# I can’t believe we built an IOS app with AI in under 33 min (V0, Cursor AI, Xcode)

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oNLQUznT8A
Duration: 34 min
Language: English
Words: 5524
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/4oNLQUznT8A

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[0:00] Riley brown people who watch this episode what are they going to get out of it I hope to instill some clarity around building with AI so I think it would be useful in this episode if we talked about prototyping and how business-oriented people marketing oriented people can communicate their app ideas more effectively to either pitch to their team and um and just yeah and yeah basically use it as a guiding vision for building [Music] software [Music] baby baby let get those juices and just to be clear you're not a trained engineer you didn't go to like University waterl for four years and study engineering correct don't even

[1:07] know what that is and no I uh I was I will say I will say just through this process because I have been building stuff with code despite not knowing how to code like if you ask me how to write a hello world thing I don't think I would be able to do it but I could build a full mockup for an app using one of the templates that we've been using and deploy it to the web so that other people can test it and I will say I am learning a lot about like what the functions do so through this process you do kind of learn how to code but it's

[1:38] just in an in the opposite way you you build the thing and then you learn about it instead of learning about it then building the thing which which makes it more fun should we get into it yeah let's what what do you want to get into first do you want to get into um vzer I think that might be a good place to start I think that's a good place to start okay let's Do It um I do have xcode open um you know what let's let's pull an audible here let's start on xcode because we can actually prototype iOS apps I forgot to bring that up so

[2:13] okay while you bring that up while you bring that up I want people to know that you are in for a treat because first of all I have so much fun when you when you come on here and share because it's just like I'm learning you you you're able to communicate in such a clear way that I get these little aha moments so people are listening you're in for a treat and I do have to I must shout out an without an this I'd be two months behind uh he has been the person that like came in and he onboarded me and and allow like gave me the right

[2:49] um the right Frameworks and mental models to like think about what's going on with code that like really pushed me forward um and so I just have to shout him out um and he was on the last episode we did together but anyway let's pull up this right here okay can you see my screen yes I've got we've got xcode open yeah and so I don't want to like build a full app honestly because I'm like brain dead right now I don't want to like deal with um like coming up with an app I just want to talk about like how powerful this is let me bring this

[3:22] to a different screen real quick so this was one of the most powerful uh tools that I've ever seen in terms of like getting me inspired to build some stuff so this is an iPhone simulator and this is xcode and if you've watched the previous videos I've made the way we've been creating apps is we are basically using cursor to generate the code and our codebase is in repet and we're connecting the two in this case we're not using repet we're using xcode instead and xcode allows us to make iOS apps and uh xcode uses Swift or iOS is built on Swift and like I you know this

[4:07] I don't know how to write code but I do know I have seen a lot of code generated and it's actually pretty easy to understand what's going on when using um Swift with building an IOS app so let's do it so first thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that cursor is open so I'll bring everything down to one window here and so we should be connected um um and it's super easy to get started all you do is you hit new project on xcode and you're going to save it to a certain location you're going to open cursor and you're going to

[4:38] hit open via file and you're going to select that same file and then they should be connected and then you're good to go it's way quicker to set up than um a web app and so let's go ahead and open composer with command shift I and say uh I want you to create a simple onepage uh app that um lets me um write my notes and save them to the phone to my phone and what's cool about this is since we're using iOS you can actually save things to the files like you have your files thing on your phone and so you can save things locally

[5:23] so you don't have to set up Firebase which takes forever and leads to a lot of Errors um and I'm just going to hit codebase here and let's go ahead and run this and I honestly think this might actually be a good place for people to start instead of starting with a web app um except for vzer like if you want to just do front-end design if you want to actually have a database I think it's a really good place to start have you tried this yet Greg building an IOS app no um I just figured that it would be okay I I always thought that building an IOS

