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- [00:00]
A
You probably already know that Airbnb can help you earn some extra cash when you're not using your home. Maybe you're traveling for work, you're taking an extended vacation, or you're just snowboarding someplace warmer. But here's where it gets interesting. You don't have to do all the work yourself. You can tap into Airbnb's co host network. This is a team of local pros who handle the nitty gritty so you can focus on what matters most. Think of it like outsourcing for your side hustle. These professional co hosts help with everything from creating a killer listing that stands out to guest communication and even on the ground support. You provide the space, they handle the details, and you get paid. Personally, I'm a fan of income streams that don't require constant oversight. When I'm traveling for work, I'm at a conference or a mastermind. Or if I'm on vacation, I'm trying to be present with my family. Here's a way to add an extra income stream without having to be glued to my phone the whole time. When you're ready to get started, see how much your space could be worth. And get connected with an awesome co host@airbnb.com host. $100,000 with AI coded apps. Hey, create something once, monetize it over and over again. That's a business model that I really like. And historically, software and apps. Definitely check that box. But it used to be you had to be pretty technical or pay someone technical if you wanted to build really any kind of software. Today, not as much. My guest has been using AI tools to help build a series of smallish web apps, usually to solve a very specific problem for a very specific customer. But he's making thousands of bucks a month doing it and having a lot of fun along the way. From doyouevenblog.com, pete McPherson. Welcome back to the Side Hustle show.
- [01:45]
B
Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Nick. It's a pleasure to be here. Talk about techy things. Hopefully we can get some good takeaways for people, some good actionable items, even if we do go a tiny bit into what sounds technical. So, yeah, let's give it a shot.
- [01:59]
A
Yeah. The promise of having AI do the work for you is an interesting one because software companies are some of the most profitable businesses in the world. It's like we could sell this same code to thousands, billions of different customers. And it has often seemed out of reach for individual creators. So what's changed in the Past few years. And what do you see as the opportunity for side hustlers here?
- [02:24]
B
The biggest thing that changed, okay, was obviously using ChatGPT or Claude or any of these newer LLMs AI models to do the parts I didn't know how to do. I knew how to do a few parts. I've been interested in this, I've been coding, I've been fairly techy forever. And then maybe about a year and a half ago, two years ago, I was finally able to cross the threshold and have AI do the heavy lifting. And the last part of your question there, more specifically, in the past like three months and six months, we've crossed another bridge. We're now at a place where you could basically just type in stuff you want. And believe it or not, like maybe 7 times out of 10, 8 times out of 10, these AI tools are getting better, they're getting faster, they're getting more aware of its outputs. And so the opportunity right now is, well, you said it already. This is, we know this, creating software products, creating stuff you can use, you can sell to your existing audience. Even I would argue entering in new markets with SaaS. Software as a service has never been easier and faster for everybody, for all of us non developers, even if you never touched a line of code.
- [03:38]
A
Yeah. So you've built a few of these. One is an affiliate link tracking tool called App Tracker. He built one called Topical Map, which helps come up with, you know, what am I going to talk about on my content creation business? FAB AI is the fully autonomous blog bot blog builder. What does it stand for?
- [03:58]
B
You're actually the only person besides myself who's ever gotten that correct. So way to go. Yeah, I sold that company a couple.
- [04:03]
A
Months ago, but okay, well I've been watching, you know, as each one of these has been built and presented and kind of like you do a good job of sharing the journey along the way, which I think is interesting. So maybe we start there with this idea generation. If I'm listening and saying like, well, this sounds cool, I'd like to start playing around with this and I probably would recommend that's where people start, is like, you're not going to build anything super beautiful right out of the gate, but you got to start tinkering with something, but you got to have an idea before you can start tinkering. Like how, where did these ideas come from? Or how do you recommend people kind of go through this? What should I even start to build?
- [04:44]
B
Sure. I would say it's a twist on an age old Strategy called scratch your own itch. I think people who have listened to your show probably heard those words before. Am I right?
- [04:54]
A
Sure.
- [04:54]
B
Yeah. So I think approaching how you work on your computer and a scratch your own itch, there's a scratch your own itch off your computer and there's a scratch your own itch when you're using scheduling software, when you're sending emails, when you are creating a YouTube, when you're editing a YouTube video, when you're interacting with the web in general, cultivating this mindset of scratch your own itch. And Nick, I think you absolutely nailed it. I think what I would recommend to anybody who's like, huh, this kind of sounds interesting. I might try that would be to pick one teeny tiny thing like you said, you're not going to build the next huge amazing 10 bajillion ARR software company probably. But you can build a little Chrome extension, for example. I play a game, I won't mention what it is, it's totally stupid. But I play a game that doesn't have any tracking whatsoever and some basic, like multiplication and division things that I've been doing on my phone, on a calculator. I was like, wait, I could, I could totally just build a Chrome extension. I'd never built a Chrome extension before. I have no idea how that works. But I went into my code editor, we could talk about tools later. Of course.
- [06:03]
A
Yeah.
- [06:03]
B
And prompted AI to I told a little bit what I want and so on and so forth and then boom, it's done, it's there. I'm not going to make any money off of it. But it was a tiny challenge, pain point, frustration I had. And again, I've cultivated this mindset of noticing when this happens. I had this small little problem and I built a teeny tiny little tool. It's like, I don't know how many lines of code it is because I actually haven't looked that much at the code. But it's really small and it works and I use it every day when I'm playing my silly little game.
- [06:34]
A
Interesting. Okay, so some just as you're going through your day to day and I'm just going to rattle off a couple, you know, pain points just from like this week. One is when you're pasting anything from Google Docs into WordPress, it brings in all of this junk HTML and you really inflates the size of the page unnecessarily. Like the formatting maybe looks a little bit janky with some of the font selections by Default. Same thing with Microsoft wor, or importing images from Google Docs. You know, getting those into your website as a, as a blog article. Personal pain point may not resonate with anybody else, but it's like, you know, so I built this little. I haven't figured out the image piece of it, but just like a little macro in Word where like, we'll strip all this stuff out.
- [07:20]
B
Yeah.
- [07:21]
A
So maybe there's something there. I don't know if that would be a WordPress plugin, if that would be a Chrome extension, but something like that. So that's one idea. Personal pain point number two is, you know how pretty much every airline now will let you rebook if the fleet, like, they don't have any change fees anymore. And so you can rebook if the price goes down. And it's like, but I'm not. It's kind of a pain to go and check and see. And I've set up some Google flight alerts. There's gotta be a way to either automate this or at least get a notification like, hey, your. Your flight went down, you might as well go and get your 50 in credit. And sometimes, you know, sometimes I get like the sale notifications, but it's like, there's gotta be a smarter way to do this.
