Vibe Coding Expert: How to Build & Deploy a $1M App in the New Era of AI (Step-By-Step Guide)

Anytime you see a SAS, anytime you see software, there's a hundred million dollar idea there. That's because it's so easy to create software now to validate an idea, to build an MVP, to build a product now that maybe thousands of people use that can make you tens of thousands a month. You can just use Replet. A good example is like linkin bio apps. You can build that on Replet in like 5 minutes. Now you can go straight from idea to application without the code.

Okay, so today's guest is Matt Palmer. Matt is our Replet insider. And before we dive in, let me tell you what inspired this conversation. A few weeks ago, we recorded an episode with Alan Hamilton where she showed us how she was using Replet to build landing pages for her companies in just a few hours. Since that moment, I started seeing more and more people online that were building profitable products in a weekend using AI tools like Replet. And so my curiosity started to grow and I realized that there are so many people, maybe even you watching at home right now, that have ideas that you want to build, but you feel excluded, blocked, because you're not a coder or software engineer. That was the position that I was in, and that's why we brought Matt on the show. He's the vibe coding expert. He works at Replet and in this episode, he shows us step by step all of the insider secrets to build your first successful product on Replet in just a few hours. It sounds even crazy for me to say that. But anyway, let's just get into the conversation. You are listening to the Callum Johnson show.

In the preparation to this episode, I just started to get really excited and there were really like two quotes or things that I heard that kind of sparked it and so I wanted to read it back to you. The first one was actually from the founder of Replet, Amjad. He said, "This is actually one of those rare examples where building has been truly democratized. Anyone with an idea can now create software." And so that was the first one. I then heard you say this in a podcast. You said, "Some of these apps I used to say, 'Oh, that'll take weeks to build.' Today you can build an app in a morning or even an hour." And so when I heard both of those things, it slowly started to dawn on me that we're really in this like golden era for building things. And for people that just have ideas and want to build something meaningful with it, and so for that human being, they're not technical, they're not a coder, they're not a software engineer, what is going to be the value to that person of listening to the conversation you and I are about to have?

That that's spot on, man. And, you know, I think it's one of the reasons that I get so excited about my job, helping people build with AI, helping them learn about what's possible today. Um, and so for those folks that that are just ambitious or really just love getting uh into the details of ideas or exploring what they can create, um, you don't need to know how to code anymore. And so, watching this episode today, I think you're going to be able to understand how to turn the ideas that you have in your head, all these this ambition and these things that you come up with or that you're thinking about late at night into something tangible, into something that you can use, that you can share with people, and that might one day be a business.

Yeah. You know, and and it's cool because we were talking before this, like we're going to get into kind of like the four-step framework for how someone can build their first product, their first app on Replet. But you just said something interesting for that human being who's ambitious, maybe they're non-technical, but they've always had kind of ideas in their head that they want to build. The funny thing is is actually that's your story. And so I just wanted to to read this quote and then we can get a bit more context on you. You said, "At one point I was punching numbers constantly into Excel sheets and I'm like, 'A computer could do this. Like, I should not be doing this. An app or a script should be doing this.' And so I want to spend my time building and expressing my creativity. But when I brought that up about automating it to my bosses you were talking about at the time, that got completely shut down." You know, I kind of think it's a it's a it's a relatable moment for people. Can can you just take us back there? Like give us the context, give us the setting uh of that moment.

Absolutely. Um, and this is super fun to talk about. But, you know, like I studied physics and economics in college. I'd always been like a pretty motivated person. I never really knew what I wanted to do and so uh I kind of just figured, hey, after school I'll go into finance. That that'll be challenging, right? Like everybody kind of told me this was like um something for people who who wanted to accomplish things, right? That's kind of how I perceived it. Uh, but maybe a year or two in, I quickly found that I was doing these kind of boring, repetitive things and that was just kind of accepted by the people around me, right? Like I was looking at uh the group that I was a part of, the team that I was a part of, all really great people, but everyone was just okay with these processes that I'd look around and think, "This, I have better ways of spending my time, right? Like I'm capable of more than this." Um, and I think it can be really challenging to sit with yourself and sit with that fact, right? That cognitive dissonance of, "This is the thing that I'm doing, but I shouldn't be doing it." Um, and, you know, when I tried to think about, well, how do I how do I move my life into a place where I am doing things that I'm capable, I am I am pushing what's possible or getting better, that got completely shut down, right? And as a a student that had recently transitioned into that kind of working life, so to speak, this is the first time I'd ever had a job. I was starting to wonder, well, is this life? Is this what life's about? Right? Like I wake up, maybe I have time to work out or like do something in the morning. I go to work. I work a lot, right? Like I'm the type of person that enjoys working, but I go to this work. I don't really enjoy it. Doesn't feel like I'm pushing myself. And then I go home, right? Is that all that there is to life? And so I really had to sit with that and and that discomfort.

I'm curious because I think there's a lot of people that have had that moment, that realization of like, okay, this isn't really the thing that I want to do long term. Going from that moment to then actually making the decision to go and build something or go and learn the new skill that like takes you into the next thing is a completely different ball game. And so I'm I'm curious from your story like what kind of pushed you over the edge where it was like, okay, I'm actually going to take action right now. Like I can't be in this environment. I'm going to move somewhere else, move in a different direction.

Yeah, for sure. And and to set the context a little bit more, this was this was five years ago, right? So AI didn't didn't really exist. Um, and what that meant for was when I brought up like, "Hey, I want to automate this thing." Well, I had to figure out how to like install languages on my laptop. I had to figure out how to write code. I had to figure out all these things. And and sitting there I was like, "This is going to take months, right? This is going to take a long time." Now, as we'll get into, there are tools that are available today. I'm going to show you guys some of those. Um, but it just meant that it was it was that much harder for me to finally decide I've had enough, right? And so I remember one day um we were doing, you know, like punching these numbers in and and there's this process that I had to do that I basically was handed off to me every day at 4 p.m. I'd have to go over to this computer, basically a special terminal. It was a Bloomberg terminal for those familiar. Find this number, this rate for the day. Take it back to uh an Excel spreadsheet, pop it in the spreadsheet, update a formula, do a bunch of manual stuff. I would mess it up sometimes. It would take 20 or 30 minutes. And every single day I knew at this time it would interrupt my flow. It would interrupt whatever I was doing. And I was just like, "A human being should not be having to do this every day." And I'm the type of person that just that drives me crazy. Um, and so I think it was at that moment, kind of looking around, realizing there were a bunch of processes like these. There are a bunch of people that had to do these manual things and it took away from their ability to actually create things or make things that were unique or novel, right? Um, I said, "Okay, I'm buying a Python textbook. I'm buying a a SQL textbook. I'm gonna sit down. I'm gonna learn these these tools to hopefully automate, you know, some of the things that I'm doing." And I later learned that like, hey, this is what it means to work in tech. It's kind of what led me down the path that I'm in today.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, you said something when we spoke earlier and it was like it was such a relatable moment because I've even had it in my career um when I left my job in consulting. And you said at some point you wake up and you say, "What is the outcome if I work here for the next five years?" And then you look at the people who've been there for five years and you're like, "I don't want that." If I'm actually on a path where in five years I'm not doing what I want to do, that's the scariest thing possible to me. Can can you can you talk about that that that realization? And it it's I I get what you mean because it's so vivid sometimes when you can like you can see the person who's three levels up from you and like what their life is like.

Yeah, for sure. And it's funny, I'm I laugh because it's I'm hearing you read these things back to me and it just kind of evokes that emotion, right? Like when I'm when I'm thinking about these types of things. Um, and I think, you know, very early on, uh, I was talking with some friends and we're talking about like, what's what's the scariest thing to like, what are you most afraid of? Right? This is like a very deep, visceral question. It's hard to answer that honestly in front of people. And I sat and I thought about it and I think my response was, my deepest fear is being the same as everybody else, right? Like I don't want to be an NPC, right? Like I have things about me, you have things about you. Everybody here listening has something unique about them that makes them completely different from any other human being on the planet. And I think about that in the context of what I'm doing, the way that I spend my time, showing up, doing something for 10 hours a day, right? Like that's a lot of time. That's really precious. That compounds over a year, five years, 10 years. And if you don't if you're not really attentive to what you're doing or where you're headed, right? You could go down the wrong path. And I'm really I have this constant pressure that, hey, what if I just go down the wrong path or I just spend my time so focused on my work, I don't think about where I'm going and then I wake up in five years and I look back and I think, "I could be somewhere completely different. I could be accomplishing something that I didn't accomplish. I could be realizing these things about myself um that are unique and using those to provide value to people or like move the needle on something bigger than myself." Um, and so that's kind of where that quote came from and how I think about things. Uh, you know, is it good to be like worried all the time about this stuff? No. But I think some healthy concern for um, who you are, what makes you different, what you're capable of, the person that you could be if you apply intentional effort every day. I think these are all really important. And I think a lot of people, probably a lot of your viewers are thinking the same thing.

I agree. I agree. You know what? You know, it's funny, even as I I listen to you because you talk about not not wanting to be like an NPC. And uh for you at that time, if if we went back five years ago, it's like you're punching numbers into a spreadsheet. For me, five years ago, I'm cuz I was a consultant. I'm like aligning columns on like slide decks and like that was my version of the of the NPC. But you know what? You you said something interesting. You said at that time it was like you had to go and learn Python or like a coding language in order to go and build something. Now it's different. Can you kind of talk about even your experience of like finding Replet, vibe coding, just you even kind of learning about that whole scene?

