Using AI to revolutionize video game development with Scenario CEO Emmanuel de Maistre | E1741

0:00the feedback I'm getting from the users themselves, is they find this technology is just augmenting them. It's augmenting their creativity. It's making them go faster, further away. So they love it. And if you are, you know, have you seen that research saying, if you are the smarter you are, the better result you get out of ChatGPT. I think the same applies for images. The more creative you are, then you're going to get an even higher level of creativity. And yes, you can pretend being an artist, even though you're not one, you're not trained as a game artist. you can pretend being one with this or you can approach being one with this but if you're a good game artist you're going to be an even better game artist with AI This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist House of Macadamias is the next big health trend.

1:02Get 20 % off your first purchase and a free bottle of cold-pressed macadamia oil at houseofmacadamias.com slash twist by using code twist20. And Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups i've never been more excited about a technology at least since the internet and the pc than i am with artificial intelligence and the pace at which it's evolving and here at this week in startups we are all over this trend you can join our sub stack you can subscribe to the podcast go to the youtube channel youtube.com this weekend and you're going to see a constant stream every week you're going to see five or 10 of these amazing demos of what is being built in the ai space scenario is the startup today they're using generative ai to create and produce creative assets for the video game industry and the ceo and co-founder is emmanuel de mastray uh welcome to the show emmanuel hey jason thanks glad to be here all right so um we know the video game industry we know the assets take a long time and are very expensive to produce tier one or they call them tier one games or title one games uh those are the ones that cost what do they call them triple triple triple a so triple a games those are hundreds of millions of dollars that's call of duty and then you have apps on your phone that might cost a million dollars to make or five million dollars to make what are those clash of clan angry birds games tend to cost do you know what those costs could could be could be from like a few hundred k to uh dozens of millions actually if you look at uh even like angry birds and so on your phone is pretty expensive um and it's not just the cost it's uh it takes a while and it's risky and those are double a games or what do they call those uh double a games are typically pc games console games but not like call of duty uh level god then you mobile is a category uh part and then you have all the new web 3 games wave ah yeah so at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars on average millions of dollars and sometimes even tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars and a big part of that is creating these creative assets there are thousands of designers you know working on some of these games I understand or at least hundreds of them working on a single title is that correct designers game designers product designers art directors technical directors technical artists it's a whole crew it's a yeah it's big it's big okay and so you're going to use generative ai which is to generate images um through typically text prompts i'm guessing but you tell me and let's just do a demo here i know you have an incredible demo so let's see it i definitely can switch to a demo let's uh yeah always great show don't tell okay so here we go i see you're in an editor of some kind i'm on the web uh it's a web uh it's a web browser it's chrome okay uh and the website is app.scenario.com pretty easy um what you see here is my my home page with some of the images i was making just before the before the show oh great definitely like like gaming related i'm like trying to uh you know iterate around some concept around a treasure chest that i'm trying to produce and um look how consistent these uh images are uh in shapes and proportions and only the color is being is being changed and we are not in photoshop at all i'm prompting the color i'm prompting the shape and i'm prompting the um the proportions of the image show us how that works yeah so you're showing like uh what i think they call in the industry a loot box or a treasure chest you might find this treasure chest in a game uh how did you propped it?

5:06What did you type in to get that unique looking treasure test? I was, I'm going to, I'm going to show you, but before we do so, please, please understand these treasure chests came from what we call a generator, which is a custom trained AI model with people's data. So instead of using a very horizontal model, such as mid journey DALI, Stability Fusion, we do let people make their own custom model with their data. And that's what they love because when, go ahead, I mean, when I do so. So if I'm Call of Duty and I'm on the fifth or sixth Call of Duty in the series where I'm Angry Birds making or Plants vs.

5:41Zombies, I could upload all the artwork in every previous iteration of the game and be starting on third base. You could upload all of it or you could pick the certain portion of the games that you want to train a model on, such as characters, backgrounds, vehicles, and so on. So in that case, we have chest. You know what I can do before going into the chest one? I can show you another even more relevant generator, which is something custom we've made for a demo, which is called Bubbleverse. So the Bubbleverse is a potential game made with that art. So look at the rendering, the colors. We're looking at a bunch of beautiful 3D rendered, you know, looks almost like, I forgot the name of that famous director, Wes Anderson.

