something i'll tweet about it and then like that just brings up you know first customers a lot of times come from these kind of tweets like it's self-serving um to some extent and it does it does provide a little bit of accountability um but yeah so like the next morning at 8 50 i tweeted about it however i had been up since i typically get up around like 4 30 or 5 in the morning and i had been working on it already at that point like a few hours um and so that was but that was 24 hours later i tweeted from your tweet i i committed to it basically and then i just kept tweeting about it in a thread and um and then by let's see what time was this 7 p.m that same day it was live so um that was that was sort of like the from your idea to the time that like i actually launched it was like less than 36 hours i think people are going to want to know how you actually did that yeah so um the the nitty-gritty of like pulling that off there's so many things here right like you see in the in the thread here i'm talking about buying domains like i first got the dot ai that was available for namesnack now um actually let's this will be great so let's see if i can okay so in Claude um finding names for stuff is just maddening um specifically when it comes to finding domains that are available so what I've been doing is I have um who is MCP um which we can talk about that if you want to that's really getting into the weeds that will check the availability of domains right here in Claude chat but like let me give you an example so um um what i did before i even figured out names now was like i have to figure out the name of something because if i can't if i can't like name the folder i'm going to put this stuff in or like when i'm generating code i don't i can't reference the product like if i don't have a name for it it will drive me crazy so like the very first thing i do is name the thing now started doing this thing a couple weeks ago where I'll be like, I need to name an app that helps people find expired domain names, come up with words related to find or snipe was I think one word

6:32or acquire related to domains so it comes up with 20 ideas here just right out of the gate fine and then it should hit that who is yep so now it starts going through using that mcp to see what's available so i just did this for i don't know 30 minutes or an hour or something where it does all this, it'll go through all 20 of them. And then at the end, it might be like, I couldn't find anything. Or here are the three dot AIs. There were no dot coms. And I'll just say 20 more, 50 more, whatever. And I'll do this until I've got 200 random things. And because it's all within the conversation of Claude, every time it will basically summarize like, okay, after all this, here are all the dot coms that are available.

7:23here are here's the dot coms and the dot ais that are available like it'll just summarize it keeps summarizing it for me and it'll even give its opinion you know on like what's uh what's available what's probably you know what's your best bet like what's the best pick out of all these from a naming perspective um which people often tell me like they're big you know they're always like the dot com's not available the dot al isn't available like all the good domains are thousands of dollars and it's just not it's it's not true like there is there are available domains that are uh snappy and catchy that you could get for 10 tens of dollars right and my first reaction to when i saw your tweet your quote tweet around i'm building this it's called namesnag i was like this is going to crush um just because of the name like the name is so good that sometimes like when you have a good name to something um it kind of sets a floor for how much it's worth just because of the name and the concept sure i and a lot of the stuff i also have a background i went school for design so like i have this um i look at everything through this lens of like oh will this work from like a branding perspective or some sort of design perspective like i hate like if something looks weird from a like the way that the word looks or something like there's this like mental block for me where if like man i just hate how that will probably look if i try to you know do a logo for that or something like um you know if if one word ends in the letter p and the next word starts in a letter p i know that's like that'll be just impossible from a branding perspective or something like that so like a lot of times i'm i'm rapidly also thinking through branding stuff as well um as these things are coming up you know um but i mean like here yeah we found we found.com and.ai's that are available so that was what i did with namesnag you know i mean and then but that's the thing with the claude stuff is like because it's got this all this context i could literally just be like three more and it'll repeat the whole thing and it's so easy it's just ridiculous how easy it is to try this stuff out and to brainstorm this stuff um and get ideas so like this is my favorite thing as of late for ideas uh because like i want the the some tld to be available whether that's.com.ai.app.co i don't know whatever it doesn't matter you can try any of that stuff um so that was what um was the initial um let's see if any of those were available yeah so i don't think people are using i call it clode i don't think people are using clode like this by the way um i haven't seen i'd never i'd really never used it until the mcp stuff yeah like that's that's really kind of what because i'm sort of nerd out over chat gpt and specifically like oh three that model and like the deep research stuff yeah so but when i could start connecting this to other stuff that that's sort of like made it click for me and obviously i use it their their code stuff is what i is my weapon of choice for like actually building stuff but yeah the domain name the naming stuff incredible kills it for me kills it okay so you named it so i named it um so let me switch back to you got a really good name step one so yeah yeah so i got the dot com and the dot a dot ai ai was available i did the dot com was like 5 000 i think and i did uh but they had a payment plan so i was like okay whatever i have nothing to lose here i'm just paying a few hundred bucks a month on this thing and we'll see which by the way a lot of people don't realize that if you find a domain that is really incredible and is five thousand dollars ten thousand fifteen thousand a lot of people will rent the domain to you yeah right and a lot of these there it's in this particular case it was uh it was listed on um it's adam.com a-t-o-m.com and like they it's already built in like i didn't have to go and like contact the seller or anything like that i mean it was essentially all automated um which is why i was able to buy it that morning and then like buy i could use it that evening you know i I wasn't having to negotiate a bunch of stuff or whatever.