Absolutely. So kind of what you're saying, right? Back in the day, five years ago, even a year ago, the thing about that kind of grunt work is that someone had to do it, right? Like we weren't fully there where it could be automated. Like somebody had to align the columns in the the PowerPoint. And if it wasn't you, it was going to be the person that was hired next after you. That's kind of one of the things that I realized is like, if I'm not punching the numbers in the spreadsheet, actually the next junior person that's gets hired after me, I'm going to tell them to do that. I don't even feel good about that because I think it's nonsense, right? But today you can do it with AI, right? Like there are tools to be able to automate these things even if you're not a developer. And so honestly, my journey to Replet started um about a year and a half ago. I joined just because I was, you know, in development. And Replet was a tool at that time that made it really easy to like deploy apps or or to build apps. You still had to know how to code, right? A lot of the tools we're going to talk about today are brand new. Uh Replet has only been doing what we're doing for like about a year at this point. Um, but it was just a really simple, easy place to go from kind of idea to code to application. Now, with the release of a lot of these newer AI models, um, we've dropped AI on top of the Replet workspace. I'll show you how that works today. And now you can go straight from idea to application without the code. And so it was really this, uh, sort of, um, fortuitous position that I was in working on a great platform. All of these AI models come out and I'm like, "We need to show people how to build with AI on the platform." Uh, and, you know, our leadership at Replet kind of pivoted into the AI uh the AI wave and we built out a lot of really robust functionality on how to do just that.

Yeah. You know, okay, because we're going to we're going to get into it. And I I even read the quote out uh from Amjad, the founder of Replet, right in the beginning of like, "Anyone with an idea can now build software," which is like a crazy thing. And so before we get into the steps and actually building, helping someone build their first product on Replet, I did some like I was doing some research and I was even watching like podcasts before this one and some of the stats about like Replet and the growth that you guys have experienced in the last six months is like mind-boggling. Just if I read this out. So the company, So Amjad actually came up with the idea like a long time ago. The company was formally founded in 2016. At the end of 2024, the company made $10 million in ARR. And then you release Replet agent. Since then, the business has gone from 10 million to over $100 million in five and a half months. From from your vantage point, when you see something just take off in that way, right? What what do you think is going on? Like why has Replet agent and what you guys have built? Why has it caught on with people in the to the degree that it has?

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Absolutely. And, you know, I think this is going to go back to to largely what we discuss um in sort of the tutorial kind of phase of this video, which is that anybody with agency, anybody with an idea can see that idea realized in like 15 or 30 minutes. And it might not be perfect. There might be, you know, some things you have to tweak, some things you have to polish up, but you can take something that's in your head and then having a working prototype of that in like a morning. This is something that number one, you had to teach yourself code. You had to learn how to build in that language. And then you'd have to spend like a week, two weeks, a month building out something just to even understand if your idea would work. So that like dopamine hit of like, "Wow, I had this idea and now it's real. Now it's like on my computer screen in front of me and I can play with it," man, is super powerful. And I know personally um I mean it's changed changed my life. It's changed the lives of many other people, whether they were able to you know create an app for their family, create an app for their business, all of these things. Um, and everybody sees that and that's why we've seen the growth that we have.

Yeah. You know, I just want to get into it because I think a big part of the reason that I get really excited about these conversations is to your point, the the first kind of like barrier of entry when it came to building software was like you had to be able to know how to code or you had to have a lot of capital that you could pay someone who knew how to code. And so just that used to prevent so many people from being able to build things even if they were creative, even if they had great ideas. But like with tools like Replet and some of the other things that we're seeing with AI, it's like anyone can do it. And so before we get into it, I'm curious just like are there just everyday examples of like people that you've seen just building things on Replet where it's like if we even rewound like a few years, this person never would have been able to build this. But because of this agent, they've now been able to build something meaningful in their life. Like maybe you can just just show us some of that.

Yeah, for sure. Um, so there are a ton of examples. Uh, I think Billy Howell is a great one. Um, he's an entrepreneur. He builds his ideas for clients. So he'll just go out and pitch a bunch of clients like ideas for applications and they'll be like, "Yeah, I need that, right?" Or that would really help our business. And then he'll go to Replet, he'll build it super quick, he'll sell it to them. He has a business basically selling these applications. So he's a great example. Um, Amjad was also recently just on Joe Rogan. He discusses a lot of those examples on that podcast. Just today, uh, somebody posted a tweet. I'll actually share my screen real quick. We're going to do uh a lot of this today, but um, uh, just passed 10K MR using only Replet to develop our app. It took one month to create an MVP to sell to customers, and it's been 3.5 months since we started. Our growth tripled from last month, and we are a team of two. Thank you for your service." Um, obviously the thank yous for the whole team, but uh, you know, these are examples of someone who has an idea. They're on a small team. They don't have the development resources. They don't have the capital like you mentioned to get started. And they can use Replet to leverage, right? It's technology. They're using technology to leverage their ideas. And it's now much more about the ideas that you have, your ability to actualize those ideas than writing the code. And something I talk about every now and then is software development used to be really capital intensive, right? Like, hey, this is why you need to be venture backed. You need to raise a bunch of money and go hire a bunch of software engineers. You have to pay them a bunch of money to then go create something. And I think at the the end of the spectrum, that's still true, right? Like if you want like Uber, if you want an app that serves hundreds of millions of people, you need really good software engineering talent to build that. But to validate an idea, to build an MVP, to build a product now that maybe thousands of people use or that can make you tens of thousands of dollars a month, you can just use Replet or you can use another AI tool. And that means that the cost of investment to build a working application has fallen to almost just time and really good ideas.

I just want to get into it. If we were going to start like right in the beginning for that person that they have an idea in their mind or maybe they don't even have an idea in their mind. Let's start even earlier and they know that they want to build something. They're like inspired by this conversation and other things that they're hearing. They want to build something this week, this weekend. What is step one?

For sure. So, what I'll do here is we're going to walk through a four-step process. But before we do that, I'm going to take a step back for the person that doesn't have ideas, right? Because I think if you get put on the spot, right? Like if you asked me right now what my favorite movie is, I don't know. I would kind of kind of freeze up, right? So, I get it. Um, and ideas can be hard. But, you know, going back to the the story I described earlier, and it seems like you're you were in a similar position for those people that feel like they're capable of more, that feel like they're always thinking of new and clever ways of doing things, like you don't have to push too much. The ideas are going to come. I promise. And the most simple way that I find to do that is to just go through life and be observant. Like, go to the store, you know, just go do your normal life. Go to the gym. And along the way, you're going to notice things that are inefficient or that you would probably do differently. Like maybe you know you're tracking your workouts in like a Google spreadsheet and you're like, "You know, I don't know. This I feel like I could do a better job. This doesn't like describe my workout exactly the way I want it to." Or you're writing your workout down in like a notes app. That's that's non-optimal. Or your to-do app, it doesn't store your groceries the way you want it to. Um, or you wish you got notifications when a certain thing happened, right? And that forms the basis of product, right? This is good product thinking. It's like just observe the things around you and then think about how they could be better. And, you know, I think this is old Steve Jobs quote. Uh, Steve Jobs said, you know, your perspective on life, I'm paraphrasing here, it really changes once you realize that life is this thing that you can kind of like poke and something comes out the other end, right? Like life is not stagnant. You can change the things about your life that you don't like. That starts with product and it starts with software because you don't actually have to build anything like physical with software. You have a computer, you have Replet as we'll get through today. Um, you can just create ideas. So start thinking about life as this thing that is malleable that you can change and then observe all the different characteristics of your life that you would change. Because if you have an opinion, if you think something's different, should be different, I bet other people do, too. And if you're going to go out there like I did and make the claim of, hey, I'm different. I'm not an NPC. I'm, you know, I have all these creative ideas. Well, you need to be able to back that up with actual ideas. So, this is kind of, you know, more meta, but like as you're thinking about the things that you're doing, think about what you would do differently and then take those ideas, just write them down somewhere and then on the weekend, you know, hey, I have 15 minutes, I have an hour or after work, you're excited, I have an hour, two hours, sit down and Replet and prototype them out. That's exactly what I do. Um, so that would be my my idea for like coming up with ideas. I'm curious though if you have any ideas for like ideas for how you come up with ideas for things you want to build.

Yeah, ju just to because I think that's such a good point just to kind of u build on what you were saying because I actually I heard this from uh Dan Martell and I actually spent a week doing this which is you just get a notebook um and you just write down like how you spend your time and you do this like you have like these check-ins like once or twice an hour like how are you spending your time and what you'll start to notice and it to your point it's like we have to force ourselves to be observant because we we go through our lives and we kind of like take things for granted. Like there's so many things that we do that we're not even fully aware of. We're just on autopilot. And so you do this process of like writing down just how you're spending your time. What very quickly starts to become apparent is actually where you're like you're wasting time or like you had a pain point or there was friction. And so it's like in those gaps, it's like the ideas start to come like they start to come around. And it was funny actually, we did um on the point of like pain points, we did an episode with um we did an episode with Greg Eisenberg a few a few weeks ago and um he has this thing where he's like anytime you're using a piece of software and you see an export button, there's like a multi-million dollar idea that's just associated with like that export button. Um, the thing he said, he said, "I have this thesis that when you're in SAS software and you see an export button that every time you see it, there's a hundred million a year AI business that could replace that export button." So, I guess those would be like my two.

Uh, yeah. No, I love that. Um, and I think it's important to understand what you do and to reflect on your life because especially for people like me, probably for people like yourself, we're all busy, right? And when you're super busy, you got a lot of stuff to do. you're excited about what you're doing, you don't always take a step back and like detach and evaluate why you're doing what you're doing. And so it can be easy to kind of just get into this flow where you're not thinking about things or you're just executing. And so I actually think it's hard, but just sitting kind of with nothing or sitting with silence or just going on a walk and just not even trying to think about anything, the things that'll pop into your mind. I think it's a combination of what you're saying, which is like reflecting, working hard, being involved in the pro problems, but then also detaching from time to time and really giving yourself the space to create. I would say even more than what Greg said though, anytime you see a SAS, anytime you see software period, there's a hundred million dollar idea there. And I think that that's because it's so easy to create software now. You know, I think like a good example is like linkin bio apps or whatever, right? That's just a website. You can build that on Replet in like five minutes. I'm going to show you an example today of building an app on Replet um in a little bit more than five minutes, but it's going to be because we're having fun, not because we can't do it in five minutes. Um, and so when you expand that and you combine it with the idea that the world is malleable, you can just do things and there's all this existing software out there that was built by people that frankly are no better than the people watching this podcast. These are just normal people that built everything that exists around us. You can build great things, too. And that's the mindset that you have to have going in. It's like, I can do this. We'll talk a little bit today about what that means and what failure means. Um, because that's important as well. Uh, but it really starts from the mindset of I can create this thing and even if I run into a little speed bump, I'm just going to keep trying. I'm going to persevere and it we're going to get something done.

