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Travis Makes Money
INTERVIEW | Make Money by Vibe Coding and Launching Faster Than Ever with Anne Cocquyt
00:28:45
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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet. Just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. Today on the show I'm talking to a new friend of mine, Ann Coquette. Ann is a Silicon Valley operator, educator and best selling startup author who helps founders turn ideas into real businesses and real revenue faster. She's the founder and CEO of the Guild and the Guild Studio where she has helped hundreds of founders build products, raise capital and scale in the US market. She's an award winning instructor at UC Berkeley's entrepreneurship program, a former startup founder herself, and a trusted advisor to accelerators and innovation hubs across both Europe and the U.S. she's also now teaching founders how to vibe code their own MVPs so they can get, they can take a product to market 20 times faster than traditional dev teams would be able to do that. So this is going to be an interesting conversation and I've been wanting to talk to somebody about this for quite some time. So Anne, what is up? Welcome to the show.
- [01:06]
B
Hey Travis, thanks so much for having me. And that's quite the mouthful you said there.
- [01:11]
A
I know, I had to cut it down. That's how many good things you've done. We didn't talk about the bestselling book Dare to launch. We didn't talk about Dare to Invest. First time guide for angel investors. There's too many things that you've done. And so I had to, I had to shrink it down, you know what I mean? I'd spend 20 minutes just intro you.
- [01:25]
B
I think it means I'm very distracted and excited about new things.
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A
The curse of the entrepreneur right there. Yeah, tell me, tell me. Let's go back in time a little bit here. Tell me how you first made a dollar that excited you. Like not, not just first dollar you ever made. The first one where you were like, ooh, somebody paid me for this. Okay, I wonder what that looks like.
- [01:47]
B
Well, you know, the very first dollar that excited me was at a school event where we started a cafe. It was actually a really cool project. Our school had this project where we were school as a country and every, everyone in the entire school was able to do anything from creating a radio station at the time to starting a business. And so we started a cafe and we sold so much. We had ice cream and we had crepes and we had all this good stuff. And of course all the other parents and teachers and students bought that. And we had so much money. And it was literally the first time where I was like, oh my God, I don't even know what to do with all this money. And I think it gave me the spark for entrepreneurship much later on, on. But then I think, you know, just much more recently when I had my first client come to me and it was a female entrepreneur and she was saying, look, we need to build this, this amazing product. And I have a lot of these conversations. It was literally last year in April. And she said, but you know, we need $500,000 for that CTO and that CO founder and to get it built. And I told her, no, you don't. You just vibe code this. You use all the new, new tools that are out there. And she was like, no, no, no, I can't do that, I don'. And I'm like, no, do not spend half a million dollars and go raise and do all this stuff. That's crazy in this day and age. And this was only five months into the real vibe coding hype. And then she said, oh, could you do this for us? And I'm like, no, I'm a startup advisor. I do all these other things you talked about. And then I started thinking and I'm like, maybe I should. And that was when I sent her a proposal and she bid and we started working together and it's been an amazing partnership since. And I became a fractional CTO for her. And with AI, the amount of iterations we could do in this product and the amount of beautiful product we were able to build within such a short amount of time without spending all this money was incredible. And she paid me well. Right? Don't get me wrong, like I'm getting paid well, but I'm translating the 20x productivity into revenue and into value for the founders. And I think this is where the entire world of early stage startups is starting to spin and is on its head because literally the seed round is being torched. I always give people this scene of the dragon coming into Game of Thrones and bringing down the wall. This is literally what's going on with code, right? Code is no longer a moat and the little dragon is the vibe coder. Either you use it for yourself, you become a vibe coder, or you hire people like me. And I really found a niche and I think for the first time my entire 20 year career I feel like, wow, I'm really at the cutting edge of what's happening here. And while I have systemized a lot of my IP and my book and my programs for founder education, this is really something where I'm excited, not just because the money, but because of the opportunities that it also gives founders, and specifically female founders and underrepresented founders who have never ever been able to do this without money and all these barriers.