[6:02] app was more time consuming and harder to do than building a web app am I Am I Wrong shh don't tell anyone but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free these aren't just random guesses they're validated Concepts from entrepreneurs who built hundred million plus businesses I've comp pile them into one simple database compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast but the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor some cost nothing to start I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet the idea bank is your startup shortcut just click below to get

[6:55] access your next cash flowing business is waiting for you um so the the thing about iOS from what I've learned and again a lot of this is what I've learned in the last two weeks from what I can tell it's very annoying to release apps on the App Store because Apple has such a strict um U monitoring policy they they're making sure that you're not selling things on because they want that 30% cut and they're they have really strict content uh regulations so like they don't want you doing anything so the it's more time consuming on that part but if you're just testing it like I can immediately deploy this to my

[7:32] phone you have to put your phone on developer mode but you can like deploy it on your phone and take it with you and so like I'll be making little voice apps and I'll just deploy it straight to my phone and it lives on your phone for the max seven days and you can just go on a walk and you can talk to your phone and you can use your AI features and I really like that because you always have your phone with you and so you can always test it it's way easier to show people and it's not super difficult to create a test flight account and so I

[7:57] could send you a test flight link and you could try the app much it's I think it's just more tangible and fun and it it's not that timec consuming if you're not trying to fully deploy it once you want to fully deploy it then yeah it's probably more timec consuming um okay let's see this so we're going to hit save all and this is the part that's annoying about xcode so anytime they add a new file you actually have to manually go in and you have to hit file and you have to let's make sure we're on the right thing um yeah so file add files to

[8:34] siod and they should did it not did it add already it's been a while since I've done this uh hold on hold okay it actually shows note view here so maybe you don't have to do that annoying uh step anymore even better um that's cool normally you have to anytime cursor creates a new file you have to like manually save them but it doesn't look like you have to um okay there you go see now we have a Notes app um and we can actually use it like it's a phone like Hello uh this is my app and we can we can go back to um we can go to cursor

[9:20] we can say um please make the top say uh sip notes even better can I can I edit that yeah yeah yeah absolutely I have a note file on my on my phone that's called ideas startup ideas so this could kind of just be my idea yeah and you can add little fields that you have so like you know like you can make it your own custom based on whatever you like and you could just make it for fun and it's like honestly as fast as setting up you know like a notion dock which kind of sucks like as you I saw in your Tweet recently you're

[10:02] talking about the feature blow which I agree with um okay startup ideas make the top say startup ideas and then um and then make the button say because we'll want this button right here to say um add sip or no uh add I add idea add idea uh change the color theme uh then at code base and yeah that's pretty fun I don't know I don't know how far we want to get into it but this is just to show you that it's like pretty easy to get oh I know what I want to show you um all right so it should be done we hit save

[10:47] all and then oh yeah every time you make an update you have to actually rerun it on xcode so you have to come back make sure that you have this like simulated iPhone 16 open right here and you're just hit this play button and it needs to succeed if it if it fails it'll say build failed um and yeah it'll just kind of it so this part takes a little bit longer than using a web app but there you go startup ideas and then add idea let me make sure this work like um selling water it's the theme selling water balloons at a football game um

[11:27] like this is the third straight episode uh idea there you go boom it's right there you can check it out um super easy final thing I want to show you um is if you go to Riley's iPhone I can actually oh I haven't set it up to this account anyway that's how you would do it you just need to hook it up via your uh iPhone and you need to put it on developer mode I haven't done it with the iOS 18 yet um and I don't think we need to do it now but yeah you can immediate it'll immediately load on your phone which is really fun that's cool

[12:04] you can go for a walk and you can come up with startup ideas and store them in there and it's a great way to get started it's a great way to get started and it's a great way to give you that aha moment yeah for sure because when you especially if people listening to this this is probably the first thing or one of the first things they're building right so I think it's a big deal you know it's going to you might look at this and you're going to be like oh I don't need this I don't need that app well actually creating the app is going