6:28These are Wes Anderson, beautiful colors, slightly Japanese inspired, perhaps beautiful 3D models of bubbly type characters and cars and vehicles and trees and homes and everything. So you only needed 25 images to upload into here to generate this. These might have been done by a human who made a collection of 25 bubbly images. Absolutely. And now let's start prompting. Let's start creating from the same style. And so, Jason, give me an idea of a, let's say, a vehicle, or let's say maybe a background. How about a hamburger? Oh, let's do hamburger. So let's do hamburger. Yeah, hamburger. Well, that's pretty easy.

7:13So you see, I just typed hamburger on the left, and now it generates. We're going to wait probably between 10 to 20 seconds for the images to generate. It's GPU-based, cloud-based. But why do we do so? We're like, what should the hamburger look like? It's pretty basic, right? do you have any specific feature? let's make the hamburger be

7:37on a bed of flowers and make it the color green cool so here is a green hamburger on a bed of flowers I'm just prompting it generates that's crazy but before yeah before we we wait for your green hamburger to show up uh let's look at your first uh session your first uh amazing so that's the first one second one third one hey people oh by the way this is like a character mixed with a hamburger which which happens sometimes so and for people who are listening for people who are listening what you're seeing is instantly something that i would say is game ready just in my professional opinion if i was playing a casual game and it threw up a hamburger any of these hamburgers would be acceptable to me as a legitimate item and it was created for free for now um and look at the the style of the hamburger is definitely it's not photorealistic it is not voxelized it is in the style of your of the person the generator and so i did not need to go into describing all the visual feature have you seen prompt engineering like people sure like 50 words and it's super complex yes you didn't have to say do this in a wes anderson style with a color palette that includes these colors that is uh you know got depth and shadows or whatever and then we did green hamburger and here are the green hamburgers and they subtly made the bun green and they put some lettuce around it and all kinds of fun options that it just decided to make yeah and so in your case we do have your green hamburger we do have the bed of flowers though which which again could be expected so on the again on the on the left side of the screen for those who are on the on the audio we have a bunch of settings and parameters to play with okay just guidance and if i increase the guidance a bit and run another generation it should emphasize it should increase the weight of the prompt and so So it's all about giving artists, mostly artists, game artists, giving artists the right tools, the right levers, so they can control the AI and stop randomly prompting forever and ever on Discord and in some platforms.

10:02The game studio we work with, they want to get their image in the least amount of time. They want it to be very efficient. Production has to be efficient. And so that's what Scenario is about. that like stop exploring ai forever train your own model that will drive consistency and then play with the settings and then you you nail your uh designs and so on there we go what's great about this is you're really augmenting an artist's work so instead of an artist having to tediously make let's call it 500 objects for this game this bubble game and then every week update it with let's say they come up with 10 new characters devices and or 50 that would be 50 times 50 weeks uh 2500 more so you'd have 3000 objects in this game you could have an artist just make um 25 test images and then somebody else a game designer can just with their judgment do everything from there so you really just need a somebody to start you out with a design style and then you're home free from there, correct?

11:08Correct, correct. And out of the 40 ,000 users that we have so far on the platform, the champions are artists, game artists. And if you remember the controversy around artists and AI, I found that very interesting that actually the biggest champion for that type of technology end up being the artists themselves. All right, founders, if you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, You need to be SOC 2 compliant from third parties in order to close big deals. And you need to use Vanta if you want to do this quickly and easily. Vanta makes it so easy for you to get and renew your SOC 2.

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12:46Are any of your 40 ,000 users using this in production yet? And if they are using it in production, what is the distance between what has to happen between you making this bubbly green hamburger on a bed of lettuce and it getting into the game? How much more artistic work has to occur? So they definitely use it in production today. Not only they use it in production to make the game assets, but some games have this part of the game where the creator of the object is not just the artist, it's the player. The player gets to, in-game, generates whatever reward, weapons skins buildings i mean depending on the the theme of the game and that's you it's ai powered ugc amazing so if you were to clear out all these prompts we did and we just said do um a zombie um teenager um wearing um a football jersey um this could be if i was playing a zombie game i could say okay well i'm a football player and i'm a teenager i'd like to make my own character and it would make a bubbly designed zombie teenager with a football jersey i'm doing it right now so i first made a batch of your prompt which was zombie teenager wearing a football jersey and because i know a bit about it i prompted 3d rendered full body and then i'm gonna do apocalyptic just to give some more uh you know color um and i'm gonna add like maybe blood and then run another yeah we're not and then so the language model knows what a zombie is it knows what a teenager is it has some conception of these things from the real world it matches it with the style but even beyond a designer doing this the game could a game player could decide uh to add some characters or make a level themselves or i suppose you could have a random generator that just looks at uh just looks at common objects in the world and just makes random objects and if people engage with them it could make more of them so you could actually have a game where it just randomly types in zombie hamburger football jersey and you get whatever out of it and this could create infinite universes with infinite characters yes so here's the zombie coming for those who are listening uh what we see is blurry pictures at the beginning very noisy pictures that's what diffusion is about you add noise and you remove noise that's the that's where diffusion comes from in stability fusion typically so um definitely very very consistent uh zombies coming up with a jersey uh jersey number on it so let's pick one of them, Jason, which one would you like?

