Building Apps That Actually Make Money - Vibe Coding vlog

0:00Over the last few months, I've spent about 500 plus hours learning to vibe code. And in that time, I have launched a startup [music] to $800 monthly recurring revenue. And in this video, I want to show some of the lessons that I've learned along the way to help encourage you as you are going along your vibe coding journey. The main lesson that I learned on this vibe coding journey is that you need to surround yourself with people that are going through the same thing. So getting involved into communities, posting on X, getting involved with other people that are also building projects because there's going to be times when you're building your project that you're going to go through little spaces of frustration, you know, and doing this remotely, you know, by yourself is a very lonely type of business. You know,

0:47going through and building any startup has been very lonesome. You know, I get excited when I fix a bug or fix a user error or go through the logs and fix something that, you know, would have broken the whole system. And who do I go to run to to tell in excitement? You know, I go tell my wife, I go tell my family, but they're not involved in the AI space. They're not involved in the vibe coding space. So getting in um you know relationships with with people that are also building startups I would say is like the first thing because it's very lonely. You know you want to share your wins. You want to share your struggles and losses. Um that's going to keep you going. Now lesson number two that I learned is going back to why I'm

1:32even building what I am building. Figuring out why am I building this and who is it serving? Does it bring any value into the marketplace? So, backing up and going through the last few years of my life, we've been a resell operation. We've been selling clothing on marketplaces like whatnot, eBay, and we've done a little over a million dollars in sales this year, which, you know, praise God. Thank you so much. But doing this job for the last five years and doing this business, it's been very um, you know, very much a burnout type of business. you know, it's it's just not as fulfilling as it once was. Do I love clothes? No. But what I do love doing more is building and creating things. Creating things that solve

2:18problems, that help save people time, that bring value into the economy. And in the meantime, I can also sharpen my skills and become more valuable. So, the why for me was simple. you know, getting out of this resell business is going to be something that I'm going to be looking to do over the next year or two and looking to build more apps that serve more people that bring more value. So, you know, going through this over the last few years, we've felt experiences of burnout and just it was not fulfilling. So just a lesson learned over these last few months. I have been more fulfilled doing and building and creating uh online and and serving audiences much more than in the previous 5 years. And in the meantime, I've

3:03developed skills that I've been able to apply to my current business and future businesses, which is basically once you become a person of value, you'll become irreplaceable. So, just giving you a little bit more backstory on why I'm doing what I'm doing and documenting the process in this kind of vlog format is just giving you some more context on who I am, where I'm coming from. I've only been vibe coding for the last, you know, couple months, but I have learned so much and I've been more fulfilled. So, if you like creating and taking ideas from the unseen to the scene, then I just say stick to it, but also stick to why you're doing what you're doing because you're going to be left in the dust if you don't get clear on why. So, now I want to talk about a little bit of

3:48the products that I've launched in the last few months and why it made sense for me to launch them. So, following the ACP framework, which is audience, community, product, I didn't have a product, but I had an audience and I had a community. So, which is why I chose Easy Flip as the first product to build and launch to my community with great success. So, just going over that with you hopefully can bring a little bit more clarity to what you're working on and why it's so important. So, basically, Easy Flip is using GPT Vision. We are using the eBay API. We're using a few other models in the background to essentially help people just be able to snap a few photos with their phone and hit a few buttons. And

4:34the titles are generated, the pricing is generated, and item specifics are all generated in just a few clicks of a button. And this really helps save people time. So for me and in my experience, creating manual listings is the most timeintensive task when you are a full-time or a part-time reseller. It's a constant, you know, you need to have a constant knowledge base of trending keywords. You need to put in the correct item specifics so they're searchable within eBay. And then structuring the title correctly is needs to be optimized, otherwise people won't find your items. So those three things I built into um easy flip to allow people to just focus on sourcing, focus on

5:20finding good quality items and letting AI do the rest. This is why this was built. It is something that I use personally every single day and I have just launched it a a month or two ago. All right, so going through a few of the stats, we launched this app back in the second week of September. So, we have made a total of $2,249 with 57 orders. Average order value is 39.46. Checkout conversion rate is 28.22% with 163 checkouts. 60 of 46 checkouts succeeded and we are at a net revenue of $1,574. So, right now we have about 20 paying

6:05customers that are reoccurring, which is amazing. And something that I'm looking to get better on is now marketing and advertising and making sure that now um now that the app is built, we can now get more people to use it because if you are making less than a million dollars in annual recurring revenue, nobody knows about you. That is a quote from Alex Ramoszi and I just something that I keep going back to is that I am just not marketing enough. So spending time doing organic marketing through Instagram and Tik Tok and then also paid ads is something that has been key to keep the ball rolling. So I have a school community of 1,400 members. I don't like to spam too much in my own community of

