← Startup Stories - Mixergy
Startup Stories - Mixergy
#2294 He Claude Code: Build Me a YouTube Replacement
Pat Walls of Starter Story
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Transcript188 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner, I'm the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. And today I've got Pat Walls, a guy who had made it really big on YouTube with his starter story. It's a collection of YouTube videos featuring him flying out to entrepreneurs who built these incredible companies to find out how they did it in person. Anyway, Sad thing happened. YouTube basically wanted to shut him down and I'd watch him get strike after strike and thought that he was going to be gone. And so did he. And just when he was feeling like it was the end, he decided to have Claude Code build him a new video platform. And the frickin thing just worked out. I didn't watch him, but I saw on Twitter as he was basically live tweeting his process. Anyway, I asked him how he used Claude Code and he said, you want to see it? And I said, hell yeah. So he did a screen share with me, which is what you're about to listen to, and he showed me step by step how he did it. Now, listening to a screen share is not that interesting, right? So why don't you come over to my new YouTube channel where I've got a collection of these types of show and tell videos and see it. All you have to do is go to TheNextNewThing AI YouTube, that's the next new thing and you'll see it. And of course, if you're someone who just prefers to stick with audio, I think we do a good job describing what's on the screen, but I'll let you decide. And if you ever want to come back to YouTube, remember my new YouTube channel. It's the next new thing, AI slash YouTube. And this interview, like the others in this AI series, are presented by Zapier, the AI automation company that I've used for so long that I'm literally their first customer. All right, let's get to it.
- [01:53]
B
Last year we did over 2 million.
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A
Then YouTube comes in and says what to you?
- [01:58]
B
They essentially labeled our content as, quote, unquote, dangerous content. And I realized that my channel could be deleted and I actually wouldn't even be able to get my videos. I basically rebuilt a small version of YouTube in an hour, a couple hours, the early versions of it, we'll do it from scratch and you can watch this video or this tutorial here and you could do it yourself. I'm going to show you all the prompts, I'm going to show you everything.
- [02:21]
A
Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, a platform where founders share how they bootstrap from 0 to 100k per month. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. And he's got a killer YouTube channel that I've been following for a long time. And then he said on X that he was kind of booted off of YouTube and that he was vibe coding a replacement for YouTube. And it looked so beautiful that I wanted to find out how he did. Don't you think it looked beautiful, you laughing at me when I say that?
- [02:51]
B
Well, I appreciate that. I'm not a design expert by any means. I'm just sort of a scrappy programmer that uses tailwind design patterns. So nothing special.
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A
It looked good and it was smart. It got me hooked into watching a video. And then it said, if you want to watch more, then you need to enter your contact information. Like all this stuff that a smart marketer would put into it. But here's the beauty of it. I watch you do it on Twitter. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You publish and you came out with it and I wanted to find out how you did. And you said, andrew, it's actually not as hard as people think. I can walk people through creating using AI tools. That's where we're going to do here today. Before we get into it, you always ask your people how much revenue they make. How much money are you making, let's say with the YouTube channel, then we talk about the business in general.
- [03:32]
B
You know, we're pretty big channel in our space and we probably do 1.5 to 2 million views per month. But as far as just the AdSense, that's the revenue that Google pays you just by showing ads, I think we're doing somewhere between 10 to $15,000 a month. But really that is just a small portion of our total revenue as a business. YouTube I see, is like one. It's a, you know, a way that people can find out about Starter Story and then we have our own products. Like we have Starter Story Build, which is our education platform which teaches you how to build products and apps with AI. And then we also have our Starter Story subscription product which has our ideas database and things like that. So as a total business, that revenue really only makes up 5 to 10% of the total revenue of the business. I have to do the exact numbers on it, but.
- [04:25]
A
Meaning you're 10 to 20x of what you had said earlier?
- [04:30]
B
Yeah, maybe 10x I think would be of that. Yeah, 150k per month, maybe a little bit, or yeah, maybe a little bit more. Than that. Last year we did over 2 million. So around there, yeah, 5 to 10%. But you know, it's up and down.
- [04:46]
A
But yeah, okay, but the model is people discover you on TikTok, they discover you on YouTube. They come in and they watch this stuff and then they say, I need an idea. They come in, they subscribe to the product that helps them learn and come up with ideas, say, I need to know how to build. They come and subscribe to the service where you teach them how to do it. That's the model. And so then YouTube comes in and says what to you?
- [05:07]
B
Well, they say that we have dangerous content. I believe they have some sort of automated moderation system. And I know that Google as a whole is a very lean business. They like to automate everything. So I think they are going through a project right now over there where they are trying to figure out how to moderate content in this crazy, AI faceless automated world. And they essentially labeled our content, some of our past content in our library, as quote, unquote, dangerous content. And that is a policy that they have on their website of what entails dangerous content. And you know, if you get enough warnings or strikes on your channel, they can delete the whole thing. And then, you know, this whole thing that you built over years and feel like you own can just be obliterated overnight and vanished.