- [05:12]
A
Yeah, money or a prestigious college degree that looks good on a pitch deck. You know, things like that are difficult to overcome, especially if you're trying to get into the, the, the gate kept world of Silicon Valley. You know, it's, it's, it's, can be really difficult to do that. But if you can build a product with an MVP for super cheap and get some product market fit, then raising a Series A is much easier at that point. Oh yeah, tell me, tell me. For somebody who's listening, that's thinking immediately like, yeah, sounds good, but I can't, Like, I am not a tech person at all. I don't understand how any of this stuff works. I know AI is going to do a lot of heavy lifting, but it seems, it just seems too good to be true. True. It seems like it's too easy. There's no way I could potentially do that. I don't know enough. What would you say to somebody like that?
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B
It's totally fair, right? Everybody has fear. And I had fear too, right? Like, I was teaching product management at UC Berkeley in January last year, and these students were dancing on my nose, showing me stuff that they were supposed to do at the end of the semester, five months later, and they were already doing it and I'm like, okay, I need to get on this train.
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A
Wow, that is interesting. Yeah, that's a wild perspective. Because at Berkeley, obviously you get a lot of the best and brightest and people who are on their way to raising large funding rounds and things like that. And like, it'd be pretty disconcerting to be, you know, week three of the syllabus and they've already completed the final project because of these tools that exist.
- [06:43]
B
No, they seriously did. I mean, it wasn't great because, you know, you need so much more than just the ability to use AI to create code now. The bar is shifting towards branding and marketing and getting and building the right thing. It's not a question anymore if you can build it. It's a question if you should build it, what you should build that people are paying for. But yeah, that was for me, the Moment where I was like, okay, I need to get into Vibe coding. And I literally sat down and looked on YouTube and I watched two videos and I'm like, okay, I can do this. Now I do have an unfair advantage. I do have a computer science degree from when I studied 20 years ago, so I understand how it all plugs together. But what is incredible is that tools like Lovable or Bolt OR REPLIT or base 44, they are built for people who are non technical. So you don't need to have some server and some, you know, any, anything. You can just sit there and they give you one little window and you say what you wanted to build and then it starts building it. And it also starts building all the plumbing. That's the stuff where people get stuck, right? Like the underlying database, the algorithms, how it all works. But as soon as you describe it, it will actually now recommend things for you and you can say, yes, that sounds great, or no, that's not good. And these tools have leapfrogged within the last eight months in terms of security, in terms of the capabilities of plugging in literally anything. So it's connected to a database right away. It creates a whole database schema. When you start, like, it's insane. It. Yeah, you can launch stuff in 10 minutes. I launch things in 10 minutes.
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A
I was going to say I have a friend of mine who's a partner in a company, Famous Labs, I think is what it's called. And they have several different AI tools. One of them sort of like competitor of Lovable, I think it's called Famous AI. Supposed to be a little bit more conversational to be fair. I've not used the tool for that purpose. But what was interesting to me is that he was talking about. So they just raised at a 300 million valuation and it's all been bootstrapped up to this point. They have over like 60,000 paying users now across like different tools that they've built. What was crazy is he was telling me, he was like, man, with, with the AI tools that we're using now, even with our, with our own AI tools, he's like, we are basically shipping new products, you know, a couple times a month with like, like a fully fleshed out mvp. And this isn't, this isn't like a feature list on an existing product. They're like literally just building multiple tools at the same time. But they do it so quickly. They can, they can spin up a working MVP so fast as well as spin up the, a quick ad campaign, a landing page, some Copy a VSL and send traffic there and get enough data to decide whether or not this is an idea that's worth pursuing and putting more dollars into to develop out a real product here or if we can kind of sunset this one and now let's launch this new one. But like it's, it's, it's what people have done for a really long time. It's just that instead of a year to ship a product, it's a week, you know, instead of three months to build up landing pages and write copy and get a funnel live and write ads, it's a day and a half, you know, so the time to discover whether or not what you're working on is worth continuing to work on is so, so, so, so smaller that it allows you to save a ton of time but also a crazy amount of money, especially if you're a non technical found historically would have had to go basically, you know, have a, a gun for hire in a, in a coder who's going to cost you a lot of money. The project's obviously going to be out of scope by the time you're done. You know, it's always going to cost more than you think it's going to cost. It's always going to take more time than you think it's going to take. And then you're 18 months into a project to have an MVP that cost you $2 million to get to the market. Can you launch it. And it's crickets. And turns out nobody really wanted to use this. You know, like all of the wasted time and money is, it's just, it's, it's being compartmentalized and shrunk into this teeny tiny timeframe that allows you to have some flexibility to figure out what's actually going to work, which is super cool.