- [08:04]
B
Yes. Would you like me to tackle those two just really quick?
- [08:06]
A
Yeah, let's do it.
- [08:07]
B
We'll start with the second one. There is a tool which I can't remember the name of, it is basically Zapier, which I'm sure most people are probably familiar with. You can set up automations and endpoints between various apps or whatnot. This is the exact same thing, except with the ability to just insert AI in between each of your automation steps, so to speak. And it would be perfect for solving the second problem you mentioned there.
- [08:35]
A
Okay.
- [08:35]
B
You could use plain language to kind of say, hey, I usually go to Google flights, or I usually check American Airlines, or I usually do this. Here's some of the URLs, here's my login information. Like, I need you to extract this and then automatically email me when this happens. And it takes a little while to set up, but you don't even have to touch code for this. This is a tool. It is paid. But I could share that with you later. Yeah, but that'd be the perfect thing.
- [09:01]
A
Okay, that's an interesting one in terms.
- [09:03]
B
Of like building your own thing. What was your first one again? I just forgot.
- [09:06]
A
The first one was just like the tedious formatting that the junk HTML that gets, you know, automatically inserted when you paste stuff in.
- [09:14]
B
Yes, absolutely. This gets into maybe a strategy I really wanted to talk about later. So I'm going to segue. This will be valuable I think for anybody who's looking to pick up coding, even if it's AI coding. Not saying you're going to become a developer, but I would say pick one specific focus, tech stack focus and then just stay with it. For example, Nick, maybe you're on a Mac OS device or Windows, you could learn how to build Mac apps. On the contrary, it's actually pretty similar to build iPhone apps. You could learn to build web apps. That's a lot different. It's a lot different. You're going to have to probably choose a new code language and again you don't have to learn development. But it's still going to be so much easier for anybody listening to this to just build five different Chrome extensions. Maybe that, maybe that's your thing. Maybe it's WordPress plugins is what you really want to dive into.
- [10:11]
A
Okay, well somebody. Oh, this is, no, this is actually really golden because they're is an opportunity, you know, in the Chrome extension space, in the Shopify extension space. We had, I heard of somebody doing like 10 grand a month with like a, a WIX extension or something like these kind of micro niche marketplaces that do something really, really specific. And because there's a built in ecosystem around that like it can be, I don't know and it goes into the, you know, search, you know, marketing on these different platforms and you know, is it a freemium model? Like what's your strategy? There's. But no, I love, I love this call to focus on one tiny little thing first versus trying to build something completely standalone and go out and try and sell it.
- [10:53]
B
Sure. There's a reason I bring this up by the way. Mine's web apps. That's what I do. I have JavaScript, I use Sveltekit, which you don't even have to know what that is. Doesn't matter. But the point is it builds web apps. Apps you access in your browser, you type in the URL to topical map, AI or whatever and it just pulls it up or calendly or whatever. I just do web apps. That's all I do. Yeah, except for my little silly game Chrome Extension. But part of the reason I bring that up is there are lots of different ways you could solve your pain point. You mentioned the formatting. Removing the formatting and getting Things ready for WordPress. You could build a Mac app for that. I know people that have. That's all they do. They just build Mac Ops. And if I were doing that, I would probably just do it where you copy a Google Doc you can build in a shortcut on your computer and it just automatically formats it, removes everything, blah, blah, and then copies it to your clipboard again after you hit the hotkey. And then just copy and paste into WordPress.
- [11:50]
A
Yeah.
- [11:50]
B
Or if you want to be the WordPress person, you build a WordPress plugin like you mentioned. Or if you're Pete, I would do it via web app because that's what I know. Now, having built a dozen of these different web apps, it would be super small. It would literally just be like maybe a text area where you just paste in everything. You click one button and maybe it automatically removes the formatting and then again automatically copies it to your clipboard and then you can go into WordPress. That's what I would do. Okay, I hope that's helpful for people. I really wanted to hint at. There's a ton of different ways you can approach these sorts of things, but maybe it'd be helpful if you think about some of the things you're interested in, like WordPress, like Chrome extensions, like web apps, like iPhone apps, that sort of stuff before you really go off the deep end here.
- [12:37]
A
All right, well, that's good. So this is idea generation method number one, Scratch your own itch. Anything else on this? You know, coming up with ideas phase.
- [12:45]
B
I have two that I like, and these are legal. I think they're ethical enough. But it's somewhat stealing. I have two examples. Number one would be to find one tiny feature in some tool maybe you're already using that has like a bunch of different features. One tiny feature. Steal one feature from one of your tools and I'll give you a good example of this. So back when I did more SEO blogging, I used Ahrefs A H R E F S hrefs. There's an SEO tool and they have a ton of different features. You can do keyword research, you can do this and that and this and that. All I really wanted, I canceled my subscription. But all I really missed was the Site Explorer tool. So that's an idea for a business right there. You don't have the $99 to pay a month for Ahrefs or however much it costs. Now you can pay $9 for my app. It's just the Site Explorer. I wouldn't market it as that because that would be straight up stealing. Ahrefs Stuff. But you could just build one tiny feature of some other app. Maybe it's an expensive app that you pay for. That's idea number one.
- [13:53]
A
Okay. This unbundling of things that maybe you're a user of or you know, are popular, but people don't need all of the things under the hood. You know, they're just trying to carve out a segment for people who really are only interested in this one feature.
- [14:10]
B
This is why Nick makes the big bucks, because that was a far better explanation than I gave. Unbundling. That's perfect. I love it. Last one is. Oh, here's the example that I. That came to my head. Calendly is a tool to use. You send a scheduling link and somebody clicks it and they can see your calendar and they pick out a time and so on and so forth there for a while. There weren't many alternatives to Calendly. There are now. But Appsumo, Noah Kagan's company, created tidycal, tidycal.com this was like a year or two ago. They didn't use AI. This is completely different. But it basically was taking an expensive tool. Yeah, that really doesn't need to be all that expensive, and then just building a cheap version. Theirs was like $30 lifetime or something. And I can think of this all the time. There's a ton of tools. I was going to throw this company under the bus. I won't. I won't mention this company. But it's a podcasting tool. I have my own podcast, Nick has podcast that produces podcast transcripts. And you can do some other marketing things like generate some titles and generate some show notes using AI and stuff like this. I did not want to pay however much it cost. I don't remember what it was. So I just built my own. It took like a week with like an hour to a day. It's technically live. You can't go buy it, so I'm not going to point people to it. But I just built my own where I just upload my audio. It gets the transcript using the same backend tools probably as this other company.