- [05:57]
A
My understanding is that they probably made a mistake, they've undone it. And what they did though was put a fear in you that this could happen and also excitement in you that, you know what, maybe I could solve it. And so I watch you say, I'm going to build. What did you build? What did you build it in? And then what are you going to show us when you do a screen share?
- [06:14]
B
Yep. Well, I was, I, we had gotten the warnings or the strikes on the channel. It was like it happened on like a Friday or something like that. And I was sitting and it just like, it just overtook me. The stress just overtook me. I, like couldn't think about anything else. I, I was at dinner with my wife and I got this email and then, you know, just like, oh my God, like the whole business can vanish tomorrow. And it is like this immense. I don't know, you almost feel like it's like this, this physical feeling of like, wow, like everything I just built could be gone. So I was sitting there that weekend going through the, going through the emotions of like, what could happen? What do I need to do? And then I sort of got inspired. One piece of it, this roller coaster Ups and downs is I had this up of like, well, I could just rebuild it myself. And, you know, I have a software engineering background. However, I'm a really, really bad software engineer. So I'm going to be showing you guys today how we could build. We can build it in just a few minutes. We can rebuild YouTube. But I said, screw it. I'm sitting here, I got nothing better to do, and I'm worried that everything is going to fall apart. Let's just distract myself by building something cool. And I basically rebuilt a small version of YouTube in an hour, a couple hours, the early versions of it. And I can show you how it looks on the actual website right now. And we're going to do a demo, hopefully too, of rebuilding it.
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A
Let's see the finished product first and. And let's walk through how people are going to be able to do this quickly by just following what you're doing.
- [07:37]
B
Yep. I will show you first what we have. You can see something here that kind of looks like YouTube. You know, it has a thumbnail, it has views, and it has. When it was uploaded, we can filter by how much revenue businesses are making and that sort of thing. I got a little description here, and you can even click on a specific chapter and it'll jump to that spot. You can go to the transcript and you can see, I got this automated transcripts thing going on. This basically costs nothing. There's a couple little streaming elements that I pay for five bucks a month or something like that. But I was able to build this in essentially a couple hours.
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A
Let's go into how to do this.
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B
We'll do it from scratch and you can watch this video or this tutorial here and you could do it yourself.
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A
Okay, let's do it. Anyone can just go to code.claude.com to get it.
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B
And what you want to do is open your terminal. A terminal is a command line interface that allows you to interface with your computer. Typically, you click around and be able to do cool stuff. Terminal, you type things and it does things for you. You should have Terminal on your Mac. I use something called iTerm2. It's basically the same thing with a different skin on it. So you can sit right here in the terminal. Let's just make that clean. I'm going to. Maybe we'll even make it bigger just to show you what to do.
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A
Yep.
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B
And we're going to use a tool called Claude Code. I believe there's a free version of it. But I'm a big fan of I pay. I think $100 a month or $200 a month for Claude code does sound like a lot of money, but when you realize what it can do, it can replace the work of developers, designers, and an entire team of people for 100 bucks a month. And you can build anything you want pretty much. I think that's probably worth it, but I think there's a free version you can try. I'm not going to go through the process of installing it because it's already inst on my computer. So I'm just going to go through the process.
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A
Before you do anything else, hit, I think it's command and then the plus sign a couple of times. Then we'll see the font a lot bigger.
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B
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
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A
There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, genius. Great.
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B
Am I supposed to type Claude? I just can't remember what to actually type. So let's go to Google and let's search that. Let's say, like, I don't know, let's go to. Yeah, how to use Claude code, install the cli. And this is, this is what programmers do. And like, some people think, like, oh, you're such a genius because you're a programmer now you just Google stuff and now AI will even give you more of the answer. So I'm using the AI overview here and I'm trying to see, like, okay, how do I actually start it? I think you just type Claude to start. Right.
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A
Okay.
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B
There's this one thing that I like to do that I would not recommend anyone watching this do, but I'm going to go to the AI mode here and ask it about one feature that I know I like to use called dangerous. Skip of permissions. This is just going to make things.
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A
Go faster for us because Claude likes to keep asking you, can I do this? And then can I do that? Can I do this? Can I do that?
- [10:32]
B
Yeah. Right, Right. So anyone watching this, I'm not endorsing to use that unless you know what you're doing. You don't have to use it, but we'll use it just to be faster. So I can sort of talk as I go.
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A
I think that's right.
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B
Cool. So I'm just going to paste that right there and it should start. Okay. So now I have Claude code open here. I can type things in here and basically it will create apps for me, it'll create code for me. So we're going to create this YouTube thing. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a folder that will Enclose all of my. Well, I have my app in it. So I'm just going to say, hey, in my code directory, this is a spot and I can show you here. Just so that everything makes perfect sense. Move this over. In my directory I have here I have Starter Story and a couple other random apps that I've built. I'm going to say, hey, can you create a new folder called. What are we going to call our app?
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A
F YouTube.