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B
And people are, are still getting quotes for one and a half million. I just reviewed one yesterday. One and a half million for a cortisol level detection app. Wild 12 months.
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A
One and a half million in 12 months.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Crazy.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And people are still doing it.
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B
They're still doing it. And yeah, I had to save two founders recently from really bad relationships, really bad contracts. They had shipped nothing for $40,000 and nothing was shipped. A login was shipped. And now you can literally within a weekend turn it around and also see if people pay for it. And that's the part that took us months and $600,000 easy to. And now we can literally see in a weekend. And so I don't think we're going to lose all these jobs necessarily because we're just iterating more and quicker. I was able to write two and a half million lines of code, which is the work of 70 developers last year. And it's not like because I created 70 times more output, but I iterated much more. Right?
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A
Yeah. And, and quickly too. Tell me, tell me for somebody sort of going back to what I mentioned earlier, for somebody who's looking at this, going like, sounds awesome, wildly out of my scope. No way I can do this. How much time do they need to spend figuring this stuff out, like to get a base level of competence to understand exactly what's being built, understand high level code architecture, to be able to prompt correctly, like get an MVP out and running. Is this like they can study it for a weekend type thing? Is it going to take 90 days? Is it going to take six months? How long for. How long for somebody to get up to speed if they're willing to put in four or five hours a week to this?
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B
Yeah, four or five hours a week. I would say within a month you are probably at a good milestone. Maven has lots of people, I also teach on Maven that go into that topic to help you understand that. And you can do it with people who actually know the back end. So if you get stuck, they can unstuck you.
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A
What's Maven?
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B
Maven is a platform with lots of courses where people, especially in product management and also, you know, founders, teach specific classes.
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A
Okay.
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B
And you know, so that's how I think about also, you know, me acquiring the skill is great. I can work with one, two, sometimes three founders, but it's not scalable. Right. So how do I productize that and you know, license it or whatever. And so partially I do this through the programs, the startup programs I teach for entrepreneurs all over the world. So that has an element of that vibe coding in it. But I also have these classes where people can just, with no technical background whatsoever, play in a sandbox. And I think that's the most important part. People have fear that they're doing the wrong thing and then everything is going to break or whatever. It's irrational fear too. But if you give them a sandbox and you're like, okay, here's your sandbox and let's just build something and see how it goes. I think that is a really good step for people to go forward and try it, test it out, see how easy it is. And I sometimes do these improv workshops where the audience yells out what we should build and we build it right there on stage, and it spits it out. And then I show, okay, here. Let's connect quickly to the database. And so we've coded all kinds of cool tools like the bookings system for the Neurborg, which is a famous racetrack in Germany, or a 3D printing booking system for the library down in Palo Alto. Anything, right? And it shows people and they go like, oh, I cannot believe it. Is this magic? And then two weeks later, some of these people from these talks and conferences and workshops I do, they come back and they say, yeah, I wanted to create this nanny marketplace, and because of you, I did. And so they have that mvp. And there might still be a lot of things that are not a hundred percent, but they have that mvp, they go out in the market and they get that first signal. And I think for entrepreneurs, that's so important to get over that hurdle of trying and testing and getting that real user feedback that's worth so much.