- [15:39]
A
Okay.
- [15:40]
B
And then I can click a button and it'll generate some title ideas and then some timestamps and some different stuff like that. So there are very few of those tools that are really, really cheap, really affordable. And that was the sort of thing where I was like, pretty sure I could build my own version of this for like, not a whole lot of money, not a whole lot of time and energy. And I did. And it worked.
- [16:03]
A
It was good Interesting. So you could look even at your own software tech stack, and what are the ones that you. The price point kind of grates on you a little bit. Like, there's gotta be. There's gotta be a better way to say, how could I build a cheaper version or even a simpler version that doesn't do all of the. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but, you know, maybe there's something there. So number one was scratch your own itch, figure out your own personal pain points and try and build something around that. Number two was unbundling of different software tools. Like, I just want to pull out this one feature that's the most important thing to me, or that's the one that I think maybe is most valuable or, you know, for whatever reason. And number three is to rebuild a cheaper version or compete on. This is kind of the AppSumo playbook. You see companies on there doing this all the time. Like, hey, we're an alternative to fill in the blank software.
- [16:54]
B
Right? Exactly. One huge thing I want to mention. This is like the thing that makes me the happiest in all of this. Building my own apps, learning how to code via AI. The thing I like the most about this is you have control. We don't have to put up with how this other software did this. We could build our own more with.
- [17:15]
A
Pete in just a moment, including validating your idea and marketing it to find your first paying customers right after this. Look, payday is awesome, but when you're the one running payroll, calculating taxes and deductions, staying compliant, it's not as simple as it was when you're just on the receiving end. That is, unless, of course, you have our sponsor, Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits tool built specifically for small businesses like yours. Gusto gets your team paid while automatically filing your payroll taxes. Plus, you can offer other benefits like 401k health insurance, workers comp. And it works for both W2 and 1099 workers. Gusto's gotten a lot of love from side Hustle show guests over the years, and some friends of mine have even mentioned using it to pay their own salary. On top of that, they've got great customer service, and certified HR experts are standing by to help. If you have any question, it's no wonder why more than 300,000 small businesses already trust Gusto to help run their payroll. And 99% of them say the value they get from Gusto is worth the price. Side Hustle show listeners get three months free when you go to Gusto.com Sidehustle again, that's Gusto.com Sidehustleen to try. Three months free.
- [18:24]
B
And I mentioned scratching your own niche. Well, there's more to it than that. Not only is that a good way to find ideas that, sure, you could market to other people, but first and foremost, you solve your own problems. And if you know how to leverage AI, if you know how to code for this stuff, you can make it how you want, which is. It sounds pretty obvious, but I think that's underrated. I think people don't think about that enough. I built my own podcasting tool, trained on my own podcasting data. The prompts I send to AI, I wrote like there was so much control and it gives me exactly what I want, exactly how I want it, and my exact formatting that I want it, like every time. I think that's really underrated.
- [19:07]
A
Yeah. Now if you're following these methods, especially the second and third one, there's some level of market validation. Hey, we know these companies have been around for a long time. People are used to paying for this functionality. Do you, does anything else go into your, you know, market validation or competitive analysis phase before you, you know, start prompting the code generators?
- [19:29]
B
Yes and no. No in one sense, because a lot of my own projects, again, just me personally, they are based on that. Scratch your own itch. So part of me doesn't care so much.
- [19:43]
A
Okay, yeah, I'm going to build this for myself and if anybody buys it, that's gravy. Okay.
- [19:47]
B
I use my podcasting. I called it POD Promo. Don't go sign up for it. But I just called it POD Promo. I'm probably never going to sell it just because I don't really want to focus on that. I still use it every week. But yes, on the other hand, I do think if you are going to approach this first and foremost as a money making venture, which I think most people should. Yeah, I do think you should validate these ideas and this might be skipping ahead a little bit, but my strategy for this is really obvious. It's really annoying to listen to on a podcast, but that is have an existing audience, build an audience that follows you from platform to platform, from project to project to from this idea to that idea, that sort of thing. This is, in my opinion, the one, the only marketing strategy that is pretty foolproof, right? Not based on anything happening with Twitter or X or Blue sky or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or email open rates or Apple or you get my, you get My picture. Right. So for me personally, that's the validation. I do have an existing email list that I've been cultivating for years and I generally send it to them within, within a couple of weeks of having the idea like, oh, I built this mvp.
- [21:03]
A
But it's not huge. It's not like, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers.
- [21:07]
B
No, no, no. I, I think I have, I don't mind sharing. I think I have like 5,500 people on my email list.
- [21:13]
A
Yeah. Which is not nothing, but it's, you know, I guess, you know, a micro influencer status. I've heard some people call like this range between a thousand and twenty thousand or so people. People paying attention to your work.
- [21:24]
B
Yeah, it's been that way since 2019. That's true. Yes.
- [21:28]
A
When you come up with these ideas, did you do like a pre sale thing? Well, how serious is anybody about this? Would they actually, you know, enter their PayPal? Would they actually swipe their credit card for this? Before I go through the trouble of building it or now it's like going to build it because it don't take that much time and then we'll see what the reaction is.
- [21:44]
B
So I do like to build something that people can access first. I think if people are going into online courses or membership sites or, or any of these more traditional digital product ideas. I do think validating the idea, getting people to a pre sale, getting people to pay you before you build it, totally valid because I think these are much bigger projects. I think for these software products, especially since we're staying small to begin with and that's what I do, I try and stay really small, really tight. One tiny feature, one tiny solution to a problem. I've built them first and usually that can take anywhere from two or three hours to maybe 20, 30 hours over a couple of weeks is like my, my longest one. But generally I can whip something up now in a couple of hours. It's not going to look very pretty, but I'll put it in front of my audience for a very small offer and sometimes not even my entire email list. I have a group of about 100 to 200 people that used to be paying members of my membership community. People I know that I could literally text on the phone like people that are close to me and I'll generally offer it to them first for a very small lifetime deal. Topical map AI. I think I sold for like $39 lifetime, period. Just. Is anyone going to pay for this at all? That's what I was going for right.
- [23:13]
A
And if there is some positive feedback and reaction in purchasers then I can, you know, invest the time to polishing it up, making it look pretty, all this other stuff.
- [23:22]
B
Totally. I sold one product called EasyCourse which was terrible by the way, in retrospect. And part of the reason I know it was terrible is because it got exactly two sales and it was, it was really cheap price point. It got exactly two sales and those two people both had major issues and they couldn't figure it out. And I was like this was, this was not it. That was really clear.
- [23:44]
A
This was going to be like a learning management system.