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B
F YouTube. F you tube. Let's just have it try that. This is like the most basic thing. Let's just. You can just ask it something, just like ChatGPT, or you could have it do something basic on your computer. This is cool because it will do anything you essentially want. This is kind of just one of the crazy ideas of AI is it could take over your computer and do stuff. So now we got f YouTube in there. So let's actually.
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A
Was that fun YouTube, right?
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B
Fun YouTube, yeah, we're going to call it fun YouTube. Let's actually start the app. And this is actually one thing that maybe is a little inside baseball on. One thing I recommend if you're new to AI coding, is to use a proven framework that real coders use that is, you know, has a lot of documentation online so that when you ask it to do things, it's gonna do it in its little opinionated way, which will just make your life easier. So when you ask it, can you add this feature or can you add. Can you fix this bug? It's gonna be looking at all the millions of documentation and code online and fix it in an efficient way. So there's something called Next js, which is just a framework. I don't even use it for myself. But I wanted to prove that anybody can do this. So we'll use that one. It's very popular and we'll. We'll use that. Say. I'm going to say, I want to build a simple app with Next js. Can you put it in that directory for me and create a basic app and then start it up? So I have no idea this is going to work, but if it does, it just shows how primal your prompts can really be. Like, I did have that little inside baseball on the Next JS thing, but other than that, I just really told it to just create an app.
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A
Essentially what it does is it gives you the framework for the front end design and then also for how all the data is going to be stored so you don't have to think, you don't have to make Those decisions for it.
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B
Okay, Exactly. Think of it like thousands and thousands of programmers have like argued and updated code and like made it perfect so that it's really easy to create apps. You're basically like channeling all that work and effort that they put into these open source platforms and you're like standing on the shoulders of giants, as I like to say. Yeah. So it'll make your life easier. You don't even need to know why. Just trust me, bro. Okay, so it started the server here. Your Next JS app is ready and it started the server. So let's go and actually try it here. It's going to do localhost3001. Here we go. This is our app. It just says Next js. You know, I could deploy it probably, we probably won't do that in this one because. Cause I don't have Vercel. But you could. That part's easy. Let's now sometimes think like you could just ask it like, oh, let's just go recreate YouTube. I think that's probably the wrong way. I think maybe in like a year it'll be able to do that. But right now you still gotta kinda approach it like a programmer. And my sort of unique maybe skill that I can share is that I've been a programmer, a bad programmer. So I kind of know how to think a little bit. But also I build, you know, businesses so I sort of have that sort of some of those trade offs there of how to do that. So let's. One thing, one cool thing you can do is what I would do here is I'm just thinking of what do I want like to be the first part of my app. And when I think about that I go, well, I actually want the YouTube show page, like just the video page. I want to. That's gonna be the core thing. And most people are gonna be watching a video. So that's where I wanna start. One feature, one page. Not the whole app, not all the features, One feature, one page. That's it. So what you can do is, what I would do is I would go to YouTube, I would go to. You want to go to Mixergy, you want to do something?
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A
Starter story, let's go to yours.
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B
Okay, let's go to starter story and let's go to our most recent video. Why not? And what I'm going to do here is maybe I'll zoom out a little bit on the page. No, that didn't work. I'm just going to take a screenshot and I'm going To use Command Control Shift 4, that's a little inside baseball too. And I'm going to copy the UI and that's it. Now, if I do command, if I'm on a Mac, I do Command Control Shift four. I think that's what it is. I can paste it here. And so I have to do Control V. And you can see image number one is there. And I say, like, here is the YouTube interface. I want you to recreate this on the page, but instead of pixel perfect, do it with place holder components.
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A
So.
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B
I can see the design and then one by one add the features. I want, like video embed and, you know, recommended videos or whatever this is. I'm trying to, like, approach it. Like, I'm almost like drawing it on a piece of paper. Like I had a piece of paper in front of me and I'm drawing the boxes.
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A
I like the logic of it. I like watching how you think this through. Essentially what you're saying is, give me all the elements and just kind of name them and let me fill them in with what I want.
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B
Yep, exactly. Because I don't want to recreate YouTube exactly. I might want to change one thing. I may want to put something cool on the right side sidebar instead of recommended videos. And I like to take things step by step. I don't want it to do it all for me. I like to sort of like build and iterate as I go. And I think that's how someone who's building like a real product will do things. But there's no right or wrong way to do it. I think this way is like a fun way to be a little intentional about how you build it. So it's going to take a little time here.
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A
So what you're probably doing is just going to keep going back and forth between the browser to see what it made and the terminal to see what you're asking for.
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B
I usually do like two screens, so I use like the. The max spaces. So I'll go back and forth. So. Yeah, yeah, I've noticed you do that.
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A
Okay.
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B
That's what some people do. You know, there's a. There's a lot of ways that people do it, but it's already done here. So what I'm doing here, as you can see, is I'm just going back and forth between terminal and here, so you can even see it behind. So let's go back to our app and let's reload and see what happened. So there it is.
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A
There it is. Yeah.
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B
I thought it was going to do something a little bit more. You never know what you're going to get with AI. I thought it was going to do something a little bit more like templates.