15:3918. Number 18 looks great. Yeah, number 18 looks great. 18. We're going to do variants around 18. The only issue in that case, maybe let's take the next one. So let's do this one here. And because we love it, I just do refine. And now I'm going to not only prompt the same phrase, but I'm going to iterate around that image. And I'm going to do image to image, and variants will be created around the same shape of proportions. And I'm not going to go into the tiny details, but something super cool just came out, which is composition control that lets you play again with the sort of input you want from that image.

16:20And we're going to have the results in a few minutes or in a few seconds actually. How much CPU and cloud is this taking? We know these are resource intensive. So as you're doing this, you seem to be creating four images at a time. These are really good looking images. so how much cpu is this using if could i be doing this on my local macbook or is it using 10 macbooks in the cloud no it's a aws uh based uh infrastructure it's pretty pretty uh gpu and server intensive uh i think we've spent uh more than 250k just in gpus just for the beta just in a few months and your company has about 250 000 in these gpus dedicated on servers so um you have that as a fixed cost and there's a certain number of images that create could create at a certain standard if you were divide those number of images into that cost does it wind up being a dollar per image 10 cents per image a penny per image or a fraction of a penny per image it's more of a it's more of penny to a fraction of penny though depending on the settings you might end up with images that are pretty expensive if you go into like more steps and more um uh you know advanced parameters and higher resolution images you can go into uh uh you know maybe up to like a fraction of a dollar per image oh wow you could be spending 10 cents or 25 cents an image this is an extraordinary thing because we've lived in such a deflationary moore's law we didn't know what we would do with all these cpus we thought cpus and gpus and storage was getting so plentiful that we had no use for it because hey people can't even you know tell 4k from 1080p from 480p like if i showed the average user they probably wouldn't know the difference whereas here because we're doing generative ai and it has to do so much gpu work this is actually using a lot of the gpus in the world and it's going to be constrained for some time or is this um something you think software where it's going to become more refined and we're going to just have these costs plummet 90 % a year.

18:22So costs will plummet, maybe not 90 % a year right now. Definitely they will plummet. We have seen some demos of stabilization running on a phone. Maybe not the type of advanced calculations we do, but someday, yes, diffusion models will run on phones, whether it's for text, like GPT models, or whether it's for images. And one day, because it's not quite there yet, full like 3d models it's coming especially when you make a 3d models right from the image you just generated in that case we have the initial zombie with the jersey and then i made a few variants without even touching the prompt and from these variants it's reasonable to think 3d models will be made just in a click and that's that's extreme extremely deflationary as you just as you just and you could take random prompts um where you could ask you could train chat gpt for just a language model you could say go look at i don't know reddit or twitter find different characters or find inspiration from these locations it could be a newspaper it could be uh youtube videos let's assume you have permission you could say look at the top trending characters or people or scenarios on this website it could be an open source one it could be like um 500 pixels right you say go on 500 pixels and just start making me images or characters and just start building up crazy amounts of libraries it's extraordinary uh where we're at right now um in terms of building stuff and develop localized versions of games develop seasons per you know holidays halloween christmas news memes you know like this could be highly personalized anything that goes into the prompt box could be you know plugged into other pipelines so this will drop the cost of making this drops the cost of making a season of let's say they're doing the Christmas season the holiday season of plants versus zombies what did you guess a game like that would spend on that refresh in terms of time and money and then how much would you reduce it by I got the first numbers from the first customers we have feedback is processes are 10x faster on average so they work 10x faster and for a small studio of 20 people which is rather small it's not Riot or Blizzard but for a small studio they would typically save at least 200k a year using Scenario just on concept arts not even in-game assets just concepting will save them 200k a year then you then go you know in-game assets and then come marketing assets which is a big part of the game industry as well how to automate the marketing got it so they like to make youtube ads tiktok ads twitter ads whatever all of those ads falls on the creatives now they could be making them without having creatives having to anoint every single one so this is going to knock 20 30 off the cost of running one of these studios this year you think it's probably right yes um amazing probably right yes yeah yeah uh which means they can either save that money or they could do 30 more work and delight their customers 30 more which is probably what they'll do um this is extraordinary um where will you be in one year we go to other media uh beyond 2D.

