How to make $100k with AI-Coded Apps.

0:00I do like to build something that people can access first I think if people are going into online courses or membership sites or any of these more traditional digital product ideas I do think validating the idea getting people to a pre-sale getting people to pay you before you build it totally valid because I think these are much bigger projects I've done various Partnerships over the Decades of Entrepreneurship and I think this idea of building your own apps is by far the easiest pitch in the world so I tried had to sell one of my apps almost a year ago 9 months ago and I was just trying to upload it very

0:35cheap I told somebody like $115,000 I was already making a little bit of money 15 grand it's yours and I found a buyer I met with this person on zoom and they were like I'm happy to pay you $115,000 or we can come in as 50/50 Partners we will now be partners in this business we'll split all the profits whatever I know this guy over here who has an audience of a bajillion people and he wants to market the app and I was like doing the math in my head like even if this be pans out this is like a win for me or this is a zero lose for me there's

1:03no downside and so I told the guy yeah sure I brought him on at 50/50 partners he did promote it it did grow it made great money and my mind was just blown $100,000 with AI coded apps theyy create something once monetize it over and over again that's a business model that I really like and historically software and apps definitely check that box but it used to be you had to be pretty technical or pay someone technical if you wanted to build really any kind of software today not as much my guest has been using AI tools to help build uh a series of smallish web apps usually to

1:42solve a very specific problem for a very specific customer but making thousands of bucks a month doing it and having a lot of fun along the way from doeven blog.com Pete mcferson welcome back to the side hustle show yes thank you so much for having me Nick it's a pleasure to be here talk about techy things hopefully we can get some good takeaways for people some good actionable items even if we do go a tiny bit into what sounds technical so shot yeah the the promise of you know having AI do the work for you is um is is an interesting one because you know um software

2:16companies are some of the most profitable businesses in the world it's like hey you know we could sell this same code to thousands millions of different customers and it has often seemed Out Of Reach for individual creators so what changed in the past few years and you know what do you see as the opportunity for side Hustlers here the biggest thing that changed was obviously using chat GPT or Claude or any of these newer llms AI models to do the parts I didn't know how to do I knew how to do a few parts I've been interested in this I've been coding I've been fairly techy

2:51forever and then maybe about a year and a half ago two years ago I was finally able to cross the threshold and have ai do the heavy lifting and the last part of uh your question there more specifically in the past like three months and six months we've crossed another Bridge we are now at a place where you could basically just type in stuff you want and believe it or not like maybe seven times out of 10 eight times out of 10 these AI tools are getting better they're getting faster they're getting more aware of its outputs and so the opportunity right now now is well you

3:31said it already this is we know this creating software products creating stuff you can use you can sell to your existing audience even I would argue entering in New Markets with SAS software as a service has never been easier and faster for everybody for all of us non-developers even if you never touched the lineup code yeah so you built a few of these one is an affiliate link tracking tool called AF tracker you built one called topical map which helps come up with you know what what am I got to talk about on my content creation business

4:29start there with this idea generation if I'm listening and saying like well this sounds cool I'd like to start playing around with this and I probably would recommend that's where people start is like you're not going to build anything super beautiful right out of the gate but you got to start tinkering with something but you got to have an idea before you can start tinkering like how where did these ideas come from or how do you recommend people kind of go through this what should I even start to build sure I would say it's a Twist on an ageold strategy called scratch your own itch I think people who have listened to

5:04your show have probably heard those words before am I right yeah so I think approaching how you work on your computer and a scratch your own itch there's a scratch your own itch off your computer and there a scratch your own itch when you're using scheduling software when you're sending emails when you are creating a YouTube video when you're editing a YouTube video when you're interacting with the web in general cultivating this set of scratch your own itch and Nick I think you absolutely nailed it I think what I would recommend to anybody who's like H this kind of sounds interesting I might try that would be to pick one teeny tiny

5:41thing like you said you're not going to build the next huge amazing 10 bajillion ARR software company probably but you can build a little Chrome extension for example I play a game I won't mention what it is it's totally stupid but I play a game that doesn't have any tracking whatsoever and some basic like multiplication and division things that I've been doing on my phone on a calculator I was like wait I could I could totally just build a Chrome extension I never built a Chrome extension before I have no idea how that works yeah but I went into my code editor we can talk about tools later of

6:18course and just prompted AI I told a little bit what I want and so on and so forth and then boom it's done it's there I'm not going to make any money off of it but it was a tiny challenge paino frustration I had and again I've cultivated this mindset of noticing when this happens I had this small little problem and I built a teeny tiny little tool it's like I don't know how many lines of code it is because I actually haven't looked that much at the code but it's really small and it works and I use it every day when I'm playing my silly

6:51little game interesting okay so some just as you're going through your day-to-day and I'm just going to Rattle off a couple you know pain points just from like this week one is when you're pasting anything from Google Docs into WordPress it brings in all of this junk HTML and you really inflates the size of the page unnecessarily and like you kind the formatting maybe looks a little bit janky with some of the font selections like B by default um same thing with Microsoft Word or importing images from Google Docs you know getting those into your website as a as a Blog article personal paino may not resonate with

7:31anybody else but it's like you know so I I built this little I hav't figured out the image piece of it but just like a little macro in word where like we'll strip all this stuff out so maybe there's something there I don't know if that would be a WordPress plugin if that would be a Chrome extension but something like that so that's one idea uh personal pain Point number two is you know how pretty much every Airline now will let you rebook if the like they don't have any change fees anymore so you can rebook if the price goes down and it's like but I'm not it's kind of a