- [23:46]
B
It was basically like never ever paid for online course software again.
- [23:49]
A
And it works like a thinkific teachable.
- [23:52]
B
That kind of, okay, really dumbed down, simplified version. Yes. But yes, it's exactly that. And I was going to teach people how to build that themselves. They could actually, they had my template, they could just duplicate the template and they change the content and they have an online course that people could buy or that they could sign up for. It did not go over well at all. No one was interested and the two people that bought didn't have a good time. So that was a big fail. And there have been one or two other projects where it's again, dirt cheap price point. But It'll be like 25 sales, 50 sales, 100 sales, 200 sales. And that is when I like, okay, now I can double down, fill out this product, do a little bit more marketing maybe and that sort of stuff.
- [24:33]
A
Okay, no, I like that I want to dive deeper into different marketing strategies. But tell me about this two to 20 hour creation phase of, you know, from idea to having something that is viable and something somebody might even have the opportunity to pay for. What goes into that time?
- [24:50]
B
The very first app I built that went public and that people could actually sign up for took about six weeks and like 40 hours a week. It took a really long time. This was two years ago at this point and I wasn't really using AI a whole lot. I was going through a YouTube course that I found and like doing what this person did except change it for my app and doing what? Doing with this next lesson and change it for my app. And I got lost so many times, couldn't figure out or whatnot the next app, which was maybe six months later, it's about a year and a half ago. Ish is a little bit more AI friendly. Like I kind of had that experience under my belt and I swear Nick, it took like less than a week, maybe 15 hours total. This was me sitting down at my computer and like whipping up some code and then going back and forth with ChatGPT and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And then we get an app.
- [25:49]
A
What would be like a starting prompt. And this is in ChatGPT versus some other software specific tool.
- [25:55]
B
The past three to six months have shown us an explosion in AI code editors. They call these IDEs. I don't even know what that stands for, to be honest with you. But VS Code has been around for decades and it's a software on your computer, Windows or Mac, doesn't matter. You open it up and this is where you actually write your code. But now it has AI in there and there are two or three other tools I can throw out later if you'd like me to. I use one called Cursor and Cursor. I would literally fire it up. And let's say you wanted to make a WordPress plugin for your, your Google Doc formatting issue. You could literally just fire it up. No folders open, no files open, just like a blank screen you're basically staring at. And you could tell it, please create me a WordPress plugin where I can copy and paste in text from a Google Doc, and so on and so on and so on and so on. You just tell it that and it's going to whip something up. It'll do it on its own. Now you'll sit there and watch it. It'll create this file, it'll implement it, it'll create another file, it'll analyze this other file, it'll create this, it'll analyze that. It'll. And I would say like 90 seconds later, you're probably going to have something pretty close to functional. There's always going to be troubleshooting and errors for sure. But at this day and age, you can try one of these tools. You can prompt it like you were telling, like you were talking to another developer. If you had no idea how to code, you would just say, I want an app that does this and ties into my Google Calendar and then emails me this and then does this and then does this and it's going to do. Sounds overly simple, but that's where we're at these days.
- [27:38]
A
That's pretty crazy. Okay. And then you go into like the testing phase after that. Or like it really can't be that easy. It's like just telling it. I, you know, in, in plain English, this is what I want to build. Like there's gotta be, I need login information I need API access, I need, you know, there's gotta be other things or is there not?
- [28:00]
B
Yes and no. You might actually be surprised how much is not needed these days. But that said, it can be, it can save you a lot of headache down the road if you kind of prompt an AI for the big picture first. So I have like, I have my notes open here. I have like a, a seven step kind of process to this entire thing. We've already gone over a couple of these. Number one, have an idea. Yeah, in some way. I think the second big step is asking AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Google, doesn't matter, asking for the big picture. Say I want to create a WordPress plugin that does this and does this and does this. What are the big steps to implementation and what tools should I use? And AI is going to give you a lot of things you can kind of choose from. And you're like, oh, Firebase, that's free, it's made by Google. Okay, I can use Firebase for my backend, my database. I'm not a backend developer at all, but I know I need to store information somewhere in a spreadsheet or database or something. So I use Firebase. And I found it, found it from AI that was like, oh, you could use Firebase for this because it's free, it has a database, it has authentication where people can log in to your app and creates a cookie and this sort of stuff. Again, I don't even know how all of these things work, but start with the big picture. Start by kind of choosing some tools. Even if you don't know what tools you need yet, no one does. Right? Ask AI, ask the big picture. Okay, and then the next two steps we kind of mentioned already, the next one would be to actually go into one of your code editors or whatever and then start, prompt it to build something, create this page, create this app, create this plugin, whatever. And then there's only really two more steps here. Number one, try it, fire it up, figure out how to do that. It's generally not that hard because of how advanced AI is these days. And if you can't figure something out, why don't you just ask it again? Like, how do I open this in my browser? That was one of the first things I googled. Like, oh, I have code on my computer, how do I test this? How do I see it in my browser? And AI is like, oh yeah, click this link. It's localhost. Colon 5, 7, 3. I don't know what it was yeah.
- [30:17]
A
Okay.
- [30:17]
B
Okay, Right. And then test it out and then fix errors and that's it. It's that over and over and over again. Test it out, Something's not gonna work and they're gonna be like, AI, this did not work. Why? And then hopefully it's gonna give you some ideas, it's gonna change things for you at this point. It didn't used to be that way a year ago, but implement something, test it, ask AI to fix it. That sounds overly simple, but that's like my entire workflow these days. Get AI to build something, test it out.
- [30:49]
A
Yeah, that's interesting because my first thought was then you got to go to upwork to find somebody. But it's like, no, just ask, hey, how come this didn't work? I mean, what are the implications of like, you know, these $300,000 a year software developers salaries? And I don't know, it's cool, like from a side hustle, you know, builder creator perspective, but it's terrifying from a, well, job security, if that's your, your role in the world.
- [31:16]
B
Sure. I don't know. And nobody knows for the, for the most part. But I think maybe a more relevant question for me personally, not to hijack your question there, Nick.
- [31:28]
A
Yeah.
- [31:29]
B
But if this was such a golden opportunity now and everybody can do it, can't everybody do it? Can't Nick go home and spit out like five apps tonight over the course of like an hour just because of these AI technology advances? Yes, absolutely. And I think we have a very limited window.
- [31:49]
A
Yeah.