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A
Placeholders. Yes, placeholders.
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B
But it didn't do that. But it doesn't look bad. Right? Nothing works. Obviously, I can play this. Nothing actually works. I click this. But it created what I like about this, even though it didn't do exactly what I wanted. The search is there, but nothing actually works when you search it. So we're going to go through, we're going to build these features as long, as much time as we have today and actually build. Build out maybe one or two things or however long you want to go for.
- [19:29]
A
Let's pick a couple of things to do and. And get rid of the rest. But before you even do that, take me into Finder and just see what it actually put in there. Because essentially what it's doing is it's listening to your requests and in that folder that you did earlier, it's putting in all the.
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B
Yep.
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A
All the files that do that.
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B
What I said earlier is that I didn't want to look at any code.
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A
Like, I think you have to. Huh.
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B
I basically said like, we're not even going to look at code. Like, obviously it's showing code here, but I'm not actually looking at and editing code. So yes, it is putting everything. Typically, it's not the way that I recommend doing things, but I just want to show you that you don't need to look at code to do this. But yes, if you go here and you look at all these packages and all this code, it's editing all these code files. And if you're building something, truly you want to be able to look at the files and edit them for this demo. I want to prove that you don't need to do it. You don't need to be able to read code. But yes, if you were to go in here and you were to go to see. I don't even know that much about how Next JS works, you could see that.
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A
Oh, I didn't mean for you to have to open that up. But yes, I see.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's created all those files and it's editing all those files. Every time I tell it to do something, it's making edits and make it.
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A
Change and then the images are being put into the folders for you.
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B
The images. I'm not sure how the images work specifically for this app.
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A
It probably just finder for a second and just take a look at where the images are.
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B
Yep. But I could prompt it and say, hey, use, you know, use an image here and you can give it to.
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A
It and you can tell it. Okay.
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B
All right, so go find Andrew from Mixergy's Face online. It'll search for that and it can put your. Your face right in there if you wanted to. You know, it can do anything, which is cool.
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A
Do you have a sense of what you want to do next, or do you want me to suggest something for what this page could look like?
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B
Sure. I mean, if you want, we can actually put the video in there to show that, you know, like, the most important thing about YouTube is having an actual video that is playing. Right. Because right now there's no video. It's just a placeholder, which is cool. So if you think about this as like a canvas, this is our canvas. Let's go and work on this part of the canvas right here, which is the video. And once that works, then we can do another. Then maybe you can tell me another feature to add. Okay, let's do it. Okay, so here's another inside baseball tip is that, yeah, we could tell it to go and rebuild streaming and quality and compression and encoding and all these things. But no, when you look at any successful app, they use something called a wrapper. And Whether it's an AI app that's using ChatGPT as a wrapper, like Claude code is technically a wrapper for an LLM. We want to use a wrapper for streaming. So there's an app that we use called bunny.net and think of it as like AWS for YouTube, kind of. It's a place that's going to host our videos, it's going to manage streaming, it's going to manage compression, and we're going to interface with it through an API, and that's where everything will host. So we don't have to handle that nasty stuff, that we're trying to operate a business. That's what we're going to do. So you could ask it to go and rebuild YouTube, you know, the. At the bare metal. But you don't want to do that. So let's, let's prompt it. Let's say, okay, okay, I want to get the video working and I am using bunny.net for streaming. Can you go online and see how maybe I want to say, like, just go online and check out the documentation for this and then implement a video. And then I would say, like, get the video player working with these credentials and just to save us time for this Demo. I have my Bunny credentials right here. This is like how the keys for the API and stuff like that.
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A
Do you need me to black that out before we publish?
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B
No, it should be fine. I'll let you know. I should be able to just delete it and then it's totally fine. But I will let you know that then. One quick thing I'm going to also have it do is just take the an example video that I have here. Please, please use this video for the demo. Let's see if this works. That's pretty kind of not overly specific on how to do it. I just said figure it out and let's see if it figures out. This one might take a little bit of time.
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A
Are you typing usually or do you do audio dictation?
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B
You know, I just heard about this awesome tool called. I typically type when I'm programming, but I just heard about this awesome tool called. I think it was called Whisper Notes or something like that. Not sure the exact name because I don't like the dictation on Mac. I don't think it's very good.
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A
It sucks.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You know what I've been using? I had to look it up voicing because it's still all run on my desktop. It's super fast and because it's on my desktop, they just charge me once and never again. It's not a subscription.
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B
Right, Right. But I love dictation and I've been hearing about a couple that are good. I'm gonna get into that soon. I use dictation all the time, just not necessarily for programming, but I should. Okay. It says it's already done, so that was pretty fast.
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A
Let's take a look.
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B
Let's see. And it works.
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A
There it is. Yeah, it works.
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B
Right? So that was way easier than I thought. Obviously I had already done some of the work like getting the keys ready and everything. But that's the power of using a wrapper or you know, like a third party API. You'll use it for lots of things like just to even have login working for your app. A lot of people use something called Firebase. So that's a little kind of inside baseball for anytime you're building stuff. Don't reinvent the wheel.