8:07pain to go and check and see and I've set up some Google flight alerts there's got to be a way to either automate this or at least get a notification like hey your your flight went down you might as well go and get your $50 in credit and sometimes you know you know sometime get like the sale notifications but it's like there's got to be a smarter way to do this yes would you like me to tackle those two just really quick yeah yeah let's do it we'll start with the second one there is a tool which I can't remember the name of it is basically

8:36zappier which I'm sure yeah most people are probably familiar with you can set up automations and endpoints between various apps or whatnot this is the exact same thing except with the ability to just insert AI in between each of your automation steps so to speak and it would be perfect for solving the second problem you you mentioned there okay you could use use plain language to kind of say hey I usually go to Google Flights or I usually check American Airlines or I usually do this here's some of the URLs here's my login information like I need you to extract this and then automatically email me when this happens

9:15and it takes a little while to set up but you don't even have to touch code for this this is a tool it is paid but I can share that with you later okay that's an interesting one perfect thing in terms of like building your own thing uh what was your first one again I just the first one was just like the tedious formatting that the junk HTML that gets you know automatically inserted when you paste stuff in yes absolutely this gets into maybe a strategy I really wanted to talk about later so I'm going to segue this will be valuable I think for anybody who's

9:48looking to pick up coding even if it's AI coding not saying you're going to become a developer but I would say pick one specific Focus text stack focus and then just stay with it for example Nick maybe you're on a Mac OS device or or Windows you could learn how to build Mac apps on the contrary it's actually pretty similar to build iPhone apps you could learn to build web apps that's a lot different it's a lot different you're going to have to probably choose a new code language and again you don't have to learn development but it's still going to be so much easier for anybody

10:30listening to this to just build five different Chrome extensions maybe that maybe that's your thing maybe it's WordPress plugins is what you really want to dive into there are a few things the this is no this is actually really golden because there is an opportunity you know in the Chrome extension space in the Shopify extension space we had I heard of somebody doing like 10 grand a month with like a a Wix extension or something like these kind of Micro Niche marketplaces that do something really specific and because there's a built-in ecosystem around that like it can be I don't know and it goes into them you

11:07know search you know marketing on these different platforms and you know is it a freemium model like what's your strategy there but no I love I love this call to focus on one tiny little thing first versus trying to you know build something completely Standalone and and go out and try and sell it sure there's a there's a reason I bring this up by the way mine's web apps that's what I do I have JavaScript I use spelt kit which you don't even have to know what that is doesn't matter but the point is it builds web apps apps you access in your browser you type in the URL to topical

11:41map AI or whatever and it just pulls it up yeah yeah yeah or cly or whatever I just do web apps that's all I do except for my little silly game Chrome extension but part of the reason I bring that up is there are lots of different ways you could solve your paino you mentioned the formatting removing the formatting and getting things ready for WordPress you could build a Mac app for that I know people that have that's all they do they just build Mac apps and if I were doing that I would probably just do it where you copy a Google doc you can build in a shortcut on your computer

12:14and it just automatically formats it removes everything blah blah and then copies it to your clipboard again after you hit the hotkey and then you just copy and paste into WordPress yeah or if you want to be the WordPress person you build a press plugin like you mentioned or if you're Pete I would do it via web app because that's what I know now having built a dozen of these different web apps it would be super small it would literally just be like maybe a text area where you just paste in everything you click one button and maybe it automatically removes the formatting and then again automatically copies it to

12:52your clipboard and then you can go into WordPress that's what I do so I I hope that's helpful for people I really wanted to hint at there's a ton of different ways you can approach these sorts of things but maybe it' be helpful if you think about some of the things you're interested in like WordPress like Chrome extensions like web apps like iPhone apps that sort of stuff before you before you really go off the deep end here all right well that's good so this is idea generation method number one scratch your own itch anything else on this you know coming up with ideas phase sure I have two that I like and

13:25these are legal I think they're ethical enough but it's somewhat ceiling I have two examples number one would be to find one tiny feature in some tool maybe you're already using that has like a bunch of different features one tiny Fe steal one feature from one of your tools and I'll give you a good example of this so back when I did more SEO blogging I used HRS ah RFS HFS there's an SEO tool and they have a ton of different features you can do keyword research you can do this and that and this and that yeah yeah all I really wanted I canceled my subscription but all I really missed

14:06was the site Explorer tool so that's an idea for a business right there you don't have the $99 to pay a month for HFS or however much it costs now yeah you can pay $9 for my app it's just the site Explorer I wouldn't Market it as that because that would be straight up stealing H stuff but you could just build one tiny feature of some other app maybe it's an expensive app that you pay for that's that's idea number one okay this unbundling of things that maybe you're a user of or you know are popular but people don't need all of the things under the hood you they maybe just

14:46trying to carve out a segment for people who really are only interested in this one feature this is why Nick makes the big bucks cuz that was a far better explanation than I gave unbundling that's perfect right I love it uh last one is oh here's the example that I I that came to my head Kenly is a tool to use you send a a scheduling link and somebody clicks it and they can see your calendar and they pick out a time and so on so forth there for a while there weren't many alternatives to calendly there are now but uh appsumo no haagan company created

15:23tidy Cal tidy cal.com this was like a year or two ago they didn't use AI this is completely different but it basically was taking an expensive tool that really doesn't need to be all that expensive and then just building a cheap version there's was like $30 lifetime or something and I can think of this all the time there's a ton of tools uh I was going to throw this company into the bus I won't I won't mention this company but it's a podcasting tool I have my own podcast Nick has podcast that produces podcast transcripts and you can do some other marketing things like generate some titles and generate some show notes