Yeah. Okay. You know, I love I love it cuz and and here's my here's my little prediction. So, if we'd say that step zero is just becoming more aware, becoming more aware and like opening yourself up to actually having ideas through becoming more aware. My prediction of what's going to happen is is that if the people listening at home, if they just spend a few days doing that or maybe even a week, they're going to have like a list of potential ideas. How do you and I'm curious for you personally when you have that list of ideas, what is almost the way that you're thinking about it of like, okay, there's 20 ideas here. This is the one that I'm going to action on and actually build like what what is that transition for you?

Yeah, this is a great question and I would say right I think it's I used I'm a I'm a perfectionist. We'll take a step back. I I want to do everything. I want to do it perfectly and it has to be excellent. That is the type of person that I am. And so to tell me right, hey, step one is actually just becoming more aware. I would say that's ridiculous. I need to do something. But right like but I think the counter to that is consistency and realism. Right? So if you're working a full-time job, if you have a family, if you have all these things in your life, that step one might be perfect. And over everything that we discuss, consistency trumps everything. So if you work an hour a day for 10 years, that's a lot going to be a lot more impactful in compounding than working 10 hours one day and then flaming out because it was just too much and like not getting anything done, falling off, and then you just drop it, right? So everything that I say is going to kind of be couched under that kind of consistency uh consistency mindset um and deliberate kind of practice mindset. Um, so say I have a ton of ideas. I always I have a ton of ideas all the time. I have a to-do list with like 30 things on them. I'm not going to get everything done today, but that I'm going to recognize that. I'm going to say I'm going to work really hard today and I'm going to pick up on it tomorrow. That's the first thing. And then second, I think we just bias action over everything. So, it doesn't really even matter which idea. Say I want to learn how to use Replet. Well, which one of the ideas makes me the most excited? I'm going to pick that one. I'm going to sit down on a Saturday. I'm going to see if I can build it. And then if I can build it, I'm going to share it with people. And if I can share it with people, I'm going to see if I can turn it into a business. Right? I would say start over everything. It's really more about consistency than it is picking the perfect idea.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what's funny? In a way, like that is the most important thing. Like if you were just to take one thing from this conversation, I I hope you take a lot more, but if you were just to take one thing from this conversation, that bias to action. And and it's funny actually cuz I was having um I was having dinner with some friends over the weekend and and one of my friends, he's been uh he has this craft. He's been working on it like music. he's been working on it for years, uh, like producing, and one of my other friends was like, "Have you released any of the like the songs or anything that you've made?" And he's like, "No, no, no. I'm just I'm just waiting just to get a little bit better. Like, I'm I'm working on this this style right now." And it's like it's been years. And it it's one of those things. I even had to reflect on it on my journey which is like a lot of people's dreams it dies in like this perfectionism, like analysis, just getting a little bit better but like in complete private, like no one's heard it. It's not been shared. It's not been deployed. Um, you know what? Let's get um I want to I want to get into it. I know that you let's let's start whiteboarding. All right, let's start let's start building some stuff.

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Okay, quick pause. I want to take you behind the scenes for a second. 24 months ago, my workflow was in chaos. Docs are in Google Drive, notes in my phone, random PDFs just buried somewhere on my laptop. I'd waste so much time trying to find stuff and it was killing my focus. Then another entrepreneur that I knew told me how he ran his business on Notion, the sponsor of today's episode. And honestly, it's changed things. Everything I do from planning this show to managing my team to building projects, it runs through Notion. And even that's been taken to a whole another level with Notion AI. And that's their all-in-one AI tool that's powered by your work and puts everything in one place. It automatically captures meeting notes, instantly finds the exact content you need, drafts documents for you, and it's so convenient because it has all of the best AI models like ChatGPT or Claude built right into it. Lately, I've started using their AI meeting notes. And so whether it's a team call, a guest interview, or even just a solo brainstorm session, it grabs every idea, every decision, every next step. It's not a bot, it's no hassle, just clean, organized notes that I can take action on immediately. And so if you want to stop wasting time and actually get ahead at work, then head to notion.com/calumjohnson. That's all lowercase. So again, that's notion.com/calumjohnson and explore the most powerful AI tool for your work. Thank me later and let's get back to the show.

The way I like to do this, if you know this this tutorial assumes, right, the folks on this call are a little new to building with AI, maybe you haven't built anything before, that's totally fine. I think about it in these four steps. First, we're going to plan out what we want to build. This is really important, right? Because maybe we don't have that idea. We need to figure out what we want to build. And I can guarantee you when you sit down and you write out what you want to build, it will be more complicated than you think. And a lot of people fail at building with AI because they're like, "Oh, well, I just want, you know, uh, an app that, you know, tracks my workouts." And then they type in the prompt, "Build me an app that tracks my workouts." AI is like, you know, it's like you're explaining instructions to someone that knows nothing about what you want. You're not going to get what you want if you just type that in. And it's quite likely that you'll get something that breaks. So, the very first thing I like to do, especially for new folks, is plan. We're going to do that together. Then, I like to prompt, right? So, we're going to think about our plan and translate that into English. We don't have to get into how AI models work. We can talk about that a little bit, but the important thing is that you take your ideas and you're incredibly specific about what you want and how you want to achieve it. From there, right, we're going to perfect or polish what we prompted. This is also important. We'll talk a little bit about this um later during our tutorial. But AI is not perfect. We have a ways to go before it is perfect. Despite what you know the internet says or you know people on the internet, there are errors. You will fail. You will run into issues. The funny thing is that that's exactly what engineering is. Maybe engineers don't tell you this stuff. Um, but most of doing hard things is just dealing with problems and solving problems. And I bet everyone here listening, if you have a job, if you have a family, something in your life is probably imperfect. And at some point, you have to do hard things to get around that thing. That engineering is no different from that. Building is no different from that. Building with AI is no different from that. And what that means is that you have to have a little bit of resolve. You can't just give up as soon as a hard thing happened. I bet everybody watching this show has overcome hard things at some point in their life. Maybe they sit around and think, "How can I do more hard things to to practice that? How can I get better? How can I be more resilient or have more resolve?" Building software, creating applications is a great way to practice that because there are problems and you have to sit with the problems and think, okay, I need to overcome this thing. Then finally, we're going to publish our app. So, Replet makes this pretty easy, pretty straightforward. This is actually the simplest part, taking what we built and putting it on the internet so that other people can access it. Now, there's some follow-up steps to that, making sure things are secure, etc., um, that we'll discuss, uh, but that are a little bit more time-consuming. So, that's important as well. But, we're going to follow this this these four steps. And if you're someone thinking, "Oh man, I don't even know where to get started and you want to do this on your own after the video." Follow these steps. Follow along with what we're doing. I think you'll kind of pick up what we're putting down.

So, I'm going to share an idea. Um, I was brainstorming this one uh earlier. It's actually thinking about meditation, and I bet a lot of your viewers are interested in maybe meditation or meditation tracking. I was thinking about like an app that has maybe three pages. So, I drew this out. So, we have like our Zen meditation app. Maybe there's some guided exercises, maybe box breathing, which is just a meditation practice, 478, just a time session, maybe some other things that I don't even know about that might flow into a timer where we can add maybe some uh background noise or interval bells. Um, and then maybe we get some sort of usage statistics or tracking out of that, right? Um, and I bet a lot of you have used a similar app before. Maybe you've used an interval timer and you probably looked at it and you thought, "I could make this better. I could do something that would make this closer to what I want what I want to build." Now, this is what I was talking about before, right? In planning, what what do we want? The essence of of all of the things we're talking about AI, it's making it easy to express your ideas, but if you don't understand what your ideas are in the first place, how are you going to translate that to AI? Um, and so what are we building? While we're building a meditation web app with customizable sounds, interval bells, and session tracking, we want to be able to save sessions, timers, and goals. Now, I'm going to talk through what this means really quick here, and then I'm going to pause just to make sure uh we're all aligned. But you might look at that, you might say, "Great. I'm going to type that in the prompt box." I think this is a really important step in planning. We have to break down what this means, right? Like, think about it like, you know, like Legos, right? We're assembling all the pieces. We need to figure out what the pieces are in order to build this thing. And and I talk about uh the difficulty in building with AI a lot. It's actually like it's more than just being a developer because you're planning out the entire product. You're being a director. You're like the CEO and you're the developer and you're the marketer and you're all of these things. You're running your own little team here. Well, for our app, if we want to save sessions and access them later, right? Like our meditation sessions, we need somewhere to put that data, which means you kind

Of something called a database. You don't really have to worry about that. We'll talk about it later.

Um, but you need somewhere to store the data. And a lot of tools, they don't don't actually have a way to do that. You need a way for people to save those sessions in the first place. So, like a front-end kind of um interaction, it's like a web page, a way for users to log in. That's actually a complicated problem in of itself.

You need sounds, right? Like we need our little meditation bell or our background music. Where are we going to get that? Um, and then maybe we want it to be mobile friendly. And there's something called a progressive web app. You don't really have to know about that either, but that's what allows sort of some really good mobile friendliness on the iPhone. Um, other things you might want tools to make sure your app's secure or a way to sell your app to other people, especially if you want to make money. These are all things that set Replet apart from some of the other tools out there.

Now, why do I bring this up? I bring it up because people hear terms like database, they hear terms like maybe progressive web app, they hear terms like user authentication, session management, etc. And they get overwhelmed. They say, "Hey, I'm not a software developer." This is very common. However, those things don't matter. It doesn't matter because the whole essence of building with AI is just understanding the puzzle pieces that you have to fit together. It's not really about like Legos, right? It's not about understanding the nuances and intricacies of how these things uh actually would be implemented. It's understanding maybe just the concept or the idea of like what it is, right?