12:20But if you're vibe coding something and you're trying to do something similar to this, doing something like finding a great domain, maybe leasing it, and then maybe flipping it is a really interesting way to think about it. Yeah, so it lowers sort of your risk, right? Especially if you can lease it and not even make payments towards owning it. Like, I mean, there are cases where you can, the person who owns it was just like, I'll just lease it to you, whatever. And then whenever you're done with it, That's the end. That was still as a nine o 'clock that morning, I got both domains that I wanted.

12:55So then I just started building. And we can talk about that in a second here. But like, you'll see. So what time is this? That was it? That was at 1130 a.m. I was talking about how I'd already built the back end for it. And then like a minute later, I posted this first pass a logo so like what i'm doing is while i'm sort of vibe coding this thing and the the ai is running in the background building this stuff i'm an illustrator which you know you could be an illustrator figma camba whatever designing this thing so the first thing i did and i don't let's see i had this idea of like the dot what was sticking in my head was the idea of like these you care about the TLD that you're getting, the.com, the.ai, whatever.

13:44So let's focus on a dot. So that was the initial impetus for this sort of dot namesnag thing. I'm a sucker for slightly rounded typefaces, so that was that initial idea. I was kind of going with this green. um then i started thinking well how does this look inside an avatar like you know a little square or circle so we need something smaller and then that led to like well what if we do something like you know this where all right just a slightly more interesting dot um then i cleaned that up a little bit and ended up on that which obviously slaps just obviously i just felt felt good yeah And I'm, you know, and I can blue is super cliche in the tech world, but like, whatever.

14:37I like the blue. Now that I posted that on Twitter, like, here's my first pass. And there's a guy named Derek who has sort of like, whenever I post these side projects, he's like, hey, man, I made a logo for you. So, and then I'll be like, oh, man, that's legit. send me a stripe invoice link and i'll send you some money so this has happened maybe like five times now where he does this and then i just give him money uh unprompted um so you know you could just do things and so so then he basically sends me this um you know which a little bit cleaner uh gets rid of the rounded stuff which is fine i think it feels slightly more professional to me and so uh so i bring the the logo mark into illustrator this like in thing and then that sort of where we landed was like this this iteration is what made the site so you have you have really good branding you you took a first stab at it and then someone you know did the last mile so i think the the lesson there is you know these people are out there and you know even if you're not a trained illustrator like you can use tools to to to take a first stab and you know and then and then get get someone for not an exorbitant amount of money to take to to to take something to the i think people tend to overthink this and there were lots of people who were like well what what tool are you using to design the logo assuming that it was ai generated yeah um which is fair and also completely valid to do so there's no reason you can't just like ask chat gpt to make you some logo especially in the early stages yeah but you need to have an idea you need to have some a concept right yes you should you should if you think put yourself in the shoes of like an art director or something right or like a creative director who's like trying to uh give some directions it was the same way with like you know in the chat there about coming up with domain idea is like i gave a few words that i wanted to kind of like focus in on right so then it can just act like a thesaurus based on the wording or the tone and go from there so like as with all things ai the more context you can provide it the better it'll yeah and you might you might want to say like you know i you know pretend you know this could be the prompt like pretend you're a creative director i look up to people like josh pigford from namesnag and maybe i look up to you know greg eisenberg late checkout ideabrowser.com you use those you screenshot those logos you give it the context and then see what it pumps out then you have to actually i saw this really good tweet today from jordan singer um and he said here it is the new bottleneck is no longer doing the work it's reviewing the work i think that's very true yes um so you'll review the work and then probably pass that off to someone who takes it to the to the last mile yeah i there's um so you briefly mentioned maybe there so like at maybe uh there's four of us working on that product and um one of them is is i i'll i would say another engineer because i'm doing a ton of coding but he's the actual engineer like he's the the one who's actually really knows what he's doing on the engineering side and so much of um our process between he and i is like i'll vibe code something super fast just to test out the idea or the ux behind it or whatever and then i'll code i'll code it then i'll push it to get and then he'll go in and like essentially clean up my my mess so like I'm passing off a lot of this to someone who's, uh, has a better idea of sort of like how this affects all the other parts of the code or whatever, you know?