16:01using Ai and stuff like this I did not want to pay however much it cost I don't remember what it was so I just built my own it took like a week with like an hour or two a day um it's technically live you can't go byy it so I'm not going to point people to it but I just built my own where I just upload my audio it gets the transcript using the same backend tools probably is this other company and then I can click a button and it'll generate some title ideas and and some timestamps and some different stuff like that so there are

16:33very few of those tools that are really really cheap really affordable and that was the sort of thing where I was like I'm pretty sure I could build my own version of this for like not a whole lot of money not a whole lot of time and energy and I did and it worked it was good interesting so you could look out even at your own software Tech stack and you know what are the ones that you think the the price point kind of grates on you a little bit you're like that there's got to be there's got to be a better way and to say how could I build

17:03a a cheaper version or even a simpler version that doesn't do all of the doesn't have all the bells and whistles but you know maybe there's something there so number one was scratch your own itch figure out your own personal pain points and try and build something around that number two was unbundling of different software tools like I just want to pull out this one feature that's the most important thing to me or that's the one that I think maybe is most valuable or you know for whatever reason and number three is to rebuild a cheaper version or compete on this is kind of the appsumo Playbook you see companies

17:35on there doing this all the time like Hey we're an alternative to Fillin the blank software well one huge thing I want to mention this is like the the thing that makes me the happiest in all of this building my own apps um learning how to code via AI the thing I like the most about this is you have control we don't have to put up with how this other software did this we could build our own and I mentioned scratching your own itch well there's more to it than that not only is that a good way to find ideas that sure you could Market to

18:10other people but first and foremost you solve your own problems and if you know how to leverage AI if you know how to code for this stuff you can make it how you want which is it sounds pretty obvious but I think that's underrated I think people don't think about that enough I built my own podcasting tool trained on my own podcasting data the the prompts I send to AI I wrote like there was so much control and it gives me exactly what I want exactly how I want it in my exact formatting that I want it like every time I think that's really underrated yeah now if you're

18:46following these methods especially the second and third one there's some level of Market validation hey we know these companies have been around for a long time people are used to paying for this uh functionality do does anything else go into your you know Market validation or competitive analysis phase before you start to you know start prompting the the code generators yes and no no in one sense because a lot of my own projects again just me personally they are based on that scratch your own itch so part of me doesn't care so much I'm gonna build this for myself and if anybody buys it that's gravy okay I use my podcasting I

19:30called it pod promo don't go sign up for it but I I just called it pod promo I'm probably never going to sell it just because I don't really want to focus on that I still use it every week but yes on the other hand I do think if you are going to approach this first and foremost as a money-making Venture which I think most people should yeah I I do think you should validate these ideas and this might be skipping ahead a little bit but my strategy for this is really obvious it's really annoying to listen to on a podcast but that is have an existing audience build an audience

20:06that follows you from platform to platform from Project to project to I from this idea to that idea that sort of thing this is in my opinion the one the only marketing strategy that is pretty foolproof right not based on anything happening with Twitter or X or blue sky or Facebook or Tik Tok or Instagram or email open rates or apple you get my you get my picture right so for me personally that's the validation I do have an existing email list that I've been cultivating for years and I generally send it to them within yeah within a couple of weeks of having the idea like it's not like you

20:47know hundreds of thousands of followers oh no no no no I I think I have I don't mind sharing I think I have like 5,500 people on my email list which is not nothing but it's you know I guess you know a micro influencer status I've heard some people call like this range between a thousand and 20,000 or so people pay people paying attention to your work yeah true yes did I answer your question there n yeah so did you when you come up with these ideas did you do like a a pre-sale thing well how serious is anybody about this would they actually you know enter their PayPal

21:22would they actually swipe their credit card for this before I go through the trouble of building it or no it's like I'm going to build it because it don't take that much time and and then we'll see what the reaction is I do like to build something that people can access first I think if people are going into online courses or membership sites or or any of these more traditional digital product ideas I do think validating the idea getting people to a pre-sale getting people to pay you before you build it totally valid because I think these are much bigger projects I think for these software products

21:59especially since we're staying small to begin with and that's what I do I try and stay really small really tight one tiny feature one tiny solution to a problem I've built them first and usually that can take anywhere from 2 or 3 hours to maybe 20 30 hours over a couple of weeks is like my my longest one but generally I can whip something up now in a couple of hours it's not going to look very pretty but I'll put it in front of my audience for a very small offer and sometimes not even my entire email list I have a group of about 100 to 200 people that used to

22:39be paying members of my membership Community people I know that I could literally text on the phone like people that are close to me yeah and I'll generally offer it to them first for a very small lifetime deal topical map AI I think I sold for like $39 lifetime period just what does is anyone going to pay for this at all that's what I was going for yeah and if and if there is some positive feedback and reaction in purchasers then I can you know invest the time to polishing it up making it look pretty all this other stuff totally I sold one product called easy course which was terrible by the

23:16way in retrospect and part of the reason I know it was terrible is because it got exactly two sales and it was it was really cheap price point it got exactly two sales and those two people both had major issues and they couldn't figure it out and I was like this was this was not it that was really going to be like a learning management system it was basically like never ever pay for online course software again like AIC teachable that kind okay really dumb down simplified version yes but yes that's exactly that um and I was going to teach people how to build that themselves they got actually they

23:53had my template they could just duplicate the template and they Chang the content and they have an online course that people could buy that they could sign up for it did not go over well at all no one was interested and the two people that bought didn't have a good time so that was a big fail and there have been one or two other projects where it's again dirt cheap price point but it'll be like 25 sales 50 sales 100 sales 200 Sales and that is when I like okay now I can double down fill out this product do a little bit more marketing maybe and that sort of