- [31:50]
B
And I'm not selling anything, so you know, I'm telling the truth here. There's a very limited window to do this, to use AI to build apps for money. Before this is just not a thing anymore. Before now you just tell Siri on, I'm talking about now, a year from now, you might just tell Siri, hey, could you build me an app and go ahead and install it to my WordPress site@duivenblog.com and go ahead and test it three or four times to make sure it's functional. Oh, and by the way, can you whip up a sales email to my list and go ahead and schedule that for tomorrow? Like that's where we're going. And so I think the next 12 months, 18 months, is where we as humans can build these software products and hopefully capitalize on it at least a little bit before that happens. And yeah, the developer jobs, I don't know, but it's looking grim.
- [32:41]
A
Okay, that's interesting. I mean, that's like, you know, this whole neighborhood is a lot of Microsoft, a lot of Amazon, a lot of tech jobs in the Seattle suburbs, where I'm at. So it's interesting, for sure. Okay, so we've kind of described what we want in AI now. It's kind of this back and forth troubleshooting process and testing process. You know, like any project, this QA phase. And this was my biggest pain point working with any software development project. You know, I'd send them over my spec and they would, you know, even if it was just updates to an existing project, this is like for the shoe business I used to have. And it'd be like, hey, we did all the things that you asked for and you sent it. And like the very first thing would be like broke and be like, did you test this at all? It was like the most frustrating thing. Like, they're so eager to like ship it, get it off their desk. It's like, where was the QA phase in any of this? I don't know. Okay, but that's the next thing. And then we go into the marketing part. I don't know. It was your list. What was toward the end of this? Seven steps.
- [33:45]
B
That's basically it. I'll tell you one more very quick lesson because I think this is incredibly important for anybody who touches code or apps or anything. Things will go wrong and you don't need to know the answer. So about two years ago, I hired some person on Reddit in the svelte community. I didn't know a thing. I didn't know what I was doing. I was like, can I just like hire you for a 30 minute Zoom call to look at some of my code here and like, figure this out? And this person was a complete professional. He's one of these, like $300,000 a year, like tech bros. He was super kind. And we got on the call, I hired this guy, he came in here and he took a look at the problem and he's like, yeah, I have no idea. And my first thought was like, okay, awesome, sweet, thanks.
- [34:34]
A
What am I paying you for?
- [34:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. But two and a half seconds later, he said, all right, let's figure it out. And he said it in this, this jolly tone, like, oh, I have no idea what the problem is. I have no idea how to fix this. Oh, let's figure it out. And so he literally, I sat there and watched his screen as he opened Google and like copied and pasted my code. And then like went to some result and read something in like two and A half minutes. He's like, oh, let's just copy and paste this and put it in your code and see if it works. And it did. And I was like, oh, okay, this is what that job looks like. Problem solving. And it's the same thing.
- [35:11]
A
And that's entrepreneurship in a nutshell. You may remember Brian Harris had this video years and years ago.
- [35:17]
B
Just figure it out.
- [35:18]
A
Just figure it out. Right? You're always going to hit that next ceiling and that next problem, that next hurdle obstacle. What are we going to do? Let's figure it out. That's your job. So, no, I'll highlight that point for sure.
- [35:29]
B
Totally. And I still get stuck in this. Every now and then I will reach something that is not working. And I'm frustrated and I'm frustrated. And maybe I do one or two Google searches, but I'm frustrated. And eventually my. My mind comes back around to, oh, my gosh, I just need to ask somebody. And by somebody, I mean AI these days. And so I do. And without fail, I'm generally like five minutes away from the solution. So again, just to reiterate here, I like to have an idea check. I like to prompt AI for the big picture implementation. That's my exact words. What's the big picture implementation to building this? Or what are some different tools I should use for this? Okay, and if we have time, Nick, I want to talk about back end as a service, which is brilliant. It's the brilliant. We'll talk about that later if we have time. But big picture. And then ask AI. Okay, what's the first step? If you're using ChatGPT, you might ask it. What's the very first step? What do I need to code first? What do I do with this? Where do I put this on my computer? Do I create a folder? Do I? What do I do with this? Or if you're using a code editor like Cursor, like vs, code, like Windsurf, replit, all these other ones, then you can pretty much just start. You could say, create me a plugin that does X, Y and Z. Fire it up, Test it. However you test it depends on what you're building. If you don't know how to test it, ask AI how do I see if this is working or not? Try it. Try to use it. For me, that was uploading a podcast episode and trying to get a transcription. Didn't work for a long time. And then ask AI to fix it. Ask AI to troubleshoot. Find what's happening here. And if AI doesn't work you can go to Google. That takes a little bit longer these days. And then do it again, and then do it again. And that's it, that's the whole process.
- [37:26]
A
More with Pete in just a moment, including the marketing and monetization of these AI coded apps and how he sold one of his creations for $45,000. Right after this, let's talk about the marketing and monetization piece and then circle back to this backend as a service. So obviously it is helpful if you have your own existing legion of followers, your 5,500 email subscribers. Great. If you don't have that, hey, start building in public, you know, start doing the social media. Like start building that up. Obviously a good practice. What happens once you've tapped out that audience? It doesn't get you necessarily super far, doesn't necessarily get your recurring revenue. If you're doing it as, you know, as a one time beta, lifetime deal, super discounted. What else have you seen work? On the marketing side, there are two.
- [38:15]
B
Big categories, one of which I hate and I've had no success with, but I'm going to tell it to you anyways. And the other which I've had a lot of success with and I love it and it's what I want to do going forward. So the first category would be all the traditional advice that you could literally Google right now. And I'll just list off some product hunt. Launch your product on product hunt. You could do that. It's actually not hard.
- [38:41]
A
Yeah, this is huge in like the indie maker community.
- [38:44]
B
It is, but it's super hard because every single day of the week, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of companies are doing this, some of which already have an existing audience of a million people that are going to go and upvote their thing or whatever.
- [38:59]
A
Right?