21:56We are expanding into 3D, making these not just 2D images but 3D models. We integrate, as we are doing it right now, into the game engines, which is a good go-to-market for us because that's where most of the game developers are. They're on Unity, they're on Unreal. They might want to do just this on Unity and Unreal. Obviously, we improve everything around asset management collaboration you know bring the whole studio together um and um there's a lot to do on the roadmap um better better trainings by the way better ai models train faster uh more efficiently fidelity will go way up you'll be able to do 3d models uh which means like a fortnite character could be made in here maybe um and then actually just dropped into the game um and so that's going to save a massive amount of money and time if you love snacking like i do you got to find the perfect snack it's not easy you want one that's going to remove cravings that fit your dietary goals regulates your blood glucose levels and gotta be something you look forward to eating and you know what i love i love macadamia nuts what a treat they got so many health benefits i'll give you the highlights right here they are the only nut that is rich in omega sevens that's linked to natural collagen production reducing inflammation stabilizing your glucose levels and healthy fat metabolism and the folks my friends at house of macadamias are obsessed with making the highest quality macadamia products available chocolate dipped macadamia nuts are my favorite but i also sometimes i get that coconut craving you ever get that they got a chocolate coconut macadamia bar that is amazing and it hits the spot it's not going to spike your glucose it's something healthy but it's a treat it's a treat and they just launched an amazing cold press macadamia oil with a buttery flavor and a high smoking point perfect for drizzling over meals or cooking use the code twist 20 get 20 off and for a limited time they're giving a free bottle of premium cold pressed extra virgin macadamia oil with any purchase go to house of macadamias dot com slash twist and use the code twist 20 house of macadamias dot com slash twist and use that code twist 20 so they know jay cal sent you there was one artist on reddit we read it on all in previously and on this week in startups um this artist was lamenting how um you know like this is taking a little bit of the art out of the game and uh he was kind of depressed that somebody who was an average uh artist could now do his work and now you have the ability for a prompt to do the work and eliminate their need to do the next 500 images so they just have to do the 25 what's your response to those people who maybe are bummed out about this technology the feedback i'm getting from the users themselves is they they find this technology is uh just augmenting them they're it's augmenting their creativity it's making them go faster further away so they they they love it and if you are you know have you seen that that research saying if you are the smarter you are the better result you get out of chat gpt i think the same applies for images the more creative you are then you're gonna get an even higher level of creativity and yes you can pretend being an artist even though you're not one you're not trained as a game artist you can pretend being one with this or you can approach being one with this but if you're a good game artist you're going to be an even better game artist with ai and it's not just push a button you know it's like prompting but like selecting the right models the right training parameters the right everything takes a while it's a new art it's a new it's just a new photoshop um yeah and it will take years until people like go to the end of this this technology it's not we had architects who were very upset about cad drawings and people using computers instead of using pencils and rulers and drafting desks and you know the fact is we're able to design you know more beautiful homes more unique homes more unique spaces with cad and share them around the world how many people in your company to get to this point how many developers did it take to get here and how much time we have 25 but we started as a team of six uh back in october uh went pretty fast to put the the beta out in december and that's when we started growing after we got some the first seed money in uh in december uh growing from six to 25 in just three months basically um mostly engineers so far got it any other applications for this we hear a lot about hey video games and disney plus and the and the real engine and things are kind of converging do you see this at some point um taking over and doing south park episodes or you know uh you know clone wars episodes bad batch episodes you could start to create characters and then place them into what would eventually become tv shows because you're doing backgrounds you're doing art it doesn't take much to have people move around the backgrounds it doesn't take much to add dialogue and if you can make the characters well certainly you can make voices and there's other people who can do voices so i'm curious where do you is there a new place to go with this right now you're helping game studios but this feels like a new art form could emerge from your tool itself how do you consider that we have some we have some edge cases uh being being uh being uh used right now by a few uh a few of the users definitely movie even though some other companies are much better are doing movies with genii such as runway such as wonder studio um they're there it's it's a slightly different sort of feature sets to develop uh but like marketing you know um all kinds of like any industry that needs some images will be based on genii or is going to be based on genii significantly how do you charge for all this we charge a subscription uh per accounts which goes from 1k to 40k a year depending on the size of the studio members quotas images uh and we we go into some enterprise custom pricing as well um in addition to the sas model we have an api based model where people just go pay per api call you know depending on how much they use the api um yeah we just we just started this week to monetize actually so oh really so do you have a sales team doing it or you just took these 40 000 people who are using the free product and just said hey you hit the upper limit consumption based you need to sign in and pay put a credit card in we we do we have a small sales team for uh for the tier one tier two customers uh like game studio of a certain size uh plus myself one in europe one in the us and we have we do have a customer success team as well it's not just about you know signing it's making sure that they are doing a good job and they're adopting it at scale but it's um yeah it's going well it's i'm super super bullish i've made a first company before which i sold was good but this one is going to be you know 100x bigger what was the previously you were in lidar if i understand from my notes here it was a aerial capture with drones lidar and photogrammetry oh so you were sending drones up with lidar on it to do what all kinds of inspections you know mapping of buildings and infrastructure construction sites and so on we were not flying the drones we were doing the software to process 2d and 3d imagery at scale with ai in the cloud so it's kind of a natural evolution but instead of like scanning we prompt and that was a niche market right like sending those drones up to do construction sites it wasn't supposed to be niche when we started according to uh you know bcg and mckinsey and so on but the drone market didn't end up being that big.

