Transcription
Tools alone don't make money. Yet, everyone's flexing online about the 10 AI tools that they've learned this week. But honestly, stacking 10 AI tools is like paying rent on 10 apartments that you don't live in. Doesn't make any sense, right?
Meanwhile, the smart entrepreneurs are actually building apps that businesses need. You can either play around with features or you can make money. It's your call. But in this video, I will break down why building one app is the fastest way to get ahead and I will prove it with real examples.
Listen, every business runs on systems, but most are renting those systems. They're paying monthly for apps that don't even quite fit. They bend their business to match the software instead of bending the software to match the business. That's the way it should be, right? And that worked 10, 20 years ago, but it doesn't work anymore.
I used to work inside big tech. I watched companies spend millions on custom apps just to squeeze out a small edge. And today, that same opportunity has come down to the ground floor. Small businesses, consultants, creators, they all want apps that fit their workflow, not off-the-shelf tools.
I mean, Technavio shows that the market is expected to grow by 53.7 billion with a compound annual growth rate, so Kagger of 9.4% between 2024 and 2029. That's not even that far away. And that means that companies will happily pay the people who can deliver this.
I mean, you don't need to be a developer. You don't need a huge team. You just need to know how to package and build these solutions. And I know because I've been that person duct taping tools together, spending more time fixing breakages than serving clients. And honestly, it nearly burnt me out until I realized that the right app or the right automation beats a dozen half-baked tools.
McKenzie says that by 2030, a third of all work can already be automated. Not only that, but Harvard Business Review calls it the new wiring of organizations. And the CEOs and founders that I used to work with and that I still meet with, they're not asking if anymore, only how fast.
And the ROI isn't years away either. It used to be something that we used to believe back in the day, but in 2025, studies show that well-executed custom software projects achieve between 20 and 50% ROI with some companies seeing 40% productivity improvements and 35% reduction in operational overhead.
I mean, for example, companies like um Vonnage demonstrate the transformative power that they've seen by implementing this. They reduced a 4-day process to minutes through custom automation. But I think the real point isn't even in the numbers. It's leverage. The companies that build their own internal tools, even small ones, create an edge that nobody else can copy. And that edge compounds.
So, it's so much more than just about the apps at the end of the day. It's about who controls the system. And right now, the door is wide open for people who can step in and build for themselves or for others. So, today I want to show you how to do that step by step.
And we're going to start with an onboarding app because it's the first place businesses lose money. When clients sign up but they get stuck in slow, messy processes, that is where they're bleeding opportunity. Automating onboarding turns um a lot of mess into a lot of clarity. You know, proposals flow into signed contracts, invoices fire instantly, welcome emails go out, accounts get created, and the client feels momentum right away. And that gives them certainty that they've made the right decision. And honestly, every business with clients needs this. From coaches and consultants to agencies and SAS startups and even local service providers. And actually, many of our community members did exactly this. They built simple apps for local businesses. And what started like a weekend project ended up uh turning into a proper business for several of them.
And stick around because at the end I'm going to give you a simple three-step framework that you can apply to any business process to decide if it's worth turning into an app.
Okay. So, for today, I'm going to be using Rocket. Uh, Rocket, which you can find at rocket.new, transforms a single prompt into production-ready web or mobile apps, dashboards, websites, landing pages, or even internal tools. And I've chosen this one because while others make you prompt for every single page and for every single feature, Rocket is different. You only need to describe your vision once and then get the full functional app with backend, with integrations, product-ready code, everything. It's basically like you have your senior product and dev teams that read your mind. And thank you Rocket, by the way, for partnering with us on today's video.
But before we jump to the tool, here's what most people get wrong. They get excited by a new tool and jump straight into prompting. But that's backwards. The success of your app doesn't depend on your prompt as much as it depends on this. It depends on whether you've nailed the problem that it solves. So before you touch any tool or start prompting away, I want you to do this instead. Okay? I want you to think like a business owner and answer this one question. What job is this app here to do? Because businesses don't want another shiny dashboard. They want outcomes. Faster onboarding, smoother payments, fewer leaks in the pipeline. And that's how you turn AI from a toy into a revenue stream.
Uh, this is a framework that is called Jobs to be Done or JTBD, which was introduced by Clayton Christensen. He's a Harvard Business School professor and if you haven't read his book on uh the innovator's dilemma, I highly, highly recommend it. So the idea is actually quite simple. People don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. So if your app doesn't do a clear job better than the current solution, then it won't sell.