Um, if you notice something's wrong with your car and you just know enough about cars to tell, oh, my battery is probably dead, it'll save you a lot of money just to go buy a battery and switch it out, which is like maybe not the hardest thing to do versus going to a dealership and having them analyze your whole car and like all of these other issues, right? So, it's about understanding concepts and things at a high enough level that then you can debug that on your own. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And and you you know what? I'm gonna um just uh context for you, Matt. I'm gonna jump in even as you're kind of like going through this stuff and I'm going to be kind of like that complete beginner that's like asking the question. And so one of the things actually as you were going through it, you you used a few terms you said um like being the director almost of building your product and understanding all of these different components and how they fit together. And you even kind of outline some of them. And it's interesting because I have no uh background as like a product manager or even like what it takes to to build something and a lot of the things that you mention I would have taken completely for granted like I wouldn't have even thought about it. And so I'm curious even as you're like and I'm thinking about that person who is the you know up until this point in their life they've been the consumer of apps. They haven't been the person actually behind the scenes building them. How are you actually figuring out okay this is exactly what I have to plan before I build versus you know I can just kind of you know deploy the thing first and then iterate later like what is almost like the minimum that someone needs to have in place before they can start building.

Yeah. Uh so I mean that's great right that's a great question because and also I appreciate please do interrupt because otherwise I'll just be talking that's boring uh and we need some live commentary. So you know what I'm the exercise I'm going through is through is just to conceptualize my idea and I I wouldn't get too hung up on the specific technologies because Replet does handle a lot of that for you but really the exercise is just to understand if this is possible right so for example here's an example uh that I get a lot somebody's like hey how do I build an iOS app on replet that's actually possible and I have tutorials on how to build a prototype for an iOS app but it's hard why is it hard it's really hard because to get an app on the app store, you actually have to pay Apple $100 and you have to go through all these hoops and then your app has to get reviewed and there's like a lot of back and forth. And so, right, if you understand at the get-go, okay, well, like that's actually really hard, you know, like maybe you can refine that down into an MVP or something simpler or you just try and build out again the the MVP, you said the minimum lovable product. I would call that minimum viable product. Um, so that right you have 30 projects. You don't pick one and then you get 5% of the way there, but it's such a gigantic project that you kind of fall off.

So when I think about this planning stage, what I'm doing here is I'm thinking how do I think how do I express the simplest possible version of this app and then how do I kind of like break it down to understand if this is worth, you know, like how long this is going to take me, right? So like what we're talking about here when I'm saying MVP, maybe I'm like, hey, you know what, actually, you know, this is actually a little too hard right now. Let's we we only have 30 minutes. Let's focus on just a way for users to log in and some sounds and mobile friendliness, right? So, when I'm thinking about this, I'm really just thinking what is that quick win that I can get that's going to get me excited so that I can really nerd out because then then when I really nerd out, I'm going to want to go the the the distance or I'm going to want to sink more hours into this rather than saying, "Hey, actually, day one, you know what? Actually, we have to build out the entire product." It goes back to the consistency piece.

Yeah. You know, you know what? Actually, as I was just thinking and it and I'm interested to hear what you think about this, Matt, is cuz I think it kind of um one of the things that I like doing is almost getting like a frame of reference, like having like a another similar product that you can then kind of focus on and pick apart. And so almost I kind of like that idea of like stripping a lot of the features back and like focusing on one thing because there's a ton of meditation apps out there, right? And so you could focus on like one key feature or one key improvement that you're like, "Okay, I just want that to be present in my app." And to your point, that's like your first win. Like figuring out how to express that to the replet agent so that that can be built. What What do you think about that? Am I completely missing the mark?

Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly what I was trying to get at. And I think that that that was going to be the next step that we're going to go into actually is like, okay, well, like we have this, right? Well, how do I just turn that into a little prompt? And so this is like prompt building 101. So we we're planning and now we're going into prompting, right? And so to kind of tie it all together, maybe to your point, you know what a meditation app, agent probably knows what a meditation app is. How do we make this different? How do we set it apart? Right? And like maybe, hey, there wasn't an app with box breathing. I like to work out. Maybe it's an interval timer. I've had a really hard time of finding interval timers that have customizable intervals that match exactly what I like to do. So maybe you have a special meditation practice that you're like, "Hey, other people need to know about this thing. I'm going to build an app that's like every other meditation app and then I'm going to remix that. I'm going to riff on it." That's actually the powerful one of the most powerful things for coming up with ideas and we didn't talk about that is like pick something, copy it, and then do it better. Like I think now is a really great time to be able to do things like that. And if if you're really like, man, I'm stumped. I'll I will say you can just use other AI tools. So like go to Claude, say, hey, help me think through how I build a meditation app. Claude is going to write something down for you. We don't want to just copy and paste this verbatim. I think this is important with AI. We'll get into this a little bit more. You shouldn't just be mindlessly dumping stuff into AI and then copying and pasting it. You should be really thinking about what you want, but like I'd approach building this app by defining the core user experience. What did we just do? We defined the core user experience. Then building out the technical foundation and content strategy. And so like this is how you can start to learn how to think from first principles, right? Describe from first principles principles what I'd have to do. There's no excuse anymore because like this is the free plan of Claude. You can go to Claude and have it walk you through how to think about all of these things. And so, you know, I'm sure listeners of your podcast are getting a ton of information already just by by uh viewing, but like any problem that you have in your life, you can go and say, "Help help me approach this thing logically. Help me break this down because I'm, you know, it's a really big goal. Like, I want to build an app that I can quit my job and like focus on building this app for full time." That's a big goal. And so, you know, we see a lot of people successful with Replet, but I don't want people to think it happens overnight. It doesn't happen overnight. It happens from doing the work and learning how to do these things. And it can happen a lot faster thanks to AI today. But it's still about learning the skills. However, you can use AI to learn skills.

Yeah. You know, I actually love the point of going to other AI tools and almost like asking whether it's Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or like whatever the thing is and asking it questions and actually helping it like letting it help you guide you through the process because I think a lot of the times and I felt this when you're building something especially when it's for the first time you you know obviously come across a point where you're like I don't really know what to do next. And it's not really that you don't know what to do next. It's like there's some questions that if it was asked to you, you probably have an answer and then you just pursue that answer. And so it's actually this very helpful process of like just have the AI ask you questions or like guide you through the process. That's going to clarify your thinking and then you can take that clear thinking to replet.

Exactly. And and I want to encourage that. There are so many tools out there. There's so many things. Use all those tools to build up a plan. And then we're going to walk through how to build something in Replet. Um, but people get stuck and they're like, Matt, you know, like I don't even know where to start. And I'm like, just go search Google, ask ChatGBT, ask Gemini, ask Claude, do whatever you have to do to get the information. These are things like typically you used to have to read a book to learn or you have to go to a library or do a Google search. You can do them in 15 seconds. Today we're going to talk more about that in the context of building this app. But this is like the prompt that I sat down from our plan and I said came up with. I was like, well, how do I instruct AI? We'll break this down. Help me create a meditation app. It should feature different meditation presets like box breathing or timed practices. I'm giving an example. Hey, I want different presets. What does a preset look like? Well, I know box breathing. Um, and then the next sentence, do research on popular meditation techniques to incorporate them into our app. Now, this is a a feature unique to Replet. it can do web search. So, it's actually going to go out and do the research for us. So, now we're in a point where, right, you can actually start to rely on AI for some of these concepts, right? I talked about breaking down our ideas, but you can also ask replet, go find those ideas for me. Um, then the next part of this prompt, the timer should be the core piece of functionality. So, do research on techniques for adding a timer to a browser, right? Like, I'm Matt. I don't know how this stuff works. I just want you to figure out the best way to do it. Um, and I want you to do it in a way such that the user can engage with it over longer periods of time, right? Because if we have a timer running in our browser for 50 minutes, I don't want the timer to like stop while I'm meditating. You know, I'm just too zen. I'll meditate for two hours and be like, what happened? You know, I need I need it to continue working and pull me back in. And I'm saying, hey, make the app hyperminimalist to be distraction-f free and zen. So, we're being very descriptive about what we want to build here. Um, and from that description, now we're going to get into replet, right? So, now I'm sharing Replet.

Just super quick. No, no, because I I do want to go into uh Replet and actually like making the magic happen. Um, but first I had to ask this and I had to ask this because of like I was that overthinker and that person that would get like stuck in the planning phase of a business. And so I just want to address it head on. um for that human being. Is there like a point in the planning process where you know that you're actually ready to take the idea to replet? Because here's my concern is that people will just keep planning and keep talking with Claude or chat GPT and it's like or doing research or like whatever the procrastination is versus just building. And so like what to you is the sign of like no, you're ready to actually just go and build the thing.

Yeah. No, I mean that's a great question, right? Um I have a concrete idea. I I know something that I want and I know the pieces of that idea and I can write them down in like what is this like 10 sentences? One, two, three, four, five sentences. You can if you can write it down five sentences. I just say send it. And you know what? The cost of comput is so cheap. the cost of AI today, you know, you have to pay for this stuff. It's not free, unfortunately. But it's so little like to validate this idea, it probably would have took me like a probably a morning, at least four hours or something to spin up an app that might do this. Today, it can take 15 minutes. So, if you think an idea is even remotely ready, just go to replet and click start and just like see what happens, see what comes out of it. I do that all the time. Sometimes I'll spin up a couple tabs and fire off a couple different prompts just to see what I get. And because AI is doing the work and like you know we have Replet on the desktop we have it on your phone as well. You can do everything that we'll do today in the browser on your phone. Like don't worry about it. I definitely bias action. I'm doing the planning so you can understand like how to basically get a good output most of the time. I can break that down more conceptually. I have some uh a little slide prepared. Um, but don't sit around and plan too much. Right? If you're watching this video, first night you do this, you can follow along with me. By the end of the video, you'll have an app. If you're thinking like, I have an hour, you should have an MVP. Maybe it works 10% of the time. Maybe you learn what doesn't work. And the way I learn is by doing this stuff. And figuring out what doesn't work sometimes is a lot harder than figuring out what does work. And the only way you learn that is by trying.

Yeah. you you know you you said it so good and it and it reminded me actually of something uh Riley said when we did the episode with him Riley Brown and um when he said it like this it actually it kind of like clicked for me. He was like the process I'm going to show you it's not like um it's steps but it's not like a linear stepbystep process where you do step one, step two, step three, step four. It's like you might get to step three and then all of a sudden go back to step one. like you might go and deploy the thing and be like actually no and then go all the way back to the planning phase and then go back to dep like back to deployment and it's kind of this it's this mindset switch with actually using AI where it's like moving between these different steps is actually much more fluid and so we've done step one which is plan step two prompt and then step three is perfect it I Let let's maybe we can we can hit fire on this and see see what we get.

