2299 - Building Software with Vibe Coding and Automation Strategies with We Live to Build's Sean Weisbrot

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0:58With us right now, Sean Weisbrot. Sean, Sean, you are the founder and CEO of We Live to Build. Your website is welivetobuild.com. You also have a pretty thriving YouTube channel, and you could just simply search on YouTube. We have a direct link to that as well. We Live to Build with Sean Weisbrot. Sean, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Well, Sean, before we kind of get going talking about your superpowers, and guess what? We're going to be talking about agentic AI again, which is critical. So if you're an avid listener of this podcast, hopefully you're seeing some patterns that a lot of high-level leaders are really bullish on agentic AI.

1:40So we're going to get to that in just a second. Sean, before we do, by the way, as of when we're recording this, congratulations. You're getting married tomorrow. Yes, I am. Wow. And on your, I get to spend, so this is our bachelor party of sorts, the day before you get hitched. So congratulations on that. But Sean, in addition to getting married, what else do you do for fun? I love table tennis, board games, golf, bowling, archery, bike riding. I lift weights at the gym five days a week. I love sauna and jacuzzis. I'm constantly just trying to do things. Are you fairly, you mentioned table tennis first.

2:24Are you fairly competent at that? I mean, I can't play in like a tournament, but I can beat people when I play sometimes. I would call myself an advanced beginner. What do beginner, beginner, what mistakes do beginners, beginners make in ping pong or table tennis? Well, not being able to hit the ball back. or if you hit the ball back, maybe the angle is wrong. Thank you, professor. Let me ask it this way. Is there a tip that you'd recommend? Like, listen, if there's one thing you do in table tennis, here's going to be one hack that I'd recommend. Anything come to mind? Move your body and make sure you focus on your core so that you're using the core of your body to have this rhythm so that you can hit the ball back.

3:14I don't know, I'm left-handed, so I'm using this side. but yeah yeah that's something that i really struggled with in the beginning yeah you you were just doing a motion and i'm like yeah that's what it looks like when the pros play um generally they keep do do you keep how do you keep your feet planted for the most part yeah but you have to be able to move so it planted but no yeah okay because because if if they hit the ball to your left side and you hit it back to their left side they could immediately go and hit to the far right of your table and so i'm left-handed in that instance if my feet are planted there's no way i'm hitting it unless i switch hands on the paddle and very few people train with both sides so most people can't get the ball in time unless you have the ability to pretty much constantly be moving so planted yes but softly planted soft planted it's kind of like um pickleball and in that same regard pretty much you're if you're doing it well and you're a close up on the net if you're playing doubles.

4:13Yeah. The difference though, is that pickleball, you're standing on the table. Yeah. Right. Which is considered bad form in table tennis, as I'm told. Generally, yes. Sean, share with us the work that you do with We Live to Build. So We Live to Build is primarily a podcast I started five years ago. I've done 260 interviews of business owners running seven to nine figures annually. And I use that as a foundation to build a network of people that I can refer clients to or bring them into what I'm working with now, which is I've invested in an AI and automations agency. So I'm actively working on building up their referral network because it's a lot easier for me to access people that can refer than would be potential clients.

5:03So mostly I'm looking to invest in companies, advise companies, and then I use the podcast as a way to kind of source all of the opportunities. Yeah. Well, share with me. So your work in YouTube and the podcast is called We Live to Build. Yeah. What sorts of content are you sharing? And obviously, here's my segue question that's going to lead into a brief discussion about agentic AI. Because that seems to be a popular topic that you talk about with your guests. So there's a founder interview and an investor interview that I do. That's the most common type of content on the channel. But when I'm not doing that content, I'm also interviewing AI voice mode.

5:50So like Gemini has a voice mode, Grok has a voice mode. So I'm interviewing them. And I'm also teaching about AI. I'm starting a vibe coding series pretty soon where I'm going to be vibe coding a business idea that I had. It's going to be a web application. And that's about market intelligence and competitor intelligence. But when I'm interviewing people right now, the focus is on how is AI impacting your business, impacting your clients, impacting your industry? How is it changing the way you run your business and how you think about your world in general? Yeah. And so I ask you to kind of maybe just give us a quick 101.

6:29So When you describe what vibe coding is, how would you define that? Vibe coding is when you use an AI to prompt it to create software for you. Okay. And? Go a step further, please. You mean more specific? Yeah, yeah. How would that look? Give us a little one-minute primer or 101.

7:01So it depends on what your goals are, right? So there's companies like Lovable, Bolt, and V0, which are pretty good at developing websites. I've literally one shot, we call it one shot. It's like when you use a single prompt to develop an entire website, obviously then you go and you make tweaks and things to get it to what you want it to be. But these apps pretty much do a pretty good job very easily. If you're looking at developing actual software, you want to move into something more like Cursor because Cursor allows you to work with Claude, which is one of the best models for being able to develop software.

7:43And that requires you to know a little bit more about other tools like GitHub, Supabase, and Netlify. If you want details on that, GitHub is the the application that helps you to store your code for your application. Then Supabase is the database tool that you use to host all of the data for it. It generally works with something like Postgres, which is a well-known database system. And Netlify is the hosting provider. It's kind of like your hostinger or your SiteGround or your Bluehost, something like this. So when you have these kinds of external tools that support your ability to develop the software, then you can work with something like Cursor.