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A
Yeah. Shorten the feedback loop.
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B
Yeah. It is incredible. Yeah.
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A
Yeah. What, what from? So you get MVP out. Great. What do you recommend as sort of next steps? Like, is it, hey, send $10 a day in, you know, meta or Google Ads to this landing page? Is it like, what, what, what, what would you recommend to say? Like, okay, you have the mvp. Now how do we go test and, and decide whether or not the market wants something similar to this?
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B
Yeah, so I, I think actually that's the next type. I'm gonna. I'm wagering that vibe marketing is the next thing. And I see quite a few companies working on that so that we can also click the button and hopefully automate it. Because the answer is not simple. The answer depends on who's a user Persona, who's a buyer Persona. Is this a financial advisor that buys 10,000 seats for their firm, or is this a direct to consumer, sell it to grandma type of thing? And so grandma will not. You won't reach her with TikTok ads, and the financial advisor won't care about your Facebook ads either. But they might care about Earn Media, they might care about conferences and events, they might care about articles and things like that. And so it really depends who your user is. If you're creating a consumer app, which is the most important common thing you can do in Lovable, for instance, or any of these web coding tools. And not enterprise software, which you can too. But you need to know more before you go down that complex product road. But if it's a consumer app and you just want to sell it and you think like a TikTok or Instagram or Facebook would be a good channel then. Yeah, absolutely. There's some great tools out there too called Heatseeker. One, one of my friends out of Australia created that. It really lets you test what message, what, what marketing message, but also what ads really resonate and then, you know, come back. Now I'm really trying to figure out the whole CEO space like SEO for, for, you know, the, the LLMs we're using like ChatGPT or the GPTs and Claw. So how do you get your product recommended by those tools? And I still don't have good answers, recommendations by anybody who knows who are the experts in that space. But I'm sure it's going to get productized very soon as well. And I would also think that the lovables of the world are thinking about that they're going to integrate probably email capability for email marketing very soon so that you keep the engagement high. Because that's what's happening right now. When you look at a lot of the products that are being built. But fantastic product managers or designers or UI UX people, when you look at that, they're great, but they're not getting engagement. It's not because they don't get people there, but you go there and then you forget about it. And so I think that's the next loop that's going to get automated there as well.
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A
Yeah, because you could almost just vibe code the landing page and talk about the product that you want to build and just build a wait list and then be like, okay, I'm going to test these 12 different landing page concepts or ideas and then at the end of 90 days, 30 days, whatever, whichever one has the biggest wait list that happened, we're going to go build that one, you know, and then, and then. But to your point, it's not enough just to build the list. You have to continue engaging with them after they sign up with their email. Or three months when you finally have the MVP built, you know, when you've decided and then you've actually built it, now you're ready to bring on some users. They're gonna be like, what was that again? What did I sign up for? Who's emailing me? You know what I mean? So you gotta kind of like stay on top. Stay top of mind when you're, even when you're testing out all the different product solutions and stuff. From the, from the instructor professor perspective here, where's the puck going? And where can we be skating in when it comes to when it comes to building these out, like, is there. Is there a skill that you feel like you have to have now in order to be able to engineer these MVPs through these vibe coding softwares that you. You don't think you're going to have to have within six months because they're actively working on solving this problem.
- [19:48]
B
Yeah, it's a tough question, right? What should I tell my students? And are they still going to have jobs, especially as these junior jobs that are being replaced at a high clip? And I see this all across tech here in the Bay Area, where people are moving away because both parents lost their job in tech. Right now it is happening. Where's the puck going? Well, you know, if you want a safe job, maybe go into roofing or plumbing.
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A
Yeah, right, right.
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B
My cynical response. Or art. But at the same time, seriously, critical thinking and understanding the user and what they want is still number one. And no AI can take this away. Now, there are some tools that are trying to automate user interviews, but it's not working because you need that. Hey, Travis, what do you think? You have to get all these emotional cues, and you have to have a real person sitting there either on Zoom or in real life to really get to the bottom of these problems. So having those communication skills is still super important. But the critical thinking also, like, I had students last week, they were like, no, look, ChatGPT told us it is a feature, not a value proposition. Then I prompted it and it said, oh, no, you're right, it is a value proposition because it tells you what you want it to tell you, right?