24:23stuff okay no I like that I want to dive deeper into different marketing strategies but tell me about the this 2 to 20 hour creation phase of you know from idea to having something that is viable that's something somebody might even have the opportunity to pay for what goes into that time the very first app I built that went public and that people could actually sign up for took about six weeks and like 40 hours a week it took a really long time this was two years ago at this point and I wasn't really using AI a whole lot I was going through a YouTube course that I found

25:04and like doing what this person did except change it for my app and doing what doing with do this next lesson and change it for my app and I got lost so many times couldn't figure out or what not the next app which was maybe 6 months later it's about a year and a half ago is is a little bit more AI friendly like I kind of had that experience under my belt and I swear Nick it took like less than a week maybe 15 hours total this was me sitting down at my computer and like whipping up some code and then going back and forth with

25:37chat GPT and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and then we get an app so what what would be like a starting prompt and this is in chat GPT versus some other you know software specific tool the past 3 to six months have shown us an explosion in AI code editors they call these idees I don't even know what that stands for to be honest with you but vs code has been around for decades and it's a software on your computer Windows or Mac doesn't matter you open it up and this is where you actually write your code but now it

26:13has AI in there and there are two or three other tools I can throw out later if you'd like me to I use one called cursor and cursor I would literally fire it up and let's say you wanted to make a WordPress plugin for your your Google doc formatting issue okay you could literally just fire it up no folders open no files open just like a blank screen you're basically staring at and you could tell it please create me a WordPress plugin where I can copy and paste in text from a Google doc and so on and so on and so on and so on you just tell it that and it's going

26:52to whip something up it'll do it on its own now you'll sit there and watch it it'll create this file it'll implement it it'll create another file it'll analyze this other file it'll create this it'll analyze that and I would say like 90 seconds later you're probably going to have something pretty close to functional there's always going to be troubleshooting and errors for sure but at this day and age you can try one of these tools you can prompt it like you were telling like you were talking to another developer if you had no idea how to code you would just say I want an app

27:24that does this and ties into my Google Calendar and then email tells me this and then does this and then does this and it's going to do it that's pretty crazy it sounds overly simple but that that's where we're at these days it's kind of crazy okay and then you go into like the testing phase after that or like it really can't be that easy as like just telling it I you know in in plain English this is what I want to build like there's got to be I need login information I need API access I need you there's got to be other things or or is there

28:01not yes and no you might actually be surprised how much is not needed these days but that said it can be it can save you a lot of headache down the road if you kind of prompt an AI for the big picture first so I have like I I have my notes open here I have like a a seven step kind of process to this entire thing we've already gone over a couple of these number one have an idea in some way I think the second big step is asking AI chat GPT Claud Google that matter asking for the big picture say I want to create a WordPress plugin that

28:40does this and does this and does this what are the big steps to implementation and what tools should I use and AI is going to give you a lot of things you can kind of choose from and be like Oh Firebase that's free it's made by Google I can use Firebase for my backend my database I'm not a back-end developer at all but I know I need to store information somewhere in a spreadsheet or database or something so I use Firebase and I found it found it from AI that was like oh you could use Firebase for this because it's free it has a database it has authentication where

29:15people can log in to your app and creates a cookie and this sort of stuff again I don't even know how all these things work but start with the big picture start by kind of choosing some tools even you don't know what tools you need yet no one does right ask AI ask the big picture okay and then the next two steps we kind of mentioned already the next one would be to actually go into one of your code editors or whatever and then start prompt it to build something create this page create this app create this plugin whatever and then there's only really two more steps

29:51here number one try it fire it up figure out how to do that it's generally not that hard because of how advanced AI is these days and if you can't figure something outse why you just ask it again like how do I open this in my browser that was one of the first things I Googled like oh I have code on my computer how do I test this how do I see it in my browser and AI is like oh yeah click this link it's Local Host colon 573 okay okay right um and then test it out and then fix errors and that's it it's it's that over and over and over

30:28again test it out something's not going to work and they going to be like uh AI this did not work why and then hopefully it's going to give you some ideas it's going to change things for you at this point it didn't used to be that way a year ago but Implement something test it ask AI to fix it that sounds overly simple but that's like my entire workflow these days getting because my my first thought was and then you got to go to upwork to find somebody but it's like no just ask hey how come this didn't work it's what I mean what are the implications of

31:07like you know these $300,000 a year software developers salaries and like this is it's cool from a side usle you know Builder Creator perspective but it's terrifying from a well job security if that's your your role in the world sure I don't know and nobody knows for the for the most part yeah but I think maybe a more relevant question for me personally not to hijack your question there Nick but if this is such a golden opportunity now and everybody can do it can't everybody do it can't Nick go home and spit out like five apps tonight over the course of like an hour just because of these AI

31:52technology advances yeah yes absolutely and I think we have a very limited window and I'm not selling anything so you know I'm telling the truth here there's a very limited window to do this to use AI to build apps for money before this is just not a thing anymore before now you just tell Siri on I'm talking about now a year from now you might just tell Siri hey uh could you build me an app and go ahead and install it to my WordPress site at do blog.com and go ahead and test it three or four times to make sure it's functional oh and by the way can you

32:29whip up a sales email to my list and go ahead and schedule that for tomorrow like that's where we're going and so I think the next 12 months 18 months is where we as humans can build these software products and hopefully capitalize on it at least a little bit before that happens and yeah the Developer jobs I don't know but it's looking Grim that's interesting I mean that's like you know this whole neighborhood is a lot of Microsoft a lot of Amazon a lot of a lot of tech jobs in the Seattle suburbs where I'm at so it's it's interesting for sure okay so we've uh we've kind of described what we want