So in our case, for the onboarding example, a business doesn't want an app just for the sake of it, right? What's the real job? The real job is to help them onboard new clients quickly and consistently without drowning in paperwork or emails. That's the job that they're hiring this app for. In terms of competing solutions, I mean, those could be anything from spreadsheets to email checklists or even binders. I don't know if they live in the paper world anymore. And your app needs to do that job better than all of those alternatives.
And here's how you can apply Jobs to be Done right now. Step number one, define the job. Write down in plain words the progress that your business or your client wants to make. For onboarding, it's get new clients up to speed faster and with fewer errors, I guess. Step number two, map the struggles. You want to list the pain points with the current system. Maybe your um client forgot important steps or u clients get lost in email chains or whatever. You need to ask them to figure that out. And then step number three, you need to test the fit. So, you need to ask yourself, if this onboarding app existed, would the company fire quote unquote the old process and hire this instead? If yes, then you're on the right track. If not, maybe you want to refine the job until it feels obvious. And by starting with JTBD, you make sure that your app is solving the right problem before you even open a tool. That way, everything that you build, the features, the design, the flow will directly support the job that your app is being hired to do.
Okay, so now we're ready to get to work with a very clear job in mind. We have two options. Either we just put that into Rocket and give it more flexibility or if you're a little bit more advanced or you want more control, you can get even uh deeper and provide guidelines on the data architecture, for example. And if you don't know how to do that, you can obviously get help from TAGPT with the clear job and then ask it to write a detailed prompt including the pages that your app should have um from a UI perspective as well as details on the databases and the data structure and then clearly you can review that, adjust it, and then provide it to Rocket.
Now if you want to make it easy and cheaper, there are top-quality templates curated by experts and this also reduces your token consumption by up to 80%. So, as you come to rocket.new, you're going to see that we can get started really, really easily and we can build pretty much anything that we can think of. Whether it's a website, a mobile app, a landing page, an internal tool, a web app, there are many options and we can get started really easily. You can see here that it works across multiple frameworks like Flutter, like HTML, like Next as well as React and it has multiple integrations.
For today, I am going to show you how to do a couple of these integrations. But let's take an example for our particular situation. If we did have a Figma design, we would be able to uh get that across into Rocket quite easily. So, all you would need to do would be to go to your design in Figma and click share and then copy link and then come back to Rocket, click import. And obviously, first of all, we need to connect our uh Rocket to Figma. So, hit connect. And now they're connected. So I'm going to paste the link and start the import. And you'll see it is very, very easily the moment that Rocket has connected to your Figma design, it is able to guide you through the entire development process step by step. So it is going to already see all the um web frames that you have imported from Figma. It'll ask you exactly which ones you want to import and then guide you step by step.
[Music] And here we go. Our app is now ready and the UI is actually functional. We've got the same profile that we had in the Figma design. I think this is pretty, pretty interesting. Not only that, but it has also created a products catalog page where we can see all the products that are available on the website and each one can be added to cart.
[Music] And then a cart page with a cart summary and the next steps. And here we go.
Okay, so let's get back to our client onboarding app. So, if you remember, we already have our prompt. So, I'm going to just paste it in here, and I'm going to go ahead and get started. And it is asking me whether I want it as a web app, a mobile app, internal tool, website, dashboard, or landing page. I'm going to just go ahead and say web app and confirm. And I'm okay to use the default framework. And now it's asking me what kind of screens I wish to have. So I'm going to say client registration, setup details, onboarding completion, dashboard, invoice access, and profile management. So it's already using the color palette that I provided and it's starting to work on each page. one by one. The speed that the code is getting written is pretty crazy.
[Music] So now it's working on the status notification. It was working on the top bar earlier. These are all part of the client registration page.
[Music] Now it's working on the registration progress. Now on the security badges, the client registration index. Okay, so we're already done with the client registration, the client dashboard, and now the onboarding completion as well. Now we're working on the invoice access. Now we're working on the billing preferences section in the profile management page. So invoice access is also completed. We're only left with profile management.
So we've got our client flow web app already prepared and we've got the dashboard here. Pay invoice, download documents, update profile, as well as service requests. We can see the recent invoices, the account status, as well as all the communications, invoice history. Then we can go to invoices and see here what's pending, what's paid, what's overdue. Payment can be integrated probably through Stripe and then clients can pay directly through the app. We have the profile page with billing details for every client. It even thought to have tax exempt organization and purchase order required. This is crazy. And this is for a new client.