[12:28] to just turn on your brain in a completely new way yeah 100% agree um you don't know what you don't know um and once you start like your problem is you're going to have too many ideas like once you you might think you have no ideas now as soon as you find one idea to make you're 100% right you're you're going to be walking around you like oh sh I want to build this thing and it's going to get in the way of the other projects that you actually want to build um and so it's actually I guarantee it too like every single person I talk to

[12:57] has the problem of like two ideas um and yeah you have to hit the aha moment um and I think I think it's a good way to start on your phone because for something about iPhone apps are more tangible than websites for whatever reason um should we talk about vzer yeah let's do it cool cool okay and maybe we can explore an idea that I had earlier today um you're at the right place startup ideas podcast you have an idea sounds about right hell yeah um can you see my screen yes sir okay I've talked about VZ on previous episodes and it's getting it's getting better so they added a project

[13:41] feature which um the app that I'm building is Yap thread Yap thread.com the uh by the way you can uh sign up for the wait list plug um anyway uh what you can do on vzer is you can actually like put in all the information about like your company about your app that you're building so that you don't have to enter in information over and over again so like you can just create like create a landing page for Yap thread uh create a um what else would you need for it yeah like um you can basically yeah create a about us page with Yap thread and it

[14:17] will always have access to that information and so it's super easy to store it in your project so highly recommend using that um but I want to create a cursor for writing I was thinking about that earlier like what if there was like a cursor that looked like vs code but it was for writing and so um imagine you have that idea and say I want you to create a VSS code but um a VSS code like app but for writers um where you have notes on the left panel and a markdown um um note uh note titles on the left panel and a markdown editor in the middle

[15:11] panel and then custom presets on the right panel where you could use them to edit the middle panel so uh so the presets are like custom AI prompts or something like that and you just put in your idea and vzer is quite creative compared to like CLA artifacts compared to anything else you can um it comes up with original ideas which is fun and it's really fast and sharable so would you recommend being very prescriptive in the beginning or letting it kind of come up with its own idea I would 100% ooh this is actually kind of clean I kind of dig this actually like legit

[16:05] like I'm not even this is fire like this is my note we can make I love the white um expand scene character dialogue okay so there's some chapter one okay so it has the notes right here o this is actually kind of sick um what would you would you change anything about it well I think uh this is interesting if you're writing a book but I think that the real opportunity here first of all I think this is a huge idea like this is a multi-billion dollar you know idea um but I think that if I was creating this vs code like interface for writers I

[16:49] would focus more on internet writers than book writers sure for sure um this does it is like chap okay so let's let's make this for uh content creators uh make the presets called uh tweet thread Tik Tock uh script podcast intro and outline uh newsletter and then um uh Instagram uh Carousel I do not know how to spell carousel I never get it right so I'm just not going to try um and um the notes should be o uh web clips from the internet and then oh no that hold on let's just try this uh make it make the the left titles uh more um about posts on social media yeah I

[18:05] think it was just the the things that they added as placeholders so basically if you create one of these and I actually can't go back while it's loading but you'll see that it it's adding a lot of these placeholders right so if we were to actually build this app what it would do is it would basically say whatever the user puts in you're adding it to Firebase which is where we're storing all of this data um and so then oh there you go there's your social icons oh it doesn't have a Tik it doesn't have a Tik Tok icon in the library that's all right that's

[18:39] interesting um okay yeah there it is uh failed to load the Tik Tok icon from lose side react it's probably because it doesn't exist [Music] um this okay so it won't let me type in there anymore but the point is you're trying to figure out what each page should look like and so if we're actually trying to prototype this app um and we're not trying to build it and like this is like the next iteration of wireframing right because what I'm going to do here is that you can hit share or you can hit Fork let's Fork it first let's say we decide Yep this is our main