18:56So there's a lot of this handing off that happens, um, throughout the whole process, right? Even the logo here for namesnag was handed off to someone who's can, can probably do a better job. Yeah, that's right. yeah okay cool so we got that and then what happened yeah so logo um so the and i'll walk i'm not going to just like cover all the tweets here but i do think this plays a part in sort of the story here so um what you see me doing here is like i i post a poll about like how do we style the domain the domain do we do this you know capitalize the s lowercase whatever uh post a screenshot of like proof that I've actually got something working.

19:41And this entire time is me making this almost this community effort on some level. To me, what's super interesting about social is not just constantly broadcasting, right? Like it's the interactivity part. It's me posting something and someone has an idea. Me posting something, a logo, and someone responds with a different logo. You know, it's someone saying, I like that feature. What if you did this? And that's incredibly beneficial, both to me as I'm sort of doing this, sitting here in a box by myself, but it's also building up a bit of hype on the product itself. So I keep yapping about it and then get to the point where it's like, hey, we've launched.

20:37Again, that was like 7 o 'clock that night. Basically, I worked on it for the better part of 12 hours or so that day. But I think later that evening, like I stayed up another couple of hours and was at, I mean, we did$1 ,000 or something in revenue within a couple of hours of launching this thing. and subscription stuff because i had just been talking about it all day right like because i was posting polls and screenshots and uh asking for feedback on things um i think it's more than that in my opinion i think it's when i zoom out you because i know a lot of people are gonna be like well josh has 50 000 followers of course he got a thousand dollars mrr and like in a few hours but what if you look at i'm building yeah this i'm building this uh click on that click on that i just want to see how many impressions you got from that 145 000 like if you go to you know go to your twitter your twitter account like you don't normally get 145 000 oh right you know what like this is a this is like a a big one and you're getting 11 000 go like to let's see about cookies for breakfast you know you're getting you're getting in the single digit thousands of views and you got 145 times more impressions now let's break that down why did you do that what what happened you jumped off a trend basically you found a tweet that was going viral right in this case it was about a startup idea yeah and you quote retweeted it and which i did not realize this like mine my quote retweet uh got you know not as much as your as your original tweet almost almost right yeah um almost so it's like yes it very much though was like jumping on to uh that your your your tweet that started going quasi viral yeah so that's what people don't understand about these social platforms specifically x2 is like find something you can there's tweets going viral every day and there's a startup idea related to um to that like I saw go to Brett from DesignJoy's Twitter so I've had this guy on the pod once and here he said click the latest his latest tweet so there's this app that's going by right now I think it's making like two three hundred thousand dollars a day of revenue which is crazy you know and he designed it it's called tea dating advice and it's like an anonymous app to basically score men that they go on dates with.

23:34And so it's an obviously viral idea. And he says, I'm the designer behind the mega viral tea dating app. If anyone wants to build the equivalent for men, my DMs are open. I have plenty of ideas. So yes, this guy, Brett from DJ, can go build this. But you can also, quote, retweet this and be like, I'm building this. And then all of a sudden, how many views this guy? He just, you know, it's gotten 50. 55 ,000. Like, all of a sudden, you're like siphoning views. and then people are following along your story and then they become your first customers. As I was posting this stuff, I think there are a number of comments that talked about how if anybody else is building this, it's game over.