6:50easy flip. I just have a pinned post here and I basically don't mention it very much in the community. It's more of a resource for resellers to go to to just see what's selling well, to see what's selling for people in their individual stores, and just more of a community of like-minded people that want to do this full-time. Um, this all stems from a uh basically a YouTube channel that I created a little over three and a half, four years ago now. And we have 17,000 subscribers. Basically, it's a lot of vlog style content of my journey, you know, of reselling, uh, becoming a full-time reseller in this space. But like I said, I had no product. I had a lot of free products, free reseller spreadsheets, uh free lead magnets, which enables us to

7:37grow our subscriber email list to just under 4,000 emails, which is nice. I send out one email per week um talking a little bit about some reseller news, which I use perplexity to get a lot of the information to create my newsletter with a quick call to action about easy flip towards the end of the email. But that's kind of the the system. The ACP framework of audience community product is we take people that want to be part of a community joining profit first and then the product is um an easy flip AI automation to help people list stuff quicker on eBay. So that's kind of just a little bit of backstory of why I built what I built. I really do think that it is much more difficult to build

8:22something that you don't have a audience already built upon. Not saying it doesn't work. I think that you should build something, but keep the audience in mind and how you're going to market your product in mind. So, one thing I've been doing recently is posting a ton on Instagram and Twitter. So, um, we have 5,500 followers on Twitter, and I've been making these, um, AI reels in the reselling niche, which is basically reseller tips, um, you know, point of view finds, Goodwill pricing items and things like that. And the reels, you know, they don't get a ton of views, but they do bring in a couple thousand views. Um, 10,000 views, 4,000 views, 7,000 views, 7,400 views. You know, not

9:08a ton. There is one back here with AI Tupac got 1.5 million views back when Sora released. But that is my marketing strategy. You know, getting distribution and figuring out who is going to get your product is the next step. You know, once you build your app, you're like then now what? You know, distribution is the key. And if you are not thinking about that now while you're building your app, it's going to be really hard for you to launch and you know, get attention and eyeballs on the thing that you're building. Now I want to talk a little bit of the addiction that came when I started building. I got obsessed with building and creating and taking an idea from the unseen and into the scene. So after Easy Flip was built and launched, I was like now what? So I then

9:55started figuring out what's going to be the next project. What's going to be the next thing that I build? So I decided to partner up with someone who is involved in the real estate niche. basically allowing real estate agents and photographers to make one-click edits, turn photos into videos and to allow that workflow be not only less expensive for agents and real estate or and photographers um allowing them to save more time. So going back to that time equation, you know, editing is a very, you know, kind of archaic process now with all these models that enable us to build upon and, you know, to transform photos into videos and make one-click edits is now possible. Now, we just need to figure out how do we use that

10:41technology. And so I decided to partner up with someone that's already involved in the niche. going back to that distribution aspect and principle of you know if you build something and you launch it to crickets no one's going to buy it. So built that and that was super fulfilling and and you know now we're in that marketing stage of getting customers which we've made two sales by the way but that is the the newest thing uh most recently that I launched um you know in the last month. The other one is more of an app helping people in a group in community called Startup Empire where we just help people build their app. You know, going from zero to one. You know, I'm not claiming to be an expert by any means, but I do like the zero to one

11:26process where, you know, you have an idea, but you don't know how to make it come about. So learning to use tools like cloud code and to learn tool to learn how to use these large language models and how to connect these backend APIs to create a product. So we use a starter kit. We help people go from zero to one to launch their app. And I would say that's probably the most fulfilling out of it all. And we're actually building an app in the community called Snaptastic which allows people to restore old photos. and I'm going through the marketing process right now with that and showing people how to market your app and get more attention and more views. So, those are the three things that I've launched in the last few months. Has it been easy? Absolutely not. This is coming from someone that

12:11had no skills in the vibe coding space. I didn't even know what an API call was. I didn't even know what a command line interface was. But if you develop skills and become more of a person of valuable value, you will become irreplaceable because those are the skills that are so in demand right now that if you just learn them and take the time, you know, you'll make yourself like gold. You'll make yourself like oil. You'll you'll become so valuable that people will come looking for you. So I just say to you, maybe you're feeling burned out right now. Maybe you're at your 9 to5 right now. There is a better way. And I know you have an idea that's going to change the world, but you just got to figure out how to make it come to pass. Well, through co vibe coding and building these apps, maybe that's something that

12:57you could look towards. And I'm just sharing my journey with you because I'm just a regular person. I didn't go to school for this. I didn't go to business school, but I'm learning how to manage my time effectively and go allin in what I'm actually passionate about and what is more fulfilling to me. So, I'm running a resell business. it's not fulfilling. But building and creating is one of the best things that I've experienced over these last few years. And I know I'm in the zone and feeling the flow when I'm at the computer and I'm creating. Now, going back to learning new skills that are in demand, a quick Google trend search of vibe coding proves my point. A year ago, this term wasn't even known or thought of. But now you can see here this is a highly searchable keyword phrase that it