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A
How do you find all these? How do you know that? Obviously we see everyone using Firebase, but if you are looking for video provider. I never heard of bunny.net. if you're looking for something else. How do you find all these tools?
- [25:59]
B
Right. Well, I think LLMs are pretty good. I was like going I asked Twitter because I didn't really know a whole lot about this space. And then I had a few options, and I ran those through LLMs, and I said, like, what do you think I should use based on, like, my preferences? I said, like, I don't really want to have to deal with encoding. And it was like, you should use Bunny. And I. Although I didn't really like the how their website looked, it kind of turned me off a little bit. I trusted the LLM there, and I'm, like, very happy with that decision.
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A
So.
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B
Good. So I try to trust AI more than my own vibes sometimes.
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A
Yeah. It's weird when I never. When I don't hear of a site and still on the bottom of their site, their copyright is out of date. They haven't changed it yet. It makes me wonder, are they really paying attention to the site? But it's working for you. Okay, I get it. Why don't we do this? Do you want to just eliminate everything from the page except maybe a box on the right? I don't know if it'll do a transcription service, but how about Chapters? Or is there something else that we want to do?
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B
Yeah. Yeah, we could try Chapters. That could be fun. Let's do it.
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A
All right.
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B
Where do you want to put the chapters?
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A
How about where on the right side, like, you did it in place of the recommended videos.
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B
The recommended videos. Okay, so, yeah, this would be kind of cool way to show it. I'm going to take another screenshot again and just remind the app, hey, this is what it looks like. Because sometimes these apps, they're only seeing code. They're not seeing visuals. So I'm going to take a screenshot here. I'm going to say, hey, here's what it looks like right now. Great job. Sometimes say nice things.
- [27:38]
A
You are very kind to it. You've said please multiple times. You're showing appreciation. You're nicer than I am to people in my life.
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B
I think that Sam Altman one time said that even if you add a nice little thing at the end, it costs them all this. They're spending billions just because people are being nice. Random, but. Okay, let's talk about the right sidebar. I don't want recommended videos. I want chapter timestamps. And now here's the thing you also have to think about, too, is like, well, I don't actually have the timestamps, and I probably don't want it to, like, go and, like, transcribe the video and find them, because that would just take Too long. I'm just gonna. Because I just want to get it working first. I'm gonna say just to make them up. Yeah, just make them up. Say I don't have the actual chapters on me right now. So just make them up for this, you know, for this exercise. And so we can make them look nice before what's called we figure out state. State meaning database. Okay. And maybe another thing we can do too is like, let's. Let's actually. What do we want our chapters to look like? We don't really know. So let's go and just go to google.com and search inspiration for timestamp chapters. This is kind of a cool thing you can do if you want to get inspiration. You're not good at design. Let's go to images. Sometimes they'll have like something like dribble or something like that. I'm not finding like super good ones here. Timestamp chapters, YouTube dribble. If you see anything sticks out to.
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A
You, the one second from the left is interesting because it's so visual.
- [29:43]
B
Why not? We can try something. Let's get a little creative with it. And let's say. Okay, can you make it look cool like this? Yeah, why not? Let's try it.
- [29:58]
A
How about put it underneath the video and then expand the video all the way to the right so now people can see the timestamps in a new way.
- [30:05]
B
Okay.
- [30:06]
A
Just playing around here. I like this.
- [30:08]
B
Okay, so let's go and start over here. And let's say. Let's talk about the right sidebar. Remove it. Sorry, I'm. It's very slow here. So I would probably break that into two things just to be simple and make the video full screen. And what's cool is that's going to go. But what's cool about Claude code is that while that's going, I'm pretty confident it's going to be able to do that. It's very sort of simple. Now I can start kind of prompting it what I want it to do next, even though it's already working for me. And this is when you start getting fast with AI. Now I. And sometimes people have multiple cloud codes open and they're doing like five things at the same time. But we'll keep it simple. Now I want to add a cool edit timeline thing below the video where the description is that flows, that shows you dynamically where the video is. I want you to do this with chapters. Make up the chapters for. For our exercise before I hit submit on that, that that something could go wrong there. But that's okay. I want something to go wrong so we can debug it as we go. So now it's full screen. That already happened.
- [31:46]
A
Boom.
- [31:46]
B
So we're good on that.
- [31:47]
A
That's good.
- [31:48]
B
And then I got to make sure that I actually put in my photo that I have from, um. Where was that again?
- [31:56]
A
The YouTube inspiration might have been in a different browser window. Did you have it?
- [32:00]
B
Oh, yeah. Maybe it was here.
- [32:01]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, There you go.
- [32:03]
B
So I'm going to. I just. The way I do things is a little screenshot thing. Just gotten good at that. So I'll put that in there and I do my thing there. Let's see what happens.
- [32:13]
A
And when you're working, you're not looking at the code at all. As a developer, even you're someone who just says, I've got it, it's good.