24:13Josh will beat you to it. Knowing how fast I'll build stuff. And I think that the problem is most people overthink this stuff, right? I have a skill set to building fast. if only because I've put in the reps to know how to build stuff really fast. So here's a list of what is it? 78 projects over the past 20 years of things that I've built. And this doesn't include everything that I built and then just shut down because I didn't completely finish it because I realized, oh, this isn't going to work. There was a Twitter bookmark AI processing thing that I was building. got real close to finishing it but then i realized oh i'm gonna have to spend fifty thousand dollars a month for twitter's api to like actually make this work so that those things don't show up on this list here so that there's there's 78 things here on the list but it's probably it's it's hundreds uh of things where i've started something right so i'm very good at like the zero to one for most things like just starting something and seeing what happens and so i've put in the reps and there's no reason someone can't take like go to like idea browser every day and just freaking build the thing even if you uh i told this people who like new new um say freelance designers who are like well how do i how do i get clients i don't have a portfolio well just like make up stuff man see an idea for a company and just make a logo for it or design a website or design the app or you know do like brett's doing where you have some idea and he's so he designed it he didn't like build the app but he designed it like you can do that you can just do that right and there's no reason you can't take something the an idea of every day on idea browser and say okay here today this week i'm going to time box myself for the week to build this thing out and i'm going to tweet about it constantly annoyingly even and eventually you'll build up a following just around that even i was talking to someone who he's you know 16 17 years old and he wants to go to business school and i was like what does that even mean in 2025 to go to business school like what does that even mean like you should go to shipping school right i mean yeah and you should you know use idea browser use or or just come up with ideas on your own like use chat gpt like whatever it is just get the reps in to know how to you know take an idea from zero to one all the stuff that we're talking about you know the the like to us and to you josh like it's it's it's intuition but you've built it over time right so people need to build that intuition yeah i think that there's everybody wants and it feels ai has made it feel like there's a shortcut and to some extent on some parts of it there are but the reason you know some of the questions people were asking or wanted to know from this podcast were like what you know do you are you using some sort of like boilerplate template for a code or whatever which i'm not and like a lot of that stuff is just, I just know how these things are going to work because I've done it so many times and I haven't done it because I got paid to do it.

27:42Right. Like I'm not doing this, working at some company or whatever. I'm doing it because I enjoy building stuff. And so I ended up getting the reps in because I I'm obsessive about it. Um, and you, you just do that and you talk about it and then you know yes uh my 50 000 followers or whatever is helpful that's that's a level of distribution but like that came from me being on twitter for since 2007 right like almost 20 years and just tweeting constantly uh about stuff um not saying that you need to like 20 years to build up a following but like you build up a community around the stuff that you're doing by just putting in the work and yes you can't but i will say it was harder for us back in the day because we had to build followers and then then we had followers to distribute and that took a lot of hard work today with the for you sure or you didn't didn't exist didn't exist right so yeah there's people who have like the uh the tweet that when you know I think it was one of the most viral tweets of all time.

28:53It's like, share a piece of lore. Did you see that tweet? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes. Go to that tweet. Absurd. Absurd. I think it got like 1.3 billion views. There it is. 1.2 billion. Yeah, give me a break. First of all, that person is getting a check for half a million dollars. When I saw this account, I think it had 2 ,000 followers. Followers? Almost 30 ,000 now? yeah that was that was not possible even 10 years ago yeah so if i could summarize like my takeaway from your story is find good ideas or come up with good ideas um figure you know have a positioning and brand in the market that's that sticks out bring people along for the journey um and just keep trying to make it better i i think there's people are so afraid of of putting out stuff that um you know there's like that reed hoffman quote about like if you've launched something that's like perfect or whatever you've waited too late or something like that like like waiting to ship perfect software like you've already waited too long you like you just have to ship stuff and uh a lot of it's going to look bad it should it should almost by by definition should like be kind of gnarly um because otherwise you're starting to make assumptions about what people will use um what features they want when it's talking we're talking about software like you just have to kind of do things and then see get feedback on it um and and like with namestack there was all sorts of feedback around people saying like well this doesn't work or like this is a bad idea which is fine like people are allowed to critique stuff um but if anything that means like that's a good thing that you're getting that kind of feedback because it means people are paying attention um before we head out what what would you have done differently in this project um i i don't know that i would have done anything different because i i really there's another tweet in here which it would take me 10 minutes to find but like um so i posted this what what day of the week was this on um whoops july 15th was what was that like a wednesday or something um that was a tuesday so that was on a tuesday that thursday i uh i occasionally will like go up take the dog and go up to the mountain cabin in the mountains and just spend a few days kind of doing whatever um so like that uh thursday uh i went and i like spent the first couple of days just building out i scrapped the entire first thing that i built all of the code and literally built it from scratch again on like that thursday so like two days later i built version two of this thing um and i think the keeping like if i had not sold it i probably would have kept that same mentality of like let's scrap it and like let's build the next iteration of this and to me that's what ai enables is this this sort of rapid iteration on things where you have an idea and then you realize oh here's some things that didn't work okay well you can just build it again.