- [38:59]
B
Yeah, there's a lot of these types of ideas. Oh, launch to this. Oh, go on. It used to be like hacker news. Hacker news, hacker news. What is that website? Doesn't matter. Oh, go to this forum and post it here. And then, oh, post it here and launch it here. I tried that for a couple of different projects. Now three projects I've tried to go that route and it has not worked at all for me personally. Some people swear by it. You can Google these sort of things, how to launch an app, how to market your app or whatever, and those things are going to pop up. Yeah, I'm going to the second category. The second category, partnerships. I've done various partnerships over, over the decades of entrepreneurship and I think this idea of building your own apps is by far the easiest. It's the easiest pitch in the world. And I'll tell you how I got into this. So I tried to sell one of my apps almost a year ago, like nine months ago. And I was just trying to offload it very cheap. I told somebody, like, $15,000. That's it. Period. I was already making a little bit of money. Fifteen grand, it's yours. And I found a buyer. I met with this person on Zoom, and they were like, I'm happy to pay you $15,000. Or. Or we can come in as 5050 partners. We will now be partners in this business. We'll split all the profits or whatever. I know this guy over here who has an audience of, like, a bajillion people, and he wants to market the app. And I was, like, doing the math in my head. Like, even if this barely pans out, this is like a win win for me, or this is a zero lose for me. There's no downside. And so I told the guy, yeah, sure, I brought him on at 5050 partners. He did promote it. It did grow. It made great money. And my mind was just blown. I was like, I've already done the work. I've already built this app for the most part. I actually did a little bit more work on it, but I didn't have to do any marketing. They were, like, sending it to their email list, and they produced a couple of YouTube videos. They created the social channels. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. And I am. So I'm building a new project as of last week with a new partner who's been on your show, a mutual friend of ours. I won't name them because the app's not live yet. And it was the same sort of pitch. And in fact, I reached out before I even built it. I knew this person already, by the way. So this wasn't like a completely cold email. I reached out to this person and I said, hey, I can build apps now because I'm fancy and I use AI. I have this idea right here which would be perfect for your audience. So here's the deal. We'll split this 50 50. I'll do all the work. I'll build the app. I'll handle customer support. I'll create the documentation. It's the things I was going to do anyways. All you got to do is promote the app however you want.
- [41:46]
A
Okay?
- [41:47]
B
Mention it to your email list. It's in the email marketing space, so it's email Related. And she was like, yeah, okay, this is the easiest pitch in the world. So partnerships, finding people who have the audience that you need. If you don't have your 5,000 people already who are following Nick from project to project, I think going and finding these people, which is easier said than done. I realize this. Especially if you don't have a very strong network yet. I get that. But I still think there's, it's such.
- [42:15]
A
A good pitch and you and your preference is to do it as almost like you said, a 50, 50 equity split partnership rather than trying to go out and find a hundred different affiliate partners. I'll give you 30% to try and promote this thing.
- [42:29]
B
Oh, gosh. Yeah. Affiliates, affiliates are the worst. Yeah, No, I like this. It's just incentives, right. People have that much more incentive to grow, to mention it, to promote it, to market it, to do all that stuff when they are literally invested. It's not just like a one off commission, it's not even a recurring commission. Part of my pitch, by the way, is we're going to run this for a year and then we're going to sell it. Because selling apps is like really hot right now. That's part of the pitch. And you get half of that, you get 50% of that. So yeah, I think it's a lot easier than affiliates for sure.
- [43:02]
A
Okay. On the pricing side, you find like this one off purchase, like, you know, lifetime access for this one price or do you do a more traditional SaaS model or do the partners, you know, want, you know, one pricing model versus the other? Like what do you, what do you see? It's like, you know, give me some examples of price points on these different tools that you're building.
- [43:20]
B
If you plan on selling your app, period, even if it's a very small chance of selling your app, I think you should go a very traditional route. Monthly payment, annual payment, subscription based business. For sure, 100% because I don't think many people are interested in buying it otherwise. That's just the truth. That said, this is part of the glory of entrepreneurship. You do however you want. I think there is a space, especially in the Mac app world. I have this tool on my computer right now called Clop C L O P. It's just like a, whenever an image hits my downloads folder, it just automatically compresses it and like resizes it for me and then just drag it. That's great. Anyways, no affiliation with these people. And it was like $30 lifetime. Just a one time thing.
- [44:09]
A
One time. Okay. Yeah.
- [44:10]
B
Right. I don't think they're ever planning on selling any of their apps. This is like a, a developer duo. They have like, I don't know, 5, 10, 20 different Mac apps. They're never going to sell. This is like their passion thing. They don't even need customer support for the most part. Like it's not an ongoing thing that they're constantly releasing features for. It's kind of a different thing, a different vibe. I don't know how else to say it, Nick, but I do think if you are going to sell, yeah, I think it needs to be traditional subscription, monthly payments, that sort of thing.
- [44:41]
A
Okay, so that's what I'm hearing is the, you know, the appsumo model of like the low lifetime access. I think great for validation, great for proving proof of concept, but you know, not so good. Well now I got to support this thing for the lifetime that I promised and I, you know it's going to be much harder to sell. Like well, it made $10,000 in sales. Well, yeah, but what has it done for me lately? You know, how do you got to keep going back to that? Well, versus the recurring model here? Obviously much more attractive to a buyer coming in. Now, did you have a non partner exit any marketplaces that you like to put this stuff up for sale? Is there a rule of thumb on multiples? What's going on there?
- [45:20]
B
I will give credit where credit is due and give a shout out to acquire dot com. This is the company I use to sell my most recent app. And I was again, I'm not affiliated with these people in any way but I was blown away.
- [45:35]
A
Is this like a brokerage?
- [45:36]
B
They are a brokerage, correct? Yes.
- [45:38]
A
Okay.
- [45:39]
B
I was blown away by how easy it was. They met on a Zoom call. They walked me through everything. In fact we had like two or three calls just to like stay in close contact as like buyers were contacted and they, they actually emailed the listing out to their list and it was, it was great. It was absolutely fantastic. And there's a couple of these brokerages, I guess Empire Flippers is another one. I actually have a listing that's about to go live there. Acquire.com and there's one or two other ones. Flippa. They, they do software products as well. There's a couple of these. I recommend going that route. Yes. You will pay the 8%, 10%, maybe even 15%. I think in closing fees. The brokerage fee. Totally worth it. Totally worth it. They make sure all the legal stuff is happening, dotting the. I's crossing the T's, that sort of thing. Yeah, use the brokerage.
- [46:34]
A
Which one did you sell? Like, if you're comfortable sharing the price point or the multiples or the math behind that.
- [46:39]
B
Oh, I don't mind. I'm super happy with this. So Fab Fabb AI fully autonomous blog bot as you nailed earlier in the episode. I did not work on this app for nine months straight. I hadn't touched it and I had it on my to do list to work on it. And I, I got to that day on my to do list and I'm like, today is Fab AI day. I gotta work on this thing. I opened it up on my computer and I had this sinking feeling in my gut like, I don't want to do this. You know what, maybe I could just sell it and. No joke, Nick. Like 24 hours later, I was on a Zoom call with the acquire.com people. I had to get like financials and order. It was literally just Google sheets. Google sheets financials with income and expenses and I use Stripe for billing and payments. So I just kind of connected my stripe account and I kind of wrote like a little blurb. I wrote how I grew the app, which wasn't very much at all.
- [47:39]
A
Didn't have recurring revenue at that time.
- [47:40]
B
Very little. Less than a thousand dollars a month at that point.