- [32:21]
B
For the purposes of this demo, I wanted to show you without having to look at code. What I usually do is before when I finish a feature, I do a small thing at a time. I'll just do a quick look at the code changes as almost like a reviewer. I'm the senior engineer who's just making sure I didn't do something really dumb that breaks checkout or something like that, or is going to take my app down. But I don't look with a lot of scrutiny at it. And here in this example, I'm not looking at with any scrutiny. I'm just trusting that it works. So I imagine in a year I may not even look at anything at all. But as of now, I just still have that little 1%. I just got to check.
- [33:08]
A
So, yeah, man, I'm picturing you that weekend just going from insane low, my business going down to this is so fun. It's so creative. This is like being a painter, getting to paint whatever you want with.
- [33:22]
B
Exactly. And that's what's cool. I've heard about the analogy before is like now with AI, like, I don't have to deal with writing all this JavaScript that I just did. Like, look at all this JavaScript here. I hate this stuff right now. I'm like a painter and it just like I can kind of just say what I want and I know it's going to do. So look, it's doing all this stuff right here. We're not going to go over what that does because it doesn't matter. But it's running all these like click events and all this stuff. So let's see what it created. I hate doing that stuff because I'm not like an engineer's engineer. I'm more of, like a product builder. So this stuff is just. It's amazing when it can do it for you. So let's go back to our app and reload. Whoa. Whoa. That looks pretty cool, right? Let's see if it actually works by pressing Play.
- [34:12]
A
That's cool.
- [34:13]
B
It doesn't actually work with, like, I.
- [34:15]
A
Want to do it. Okay.
- [34:17]
B
But. So let's fix that. Say, okay. Wow, that worked pretty good. I gotta talk. I gotta tell it. Only issue is the timeline doesn't change when I update the scrubber of the YouTube or, sorry, the. The bunny video and vice versa. Cool. So I know, like, you know, you get 95% of the way there, and there's usually small bugs to fix to get that final 5%. That's just how product development works. But that looks pretty cool. I mean, the fact that it came up with that with, like, a.
- [35:04]
A
What I didn't like about it is it looked a lot like a timeline on a video editor with multiple tracks. And I said, that's confusing, but I do like the visual of what's where. And it took the best of it. And it ignored the part that didn't really relate here. It didn't have different tracks.
- [35:21]
B
It made some decisions and said, hey, I don't want to show. You know, on an editor, you see multiple things. It put it all on one line, and it kind of. It kind of is cool because it's like the, you know, the. The timeline of a. Of building a business. And that is something that YouTube would never do because, you know, it's not that specific to entrepreneurship. But that's pretty cool. Hopefully it'll fix the bug, but, yeah.
- [35:51]
A
All right, I'm getting it now. I'm getting the way that you were feeling, how you. How it took you just a few days to get this going, how it gave you this sense of ownership. I also have to keep enforcing that. It wasn't just dumb creation. What I loved about it was the thought, the marketing thought, that you knew that there would be a period where people want to taste that you knew that there would be a next step and a next step after that. It's so easy to get carried away with. This is so cool. I want to show it to people that you forget. It's also a business that I need people to interact with properly and I need to get to the next step. And I love that you did that and you kept thinking that through. I wish that there was a Way to inject more of that into. Into people, frankly, even into me. I like seeing that.
- [36:35]
B
Well, I mean, you can build anything you want now. You know, I'm sure I saw on, I think on X that you had just built like a note taking app. Is that right?
- [36:43]
A
I'm such love with this note taking app because I just didn't think to create it. There's so many note taking apps and suddenly I said, I'm just going to do it. And within 15 minutes I had my ideal note.
- [36:54]
B
Yeah, Notepad.
- [36:54]
A
It's such a dream.
- [36:56]
B
Yep, yep. I don't know what's going to happen with software because of this, because anybody can sort of code up something that's super customized to them and.
- [37:04]
A
Okay, let's take a look at where we are.
- [37:06]
B
Okay, let's check. Whoa, we got a bug. Nope, it works. Okay, let's see.
- [37:13]
A
Hit play.
- [37:14]
B
Didn't work.
- [37:16]
A
Oh, man, I wonder why.
- [37:18]
B
I'll be able to show another inside baseball thing that I think is really cool that you might like. So for this one, I'm going to do something called Playwright. So name doesn't matter. But basically there's another cool thing about AI is that you can use AI to do the testing for you. So when there's something going on like this that's like kind of hard, it's like a really, like, kind of deep bug, you can actually ask it and say, hey, that didn't work. I want you to actually spin up MCP Playwright. Just if you're watching this, you can do something similar using those things and pull up a browser and debug the issue until it's fixed. And when I was preparing for this demo, this didn't come up. So let's hope it works. But basically what it should do is it should pull up another browser with AI and start looking at things around and clicking on buttons and diagnosing the bug until it fixes it. So not only can AI write your code for you, it can also do your testing for you, which is again, if AI is the future of AI is in marketing, it's in building, it's also in user testing. Right. I use this kind of thing all the time. I use a different way to build my app. So I'm hoping this is going to work right now. But it's one of those things that if you're not like a big coder, like, this can be a huge.