Amazing. Um, so I have some ideas. We're going to we're going to fire this off. I don't want people to wait too much longer and then we're going to jump back into some conceptual things that tie into what you just said because it's really important. It is not linear. You're you fail. Maybe the best course of action is starting over. Um, and we'll talk about that as as well. So I had this prompt. I kind of crafted it. We didn't spend too much time waiting around. The first thing replet agent's going to do is going to make a plan. So we send it. This is the first screen that you'll see and it's going to agent saying hey I'm going to help you create a plan for this app we planned. Now we're giving a plan to agent. This is the implementation details of our application. And now what you'll see down here is it's searching the web. So agent's going to search the web. It's going to come up with a plan for us and then it's going to show us that plan. That typically takes one or two minutes. So while this is happening we're going to come back and we'll see everything that's happening. I'm not going to skip any steps. I want to talk about what you just said. Everything most of the things you've done in your life, right? Maybe you go to school, you go to a job and there are steps that you do in order and if you do those steps, you get an outcome. So like maybe you press buttons and then something happens and you kind of learn, hey, if I do this thing, if I do X, then I get Y. AI is not like that, right? So if we have people here that took statistics or know what like a distribution is or what it means for things to be random, AI is like a little random. That's actually kind of crazy, right? And so what I'm explaining here is like, hey, think about the outputs quality. There's some likelihood that you get an app of a given quality. And so we can mark this up a little bit, right? Maybe most of the apps that you get are here, right? Like the there's a high likelihood that the quality is like average from a given prompt, but then there's some likelihood because AI is like a little random. Obviously at Replet, we're trying to make these results as good as possible. Some of your apps might be really great. some of your apps might not be really great and that just might be because AI makes errors sometimes and I've done this live on podcast before. I try to build something and it breaks and it's really embarrassing. So, what I'm trying to to emphasize is the same prompt is going to get you different results. Some of them might not work. Some of them might work really well. And there are things we can do to increase quality and likelihood of success. And that's what I'm explaining to you in this video. But that doesn't mean you won't fail sometimes, right? This is like sports. If you ever played a sport, you played baseball. I played baseball. you bat 300, that just means you literally get out 70% of the time and you're a great baseball player. Think about it like that, right? Like not everything is going to work. It's not going to work all the time. I'm not saying you're going to fail more than you succeed, but what I am saying is that you might fail. And the implication of that is that we can't be afraid to fail, right? We can't be afraid to start over. And the secret of being an engineer is actually failing a lot. And so like there's this concept of variance, which just means like there's a likelihood associated with these probabilities. Um, and that's the mindset I want to bring into building with Replet. So that we're gonna fail and things might might look different sometimes because AI is just random, right? Like the prompt I gave to Claude um might be different times I send it.

I I just going to quickly say it's actually funny that you mentioned that. Um, I was using chat GPT this morning and I was having that exact thought of like sometimes I I'll wake up and I'll use uh chat GPT or other AI tools and it's like the answers it's giving me are so perfect and so great and then other times I'll wake up and I'll be using it and it's like completely off the mark and to your point it's like we have to kind of get our minds around and it was even an adjustment for me these there's not like a perfect way to use these tools. There's not like a perfect prompt and they're unpredictable. So sometimes it's like it's firing, sometimes it's not. And so the actually the important thing is that can you correct it like can you almost like correct uh the ship uh to your point and and obviously we're going to get into to how to people can do that.

Yep. And that's perfect. So if there are people here who use chat GBT, it's all about context. When I say context, I mean the information you give to the app. In our case, it was a prompt, right? Like this is the context that the AI has. Sometimes it could be a link as we'll see later on in this episode. Sometimes it could be an image. It's about the context that we give to AI. So I want to break down exactly what's happening here and then we're going to jump into actually like we're going to jump into the building. So agent said, I'm going to help help you create this thing. And then it searched the web for meditation techniques, right? So now it's like learning about meditation and it's going to integrate those into our app. And based on the research, it gathered information about the app and then it created a visual preview of what our app might look like. So this isn't actually a working uh working application, but it is a preview and it tells us exactly what it's going to include in the application. a robust timer system, meditation presets, um, customizable timer durations, visual breathing guides, pause, resume, session completion, progress tracking. That's perfect. That's a lot of what I wanted. And this looks good. So, when I click approve plan, we're going to get dropped in the workspace. An agent's going to start working. See this little message down here? And what it's going to do basically is build out this visual preview. Because this is just a preview, it's not going to look exactly like this, but agent's using this basically. And when I say agent, that's just our automated developer. You can think about it like a junior software developer or something that can build apps. It's going to use this preview for what it's building. And so, conceptually, I want to talk about what's going on because this can be confusing to a lot of people. I noticed that a lot of people kind of don't understand just how cool this is or why it might be different. I'm on replet.com here. I didn't install anything on my computer. I didn't have to install Python. I didn't have to, you know, learn what Python is. I didn't have to install JavaScript or maybe some of these other things you hear about. And I just created a workspace and now I have this autonomous developer that is writing files to build a thing that looks like what's on my right. And so this is a pretty user-friendly display. I would like to think it's pretty user friendly. You know, it can always be better. But under the hood, if I click open files, there is code being written here. And that's important for a few reasons. Because at some point, say you have a wildly successful app, maybe you hire a team of developers. Well, you need to give them the code. Or maybe you want to like learn more about how to write the code. You can ask agent or assistant, another tool in the workspace, explain to me what this is, right? Um, explain to me how this app works. Explain to me what you're building. And it can break it down. That's actually I talked about being a software developer. I learned Python, backend engineering. It's very different from front-end engineering, building these apps. But I learned that through AI through like, okay, I'm going to build this thing and then I'm going to open this up and I'm going to go in and I'm just going to look at files and like after the course of months and years, you're going to understand what they're doing and you're going to write that code on your own. And so if you want to learn, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, this is actually really important for learning. Um, if you don't want to learn and you just want to build cool stuff, that's the whole point of this episode is that you can just build cool stuff. But just like I talked about learning how a car works, starting to understand how things are organized can be really helpful. And that's going to be a major theme of this video as well.

Yeah. You know what? And and this is why I was actually really excited to bring you on is because we've actually we've had uh guests come on the show and they take us through Replet and they show certain things. Um, the cool thing with you is like you actually work at Replet and are like part of building this stuff. And so just your knowledge of the agent and of the platform is like on another level. And so I have this thing I think what kind of separates like a beginner from an expert is the expert has so much experience that they're like just aware of certain things and features that like for a beginner like someone starting out like myself or someone listening it's like we wouldn't even think about. And so what are even some of like the the features or like the aspects of replet that a lot of the times you see people entirely ignore but like if they took it into account it would be tremendously valuable even when they're even if they're just building their first product

100%. This thing this environment that we're in right now it's like a computer. Think about it like a computer. It's running in the cloud. We're accessing it through our browser. But this is like if you opened up your laptop and you installed a bunch of stuff. What that means is that this is going to get a little technical, right? But there is a a shell. Like if I want to go over to here and type in shell, like this is the command for listing files. I have a file system. So under the hood, this platform has access to everything a developer could do. So what I'm showing you right now are things a developer would do. Maybe they want to install languages. Maybe they want to configure that environment. Our agent is doing all of those things. And people take this for granted, right? If you're building like if you build something like claude, you can build like an artifact or whatever or some of some other tools. What you don't realize is that's not actually an environment. It's not how a developer would build an app. And that's why it's really hard to get that thing running. Like maybe you have to if you tried to build anything before, you have to figure out how to set it all up on your own computer. You have to figure out how to add a data source. I'm going to show you exactly how to add a data source. You have to figure out how to do all of these things. All of these things that Replet offers kind of for free because it's built on the platform. And the platform is the thing that's really powerful. And so I think a lot of people get confused when they come in here and they see replet uh because they don't understand like actually what we did was we built all these tools a developer would use. We built all of this really complicated infrastructure and then we just gave AI access to it. And so the other platforms out there don't have access to all the different tools, right? And and that's a really big differentiator like what it means to deploy something, what it means to add a database. These are all things that sometimes people take for granted. what it means to run a a project in Replet is the fact that I could take this and open up my phone. I mean, we'll see if this works right now. I'm pretty sure I'm logged in. Um, and if I go to my apps on my phone, refresh it, uh, and then open up what we're building, you can probably maybe you can see this. This is the same workspace actually that's running on my phone. So, like in real time, I can see what I'm building because it's in the cloud, right? And so then if I say I had a lift coming, I just take my phone with me and I can keep prompting and keep building and keep seeing what things are doing. And so like real time you can build in a completely isolated environment. You can take it with you on the go and it has access to all the same tools a developer would have access to which as we build out this app you're going to see enables some pretty powerful things.

Yeah. Okay. You know what I I I um I want to continue for people and and go bit deeper. if someone so it gives you kind of like the plan of what it's going to build as you're like assessing the plan cuz I'm just even thinking about the person sitting at home doing this right now and you're like reviewing the plan you're like okay this sounds good like at what point are you actually hitting go on it like what what is kind of giving you pause like what is making you go back to the drawing board versus just like okay let me just run this and see what it comes out with

Yeah. No, I mean I basically I just send it most of the time I just do a quick glance to make sure it's not like do something crazy, right? Like I just want to make sure there's nothing in the plan that that is too complicated. I'm actually thinking from simplicity. I'm like is this plan simple enough because I want something that works on the first run. And so I'm really thinking is this simple enough? I'm I'm basically looking for things that would I would want to remove, not add necessarily. So just send most of the time I'm just sending the plan to be honest with you.

What is an example of something like if you did see it, it would be like a red flag. Like you would actually be like, "Okay, I actually want to remove that."