13:43is a skill to be acquired. There's Fortune 500 companies right now that are looking to hire people to whether to help integrate AI into their business to help become more optimized and efficient in their business. So, just wanted to show you this graph here because it really does help paint a picture of why learning new skills in the AI space is the key is the key to becoming irreplaceable and adding value to yourself. So, through your vibe coding journey, whether you're launching a startup, you're helping your current business implement AI, those are skills that are going to be almost futurep proof. I mean, I don't even think they teach vibe coding in school. You know, we homeschool four kids and they are very much aware of who Claude is, what AI is, and now we're figuring out what

14:28are the things they want to build with AI. So, you got to be forward facing and look into the future with the rapid advancement of AI. Where is it in 10 years um in trying to figure out what are the skills that are going to be basically irrelevant, you know, in 10 years and what are the things that we should be learning now to prepare ourselves for the future. So this is a good kind of like picture that I like to paint but app um I launched within the school community was going from zero to one. Um you know being able to restore old photos you know using um you know the technology that is out now to be able to restore photos is pretty amazing. So, this is something that we're working on that's reoccurring in the group um of Startup Empire and just

15:14helping people like learn, you know, the the process of building and how to build and then how to market. So, like I said, I'm just kind of teaching my journey of what I've learned and how I'm learning to help people grow their business as well. So, that's the other thing that we had been uh working on building. I want to talk a little bit about the setup that I use. This is way overkill and not needed, but it does help me become a little bit more efficient when I'm doing my work. So, usually side projects like Perfect Pick and Snaptic I do over here because I like to keep it separate from my main thing that I'm looking to do, which is easy flip, content creation, and managing my resell business. So, you

15:59know, you don't need three monitors obviously at all. And don't mind the cable mess in the background, but it does help me become a little bit more not saying like multitasking, but just become a little bit more efficient with my time. So, one thing I like to track here, and this is probably not going to show up well, but I do like to see, you know, our daily active users. And this is for Perfecto Pickic. Just, you know, seeing that we have 33 um recent signups in the last 30 days. I also do all my communication through Slack um with anyone that we're doing business with. So, business partners um you know, people like that just really helps with communication. Also, all of the communication happens in notion. So, I

16:44don't even know how this is going to be showing up here, but I just do think if you do have a business partner and you're building anything with, you know, a team or a group of people, having things where you can track it and, you know, having things that you can communicate well is the key because if you build anything with anyone and you're not communicating on a constant basis, um it's going to be difficult for you to build something. So, uh, making sure everyone's on track, making sure everyone knows what to do and, you know, why they're doing it. Um, I just wanted to show you a little bit of the setup. Um, I've had this setup for a while, but, you know, making a a comfortable workspace for you, I think, is very important. Some people like to work out of coffee shops, you know, whatever. Um,

17:31I can never do that just cuz it's too distracting. Um, but here, you know, I just have this in my bedroom, you know, it's nothing special. So, I'm in literally a corner of our bedroom and I try to make as much work and progress as I can early on in the day um before the day gets going because I do run another business uh with the resell business. But just wanted to show you kind of the workflow. Another huge thing for me is um making sure that I always have the logs page open. This is for easy flip and I use uh Versel to host Easy Flip. Um, I like to look at the live logs just to make sure that the users are, you know, having a good experience. Um, so I that way I can always go into the logs and make sure that, you know, if an

18:16error comes up, I could then go into clawed code and and squash that bug in that error. So, same thing with, you know, perfect a pickic and snaptastic. I have the same thing open um is I have the logs you know making sure that I can get to the logs if you know someone has an error or a mistake and I always try to be super responsive with people that are you know using the app making sure that they're you know having a good experience because I don't want to have a high churn because I'm taking five business days to get back to people. Another thing that I implemented recently was um and this is very simple, but it's called Crisp. Um I just put this on our website for easy flip and allows users to just click a button um

19:03on easy flip right here. I don't know how well that's going to show up, but basically they can click that button and get instant, you know, message to me. And you know, if I don't get to their message in time, it uh sends it to their email, which I want to just have the best customer experience as possible because like I said, every customer is super valuable to me and I want to make sure that they have a great experience, which is why I offer a money back guarantee. If they're not happy, I'm just going to refund them because, you know, I want to make sure everyone is set, happy, they're paying their hard-earned money, and that's why that's super important to me. um you know making sure that we can have a good user experience to reduce churn and also getting feedback from users even though if they're cancelling their subscription I want to know why they canceled so I

19:49can make my product better and I'm just going to keep doing these vlog style videos of kind of day in the life of what I'm doing and I hope that it can help you along your startup journey and give me some feedback you know what are some things that I can improve upon what are you building and what are some of the struggles you're going through I'd love to help but And I hope you guys have a blessed rest of the day and we'll see you in the next