- [38:55]
A
Hack.
- [38:55]
B
Not hack, but this can be a huge help for debugging crappy issues like this. So it's doing Its thing right now it's trying to figure out how to run this sort of advanced playwright software, which basically spins up a browser and starts clicking around. So it might take a second there, but if I already had it installed, it'd probably be faster.
- [39:19]
A
While that's working, what else are you doing on a personal level with this?
- [39:23]
B
It's not necessarily personal, but one thing that I was, like, able to do with AI that I thought was amazing was build a command center for our business. So I have one dashboard that all me and my team can look at that integrates notion, where we have a bunch of stuff that we save. It integrates Stripe, integrates analytics, and it puts it all in one place.
- [39:46]
A
Okay. It's continuing to do this.
- [39:49]
B
Well, that's the cool thing about cloud code, is that it could go forever.
- [39:52]
A
Do you want to see if it's got anywhere? It's been. It's been refreshing it.
- [39:57]
B
Yeah. Let's see if it worked. Maybe it's just still doing its testing thing. It works.
- [40:02]
A
It works.
- [40:05]
B
Look at that.
- [40:05]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, how about we do this? Let's just clean up this page a little bit and remove some of the extra features that we have on the page and then publish it for the world.
- [40:19]
B
Cool. So what I would do is I would just remind Claude code what is there, because while it can look at the code, sometimes it's nice to give it a little visual of what's there. So I'm going to take a screenshot right here and I'm going to paste it in there just like we showed a couple times already. And let's just ask it. I'm going to say I need you to remove a couple things that don't work. So let's say we're going to remove search, right?
- [40:54]
A
Yeah.
- [40:55]
B
What else we want to remove Hamburger Menu.
- [40:58]
A
And let's even get all the. The comments from below. Out of there.
- [41:04]
B
Remove comments.
- [41:05]
A
And the Create button, the stuff to.
- [41:07]
B
The right of that, I guess that's the account Create button. Account stuff on top. Right. Again, you can just kind of say, like, pretty. You could really put some vibes in there. Like, you don't have to be too specific. It'll probably get it. Okay, we got the comments out of there. Should we get all this out of there?
- [41:28]
A
Sure. Is there a description in there? Sure. Let's get. Let's get rid of it all. Let's just have something that's super simple.
- [41:34]
B
And title and buttons and description below. Video. Okay. Let's just try to see what happens. So that should be pretty fast. I think that'll be pretty fast. And we can always add it back later because you don't want to have some fake stuff.
- [41:59]
A
I see it doing it.
- [42:01]
B
So it says it's done here. Let's reload. And looking good. Yeah.
- [42:05]
A
All right. Yeah, I do. I love it. Let's publish.
- [42:08]
B
Okay. Let's ask it again. Again. I don't know anything about Vercel. I'm a Rails guy, so it's totally different. And I'm doing this from scratch.
- [42:17]
A
Basically.
- [42:17]
B
I have a Vercel account signed up, but that's it. So I'm just gonna say I have no idea what I'm doing, but I want to deploy to Vercel. What do you need to do that and can you help me? Let's try it. Because right now I know they're probably gonna need some sort of information, like what's my account? And something like that. So I want to just keep it open and make sure that I don't put the cart before the horse in terms of the deploy. I can help you deploy to Vercel. Let me check a few things. Now it's running some stuff. Let's see. Build works. So it's doing a build, which is cool. That's what typically has to happen to get it up into production. But you wouldn't need to know that anyways. But that's a good sign. This is where a lot of things can go wrong before the days of AI. You know, you get these weird errors, like, here we go, there's an error right there. But what's amazing about cloud code is it can see the error and then fix the error, and you never have to Google it at all. So now it's asking me to log in. So let's try that. It should hopefully pop up some sort of. It needs to authorize to my Vercel account. So let's see. I'm just going to turn off this cloud code. You were doing good.
- [43:49]
A
And you do a lot of this. You just say, I don't know, I'm not sure. You teach me. You tell me what to do.
- [43:54]
B
Even before AI, we were. I was a software engineer and we were just Googling stuff. You know, you go on stack overflow and you'd say, you just ask kind of like a dumb person, like, how does this work? And that's. That's kind of the ethos of the programmer or the builder really is just, help me. I don't. I don't even know what I'm doing. It's almost like a humbleness of like, not. I think some of the best programmers are very like, they're not, you know, they're not smart asses. They're. They're humble folks.
- [44:25]
A
So I'm surprised that it's taking this long for something that seems so basic, you know?