[19:13] page of this cursor writing app and we are going to Fork it and that allows us in any of these apps the less context you have in the better unless it's relevant and um if you want to iterate on it I recommend forking because if you have all of that context in here it's just going to start performing worse um but when you Fork it also isolates it so you can share it so you have these public links right what we can do is we can go to um let's just go to Google Docs and let's just very easily just like you can just go front page and then

[19:52] we just um we can hyperlink that in and so now our goal would be to get whatever other page we might want on this so let's now say from here we say Okay I want there to be a profile icon on the bottom right of the screen uh this should have all the important information about or information about the user um that a writing tool would have including um let's just say audience information so that might tailor some of the writing styles um example scripts uh actually we'll we'll call them let's call these high performer scripts because you want really good examples any really good app

[20:59] it's not about having being able to do everything it's about having really good examples and staying super narrow um towards those that's just that's kind of how one of the things that we're taking in consideration when um we're building our app is we're you have to have really good examples and you don't want it to just let it do its thing because it sucks at writing in that way um audience information High performing scripts and then basic details and um and then one thing to always include is keep the theme of the site it should look like the same style that'll probably work and then you

[21:39] can run that and I really dig the style to be honest like it's super minimalistic it's kind of like typewriter Vibes yeah it's it's very versel if you look at their company it's very black and white um whatever I don't know what the font is called um but yeah it's very clean this is kind of their default style um okay so it's so it's basically adding the profile button maybe it's going to be a full screen popup I forgot to just say to generate like a full separate page I was actually prompting it like it was cursor because I was basically saying put the button on the

[22:19] main page and create that new page I forgot that I was actually in vzer um but it should give us that icon I don't see it yet oh was that saying it failed okay just create the profile page please um no need to show the profile icon I must admit I'm a lot more Angry to V zero than than you are I feel like you're so you're you're polite oh yeah I mean I feel like uh and trust me right now we're in the beginning you haven't seen me uh at the end of uh an error Loop that last multiple hours okay I have I'm not crazy

[23:10] I have definitely behind not not filming I have sworn relentlessly at cursor before especially cursor when the um oh it's kind of O this looks dope actually um oh so this this would be like if it was pulling your data so like if you you could set that up to your you YouTube API your podcast statistic apis which might take a little bit longer um but yeah you could actually have it automatically load your high performing scripts you have your account details that would be something that you could automatically set up um but yeah this is pretty cool so what I'm going to do again is Fork this profile page and then

[23:54] quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses is I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like

[24:31] SEO and that's why I use boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com um this is basically what I sent my team before we started building is I just had all of these pages in in links so you just have the profile page um you have the um yeah profile page and then you can link it there so you can always find it if you want to use something like Whimsical diagrams you can basically show what button will lead to that page

[25:14] and it's super useful um and then yeah cursor for writing and yeah now we have two pages what do you what do you think we should do next first of all I love this page I I love how simple it is I love how gamified it is like it it now feels like this is like a game almost like I would use this like one you know one of the reasons why I think people got addicted to platforms social platforms like Snapchat Snapchat streaks it's like you know you came back to Snapchat because you didn't want you know to lose your streak with someone so I think like a gamified writing tool is

[26:04] really interesting yeah yeah yeah so like maybe it scores everything that you post maybe or something like that or because a lot of what people are writing now end up becoming videos so that's actually that is a tougher problem that we're actually trying to solve is like how do we connect that original piece of writing to the video content that you've created because a lot of a lot of video in order to create an AI tool that helps with video you need to have sufficient input output so you need to not only know the video but you need to know what script or what outline you

[26:42] used and then it's useful to know what research went into the outline and so if you can map the whole process um you can then reverse engineer it so you can basically take someone else's video you can be like I want to create a video like this and then it says like okay you want to create a script like this and then you want to be able to find these types of sources U and so that's the way that we're trying to approach this problem um but yeah so that's v0 and v0 is just front end so I'm not able to they actually are adding certain apis