- [47:43]
A
Okay.
- [47:44]
B
And so yeah, I use their built in valuation tool. You know, they give you like a huge range. Oh, your app could be worth $10,000 or like $130,000. Well, mine, I literally just slid the little slider, the, the valuation price point slider on my screen all the way down. I slid it all the way down. I was like, I just want to get rid of this. And it was like $45,000 or something. And I was like, done. Fine, that's great. If I. $45,000, I'll take.
- [48:14]
A
Wow. Yeah.
- [48:15]
B
Again, like, I launched the app and I had like a hundred subscribers, paying subscribers. But then I didn't work on it for like nine months and people dropped off and it was, it was crazy, right? I have no idea what the multiple was. I know that between 30x 30x monthly net revenue monthly, you can literally Google this. Like SaaS, multiple sales or whatever. Yeah, 30 to 35 is generally like a pretty normal range. I think 30x to 35x. Mine was a little bit more than that just because I think it was fairly cheap. It was. I'm not selling it for like one and a half million dollars. Right. It was $45,000 and that's it listed it, I think a week and a half later it was live. I had an onslaught of like the initial people showing interest and then maybe like three or four people a couple of days later that were having a conversation. And then one person who was like literally sent over the, oh, I forgot what it's called, the purchase agreement, like intent or whatever to buy it cash closing. And I was like, sold. That was easy. This is great.
- [49:21]
A
A couple important things to note here. One is like, when's the time to pull the plug on your side hustle? When it's, you know, when you have postponed working on it for nine months and when you do finally get to it, you like within 10 minutes you're like, this is awful. Why am I doing this? Like when you come to dread the work, that's a good sign that I don't need this in my life. But it's an asset, right? Instead of just shutting it down and sunsetting it into the, you know, abyss of the Internet. Hey, this might be worth something to somebody else. It might be worth $45,000 to somebody else. I think that's a really interesting one where in the case of building tools like this, okay, I can build near term cash flow if I sell it either as a one time thing or I sell it as a subscription. But I'm also building equity in every incremental, you know, $500 that I'm adding to the bottom line every month. Every thousand dollars that I'm adding in recurring revenue that's worth 30 to 35x as an exit valuation. It's like really, really interesting this cash flow plus equity component there, you know.
- [50:22]
B
One other benefit to this, this whole building apps thing, the expenses are essentially zero. Essentially zero. A few of my apps do use AI themselves. Fabda AI was using AI to create blog posts. So yeah, there were API costs from OpenAI from Anthropic who makes the Claude AI models. But other than that, like actually hosting the app and having it live on the Internet is in most cases free for all my other projects.
- [50:56]
A
Like yeah, if you already have hosting or something. Yeah.
- [51:00]
B
Or no, no, not even have hosting. I mean you can host it for free. You can go to Vercel right now and you can deploy host your app with SSL certificates and everything for $0 every single month. Like it's just there. And the backend I use is $0 from Google. It's made by Google and stripe, you pay stripe fees when somebody buys your app. But again, it's free to Sign up. My expenses for these things are nothing. So even if they only make, like you said, a hundred bucks a month, 200, 500 bucks a month.
- [51:33]
A
Yeah. It's incremental. Yeah.
- [51:34]
B
The expenses are nothing.
- [51:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. The margins are out of control. Yeah. Okay. So finding this, we'll call them like the audience partner or the marketing partner. And this is one of the side hustle trends that have been going on for a long time. Like you have the, you know, the founder and then you have like, well, how are we going to market this thing? Like we need that influencer component. Like somebody who already talks to the people that we want to talk to. That would be a great. A good fit for the tool. So that's one component you tease this back end as a service thing. So I'll tee that up for you.
- [52:05]
B
Sure. I had the most trouble when I first started out figuring out the backend. A database hosted on a server somewhere. What it even is a server. A server is just a computer. It took me a while to figure that out, but literally just a computer that has a database where I store my user data, their email address, their name, anything related to my app, like the transcription for a podcast or whatever it is. That was so hard for me when I first did this. It took forever. I just could not wrap my head around this. Oh, how does my app like talk to a database and back and forth. Like, my mind was just blown. So backend as a service is relatively new and it's basically software products itself that you can go use for no money. By the way, the kind of does most of that heavy lifting for you and you kind of plug it into your app with a few lines of code that you can just kind of copy and paste in and. But once you do, you can run a backend database authentication. Like for my apps, people can use the sign in with Google button. Like they click the button and then the Google thing pops up and they sign in with Google.
- [53:23]
A
Oh, okay.
- [53:24]
B
I didn't code any of that.
- [53:25]
A
Yeah, yeah. I don't want to create a new password or anything. Okay. Yeah. So this is like the off the shelf tools or templates. Like you kind of plug it. I don't have to start completely from scratch. Some of this functionality already exists and apparently it's open source or it's available for people to borrow.
- [53:43]
B
Again, this is why Nick makes the big bucks, because off the shelf is the perfect way to think about this. It is. No one cares about messing with databases. I do not care about. I don't get that. My brain doesn't get that this is off the shelf solutions for databases, authentication and other stuff like that. But those are, those are the two big things. So I'll just point out. I use Google's Firebase. It's literally the name of the app. You can go Google it and it's completely free. It's silly, easy to like set up. In fact, you can really just ask AI to do it these days and it'll tell you like, oh, first you need to go create a Google account and then do this, so on and so forth. But once you do that, ChatGPT knows how to use Firebase, they know how to use Supabase, they know how to use these backend as a service things. And if you ever have to manage it yourself, it's as simple as going to their website, Firebase or Supabase, and kind of like point and click searching for things. It's the off the shelf thing because you don't want to touch SQL, you don't want to be doing queries for databases because that's just, oh, that's way beyond the scope of anything I know how to do. So yes, backend as a service, you're going to have to pick one. That's what I'm saying. So Google what that is, ask ChatGPT, get signed up, they're completely free to start with and go from there.
- [55:02]
A
All right, this sounds like a project for after putting the kids to bed. Let me dig around on the Internet, which has always been and fun. My coding knowledge is super, super limited. Like I can read some HTML and insert hyperlinks and stuff like that, but otherwise it's super, super basic enough to figure out, you know, every time I hit refresh on after updating code and it doesn't break. Like, yes, okay, I'm a programming genius. This is amazing. But this is, this is really cool. I remember going Back to like HyperCard. Did you ever do HyperCard? It's this like middle school era programming, you know, shout out to like the two people in the audience who will get that reference if they're old enough to. But it was this, you know, going back to this practice of figuring it out where the, the teacher would kind of, you know, write a very simple instruction or prompt at and at the beginning of the class, the beginning of the quarter, super frustrating. Like, dude, you didn't tell us how to do any of, how are we supposed to do the thing? And he's just, he kind of like, it was super frustrating. He's like Give me the instructions. I will thought that was like the kind of student, like, I will, I will knock this out of the park for you. But it was so open ended and it took a few weeks into the class to be like, there's a method to your madness here. And it ended up being one of the most fun and rewarding classes here. And I can kind of see this being similar, like creating something to solve a problem of your own, to like, you know, put something out into the world. I think it's really unique. But anything surprised you over the last couple years in building these things and trying to market and sell them, the.