Yep. I think about complexity. I I think an overarching theme hopefully that you get from this uh from this example is simplicity over everything. I talked about consistency already. Simplicity and consistency over everything. If I see that it's trying to build out, right? Like if I'm trying to build Uber and I'm like, "How do I get a million people to use my app?" That that's going to be really complicated. I just want a timer that works here. that's what we're going to get to. So that would be like my example, right? Like if you start to see really complicated architectures, things that like you're not understanding or that are unrelated to your vision, start with MVP, boil it down to the simplest possible thing that you can create and then start marching towards that step by step because um again the goal here is to get to something that works. The the the way I think about it is like to tinker. It's a lot easier to tinker if you have something that works. So we want to get to the simplest possible thing that works and then iterate to build something really cool. Um, that's like hey look if I want to build if I want to understand how a clock works I can just take a clock off the wall you know like an back in the day old school analog clocks right it's easier to open up something open up a piece of electronics open up like a mechanical watch and look at it and see like oh I can see how those things fit together and I can think about what I would want to add versus spending all this time planning spending all this time building from scratch building a completely new clock because you're just into being really complex you know I think if we can just start from the simple pieces that's that's the best bet

Yeah. It's it's almost like okay, what is the core feature and then making sure that that core works and like once once you kind of have confidence of that it's like we're ready to go.

Okay. So, so what if we if we hit deploy if not deploy if we hit go and then we can kind of talk about like the step three which is perfect.

Of course. Yeah. No, let's let's dig into it. Right. So, you know, agent ran this. It took about we were talking the whole time. um took a couple minutes I would say. Um, you know like the first thing is it's a timer. So if I hit play the timer number one this doesn't appear to work. So you're going to see in real time right like we're building something here. This is uh this is what we want. This is different.

Yeah. Right. So we have the the layout. It's telling us to inhale and hold it looks like every four seconds. Exhale. Right. That's box breathing. So if you don't know box breathing it's inhale four, hold four, exhale four, hold four. That's kind of the pattern, right? So that that's actually working. So it's keeping track of the time, but it doesn't look like it's actually updating the state. This might seem pedantic. This is important, right? Because what we're going to talk about now is actually the process of debugging. And that's like a really important skill in vibe coding, uh, in building your ideas. Um, and so I'm going to switch over to a different tab. What is debugging? What do I mean when I say

And ju just quickly because you you said you had such a great quote on this, I just wanted to read it out before you go deeper. You said uh you try something, it breaks, but now the AI helps you fix it. That moment when you debug with AI is the moment you start believing you can build anything.

Totally agreed. Totally agreed. You know, and so actually more than before we I I'll switch back over to to agent um and I'll say like the timer isn't working. Uh that's actually not descriptive enough. The timer isn't counting down, but I see the box breathing um like assistant moving. I'm being very descriptive about what's going on and uh can you fix it? So, the thing about agent is that it has access to this entire environment. So behind the scenes, what's going on is there's like you can look at the console and actually see like the console is just a place that shows you what the the server of the of the database of the application does, right? Um then there's a front end kind of console as well. And what you'll see is that a agent is saying I need to fix the timer countdown issue. I can see there's an LSP error in the storage layer. I don't even know what the heck that is. I'm not too worried about it. But it's going to look at it and start fixing things. Now it's saying I need to examine that timer logic a bit more closely. I think it might be this thing or that thing. So you can learn about the implementation what's going on. Again, this is all kind of complicated. You don't have to worry about it too much. But now you can see that agent is going through these things. It's testing them to make sure that it works properly, seeing some React errors, and it's actually doing the debugging work for me, right? It's doing a lot of the the nitty-gritty for me. How do I tie this back to what I was going to say before? Debugging is a process of observation. You know, we're finding bugs in the app and then we're removing them. And at the simplest, right, maybe you have a lamp that doesn't work. The first thing you ask, the question you ask is, is the lamp plugged in? Now, with AI, I without, let's talk about without AI, you'd have to go look if the lamp is plugged in. Now, with AI, you can say, is the lamp plugged in? AI is going to figure it out for you because agent has access to that environment, right? So, I sent that command. It's like going through and basically debugging the application for me. But the thing I had to do, we talked about context, was provide context. I had to visually inspect my app and say, "What isn't working?" And I had to break that down logically. Hey, this part of the application isn't working, but this other part is, and I'm going to give that information to AI to kind of get to the root of the issue, right? And tell the LLM, tell the the system what's wrong. And that kind of that flows into context, right? like context can be the prompt that we provide to to AI, but it can also be images, documentation, errors, other details about the application that AI doesn't know about. So, all we're doing is giving context to AI to help it debug. And, you know, we're building this app. This is another great example because I built this app before this podcast. Obviously, I want to make sure that it works and it worked on the first time. And now, of course, I do it live and it doesn't, but that's like part of it, right? So, we're having fun together. I talked about the countdown timer not working. I click it and now it works, right?

Yeah. And this is a simple this is like maybe you're saying, "Hey, Matt, that should have just worked on the first time anyway." You're probably right. I'll take this back to the team. But these are the foundations of what I want to talk about because you're going to build apps and you're going to be like, "Why doesn't this thing work? Why does this other thing work?" I don't know, right? Like, does the pause button work? Yes. Does the stop button work? It does. It resets. And when I press start now, I'm getting this nice little countdown. Did we break anything else? Right? You might be asking, can I go through and start box breathing? The box breathing timer works. Hold. Two. 3. Exhale. Right. So now this is working. Now we have a little timer that's going according to our rhythm. Perfect. So I really like this. It looks like for the most part it's working. The hard part, right, is how do we track these sessions? How do we make it so that anybody can log in? This is one of those things you wanted to know what sets Replet apart. Why should be people be using Replet? we have all those tools available. So what I'm going to say here is add um user login also known as authentication you know some people might call it that uh with replet off um and store user session data um so that I can visualize it for my account. I'm going to send that.

So this is almost like if someone say that I had an app and instead of you know every time you go in it's a fresh session like someone's actually able to build an account where it like logs their data and like tracks it over time. That's essentially what you're building right now.

Yeah. So right if I log into Replet I have my Replet account and I can see my apps. If you have an account if you have an app that you want to share with people well they need to be able to customize that app. They need to be able to save information. That's actually called authentication um or user login, right? Basically, you log in with your replet account or your users would create a replet account to log in. It looks like they're logging into your app.

Yeah. You know, it's uh it's really cool and it's like I think it's actually a really cool part of the experience is kind of the thing that I said earlier is for 99% of us, we're only used to using apps as a consumer. And I think it goes back to that point of why it's so important to start and like move quickly and deploy and publish is as you go through this process, it's actually kind of teaching you some of like the foundational elements of actually building something with software.

I think that's exactly right. And there are things um I forget sometimes uh or that I've learned just by building. And so I want to call out a few things. First, if you're looking at what I'm building and you're saying, "How did Matt know how to do that?" Well, it's actually like pattern matching cuz as you get good at building things, you will be able to match like, "Oh, I I've seen this thing before. I know how to solve this problem." As a human being, you you'll be able to do that. I promise. Um, and then two, knowing about what exists. And you also learn that by building. And so, you know, the way I talk about it a lot is I talk about frameworks. And so, this is like React is just a framework for writing a certain type of code. You don't have to worry about that. The important thing that you do have to worry about is that you don't know what you don't know. Right. So, exactly what you just said. If you think, oh, it's going to be a walk in the park for me to add user login and then you go down a 2-hour rabbit hole of trying to do that, you're going to learn a lesson and you're going to waste some time. Right? So, my favorite part about the job is showing people what they can do and how to get over all the stuff that I struggled with. Don't do that. Do it the simple way. Right? How do I do the thing I want to? What frameworks allow me to accomplish this thing? What frameworks did somebody else build that I can just plug into my app or do I need to bill out? What works best with LLMs? If you don't know, you can just ask LLMs or to your point, you can just start building. And so, super important, super important lesson, right? It's like learn to know what you don't know. That's super hard uh part of really life. So, um I don't want to trivialize that. Um it's difficult. Uh and you know, it's something that we're going to need to work through.

Yeah. You know, I think um I even I I wanted to read it again when you said that moment when you debug with AI is the moment you start believing you can build anything. And I like the it really just stuck out to me because I think that a lot of people get discouraged and I can even imagine for myself I would get discouraged if you watch a video like

This, you rush out there, you start trying to build the thing and it comes back and it's like it seems like the thing that should be simple is broken. And it's actually that descriptive process that you kind of outlined where you're kind of explaining like what went wrong back to the agent and then it fixes it. It's actually giving you momentum. Like it's actually back to that thing you said you'll start to believe that you can build anything. It's actually when things get broken in a way it's this reframe of like you should look forward to it because it's like you're actually going through the process like that's how it should be. Um, yeah, I I wanted to make that point for people. Thank you. I love that.

Um, and I think about this every day, you know, because separate from Matt at Replet, I'm Matt, a human being, too. I think we all see these things in life. And I I want to tie this a little bit back to life, right? Cuz um, you know, I'm sure our viewers out there, everybody has a life. And I'm sure, well, I'm not. I I know it for a fact. Everybody at some point is going through something that's kind of sucks or that that's hard or that's baggage or that's you know sets you back or that you feel like is unfair that you know you get resentful at the world for this thing that's happening to you right and you might want to feel like a victim like oh woe is me like there's nothing I can do about it you can get momentum by doing hard things and by not even doing hard things just building stuff maybe it's hard maybe it's easy you get momentum by executing by waking up and saying I'm going to go to the gym and then I'm going to go to work and then I'm going to do good work and then I'm going to go home and I'm going to like do the right stuff for my family, right? And that's all all this stuff is very important, right? So I don't want to tie that back to hey, you know, now you can use a replet. But building these things, Replet is a platform for you to build your ideas. And right off the bat, we saw a problem. We saw an error. I could have just gave up and I probably would have went I would have been like, "Dang, I got on this podcast and I failed." Sometimes you're going to fail. That's that's part of life. But just one prompt observing things and oh now now it feels a little easier right now the pressure is off. Now I think well if I come to a problem I actually can solve it just by being clever or by like working hard or trying things out. So to tie that back that back to my my larger point right like you build momentum exactly what you're saying right into your life by seeing challenges and facing them down and you know becoming basically a better person and and that's really important and and you can do those things through creating with AI and that's the point I'm trying to drive home.