[27:17] that you can use to fill data in as just placeholders so you don't have to look at like um like one thing we could do is say we could say let's go back to this real quick and what I've been doing for with VZ recently is using it to make landing pages so that's been really fun and I think the best use case for vzer is say um okay for this site create a landing page that is highly um effective to get people to sign up based on the value prop or this site um the ultimate or we can just call it cursor um Creator composer uh name of site

[28:18] okay and yeah have you ever used tally um the talking about like the form company yeah yeah so if you want to create a really really fast landing page and collect like user um like if you created a weight list like I created one yesterday in 10 minutes and just threw it up and I was able like I literally said use this logo that I generated on Mid journey in one minute use this logo and then embed this form and I just pasted in the tally embed form and literally one prompt it generated my landing page and now like people are signing up on the wait list and it's

[29:02] just going to tally so we have that information so if you have to do it really quick that's a really good way to do it and it's and it's free what because I I know I pay like hundreds of dollars a month on type form for all the different ideas that we're running yeah well Tally's only 30 bucks a month if you don't want any of their branding like um yeah like this is one prompt on vzer right here and if you just click on sign up for wait list um it just one prompt like I created this basically it's crazy yeah and it's super easy to get go from

[29:39] this it's a lot easier with one page to go from this to get it over to repet you basically just give it all of the code you can also um I mean this is basically the whole landing page I mean look at this landing page let's let's use your um I guess the the Bor in marketing analytics here um like compose your content orchestrate your success I you could probably work on that but like that's a clean landing page it's clean it's clean and I think what's so cool about this is you can come up with an idea you can prototype something you can put it out there and

[30:19] start getting feedback in minutes yeah I mean think about how long we've been sitting here I mean like look at this public link boom look at this we have now we have a landing page and so if you send this to a developer they're like oh like he has the whole site mapped out all they have to do basically is connect things with the backend obviously there might be some code that might be a little messy but like their job is mostly just the vision is very clear um maybe not with something like with cursor for writing is actually a pretty that is a tall task that's a

[30:58] multi-week project no matter what but they have a better idea of what you're talking about um which is really cool um yeah I mean that's vzero what what else what else should we should we dive into I think that's it I think that's the episode I like it hell yeah let's do it yeah so if you're listening to this you've got ideas don't just be an idea guy or gal like be a prototype guy or gal you know um put your stuff out there uh I've never used tally but I've seen people use it like get your tallying I think like voice of customer feedback is

[31:37] so helpful um and you might realize by putting out this prototype that hey turns out people don't want this product and that's that's great too it is the best Loop and you said that like you had a tweet that I referenced in a YouTube video uh that I released this morning which was like the most dangerous person or um something about the I call them the Creator composer someone who can build things with a community and asks them if they like it or ask them if they don't like it or ask them what they want and you just have this like really fast feedback loop because yes you can as a Creator I

[32:12] can Outsource someone to build apps for me but the loop is so slow I'm talking to other creators who do that and it's like multiple months before basic features are created features that I have literally released to my community the same day I have the idea and so it's a it's a huge unlock in my opinion and I agree that it's they're the most dangerous people you want to be dangerous yeah Do It um if you like this episode please like And subscribe and then Riley and I will be in the comment section if you have any additional questions or want to just talk more about the stuff and nerd

[32:48] out about it love to see you in there and Riley where could people learn more about you and some of the stuff that you're working on yeah Yap thread.com uh releasing an app that's all I've been doing in for the last two weeks so it's nice to get a little content break in this was a lot of fun um yeah that's what I'm working on and he's doing it in public which is cool you know like this is a guy who like you said he wasn't wasn't a developer he's got a small team and uh one thing one one one thing before I go is we're actually G to have

[33:19] feature contests so we're going to release the code for the app and we're going to see who can like Fork the code and add the coolest feature to the app um and it's going to be really fun I'm super excited about that yeah we're just going to do it um if someone copies us whatever whatever yeah cool all right my man I'll catch you later yep peace peace [Music]

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