32:36Like it's not, we didn't spend six months building some complex piece of software, spent a few hours and not, and I'm not tied to it. I now have learned, I've got new information. So let me just build it again. Um, and to me, like, that's one of the big takeaways is, is just, you know, I, I shipped two versions of this thing in like a 48 hour period. and um you can apply that to almost any side of business including marketing you know growth stuff code whatever you just you just keep building stuff really fast and and don't get like tied to it right it's everything's not your baby amen brother so people have asked you questions we're going to go through three or four of those questions and answer them cool let's see so somebody asked her about selling.

33:27So this is actually a decent topic for us to talk about here. So, um, they asked when I knew I should sell it or do I build to sell things? So, um, first off, I don't, I don't typically build anything to sell it. I build it because I'm trying to learn something. Like that's my motivation is I want, I'm teaching myself some piece of code or some concept, I guess. So I don't build stuff to sell, but I do tend to assume I will not hold on to things for a long time. So this is the same reason that I can build V2 48 hours later because I'm not so married to V1 that I built and think that I've done something amazing.

34:12Like if I've learned what I needed to learn from it, then like let's move on. um and that was the case for this you know your idea was like you could build a 1.2 million arr business which is entirely possible i wasn't necessarily i didn't build it because i thought that i could make 1.2 million dollars right so i sold it for like 15 000 uh eight days later and it's 100 could have sold it for more but like i'm not i wasn't building it to sell it i wasn't building it to make 1.2 million dollars like i was building it because i wanted to learn um stuff about like who is records and then the ability for ai to like process um all this data and um you know semantic search stuff like super nerdy things that just happened to fit this project and that struck a chord for me so i decided to build it um but that's sort of my motivation is almost exclusively for learning things um more than anything there's a couple of questions about like selling it or like this person here's like leave money on the table and not list it on like acquired.com um i think there there one idea that i have had here is like it would be kind of interesting if i wasn't actually building a full-scale sort of vc-backed startup also um along with all these side projects is it would be kind of fun to every week, pick some idea, build it out.

35:42And then you just sort of sell a startup in a box. I think there's this thing. So in the past since 2023, in the past, like two years, I've built all these different apps, like sold for 8 ,000, sold for 25 ,000, sold for 5 ,000, sold for 12 ,000, sold for 24 ,000. Like I think I've probably done, I don't know, close to a hundred thousand dollars over the past couple of years, just selling off random side projects that I built over the course of like a week. So I think that there's, if, if your obsession is just building stuff, um, you could almost make that your job, you know, like there's income to be had of just like taking an idea, building it and then selling it.

36:31um i think ai allows for a lot of that stuff and there's people who don't want to get in the weeds on the ai but do want a functioning tool and you could sell it um to me that would actually be kind of fun cool that's the podcast bro we did it i appreciate it josh um how many ideas did you say you've done 70 there's 78 on this list here on my website so this is the startup ideas podcast you're obviously the you're an idea person you're one of us i appreciate you coming on if people want to follow josh's journey i will include links to all the places you can get to know him better in the show notes uh check him out i told him before we hit record i told josh that he's my my ex crush of the week um because i recently found him and i've been i've been i've been consuming his tweets loving it so um you know keep it up well thanks for having me greg it was a ton of fun later