29:55Why do you think the drone market didn't become that big? Didn't provide enough value to users? Value was enormous. It's more like regulation and it's not that easy to fly a drone anywhere, anytime with the right material resolution and so on. So the pilot limitation and the regulations killed it. You can only carry so much in a drone. You're never going to see 500 pounds drones flying tomorrow to to capture you on your next construction site um yeah and let alone uh let alone uh the the transportation drones you know it's it's an amazing technology but physics is physics regulations are regulations and things in the air when they fall from the air can do damage and i think that is i think one of the lessons people learned was the utility of drones um is based on weight and the utility is based on being in cities or populated areas in some cases like delivery and uh that's challenging uh because people do have uh the regulators seem to be very cautious uh in the in the drone space and here you don't have to deal with regulators um you just have to deal with software and how much you can delay your customers for now for now for now yes what do you think yeah i couldn't i think if you i think it's there yeah good well i was going to say um if there was a a place to start thinking about regulation where would you as somebody who's an insider start to think about regulation at what point in the stack at one point in the code the hardware the application the geography where would you even start with regulation I think it starts with the training data how did you get it, where did you get it from how did you select you curate the training data that is the debate today around chat GPT and what data has been used and how do they control what comes out and what gets eliminated or

32:06just like what gets out and what gets blocked. The same will go for images stable effusion was trained on a very wide array of five billion images scrapped from the internet uh people loved it but a lot of legal teams find challenges around like do we have the right to generate commercial uh images the answer is clearly no you cannot take getty's images and make derivative works from it especially if that infringes upon their ability to do the same business at least here in the united states that's how the law works it's clear as day there'll be tons of settlements which is why people use their own models and which is why adobe released firefly which is ethically trained on on images they have the right to use and i believe in a few months every single you know gen ai image generator will be trained on on the on data that people will have the right to use at some and in some in some you know at some point there's plenty of open source data out there and if you wanted to train on gettys you should just ask them and pay them a fee and they might charge you a million dollars or they might charge you you know there might be a photographer out there a group of photographers who own these who just say yeah you can train your image generator for one dollar per photo and if you need a million images great that's a million dollars per year there's some reasonable amount of money to be charged so it could be a great income stream in the way streaming is for musicians and income stream could be renting or leasing your generator instead of selling the final image such as the final picture the final photograph just rent a the use of your model as an artist and it's like a much more like a much passive uh income that could be interesting for them it has to be um that's fascinating but yeah it's coming well you could do it if you had somebody who put a collection in here like this bubble collection you could have an artist who builds that on spec who's in college and they say here's my bubble collection anybody who wants to generate on top of it um it's going to be you know one dollar per exported image and um then they would know who paid that one dollar per exported image and they create those 25 images and if 10 000 images are exported per year that's ten thousand dollars you as the platform take 30 they take 70 you made three they made seven thousand that's a pretty fantastic business for a kid in art school who made 25 images that took i don't know 10 hours each so and that's money they would make forever so there's a reasonable trade of services here yep and you know what this happened in stock photography stock photographers were um were villainized at some point because they were like hey you should send a photographer out to take a picture of the golden gate bridge for a thousand dollars i'll let them develop the film and they should pay charge a thousand dollars or two thousand for that image you shouldn't let people buy a golden gate photo for five dollars or ten dollars yep so the world advances more people have access to this incredible content that's better for society sorry if people are you know i'm sorry that it's deflationary but when things are deflationary people can do more creative things right yeah and free free time um to um to do more and um you want me to drop another you know buzzword it could be also So blockchain could be involved to track these flows of images across different owners, which has not been done yet.