33:09in AI now it's kind of this back and forth um troubleshooting process and testing process you know like any project this QA phase and this was my biggest pain Point working with any software development project you know they they you know would I'd send up over my spec and they would you know even if it was just up updates to an existing project this is like for the shoe business I used to have and it'd be like hey we did all the things that you asked for and you s it in like the very first thing would be like broken be like did you test this at all it's like the

33:39most frustrating thing like they're so eager to like ship it get it off their desk it's like where was the QA phase in any of this I don't know okay but that's that's the next thing and then we go into the marketing part I don't know I guess it was your list what was what was toward the end of this seven steps that's basic Bally it I I'll tell you one more very quick lesson because I think this is incredibly important for anybody who touches code or apps or anything things will go wrong and you don't need to know the answer so about two years ago I hired some person on

34:15Reddit in the spelt Community I didn't know a thing I didn't know what I was doing I was like can I just like hire you for a 30-minute Zoom call to look at some of my code here and like figure this out and this person was a complete professional he's one of these like $300,000 a year like Tech Bros he's super kind and we got on the call I heard this guy he came in here and he took a look at the problem and he's like yeah I have no idea and my first thought was like okay awesome sweet what am I paying you for yeah yeah but two and a

34:51half seconds later he said all right let's figure it out and he said it in this this Jolly tone like oh I have no idea what the problem is I have no idea how to fix this oh let's figure it out and so he literally I sat there and watched his screen as he opened Google and like copied and pasted my code and then like went to some result and read something in like two and a half minutes he's like oh let's just copy and paste this and put it in your code and see if it works and it did and I was like oh okay this is what that job looks like

35:22problem solving yeah and it's the same thing So for anybody that's entrepreneurship in a nutshell you may remember Brian Harris had this video years and years ago just figure it out just figure it out right you know you're always going to hit that next ceiling and that that next problem that next hurdle obstacle what are we going to do let's figure it out like that's your job so no I I'll highlight that point for sure totally and I still get stuck in this every now and then I will reach something that is not working and I'm frustrated and I'm frustrated and maybe I do one or two Google searches but I'm

35:56frustrated and eventually my my mind comes back around to oh my gosh I just need to ask somebody and by somebody I mean AI these days and so I do and without fail I'm generally like five minutes away from the solution so again just to reiterate here I like to have an idea check I like to prompt AI for the big picture implementation that's my exact words what's the big picture implementation to building this or what are some different tools I should use for this and if we have time Nick I want to talk about backend as a service which is brilliant it's the brilliant we'll talk

36:37about that later if we have time but big picture and then ask AI okay what's the first step if you're using chat GPT you might ask it what's the very first step what do I need to code first what do I do with this okay where do I put this on my computer do I create a folder do I what do I do with this or if you're using a code editor like cursor like vs code like wind surf repet all these other ones then you can pretty much just start you could say create me a plugin that does X Y and Z fire it up test it

37:13however you test it depends on what you're building if you don't know how to test it ask AI how do I see if this is working or not try it try to use it that for me that was uploading a podcast episode and trying to get a transcription didn't work for a long time and then ask AI to fix it ask AI to troubleshoot find what's happening here and if AI doesn't work you can go to Google that takes a little bit longer these days yeah and then do it again and then do it again and that's it that's the whole process let's talk about the

37:44marketing and monetization piece and and then Circle back to this back end as a service so obviously it is helpful if you have your own existing Legion of followers your 5,500 email subscribers great if you don't have that hey start building in public you know start doing the social media like start building that up obviously a good practice what happens once you've tapped out that audience it doesn't get you necessarily super far doesn't necessarily get you recuring Revenue if you're doing it as um you know as a one-time beta lifetime deal super discounted what else have you seen work on the on the marketing side there are

38:21two big categories one of which I hate and I've had no success with but I'm going to tell it to you anyway ways and the other which I've had a lot of success with and I love it and it's what I want to do going forward okay so the first category would be all the traditional advice that you could literally Google right now and I'll just list off some product time launch your product on product time you could do that huge in like the Indie maker Community it is but it's super hard because every single day of the week dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens

38:56of companies are doing this yeah some of which already have an existing audience of a million people that are going to gos upot their thing there's a lot of these types of ideas oh launch to this oh go on it used to be like Hacker News Hacker News hacker what is that website doesn't matter oh go to this forum and post it here and then oh post it here and launch it here I tried that for a couple different projects now three projects I've tried to go that route and it has not worked at all for me personally some people swear by it you can Google these

39:31sort of things how to launch an app how to Market your app or whatever and those things are going to pop up I'm going to the second category the second category Partnerships and I've done various Partnerships over over the Decades of Entrepreneurship and I think this idea of building your own apps is by far the easiest it's the easiest pitch in the world and I tell tell you how I got into this so I tried to sell one of my apps almost a year ago like nine months ago and I was just trying to offload it very cheap I I told somebody like $15,000 that's it period I was already

40:10making a little bit of money 15 grand it's yours yeah and I found a buyer I met with this person on zoom and they were like I'm happy to pay you $115,000 or or we can come in as 50/50 Partners we will now be partners in this business we'll split all the prod profits whatever I know this guy over here who has an audience of like a bajillion people and he wants to market the app and I was like doing the math in my head like even if this barely pans out this is like a win-win for me or this is a zero lose for me there's no downside and

40:45so I told the guy yeah sure I brought him on as 50/50 partners he did promote it it did grow it made great money and my mind was just blown I was like I've already done the work I've already built this app for the most part I actually did a little bit more work on it but I didn't have to do any marketing they were like sending it to their email list and they produced a couple of YouTube videos they created the social channels I was like oh my gosh this is amazing and I am bu so I'm building a new project as of last week with a new