- [44:32]
B
Yeah. Oh, sorry. It says press enter. I wasn't even reading. It's actually telling me something here, saying press enter to open the browser. So. Okay, so it was waiting for me, but it didn't really give me a nice notification. Sorry about that. So it should have worked. I may try to interrupt cloud code here and say like, hey, you're kind of screwing up here. I think I need to log in and auth to Vercel. But you are just hanging, doing nothing. Let's see what happens if I say that. Because what it's doing here is while Claude code is technically running and trying to figure things out, you can send an additional message like this to give it maybe a little bit of a boost or a little extra context. Just like someone who seems like they're spinning their wheels, maybe give them a little nudge in, in the right direction. And sometimes it can help. So let's see, sometimes it can be a little slow here. Okay. I think it's making some sort of progress. I hope it made some moves here. There we go. You need to authenticate in your browser. Go to this URL. Boom. I think we're going to get it. So I'm going to go plug this in here. And it's asking me for a code. This is okay to show authorization successful. Yeah, it's just like a, you know, an SMS code, just temporary. Okay, I think we're making progress here.
- [46:10]
A
I think so too. It's percolating.
- [46:14]
B
Yeah, it always says these like random adverbs. I don't know if that's the right word, but you're logged in now. Let me deploy your app. So they're deploying now and I think deploys are pretty fast on something like Vercel and Next js. So let's see if it's fast. And I want to tell you that cursor or really Claude code, when it first came out, it was nothing like this. I mean it was, it was very promising when it first came out. I've watched it. It's almost been a year, I think, since Claude code came out. And it just gets better and better and better. The models get better and then the reasoning gets better too. And I just don't even know where it's going to be. There's probably some sort of new tool in a year from now, but it's pretty amazing to see how fast it's gone.
- [47:00]
A
Yeah. It is like a junior developer who's really learning quickly and you don't have to give it as much context. You don't have to be more. You don't have to be as specific with it.
- [47:12]
B
Yep. Okay. It says it's done and it's even nicely told us where to find the app.
- [47:17]
A
So it's not.
- [47:18]
B
We can put our own domain on it. That would be.
- [47:20]
A
Yep. That's easy within the platform.
- [47:23]
B
But this is it right here.
- [47:24]
A
This is it. It's up and running.
- [47:26]
B
Yep. There you go.
- [47:29]
A
Holy smokes it. That is super fast.
- [47:32]
B
Yep. Yep. And there you go. Anybody that's watching this can go visit this website and check out.
- [47:40]
A
What is it? It's futube-flax vercel.app.
- [47:45]
B
Yep.
- [47:45]
A
Hell yeah. And wow.
- [47:47]
B
We. Yep.
- [47:48]
A
Pat, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for taking us through step by step how to get an app created, published to the Internet and used by people. Congratulations on what you've done with yours.
- [47:59]
B
Thank you. Well, I hope that you can do something even cooler.
- [48:03]
A
What I would like to do is just create a lot of little playful things that I need. You're going to continue to do this even though you're back on YouTube, right?
- [48:10]
B
Yeah. Yep.
- [48:11]
A
Because.
- [48:12]
B
So I think about it differently now. When I was. I thought about before, before I got the strikes, I thought about YouTube as our platform, our. Our place where the original content is hosted. And I just never even thought that it could be taken down. And now there's this concept called the hub and spoke, which is you have your hub and then there's spokes. There's, you know, LinkedIn is a spoke and maybe your newsletter is a spoke and your YouTube is a spoke and whatever. I used to think of YouTube as the hub and then everything else was a spoke. Even my website was the spoke because YouTube was so powerful and that's where most of the people were after this happened. And I realized that my channel could be deleted and I actually wouldn't even be able to get my videos once it happened. Once we got the first warnings, I told someone on my team, download every single video and just make sure that doesn't happen. And then now how I think about it is that this is the hub and YouTube is a spoke. Yeah, that would be a really bad spoke to lose, but it will not kill the business at the end of the day we're creating content that a lot of people like, they will come. Not everyone will come over, but a lot of people will come over and still want to consume this content. So that, that's, that's the mindset shift that I had.
- [49:29]
A
Do you think that you will then link people from an x post, a LinkedIn post, etc, into here to your site?
- [49:36]
B
Already doing that. You can, you can go check out my, my, my Twitter and I will reply. Yeah, yeah, I've just, we just started doing it. We don't send people to the YouTube anymore. We send people to here, which I like more because I'd rather have them on my site. You know, that could potentially be useful for retargeting. Yeah, it could be. Obviously we have like a little login wall so you can watch like two minutes, but then if you want to log in so I can do more customized stuff like that. And as you said, yeah, that, that's now the hub. Right.
- [50:10]
A
So. All right. And you know what? At this point, you've built enough of a reputation on YouTube. YouTube is sending you enough people. You've got the design and the aesthetic right. That you don't need every last video viewer on there. You now need to get them into your network. I'm assuming you're building your email list now a lot faster.
- [50:26]
B
Yep, yep, yep. All right.
- [50:29]
A
The website is the place that we're going to send people to. It's starterstory.com.
- [50:34]
B
Yep.
- [50:34]
A
All right, brother, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. And if you're listening to this and you have any ideas if, of who I should be talking to, interviews I should be doing, hit me up, let me know.
- [50:42]
B
Bye, everyone.