35:34But I think it's a good use case of blockchain. Explain how that might work. Well, a generator might be tied to some sort of smart contract. So any image that is being made from that generator could be tied to the generator and then to the artist via some revenue share stream. you know, written, coded into the contract. Or, I mean, like, look at GNI. It's the abundance, right? It's like millions and millions of images being made and shared and content overall. You know, how to be able to track it via some sort of, like, a trusted ledger could be interesting. I'm not saying we should all do it on, like, right now.

36:15And we are not even doing it, but with the Web3 people, the Web3 games that use Scenario, they're all about it. Incredible, yeah. You know, yeah. Well, this has been amazing. Continued success. where's the company based san francisco you know this is like your maybe the fourth ai company to come on who is basing in san francisco and it does seem like there's a little uh you know revitalization uh in san francisco of people putting their ai companies in the city itself not in the surrounding area so hey listen continued success and uh we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye probably the most common challenge i hear from founders is related to building.

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37:32So cut out the hassle and get back to building that perfect product for your delighted customers. When you think Crowdbotics, I want you to think getting your time back to focus on product. Product drives everything in a startup. So let the folks at Crowdbotics show you how it works. Schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist that's crowd b-o-t-i-c-s dot com slash twist. Hey everyone I'm Presh and today we're going to walk through how to build no-code apps. So first we're going to talk about why build no-code apps in the first place. We'll cover things like who's it for and then we'll jump into some of the pros and cons.

38:11Next we'll talk about some of the best tools to use when building a no-code and these are going to vary depending on what you want to build. So hopefully after watching this presentation you'll have a better understanding of what no code is capable of and then you can get started on third base picking your platform and lastly we'll wrap on some of my favorite resources in the no code community to help you further your education so let's get into it so why build no code apps in the first place it's going to come down to two things so one you're non-technical or non-technical yet and two you want to move quickly so for example you have an idea and you want to put that idea in the marketplace as quickly as possible, test and see if it's worth pursuing.

38:54Over the next couple of slides, I'm going to show you how before even building your product, you can utilize some cool tools to get to the third base of building your product. So using no-code tools to start this process of building your product might look like this. Step one, you get your idea. Step two, you might want to share that idea or validate it a bit. And this can be done by tweeting it, writing a blog post, or sharing it in the subreddit. Step three, you might want to start making a mock-up of your product with tools like Figma or Canva or Sketch. And I include design tools in no-code because they've really designed them so anyone can learn them quickly and they're just delightful and fun to use.

39:30Step four. Okay, now your product mock-up is done. So it's time to build a simple landing page. And remember, the goal of this is to put something out there and see if there's interest of the product. So it's not mandatory to have a overly designed website. So I use tools like Webflow or maybe even Notion, Squarespace, Card. Step five. Okay, so now the website is up and we want to start capturing people who visit the site that might be interested in the product. So we can do this with a simple email capture tool and I like to use MailChimp in this case. Step six. And lastly, with the emails, we can now start funneling customers or potential customers into a community with products like Slack or discord or even twitter keep the conversation going and keep your potential customers engaged now we're going to talk about the pros of no code development and i've narrowed it down to three things agile development low to no maintenance and cost efficiency so in terms of being agile you can put out an mvp as soon as you have the idea and you just need to do it with one person which is yourself you don't need a whole team next there's no maintenance since you're building on top of platforms and ideally big ones with big teams we're piggybacking our product on them and so they manage the maintenance for you and updating everything.