41:16partner who's been on your show a mutual friend of ours I won't name them because the app's not live yet um and it was the same sort of pitch and in fact I reached out before I even built it I knew this person already by the way so this wasn't like a completely cold email yeah I reached out to this person and I said hey I can build apps now because I'm fancy and I use AI I have this idea right here which would be perfect for your audience so here's the deal we'll split this 50/50 I'll do all the work I'll build the app I'll handle customer

41:49support I'll create the documentation the things I was going to do anyways okay all you got to do is promote the app however you want I mentioned to your email list it's in the email marketing space so it's it's email related yeah um and she was like yeah okay this the easiest pitch in the world so Partnerships finding people who can who have the audience that you need if you don't have your 5,000 people already who are following Nick from Project to project I think going and finding these people which is easier set than done I realize this especially if you don't have a very strong Network yet I get

42:27that but I still think there's your preference is to do it as almost like a like you said a 50-50 Equity split partnership rather than you know trying to go out and find a 100 different affiliate Partners oh 30% to try and promote this thing go oh gosh yeah Affiliates Affiliates are the worst uh yeah no I like this um it's just incentives right people have that much more incentive to grow to to mention it to promote it to Market it to all that stuff when they are literally invested it's not just like a one-off commission it's not even a recurring commission part of my pitch by the way is we're

43:05gonna run this for a year and then we're going to sell it like a selling apps is like really hot right now that's part of the p and you get half of that you get 50% of that so yeah I I think it's a lot easier than Affiliates for sure uh on the pricing side do you find like this oneoff P like you know life time access for this one price or do you do a more traditional SAS model or do the partners you know want you know one pricing model versus the other like what do you what do you see is like you know give me some

43:32examples of price points on these different tools that you're building if you plan on selling your app period even if it's a very small chance of selling your app I think you should go a very traditional route monthly payment annual payment subscription based business for sure 100% because I don't think many people are interested in buying it otherwise that's just the truth that said this is part of the glory of R preneurship you do however you want I think there is a space especially in the Mac App World I have this tool on my computer right now called kop c o p it's just like a whenever an image hits my

44:11downloads folder it just automatically compresses it and like resizes it for me and then just drag it that's great anyways no affiliation with these people and it was like $30 lifetime one time one time thing right I don't think they're ever planning on selling any of their apps this is like a um a developer Duo they have like I don't know 5 10 20 different Mac apps they're never going to sell this is like their passion thing they don't even need customer support for the most part like it's not an ongoing thing that they're constantly releasing features for it's kind of a different thing a different vibe I don't

44:47know how else to say that Nick but I do think if you are going to sell yeah I think it needs to be traditional subscription monthly payments that sort of thing okay so that's what I'm hearing is the you know the appsumo model of like the low lifetime access I think great for validation great for proving uh proof of concept but you know not so good well now I got to support this thing for the lifetime that I promised and totally I you know it's going to be much harder to to sell like well it made you know $10,000 in sales well yeah but what has it done for me lately you know

45:18how do you you got to keep going back to that well versus the recurring model here um obviously much more attractive to a buyer coming in now did you have a nonp partner exit any marketplaces that you like to put this stuff up for sale is there a rule of thumb on multiples what's going on there I will give credit where credit is due and give a shout out to acquire. comom this is the company I use uh to sell my most recent app and I was again I'm not affiliated with these people in any way but I was this like a brokerage they are a brokerage correct

45:53okay yes um I was blown away by how easy it was they met on a zoom call they walked me through everything in fact we had like two or three calls just to like stay in close contact as like buyers were contacted and they they actually emailed the listing out to their list and it was it was great it was absolutely fantastic and there's a couple of these um brokerages I guess Empire flippers is another one I actually have a listing that's about to go live there aire.com and there's one or two other ones Flippa they they do software products as well there's a couple of these I recommend

46:29going that route okay yes you will pay the 8% 10% maybe even 15% I think in closing fees The Brokerage fee totally worth it totally worth it they make sure all the legal stuff is happening dotting the eyes crossing the te's that sort of thing yeah use a brokerage which one did you sell like if you're comfortable sharing the the price point or the multiples or the math behind that oh I don't mind um

46:57I'm I'm super happy with this so fab fb. a fully autonomous blog bot as you nailed early in the episode I did not work on this app for nine months straight I hadn't touched it and I had it on my to-do list to work on it and I I got to that day on my to-do list and I'm like today is fa. a day I got to work on this thing I opened it up on my computer and I had this sinking feeling in my gut like I don't want want to do this you know what maybe I could just sell it and no joke Nick like 24 hours

47:32later I was on a zoom call with the acquire. comom people I had to get like financials in order it was literally just Google Sheets I just Google Sheets financials with income and expenses and I use stripe for billing and payments so I just kind of connected my stripe account and I kind of wrote like a little blurb I wrote how I grew the app which wasn't very much at all I wrote down didn't have recurring Revenue at that time very little less than $1,000 a month okay at that point um and so yeah I I used their built-in valuation tool you know they give you like a huge range

48:10oh your app could be worth $10,000 or like $130,000 well mine I literally just slid the little slider the the valuation price point slider on my screen like all the way down excuse me I slid it all the way down I was like I just want to get rid of this and it was like $45,000 or something and I was like done fine wow that's great wow yeah that' be $5,000 I'll take because my again like I launched the app and I had like a 100 subscribers paying subscribers but then I didn't work on it for like nine months and people dropped off and it was it was