And when your app is ready to go public, all you need to do is hit launch. Launch to web or launch on custom domain. For me, I'll just go launch on web using Netlify. Let's try it out.
So for today we only looked at the Figma, Superbase, and Netlify integrations, but you can also integrate with lots of other apps and platforms like Stripe in order to accept payments, Google Analytics to see how users u interact with the application, AdSense to look at monetizing the app or site with ads or ad revenue. Um, OpenAI to add AI features like chat, summaries, text generation. GitHub if you want to sync code for backups, collaboration, and version control. With Anthropic, if you want to use Claude for safe, helpful answers and long-term content with Gemini to use Google's AI for chat, text, or image generation with Perplexity for um fact-based answers, or with Twilio to send SMS for verifications, for alerts, or even for updates.
All these integrations are also available directly in the chat view as you click on the integrations button at the top. There is a lot more information about these um integrations and I'll make sure to link uh documentation that you will find very easy to follow and you'll be able to do all of these integrations quite easily.
Okay, so our app is already ready. It is fully configured with backend and everything. It has database schemas. It has authentication. And I mean, you've seen how long it took. The experience with Rocket has been amazing. We've gone from idea to live application in a matter of minutes, clearly not months. Um, and the fact that their deployment pipeline handles everything from code optimization to server configuration for launching instantly, has made it super, super easy.
So check out Rocket at rocket.new. You can start completely free and then you can upgrade as your needs expand. Uh, you can obviously choose between a monthly uh billing and yearly billing. For yearly you get 20% off. Um, and if you want a clear overview of the plans, we're going to make sure to show them for you on the screen. Obviously, you have the free uh plan where you get 1 million tokens that are available for public projects and you can access some templates as well. I think this is perfect for experimenting and for getting started. Although data here contributes to training their model, so you need to be mindful of that. Uh, then you've got the personal plan which is $25 per month and this um gives you access to 5 million tokens, uh private projects, unlimited custom domains, code download, the ability to remove the branding, opt out of data training, uh plus a bunch of templates as well. Um, and it's built for personal use, okay? It's not for um serious app builders, so to speak.
If you do need a bit more than that, you've got the Rocket plan, which is $50 a month with 10 and a half million tokens. Uh, this also includes uh 5% bonus. And this tier is for professionals or for frequent users. You also get everything in personal, private projects, custom domains, co-download, bunch more. And then you've got the Booster plan. That's $100 a month. You've got 22 million tokens, 10% bonus. Um, and this is built for power users if you want to rely on Rocket as your main tool. And clearly this will also give you access to premium features like private projects and unlimited domain downloads and branding removal, opt out of data training, and so forth.
I mean, Rocket is already trusted by more than 400,000 users across 180 countries. You can start free, you can grow at your own pace, and you can choose the plan that fits your journey.
Okay. So I promised you in the beginning that I would share a framework to give you an easier way to decide if something should be an app or not. And step number one for that is to spot the leak. So you want to look for places where time, money, or clients are slipping through the cracks. Onboarding delays, missed invoices, repetitive manual steps. If it feels painful or costly, that's a leak that's worth fixing.
Now, step number two, you need to define the outcome or the job. So you need to ask yourself, what progress does the business that you're working with want to make here? Don't think in features, think in results. Faster onboarding, smoother payments, more consistent delivery. That is the real job that the app gets hired to do.
And then step number three, you need to test the fit. So you need to ask yourself, if this app existed, would they fire quote unquote the old process and hire quote unquote this instead? And if yes, then you've got a winner. If not, then maybe you need to refine it um to make it more of a no-brainer.
All right, you guys, that was it for today. Thank you so, so much for watching. Like this video if you did. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't done so. Share it with anyone in your circle of friends or family who is looking to learn more about building apps with AI and maybe getting started on a side hustle or start a business with that.
In the meantime, if you want to practice this together with over 11,000 other people, you are always more than welcome to join our community. It is completely free. Please take your time to answer the three questions. We do take that very seriously. Uh, and if you feel like you want to be surrounded by people who are on the exact same path as you are, that is the place to be. So, I'll see you on the other side.
Thank you again for taking the time and watching this video till the end. I really, really appreciate it. I know your time is valuable. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time and for being here with us every single video we post. And hopefully I'll see you in the community. Have a great day.