- [56:40]
B
Most surprising thing is that I actually did it. I didn't go to school for this. I've never went to a coding boot camp, so on and so forth. Right. I'm not a trained developer, but at some point, like I literally coded something and built it and got paying customers and then sold the company. And not for a million bajillion dollars.
- [57:01]
A
Yeah, isn't that crazy?
- [57:02]
B
But yes, it is crazy. I've just blown away by not just me, but the fact that we can all do stuff like this now. Again, we have AI to thank for the large part. But for anybody listening to this, we can all build apps now. Software, it's just wild. And every single week that goes by, it gets easier, which is continuing to be surprising.
- [57:26]
A
So have you got a checklist of future projects that you want to build? What's next? Where are you going with this?
- [57:33]
B
Yeah, you want the ideas? I will literally just throw them to the ether and then somebody can steal them. Number one, an app that will text me when halftime is over. For my college football games, I want to be, I want to be able to input next team. The Washington Huskies. Go Dogs. But also the Georgia Bulldogs. Go Dogs. I want to input my team and I want to get a text message when halftime is over and the game is starting back so I can walk back in the other room and get in front of my TV. There's an app right there that I would pay $10 a year for.
- [58:01]
A
Love it. I mean, it's like Red zone, Right? So it's similar.
- [58:04]
B
Oh, I don't know. I don't know what Red Zone is. Maybe you could share this with me.
- [58:07]
A
Well, this is like NFL red zone. Or like we'll send you an alert when your team is inside the 20. Didn't something like that exist?
- [58:15]
B
I don't know. It's a great question. Either way, I'd pay for it. Here's another one. That I think I might actually do as my next project, unless somebody else does it better. And that is an AI mastermind group. I want to be able to log in to something that looks like a chat window or heck, I might even do voices, since the AIs have voices now. Audio. And I literally just want to interact with it as my mastermind group. In fact, I want to go more specific. I want to be able to define the exact people that are in my mastermind group, give them names, give them character traits and life experiences and pros and cons and strengths and weaknesses. Each person except for their AI. And I want to chat with them. So almost like an AI therapist, but an AI mastermind group. That's another idea.
- [59:05]
A
Yeah. And this is something I've been exploring. Like, you could easily prompt it to be like, respond as if you were Tony Robbins. Respond as if you're Pat Flynn or Warren Buffett or Aristotle or, you know, and it's. I mean, this is kind of taking it to the next level. I'm picturing there like talking heads, you know, hey, gen generated on. On a screen here.
- [59:26]
B
Totally. I'll. I'll give you another one that somebody else should do that I don't want to do. And that is affiliate tracking software, but dirt cheap. So there are a lot of tools out there, like rewardful and. Oh, what's the other one? Link mink. There's another one. These are affiliate referral softwares where you sign up, you pay $49 a month, give you this code, like a job, a line of JavaScript or something that you install into your site. Maybe it's WordPress, maybe it's a software product like ConvertKit or something like that. I don't know. And then they handle your affiliate marketing, right? They give you affiliate links, they give you a page where your affiliates can sign up, so on and so forth. All of these are way overpriced. And the market is itching for people like me, who are indie developers, to pay $9 a month and just have a dirt simple affiliate tracking thing. I don't know why these are so expensive. And somebody needs to create this. This is like the AppSumo tidy cow versus calendly. Somebody should build this right now and sell it to me and I'll pay for it. There you go. And it can't be that hard. I haven't dove in yet, but it can't be that hard.
- [60:38]
A
All right, these are great. Well, you can email Pete, peteevenblog. Once you got this developed. Do you even blog.com is where you can check them out. Thanks so much for schooling me on this stuff. I think I'm inspired to start playing around with it or allocate, you know, a portion of the week to just learn new things, start dinging around with stuff and see what comes of it. I think it's really exciting what you built and looking forward to seeing the future projects in the pipeline, what comes down the road. But let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.
- [61:12]
B
Quit quicker. I think maybe I've heard this on your podcast before, so this is going to be a little bit of a cop out, but my one tip is to drop your projects faster, drop your ideas faster, and move on to the next thing. I do think there is a possibility that you will, quote, unquote, lack a certain focus here. I do think there's a possibility that you might miss out on some opportunity if you had tripled down on a project instead of quitting. But on the long run, I actually think it's better advice to quit faster and move on to the next thing. That's my side hustle and entrepreneurship mantra right now.
- [61:57]
A
Well, I gave my criteria for when it was time to throw in the towel. When you come to dread the work, what's your quit criteria?
- [62:04]
B
That's a huge one right there. I mean, that's it. That looks like a lot of different things for me personally, but I do feel that now I don't want to work on this project anymore. That's the number one sign. Figure out a way to probably not shut it down completely. I'm with you. All of these things can be assets. I mean, I didn't touch my app for nine months and then I sold it. Either just give yourself grace for not working on it and just put it down. If it's not costing you any money, list it for sale. Figure out something else to do with it when that work becomes tedious. I'm with you.
- [62:36]
A
All right, well, this is fair. And this is the reason why we ask this question. Because half the time or oftentimes, well, the answer is persistence. If you just stick with it through the hard times, eventually you get to the pot of gold at the other side. It's like, well, how long do you really keep digging before it just never comes? So there's no shame in quitting. Same thing like if you're going to leave your job, you know, to start a business, I would love to see you start the business before quitting your job. Like you have lower the height of that cliff that you're jumping off if you're quitting to something rather than from something. You know a whole lot of psychology around that, but you don't. You don't need to hang on to something that's making your life worse. So quit quicker is the number one tip from Pete in this one. This has been awesome. I love the calls to action of like, well, if you don't know how to do it, ask the AI to troubleshoot it. I love the call to start small. I love the call to find a marketing partner and share the upside with them. Really, really interesting episode again, one that's inspired me, hopefully to go try and build something on my own. But big thanks to Pete for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up side hustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message to somebody who's always coming up with different business ideas. Hey, have you ever thought doing a software project? This episode is for you. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle Show. Hustle on.