48:50crazy right yeah I have no idea what the multiple was I know that between 30X 30X monthly net revenue people you can literally Google this yeah like SAS multiple sales or whatever 30 to 35 is generally like a pretty normal range I think 30X to 35x yeah mine was a little bit more than that just cuz I think it was fairly cheap it was I'm not selling it for like one and a half million doll right was $45,000 um and that's it listed it I think a week and a half later it was live I had an onslaught of like the initial people showing interest and then

49:33maybe like three or four people uh a couple days later that were having a conversation and then one person who was like literally sent over the oh I forgot what it's called the purchase agreement like intent or whatever to buy cash closing and I was like sold sold that was easy this was great yeah yeah this is a couple important things to note here one is like well when's the time to pull the plug on your side hustle when it's you know when you have postponed working on it for 9 months and when you do finally get to it you like within 10 minutes you're like this is awful why am

50:09I doing this like when you come to dread the work that's a good sign that I don't need this in my life but it's an asset right it's instead of just shutting it down and sunsetting it into the you know abyss of the internet hey so this might be worth something to somebody else it might be worth $45,000 to somebody else I think that's really interesting one where in the case of building tools like this okay I can build near-term cash flow if I sell it either as a onetime thing or I sell it as a subscription but I'm also building equity in every incremental you know

50:42$500 that I'm adding to the bottom line every month every th000 that I'm adding in recurring Revenue that's worth 30 to 35x as an exit valuation it's like really really interesting this you know cash flow plus Equity component there you know one of the benefit to this this whole building apps thing the expenses are essentially zero essentially zero a few of my apps do use AI themselves Fab to AI was using AI to create plog post so yeah there were API costs from open AI from anthropic who makes the claw AI models but other than that like actually hosting the app and having it live on

51:27the Internet is in most cases free for all my other projects like yeah if you already have hosting or something yeah it makes sense yeah or no no not even have hosting I mean you can host it for free you can go to versell right now and you can deploy host your app with SSL certificates and everything for zero every single month like it's just there and the back end I use is 0 from Google it's made by Google and stripe you pay stripe fees when somebody buys your app but again it's free to sign up my expenses for these things are nothing so even if they only make like you said

52:05a 100 bucks a month 200 500 bucks a month like yeah the margins are out of control yeah okay so finding this we'll call them like the audience partner or the marketing partner and this is one of the side usle Trends have been going on for a long time is like you have the you know the founder and then you have like well how are we going to Market this thing like we need that influencer component like somebody who already talks to the people that we want to talk to that would be a great a good fit for the tool so that's one component you teased this backend as a service thing

52:37so I'll tee that up for you sure so I had the most trouble when I first started out figuring out the backend a database hosted on a server somewhere what it even is a server a server is just a computer took me a while to figure that out but literally just a computer that has a database where I store my user data their email address their name anything related to my app like the transcription for a podcast or whatever it is yeah that was so hard for me when I first did this it took forever I just could not wrap my head around this oh how does my app like

53:17talk to a database and back and forth like my mind was just blown so backend as a as a service is relatively new and it's basically software products itself that you can go use for no money by the way the kind of does most of that heavy lifting for you and you kind of plug it into your app with a few lines of code that you can just kind of copy and paste in and but once you do you can run a backend database authentication like for my apps people can use the sign in with Google button like they click the button and Google thing pops up and they sign in with

53:58Google I didn't I don't want to create a new password or anything okay yeah I create I use the offthe Shelf yes um tools or templates like you can kind of plug it I don't have to start completely from scratch some of this functionality already exists and apparently it's it's open source and this or it's you know available for people to borrow again this is why Nick makes the big buck because offthe shelf is the perfect way to think about this it is no no one cares about messing with databases I do not I don't get that my brain doesn't get that this is off-the-shelf solutions for databases

54:35authentication and other stuff like that but those are those are the two big things so I'll just point out I use Google's Firebase it's literally the name of the app you can go Google it okay and it's completely free it's silly easy to like set up in fact you can really just ask AI to do it these days and it'll tell you like oh first you need to go create a Google account and then do this so on and so forth but once you do that chaty knows how to use Firebase they know how to use superbase they know how to use these backend as a

55:05service things and if you ever have to manage it yourself it's as simple as going to their website Firebase or superbase and kind of like point and click searching for things it's the off the-shelf thing you don't want to touch SQL you don't want to be doing queries for databases cuz that's just oh that's way beyond the scope of anything I know how to do so yes back end is a service you're going to have to pick one that's what I'm saying so Google what that is ask chat GPT get signed up they they're completely free to start with and go from there all right this sounds like a

55:40project for after putting the kids to bed let me diging around on the internet which has always been been fun my coding knowledge is super super limited like I can read some HTML and you know insert hyperlinks and stuff like that otherwise it's you know super super basic and have to figure out you know every time I hit Refresh on after it updating code and it doesn't break like yes okay I'm a programming genius this is amazing but this is this is really cool I'm go back to like hypercard did you do hypercard it's is like middle school era programming you know shout out to like the two people in the audience who

56:21who'll get that reference if they're old enough to um but it was the you know going back to this practice of figuring it out where the the teacher would kind of you know write a very simple instruction or prompt at and at the beginning of the class the beginning of the quarter super frustrating like dude you didn't tell us how to do anything how are we supposed to do the thing and he just he kind of like it was super frustrating he's like you know give me the instructions I will thought that was like the kind of student like I will I will knock this out of the park for you

56:54but it was so open-ended and it took a few weeks into the class you be like there's a method to your madness here and ended up being one of the most fun and and rewarding classes here and I can kind of see this being similar like creating something to to solve a problem of your own to like you know put something out into the world I think it's really it's really unique but anything surprised you over the last couple years um in building these things and andent try to Market and sell them the most surprising thing is that I actually did it I am not a developer I