40:40And lastly, it's cost effective to a point because you don't need to hire developers, which are expensive. The other thing is you're dependent on the platform you build on. So if one day they wake up and decide to remove a feature that you use every day, you might be at a disadvantage there. And lastly, it can get expensive. Again, depending on if you're using multiple tools, you want to be thoughtful with the kinds of tools that you're using. Now we're going to talk about the tools you might want to use when building no-code apps and what's actually possible. Let's get into it. So to start, the first decision we need to make is what type of product do we want to build?

41:13Do we want to build a simple website with a gated community slash paywalled content? Or do we want to build a marketplace type of business similar to Airbnb, where it's two-sided, you got a supply side, a demand side, and you want transactions to occur? Or do we want to build a mobile application for maybe the App Store or the Play Store. So there are tools for all of these examples, and we'll dive in deeper right now. Let's start with a simple subscription website or subscription business. These are three tools that will get you started, and you can build an entire business off the back end of this.

41:44The first is Webflow, which is the visual no-code website designer that I mentioned earlier. And this is popular now because you can customize fully, and they've got beautiful templates. The next is a tool called MemberStack. And what this allows you to do is allow your website to have a signup portal or dashboard and allow you to charge customers either one-time payment or a subscription model. So really turning your website more into like an app or community. And lastly is Zapier, which is an automation slash API tool that allow you to connect and talk to different applications. So you can have your Webflow website, talk to member stack, and you can do that through Zapier.

42:20So here I'm just on Webflow's template website, and you can see they've got beautiful designs here. I'm in one example called London, and I can buy this if I want to use it. You can see, looks like a very professional website here. It's got nice animations, nice colors, and this looks like, you know, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to build, but you can replicate this with just a click of a button. Okay, now here we are on MemberStack. Again, MemberStack allows you to create like a signup portal and create a login for your users on your Webflow site. And so here you'll see this login portal.

42:50That's kind of an example of what it'll look like. And then you've also got a pricing page. So that's, you know, if you want to charge or put up a paywall for some of your content, you can do that as well. Here's an example with one of our portfolio companies, Sol Savvy. And they initially started with just completely no code tools. So you'll see their website, you know, you can go in, you can sign up for the waitlist, or you can skip the waitlist and put your information and sign up. All of this can be done within Webflow and member stack. Lastly, on the subscription website stack, we have Zapier, which is the king of automation and connecting different apps to talk to each other.

43:21So you'll see in the screenshot, they've got thousands of integrations into all the main apps like Google Sheets, MailChimp, Calendar, Slack, Typeform, Stripe, and so on. So the main purpose for Zapier is for apps to interact with each other. Moving on to a marketplace type product, these tools will get you started right out the box. So the first one is software.io and the second one is bubble.io. And both of these will get you on third base because you can use some of their marketplace templates. And the best examples I'll show you here are Airbnb clones on both platforms. All right, so here I am on software.io and they've also got a great template library.

43:55I'm going to go to one of their examples here, code.live. And this is a marketplace example built right on the platform. And so you can see you've got some houses here that you can click into. You've got a search feature, you've got to explore spaces, and you can even go as far as booking a spot on the platform. And that'll take you to like a landing page or stripe, a stripe powered page to complete the transaction. This is another example using the bubble platform. So again, another marketplace type product. You can see you've got different locations here. You can even create your own listing.

44:26And so again, designed beautifully, works perfectly. And you're building this from scratch, but you can also use a template and get you again on that third base. Lastly, moving on to mobile app development in the NoCode ecosystem. There are two main tools that I've used. And the first one is Bravo Studio. And that's bravostudio.app. And the other one is glideapps.com. The first one, which is Bravo Studio, is more of a visual designer. so you can use Figma or Adobe XD to design your app. And so what Bravo Studio does is it connects those elements together to make into actions. So you're basically leveling up your prototype, be a functional product.

45:02The other app I've used is called Glide, and Glide allows you to create web-based but mobile-friendly apps to do powerful things like create management tracking tools or a conference app or a workout app. And I've even seen a template for an Instagram clone. Now let's wrap up with some resources you can use to learn more about building no-code products. So the main resources that I like to use are makerpad.co and nocode.tech. And both of these sites have extensive libraries of content that you can get started from beginner all the way to advanced. And you can see on this screenshot, you can start as, you know, as basic as just creating websites or you can go to building mobile apps.

45:40And again, this is all no-code, so they've got you covered. And that's going to wrap today's episode of how to build no-code apps. Thanks for listening. Thank you.