8:28That's a desktop application where you can start to work within Claude and code the actual application that you want, which is able to work with the front end and the back end because it can hook into these other tools to be able to update and push code and pull code and all of these. I don't know how technical I can go. Yeah, no, no, that's wonderful. So, you know, the remarkable thing here is that, you know, super tech, super non super techies like, you know, obviously you have to have some degree of comfort and you have to know what to ask for or know how to push back and so forth. But it's remarkable just how quickly with some of these no code, low code tools you can bring an MVP to market.

9:12it. You know, so our platform pod verified, I mean, it's, it's been a couple of months and we did, you know, bring on a, you know, a developer who specializes in this, but it's been remarkable how much I as a kind of non-coder you know, I'm able to work in an environment and gets at least simple things fixed. And also I think just spec out what's possible, but yeah, platforms like were you softer, lovable, bubble? I mean, these are really incredible, just how fast. It's really exciting. What's the, you said you've worked on some no-code, low-code projects. What have you worked on lately? Or what are you going to be working on?

9:55Or have you not shared that yet? So I had built a to-do list application for myself. I never intended it for anyone else to be used. So it's not publicly available. But I built that in about two days, I'd say. I also built a tool called Spendomi, which I'm kind of deprecating now just because it didn't really work out the way I intended. I spent about three months on that. And it was designed to be this application that connects to your QuickBooks so that we could pull in only your income, sorry, only your expenses and ignore your income so that we could get very clear on what you're spending and where it's going.

10:36and there was AI already built into it. The AI was trained on your data so you could chat with your data, which took me a little bit of time to build. That's been the most complicated thing I've done so far. I also built a Shopify report system so that you could see what your costs are there. Right now, the thing I'm getting ready to start building is a market intelligence and competitive intelligence platform that's gonna be far more focused on agents where the goal is for you to be able to understand how the market's talking about you in real time and then assess those things and give you feedback about how you should be responding to it in order to suit your goals.

11:17And then the agents would actually go and make those responses on your behalf and kind of create the content that would support your ability to respond in a fast enough time period to be able to minimize any sort of damage of its crisis or take advantage of good press, things like that. So that's an idea I had. And I actually went to Gemini and I filmed myself having Gemini interview me about what this product should be. And the end result of the video was that I had the documentation I needed so that in the next video, I can set up my environment and start to vibe code with it. So I'll be recording myself every step of the way, vibe coding this software to completion so that people can get to understand just how easy it is to actually come up with an idea and code it.

12:05And I don't have a technical background. Yeah, which is kind of like, I'm a fabulous coder when I don't actually have to code. Like, I know what I want. Like, I have a vision. So this is really exciting for visionaries. And of course, Agentic AI really is quite remarkable as well. What are you doing? And you provide services around Agentic AI. Is that right? So I am not specifically providing these services. The agency that I've invested in is an AI and automations agency. So they can provide agents, but it's not the focus of We Live to Build. What is something that you've seen done with Agentic AI or you've done yourself that you're like, okay, that's pretty amazing.

12:49What's been impressing you lately? I think everything is impressive. I see people all over the internet talking about different agents that they're making, whether it's for automating the lead generation process or automating the sales process or automating their HR process. There's all sorts of agents that can be made. The thing that a lot of people have to realize is that you can't just have something out of the box work. I couldn't create an agent that then automatically works for everybody. It doesn't work like that. The agent has to understand you and your business and your needs. And so each agent has to be built custom.

13:28So if you're a business owner looking to get into agents, if you're going to attempt it yourself, it would be maybe harder if you don't have the in-house knowledge of how to do it, which like the vast majority of people don't know anything about it. So pretty much everyone's in the same playing field here. Yeah. Um, but it's also very easy for people because they don't know to get played by someone that also doesn't know who charges them a lot of money for something that may not perform. So I would very much urge people to be very careful about trusting people outside of your business to use an agent to automate your business.

14:07And that's one of the reasons why I invested in this agency. I've known this guy for 28 years. I trust him. He was the CEO of my last tech company. So I trust him because I know when he was my COO that he was constantly stopping me. I wanted to move fast. I wanted to do things. And he was like, no, we have to think about this. We have to make sure that we do it right. And he constantly annoyed me in that regard, but I love him. So I know that he was doing it with good intent. And so I trust him to be able to do this for people. But I do have other people coming to me and wanting me to promote this service from them.

14:43And I just don't trust most people. Awesome. All right. Sean, how do you work with someone that's listening to our conversation and they want to know, okay, well, how do I engage with Sean? What can we do together? Where would you lead them? I would say the best thing is if they are running a seven plus figure brand, they can reach out to me to possibly be a guest on my podcast. And through that process, we can kind of discover what's possible. Because I'm always looking for potential people to refer clients to or potential referral partners for the AI agency. And my network is constantly expanding.

15:23So there's always new opportunities to be reviewed. All right. Excellent. All right. Well, Sean Weisbrot, again, your website is welivetobuild.com. That also is the name of your YouTube channel slash podcast. Again, it's We Live to Build with Sean Weisbrot. We've got those links in the show notes. Sean, it's been a great conversation. Again, congratulations, my friend. Very exciting that we get to be hanging out on the eve of your wedding day. So congratulations on that. And I wish the bride and groom well. Sean, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, is there anything else that you would lead folks to other than your gift registry?

16:07so we we actually live in Portugal so there's no people don't really do registries outside the U.S. so I would say the most important thing for me is just the YouTube channel because it's how people can find out especially if they're looking to get into AI and try to understand a little bit better for themselves they can learn more about it from the interviews I'm doing and from the videos that I make outside of the interviews where they can learn a little bit more about what AI is the models that they can use and these kinds of things. I love it. All right, Sean Weisbrot, congratulations. Thank you so much for joining us.

16:39Thanks.

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