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A
Yeah, it tells you what you want to hear.
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B
Yeah. And so if you don't have that background information, you can't have that critical thinking to push back. Right. And so even I had to try to do a team assignment out of 60 students into 12 teams, with first, second choice, and every team had to have a coder and da, da, da. And it hallucinated half of the stuff, right?
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A
Yes.
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B
Right, Travis, that was your first choice. And I was like, no, it wasn't. And so I think the critical thinking is super important. Building something and trying to put it out there teaches you such a round skill set of things. Right. You're a builder, but you're also an evangelist. You're also an explorer, and you're wearing all these different hats. And I think in the world we're going into, you cannot just be one thing. You have to be able to wear different hats because of the ability of AI to come in and Take big parts of one hat at the time. So unless you can be an umbrella skilled generalist, I think you're going to have a very hard time to, to defend that one skill you've developed.
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A
Yeah, well it's like I sort of look at it the same way as excess funding was five years ago. It's like having the ability to vibe code the idea doesn't necessarily solve the problem in the market. Just like having a bunch of money or a crazy venture backed startup does not, does not indicate whether or not the product's going to be successful. You look at a company like Quibi that started those like short form, you know, movies that, that came up a couple years ago, they got like, I don't know, it was close to a billion, I want to say in funding like you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to go secure these a list actors and put together these like five, you know, three to five minute films type thing. Tried it for a couple of years. Massive, massively funded company and then bankrupt within like a year of launching. It's like the money is not going to solve the problem. The vibe coding is not going to solve the problem. Ultimately it's still going to be the scrappy entrepreneur. The difference is this just gives more access to people who would not have been able to figure it out earlier. And now they have the same access of somebody who has a, you know, degree in computer science and all their friends are product engineers. You know, now you, you just, it's just democratizing the access to the industry rather than guaranteeing success just because you were able to put out something in the market.
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B
Exactly, yeah.
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A
And I really appreciate this conversation. It's fascinating to me what's being built and how quickly it's being built. I am eagerly awaiting the day where we see products that are built on lean teams of three to five people where they're getting the multi nine figure valuations type of a thing which is absolutely coming. I think I saw one that was worth like 75 million, a hundred million recently. It was like a single like solo founder and a couple employees or something. It's just like, like wow, that's so.
- [24:20]
B
Crazy that that's actually million Last year, base 44 sold to Wix and they build it within eight months. Eight people. Wow.
- [24:28]
A
Yeah. So crazy. So if you're sitting, if you're one of those people that was sitting here telling yourself that it's impossible for you to figure it out, you heard it here first, you can figure this thing out in about a month with a couple hours a week. So there's, there's just no excuses anymore. And that applies to every age range, every experience or skill set that, that, that would be across all the different people who listen to the show. So stop being in your head about it and start just playing around. You know, you don't gotta, you don't gotta commit your entire new career path to this. But if you got some free time, you're watching Netflix with the family or something, just pop your computer out, play around with some of these things and see, see what you can create. You never know what might come from that. So, Anne, I really appreciate the time that you've taken forth with us today. Where can people go to get more from you and what you're working on?
- [25:12]
B
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn and also on AnnCoquette.com and the Guild website if you're interested in any of the educational programs or the Guild studio.
- [25:22]
A
Is on letsguild.com letsguild.com and then anncakette.com that's a n n E C O C Q U Y T C O C q u y t anncaket.com Go check out some stuff that Ann's putting out into the world because she is one of the best at this and right in the midd of Silicon Valley, on the cutting edge of everything that's coming out. So go check out some of the stuff that she's working on and thank you for taking the time. Everybody else listening, remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got money in the bank. So let's solve that one first here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.