57:28didn't go to school for this I've never went to a coding boot camp yeah so on and so forth right I'm not a trained developer but at some point like I literally coded something and built it and got paying customers and then sold the company not for million bajillion dollars but yes it is crazy and I've just blown away by not just me but the fact that we can all do stuff like this now again we have ai to think for the large part but for anybody listening to this we can all build apps now software it's just wild and every single week that goes by it gets easier which is

58:09continuing to be surprising so have you got a a checklist of future projects that you want to build what's what's next where are you going with this yeah you want the ideas I will literally just throw them The Ether and then somebody can steal them number one an app that will text me when half timee is over for my college football games love it I want to be I want to be able to input um Nick team the Washington Huskies go dos but also George Bulldogs go dos I want to input my team and I want to get a text message when halftime is over and the

58:42game is starting back so I can walk back in the other room and get in front of my TV there's an app right there that I would pay $10 a year for um I mean it's like like red zone right so it's similar oh I don't know I don't know what red zone is maybe you could share this well this is like NFL Red Zone like will you know send you an alert when your team is inside the 20 like didn't something like that exist I don't know I don't know it's a great question either way I'd pay for it all right um here's another one

59:08that I think I might actually do as my next project unless somebody else does it better and that is an AI Mastermind group I want to be able to log in to something that looks like a chat window or heck I might even do voices since the AIS have voices now um audio and and I literally just want to interact with it as my Mastermind group in fact I want to go more specific I want to be able to define the exact people that are in my Mastermind group give them names give them character traits and life experiences and pros and cons and strengths and weaknesses each person

59:47except for their Ai and I want to chat with them so almost like an AI therapist but an AI Mastermind group that's another idea yeah and this is something I've been exploring like you can easily prompt it to be like respond as if you're Tony Robbins respond as if you're Pat Flynn or Warren Buffett or Aristotle or you know and it's I mean this is kind of taking it to to the next level where I'm picturing there like Talking Heads you know haen generated on a on a screen here totally um I I'll give you another one that somebody else should do that I don't want to do and that is affiliate

1:00:25tracking software but Dirt Cheap so there are a lot of tools out there like rewardful and what's the other one link mink there's another one these are affiliate referral softwares where you sign up you pay $49 a month and they give you this code like a jav a line of JavaScript or something that you install into your site maybe it's WordPress maybe it's a software product like convert k or something like that I don't know okay and then they handle your affiliate marketing right they give you affiliate links they give you a page where your Affiliates can sign up so on and so forth all of these are way

1:01:06overpriced and the market is itching for people like me who are Indie developers to pay $9 a month and just have a dirt simple affiliate tracking thing I don't know why these are so expensive and somebody needs to create this this is like the app Sumo tidy Cal versus Kenly somebody should build this right now and sell to me and I'll pay for it there you go and it can't be that hard these are great I haven't do yet but it can't be that hard these are great well you can email Pete Pete I do even blog once you got this developed do you even blog.com

1:01:37is where you can check him out thanks so much for schooling me on this stuff I think I'm inspired to start playing around with it or allocate you know a portion of the week to just learn new things start dinging around with stuff and see what comes of it I think it's really exciting what you what you built and looking forward to seeing the the future projects in the pipeline what comes down the road but let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle Nation quit quicker I think maybe I've heard this on your podcast before so this is going to be a little bit of a copout but my one

1:02:13tip is to drop your projects faster drop your ideas faster and move on to the next thing I do think there is a possibility that you will quote unquote lack a certain Focus here I do think there's a possibility that you might miss out on some opportunity if you had tripled down on a project instead of quitting yeah but on the long run I actually think it's better advice to quit faster and move on to the next thing that's my side hustle and Entrepreneurship Mantra right now well I gave my criteria for when it was time to throw in the towel when you come to read

1:02:56to work what's your quick criteria that's a huge one right there I mean that's it that t that looks like a lot of different things for me personally but I do feel that now I don't want to work on this project anymore that's the number one sign yeah figure out a way to probably not shut it down completely I'm with you all of these things can be assets I mean I didn't touch my app for nine months and then I sold it MH either just give yourself Grace for not working on it and just put it down if it's not costing you any money list it for sale

1:03:29figure out something else to do with it when that work becomes uh tedious I'm with you all right well this is fair and this is you know the reason why we ask this question because half the time or you know often times well the the answer is persistence if you just stick with it through the hard times eventually you get to the you know pot of gold at the other side like well how long do you really keep digging before it just you you throw it it just never comes so there's no shame in quitting that's you know I would love to have you same thing

1:04:02like if you're you going to leave your job uh you know to start a business I would love to see you start the business before quitting your job like you have lower the lower the height of that Cliff that you're jumping off um if you're quitting to something rather than from something you know a whole lot of psychology around that but you know you don't need to hang on to something that's making your life worse so quit quicker is the number one tip from Pete in this one has been awesome I love the calls to action of like well if you don't know how to do it ask the AI to

1:04:30troubleshoot it I love the call to start small I love the call to find a marketing partner and share the upside with them really really interesting episode again one that's inspired me hopefully to go Str try and build something on my own but big thanks to Pete for sharing his Insight big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone you can hit upside hustle nation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place thank you for supporting the advertisers support the show that's it for me thank you so much for tuning in if you're finding value in the show the

1:05:01greatest compliment is to share with a friend so fire off that text message to you know somebody who's always coming up with different business ideas hey have you ever thought doing a software project this episode is for you until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on