Yeah. No I think I think it's so brilliant. Okay, you know, if we just if we wanted to fast forward, let's assume that we were like we were ready to deploy. So, we've like we've moved through the the perfecting it phase, like we've gone through the steps, we've debugged, we've like made sure that it's working, we're ready to deploy. I think one of the cool things with with Replet when I saw it is like it's so easy to actually deploy the thing. Could you demonstrate that? Absolutely.

Um, so assuming we have one minute here, let's just see if this worked because we tried to implement our login here. So if I click get started, let's see what happens. Um, we're going to log in. So I get a popup. You probably can't see this, but I'm just logging in with my Replet account. And now we got our app. Top right. That's my profile picture. So something worked. Our app still works hopefully uh like we expected. So I can start my medica meditation countdown. But now I'm logged into my app and I should be tracking the sessions. So, if I pause this or like say stop it, let's see what happened. Um, we'll refresh to see if anything updates. Um, so we didn't get our session. Just want to kind of recap what we got to, but we have a database. And if I click see my data, I have meditation sessions. I have users. If I click user, I should see me. Like my email probably pop up. So, we won't do that just now. But we have all of the sort of basics of being able to log in, create user accounts, right? Uh, we have all the basics there. And now it would just be like quite literally one follow-up prompt of saying like um you know implement uh session tracking for my user and then we'd have kind of exactly what we described at the outset. Now I think that's astounding to go back to what you said. What what is what does deploying mean right? Everything that we just built is in its own little environment. So I said think about this like a computer. Well what does that mean? Well, that means that if it's running on this computer and we just took a snapshot of that thing and deployed it, well, then it's going to be running in the cloud. And that's the amazing part about Replet. So, if I click deploy, you get some configuration settings. This can be confusing. We're not going to worry about that right now. Most of the time, you can just click approve. We're going to call this Zen timer. Um, we'll call it, yeah, zen timer uh.replet.app. Um, and we're going to go down here and click deploy. Some other notes, you could run a security scan to make sure that this is secure and that there aren't any gaps. You could um link a custom deployment, so your own a custom URL, so like matt mattpalmer.com or something, right? Um to be able to go and to to an actual website. But what we're doing is we're taking a snapshot of this environment and pushing it up to the internet. Now, that snapshot piece is really important because a lot of times people build stuff and it breaks. So, one other thing I want to call out is that when we're building this this application, it's getting a little sticky there. Um, agent is taking snapshots or making checkpoints of our apps just like a video game. So, here we have a checkpoint that was made 24 minutes ago while we were talking. It's after we built the core UI and anytime I can preview what that looks like, I can roll back to that checkpoint. So, we can roll back the files, the agent, actually our entire database, all of our data as well. And we can know that we're completely safe. And the amazing thing about Replate is that you don't have to set any of this up. You don't have to to worry about losing your work. It also means you don't need to worry about failing, right? Because if I went kind of crazy and started implementing a bunch of experimental stuff like we're doing right now and it broke, it's okay because I can just roll back to the last checkpoint and continue building. And so what we were talking about earlier, right, this mindset of not being afraid to fail, of like randomness, of all this stuff, well, your work's actually always saved. So you can be more um adventurous. you can be you can take risks and not worry about messing anything up. And and so to tie that back in, right, I talked I spent a couple minutes talking, couple minutes yapping. We have our app deployed. Uh I'm going to switch to that app. We get exactly what we had before. I'm going to click get started. And this is the login screen I was talking about before. Going to log in. So now I have my timer. It's uh working exactly like we'd like. You can't see this, but it's at zen-timer.replet.app. I can leave this up for your viewers. They can play around with it. Um, now we got a countdown. I just asked it to implement our session tracking. So maybe if I pause or stop. See, does anything work or are we gonna have to Would this be a future? That might be a future endeavor. So session tracking that can be pretty difficult. Um, but the bare bones of our app, we built it, we took an idea, we turned it into reality, and we deployed it live to its own website. Nice. So this is actually, so people can actually go and see this like this is actually live on the internet right now. This is zen timer. Zen-timer. We'll go back over here. Uh.reuplet.app. So, if they're watching um Oh, I'm on the wrong tab. So, if they're watching uh and they wanted to just like, you know, scan this QR code, we could throw that up. I'll leave this app up um for your viewers to check out.

Yeah. And and so just quickly because I I want to actually I want to spend a few minutes talking about um I think the thing that like in a way builders sometimes dread which is like marketing actually getting people to to use like or getting your first few users. Um, but before before we get into all of that in terms of like cuz I can imagine it for me like if I if I launched it and it's now live on the internet, the first thing that I would think of is actually like almost the design like how it looks. Is there a way to like say that there's certain websites that I really like the look of? I could actually go back into Replet and like be like, "Okay, I really love the way that like the Apple page is designed or Nike or WB park or like whatever the brand is, Airbnb." Is there a way that it can actually almost design this page so it looks a bit more like aesthetic, so it looks a bit more similar to something that I might see from other bigger brands? Absolutely. And um you know I I think we could have got I would have loved to get into this a little bit earlier. There were some other features I kind of plan to build out but one thing I want to drive home is that you can give all kinds of context to agent. So you know say we we see a timer that that we really like. Um oh like hey here's one right maybe I want my timer to look a bit more like this. I just took a screenshot of that page and I'm gonna go back to replet. I'm gonna paste that screenshot in and I'm gonna say make it look like this. Or even one one step further, right? Um what if we just have the URL matttimer.com? You type in the the URL and you can click take screenshot and then you get a screenshot of the application. So you can take screenshots, provide them as context. you can just type in a URL and uh and provide them as context. Um some some apps, right? Like if if the app doesn't act if the URL doesn't exist, right, that would fail. Um you can do a couple other things, right? So uh I was thinking, hey, maybe I want to add white noise to this app. Well, I found a site with white noise on it. Uh download the audio and add it to our app. I can paste in that URL. Click get text content. It's going to scrape that page. It's going to pull in the MP3 and it'll add white noise to our app just because I found that. One other thing specifically for people who like to design, we also have a Figma import. I have separate videos on how to cover that. You can design something in Figma, pull it in. You can build in some of your other tools, pull it in, keep building with agent. Um these are all really great uh really great ways to get started building.

You know, you know what it comes to mind just even as you were explaining it. It's almost as if um it's almost like having a teammate. Like if you had like a if I was running a business and I had like a web designer on my team and I spotted something on the website that they deployed. I'm actually like I actually want it to look more like this. It's like the way that you were talking to the agent was almost as if it was a teammate and you're just directing it what you want. Exactly. Exactly. So think about it like you have a junior developer. Think about it like you have a team and you're the you're just the director of all your different teammates and you're helping them kind of figure out what they want to build helping them, right? Like if I talk to say I'm baking a cake, like I'm I'm making a cake for my friend's uh for my friend's birthday. Actually, I'm hiring someone to make a cake, right? So, you're getting somebody on your team and they say, "Well, what cake do you want me to build?" Well, you have to think about what your friend likes. You have to think about all of these things. How do I make this perfect? And then how do I explain that in plain English to an employee to to help them create what I want? And and what we're doing with AI is we're using it like an employee or like a co-orker. Hey man, I really want you to build this thing and I have to be really descriptive to get what I want. And I have to be really precise and understand English and understand from first principles what's actually happening in my app. And these are these are exactly the skills um that I'm using to build this app. And then I'll just call out one other thing. So that actually our session tracking did work. We just had to wait for the session to end. So kind of soup to nuts. We we actually did get a lot more done I think here than than even I expected with uh being able to log sessions and save accounts. Some of that uh some of the things that you put in with like even the screenshot. Could we actually see it apply that? I I don't know. I'm just curious to just see like what it actually ends up how close they able to replicate. Uh, so that's that's another thing. We'll talk we'll talk about this a little bit. When you think about like just giving AI a screenshot, what does that mean? Like AI is going to see an image. What are the limitations? Like we're going to think from first principles here. What are the limitations to give giving AI an image? Well, it probably won't know the font, right? It won't know exactly what text it used unless, you know, maybe in a year models are super good. Um, it'll probably match the colors. It can match colors pretty well. um it won't have image assets, it won't have all these other things. And so I'm giving you reasons why this might not work. Um because like doing it live and then rebuilding the entire app often doesn't come up with super great great results. We can we can do that. Uh, but if you think about from an from a perspective of well can I figure out what font it's using? Can I figure out where those images are? And if you can find the assets right if you can find all these different things you're going to be able to get a lot closer. or if you figure out how to build it in Figma or if you find right like clever ways of getting AI the things that it needs, right? If I said to you, um, right, hey, go clone this website and I just gave you an image of it, what would you do? You would go out and try and figure out what font was on the website. You'd go and try and figure out where you could find the images. You'd go out and you try and figure out how to use the text. And these are all things that AI struggles with. And so from my perspective, if you're trying to clone something, that's still one of those things. I don't want people to think, I'm just going to send it a screenshot of Nike and have my own shoe store, there's actually, you know, it'll it'll be able to do web research. So if you said do web research to like understand what fonts there were, do web research to understand similar images and these things, AI might be able to get us closer there. Um, but along with the screenshot, I'm doing exactly what I just said to you, the work of a human. So, if I was going to add this screenshot, I'd say like, um, I want my app to look more like this. Uh, do research to understand where you can find a nice Now, here's where some of that background knowledge comes in. There in this this app, there's what's called a serif font. How do, Matt, how do you know what a serif font is? Because I'm a huge nerd. That's how I know. Um, but these are like the kind of terms. You don't know what you don't know, right? a nice serif font and AI knows what that is. Um, make the app dark mode and find similar free assets online that we can use for our timer. So, we could send we could Sorry. Basically, the more detailed you can go, the more closely it's going to be able to replicate uh the thing. I guess if you just wanted to be in like the ballpark of it looking like the uh the app or the website that you had in mind like yeah I guess it's a starting point to share the screenshot but if you really want it to closely resemble it's like you need to give it as much detail as possible 100%. And so this is but this is where we get into our levels of fidelity and how we think about just quickly cloning something or kind of going the the distance and and saying okay well now I know what I want right and what I found in building with AI hot take here it's going to be really hard for me to drastically change the functionality of this app if I was like rebuild this entire app and I sent that in a prompt agent that might take a long time it's really hard for AI it gets confused when projects start getting larger and it's building out the structure that might be a point I do this a I'll build something and then I'll be like, "Okay, this is cool." Right? Like we have our app. It says, you know, like we have like ocean sounds or something that Okay, I don't know if you heard that. It's white noise. It's not an ocean. Okay, we got we got close. Um, but I want to change the entire structure. And along the way, along the way, the process of building, I learned what the structure should look like. This is huge, right? Because if we're taking that MVP approach, that prototyping approach by building, by being observant, you're going to build and then you're going to say, "Man, I wish I would have done this differently. I wish I would have done that differently. I wish I hadn't made this mistake. I wish I would have just changed my prompt at the beginning to do this other thing." And you can do that now, right? So maybe instead of saying change the entire uh application, what I might do, I might go to replet.com uh and I might say, "Hey, you know, like I have this app and I want a meditation app that looks like this one." And so don't be afraid to start again, start over with new information, right? Don't be afraid to kind of like say, "Hey, I learned this from building with this app and now I want to take it into a new I've done that like four or five times where I built something, it was like kind of janky, but then what I built, I said, I'm going to extract all the knowledge that I learned from this and take it into my next application.

Yeah, I love that. And it goes back to that point we were saying in the beginning of like it's not a linear process. Like sometimes you'll go all the way to the end just to go back to step one. And that's actually how it should be. You know, before before we get out of here, um I wanted to talk because you've seen so many products like there's hundreds of thousands of apps that have been built on Replet. Some are incredibly successful and have like raised money. Some, you know, don't go anywhere. If you were to kind of take those two extreme use cases, the people that tend to get like users and actual like adoption and their thing kind of goes and there's traction. What have you found like when it comes to getting users? What have you found is beneficial? Especially when it's like those first few people, right? Because those are the ones that are kind of tough to get. It's like your thing isn't fully validated yet. You don't have a ton of money to build it. like what have you seen work for people when it comes to getting those first few users? Yeah. Um, you know, it's hard. So, I don't want to say it's easy. Uh, it's hard to build something that that makes people's lives better. It's hard to build something that people care about. A lot of times you're going to get that rejection. I think the worst kind of rejection is just being ignored, right? Like building and nobody's even telling you, "Hey, Matt, this looks bad." They just ignore what you're building. That man, that's that's hard to deal with, right? And so building and shipping is like it's consistency. It's a number. It's simplicity. It's thinking about what you're doing and doing it over and over again, right? Like I think some people see creative acts, they see like the act of creating a company is is creative by nature, right? Like the idea that you have, you have to pick an idea that resonates with people and then execute on that idea. And just like I talked about the results, they might be luck, right? like hey maybe you have the perfect idea and you fail and then somebody else does it next year and they succeed or like Amjad right he had an idea for building AI into replet he kind of tried to implement that in like 2020 2021ish kind of flopped but then two years later it worked right what does that mean well it means that there is some luck that's involved means that there there's definitely skill and there's definitely creativity but it means that you might try something and fail and then try it again and it might work and so I think the things that I talked about right consistency Simplicity, sharing things with other people. These are things that if you build those muscles, you're going to get really good at you might not get users immediately, but you will eventually. You know, I'm you're you're YouTube famous. You're much more YouTube famous than I am, right? Like I'm sure the first few videos you made, getting users is no different from getting like views on a video, right? You have to get people's attention. This is where we get product gets into marketing, right? I have to solve a problem that matters to you. And the solution has to matter enough that you say that way that I've been doing things for 10 years, I'm done with that. That way that I've been doing things my entire life, I want to try out this new product. And that's like that's really hard to get people to do because most people they just want to do the things the same way. Your idea has to and execution has to make people say, I want to try this thing and this thing is better than the way I did things before. Right? And it's the same thing with like a YouTube video in a very micro context. This video is worth my time. Right? And that's like, you know, most people, they they care about their time. Um, and so I'm sure like the first videos I made, nobody watched, nobody said anything about them, but you do it over and over again and you look at it and you refine your craft and you make the product better and you make your process better and you make how you share it better with people and you make it more attention grabbing and you make it more informative and more educational and then eventually you wake up and you're like, "Wow, people want to view my stuff. They want to use my product." So it's it's all consistency, simplicity, execution.

you know, you you you said something you you mentioned you've mentioned it several times. It's been like a reoccurring theme of um not just building but actually sharing it with others. And it's really interesting because I've been paying attention to a lot of the people that have been like vibe coding and building products and like been successful at doing it with AI and there's a part of their marketing strategy which I love which is they kind of build in public and so like as they're building the thing and they're coming across bugs or they're coming across issues or like they have a 2 threeh hour session of using like a replet and they get to a certain sticking point. It's like they're documenting the whole thing and then they'll share like updates with people on Twitter and it's like this really effective way of doing this like very subtle marketing where it's like as you're building the rocket ship it's like you're telling people like yeah this thing just fell off like the the rocket exploded like the engine didn't work and it's like gradually building that base of people that have been following the entire journey and are like ready and willing to be those first few users that you need. It's like this very organic just authentic approach to marketing. Yeah. And and you know if we're talking about how that ties into marketing, right? It's building a brand because we are all different human beings. And like people ask me, they say, "Oh, you know, like I had this idea for content and I just didn't start." This go back goes back to the perfectionist mindset. Oh, well, like I had this idea for a conversation or a video. One really good friend of mine, she was like, "Hey, let's just go have a conversation." And we had the conversation. It was amazing conversation. And she's like, "Yeah, you know, I've always wanted to start a podcast." And I was like, "Just get people in front of you and do what you just did with me now because that's excellent, right?" And so when you think about building a personal brand, you just go out there and like I just I am me on Twitter. If you go follow me on Twitter, on YouTube, like hopefully it comes across. This is just who I am. And as it would turn out, people like people a lot more than they like faceless, nameless brands, right? And so if you can be yourself, you're going to find other people. Maybe it's not like, you know, tech nerdy stuff. That's who I am. But maybe you really love sports, you love basketball, or you love, I don't know, going outside on a hike, whatever. If you can express that, you're going to attract other people who like the same thing and that want to be around you because you give off good energy. And so that's my approach to like marketing. You know, there are all these things written about how to market to different types of people. But at the end of the day, it's just being authentic. And building a public is really powerful because you go out and you show people and you fail. Now, the important part, right, is you learn from your mistakes. Every time I fail, that's that's actually an opportunity for content because I'm like, "Oh, my app broke. I'm going to show people how they can avoid this same process." And then this is like I like to do how do I do one thing that does like a lot of things? Well, I'm going to go build something. I'm going to fail along the way. I'm failing, but I'm also learning. And then I'm not only learning, but I'm creating something to help other people. And so, you're creating stuff, you're learning, and you're sharing it with other people, which then helps them, builds a personal brand, and is quote unquote like marketing technically. Man, that's pretty cool. Yeah. It's like kind of like this irony to like doing content and marketing is like in the beginning, and and this was what it was for me. You come in and you think it's all about being polished. And the reason you think that is because you're so used to watching like the other people who are huge content creators who have been doing it for like you know Mr. the beast has been doing it since he was 12 years old. And so you see you see people who are like polished in the craft and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to try and be that." And it gets low traction. And then if you keep doing it long enough, you'll get to the point where like you're so comfortable, whether it's on camera, you've just done so many repetitions, you it's like you're comfortable enough to just be yourself. And in that moment where you're comfortable enough to just be yourself is typically from what I've seen in my journey and then also for others. That's when your stuff starts taking off because people can see themselves in it. It's like this irony of doing content of like once you stop trying to be perfect and show the perfect path and everything worked and my story was just this perfect linear story. Once you stop trying to do that is actually once it works.

Um, you know what? Just quickly before we get out of here, I think back to like uh what you shared in the beginning and like you're working in that finance job where you're just punching numbers into a spreadsheet and I and I just want to do a little thought experiment with you of like if the Matt that is sitting before me today almost like went back in time and he had to go and speak with the Matt that's there punching numbers into the spreadsheet at his desk at his finance job and let's say that like replet and all the AI tools like we're in 2025 everything is available. If you were to give that Matt maybe just pause him for a second on punching those numbers in. If you were to give him just a challenge, like something to do this weekend that like, okay, if you start doing this thing, you're not going to have an incredible business overnight, but you're at least going to have like some momentum, like something, you're going to have a win under your belt, something that you've built. What challenge would you give that version of Matt? Absolutely. Um, yeah. No, I I think this one's simple. I'd say go build an app on Replet. go take your idea and turn it into something and prove that you can change the way that things exist in the world, right? And you know, an app might not seem like you're doing that, but that's what you're doing. You're creating something. So go take that idea, do what we just did, plan it out, break it down, create it, and then what's the next step after you create it? Well, we just talked about building in public. It's to share it. So I say go on social media, go on Twitter, and share what you built with somebody. Um, and you know, I think we'll share some links uh to to make it easier to do just that. But practice the habit, the muscle of idea, something that works, share it with people. I think that's the first step.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. And you know what? Just just to build on that. So, I think if I'll put both of our Twitter handles in the description. if people at us uh and have the link for whatever they build uh we can retweet some of them and maybe even I don't know we we I'll have to check this with you Matt but maybe we can even have the replet account retweet some of them as well I I might be I might have access to that account I won't no one you know say anything for sure and you know what's bigger than getting the replet account to retweet something is getting to retweet it and you know like he retweets really good apps so he built something really You tag me, you tag uh tag this show, right? And then we can get retweeted by Replet. Maybe Amjod sees it. That would be pretty huge. Let's do it. I love it, Matt. So, thank you so much, man. It's been a pleasure. Honestly, the pleasure was all mine. I love talking about this types of this type of stuff, not just building, but like the stuff we get down to that like experience of being human, especially of being like someone that's frustrated, that thinks that they're capable of more that that wakes up every day and says, "I can be better." But they have to deal with like reality which says at the moment what have you done that proves that you are better and now you can go out and do things that prove that to yourself that help you take the next step and that eventually gets you to where you want to be. So that all makes me super excited. Thanks so much for having me on. It's been awesome, man. Nice, man. This is good. Okay, so if you enjoyed this episode, you're going to absolutely love what we did with this one right here. Click here.