My name is Josh and I built a $6 million app without knowing how to code. >> This is Josh and he quit his fancy tech job to build apps online. >> I left my job in tech to build apps because I was ready to go out on my own. And >> but the crazy part, he had zero coding experience. >> I asked Chat GBT to help me build everything. >> So one day he opened up Chat GBT and started typing. In a few weeks he had a working app. A few months later he had some users. and now he's making millions. >> My process for building with AI is >> I had Josh come onto the channel and in this video we'll dive into how to use chat GBT and AI to teach you how to build apps, his advice for people who want to quit their job and the secret that's hiding in plain sight on how to make millions with AI apps. All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Welcome Josh to Starter Story. Tell me about what you built, who you are, and what's your story. >> My name is Josh Moer. I built Wave AI Noteaker app, which now makes between 400 and $500,000 a month. And I built it without knowing how to code. >> All right. So, as I understand, you were not a software engineer or a developer. Uh, you taught yourself how to build this app with AI tools. Can you tell me more about that? >> So, I had a bunch of startup roles over the years, always on the business side. I had an operating role that I was at for about 18 months. I quit that job in November of 2022 and then a couple weeks later, Chat GBT rolled out. My first instinct was to use it to see if it could help me make an app and it was able to do that. And so I made a couple of very basic apps and websites. I felt like Chachi BT's most amazing feature was summarization. Was taking a lot of text and making it into a smaller amount of text. I had this idea where you could a very basic thing just record audio, transcribe it into text and then summarize that text. And so I made a very early version of it. Chatbt helped me make kind of a one-sreen app where all the activity was sort of happening on the device. What would become wave was the one that kind of stuck. >> Cool. Now looking back, I mean you built a bunch of different apps. You you taught yourself to code with AI. What is your sort of framework for building with AI? How do you build with AI? And what did you learn? >> In the beginning, it was a chat GBT window on one side of my screen and the IDE on the other. It wasn't integrated and the models weren't that good. And so, it was sort of me asking it like it was a human. How do you do this? How does this work? We're going to load all this data into the app. How does that work? I find that the best process for me is to never let it do things that I don't understand. And so that's sort of how I approach software development with AI because if you go too far, it gets complicated. It makes assumptions that maybe you don't want. So I try to make the steps I take small. >> All right. Well, let's take a step back. Let's talk about your background. I mean, you went from working in tech and working more operations roles to actually building real apps used by hundreds of thousands of people. Can you break down that background and take us through how you get here? >> So, you know, I grew up in the '9s. I, you know, was a computer nerd from as soon as I got one. In the late 90s, I taught myself how to sell things on eBay. I would sort of sell anything I can get my hands on. I was able to make HTML in the listing so that they look nice. I had kind of the right mix of business and tech. Notably, in 2012, I joined Uber as the first GM of New York. That was a marketing and ops role for the first few years and a government affairs and PR role for the latter years. Through all these things, I'm working with engineers. I'm getting along with them. I'm kind of speaking their language, but I'm not one. And I developed a sort of envy of like, you know, you guys are actually making the thing. And so after Uber, I did what a lot of successful operators do and became a VC. I also started series A venture firm. But in all those iterations, I sort of found like it wasn't for me. I wasn't particularly good at it. Didn't particularly like it. So I joined Levelvels, which is a health tech startup, as head of operations there. I was at that job for a little more than a year and a half and decided to leave and sort of go out on my own. >> All right. So over the course of many years you went from worker, you're working in lots of jobs, working in tech to builder. What was your motivation at the time? Take me back to that point. How are you feeling? >> Entrepreneurship has sort of been a common thread for me since the beginning. So it's always been like employee but with an entrepreneurial bent. I would often find that over time I would sort of as it got bigger I would feel frustrated that I wasn't really running the place and I think I learned over many years that in a lot of ways I'm unemployable and I think founders often are. >> I think a lot of people watching can relate to that. I mean I had many full-time jobs and and I can relate to that as well. What would be your advice to someone who is in a full-time role or in a career looking to become a builder? What would be your advice for quitting your job? Yeah. So, like my unfair advantage is that I was approaching all of this after a big success at Uber. It's easy to say just quit and build, but the reality is got to pay the bills in tech. And in this moment, it is easier than ever to put something out into the world. So, I think it's hard to do this, but if you can make it a side project to start and get it to a point where you're confident to some degree that it can sustain you, that's probably the way to do it. the leverage you can get with AI has made it easier than ever to put something out into the world and so you can get validation really fast depending on one's financial situation. You know, you don't want to ruin yourself. It would be a good idea to get some validation out there in the world before you jump. >> Before we finish Josh's story, I want to talk to the solo founders that are watching this. Going solo doesn't mean staying small. If you plan to hit a million ARR, you're probably going to have some enterprise customers. But those customers won't just ask what does your product do. They want to know if you're compliant. Terms like sock 2, HIPPA, and ISO 2701 can be hard to understand. And if you're not up to date with your compliance, the deal will probably die before it starts. That's why we partnered with Vanta on this video. Vanta is a platform that automates the hard stuff around security and compliance so you can focus on your product. It hooks into your stack, runs continuous checks, and keeps the evidence all clean for the auditors so you can stay in build mode while Vanta handles the paperwork. Thousands of fast growing companies like Ramp, Atlassian, Langchain, and Curser already use Vanta to prove security in real time. And if you're just getting started, Vanta put together this free compliance for startups bundle. It has checklists, case studies, and step-by-step breakdowns to help you get compliant before you lose a deal. Just click the first link in the description to download it for free. Huge thanks to Vanta for supporting the channel. All right, let's get back to Josh. Let's talk about this amazing app you built, which makes millions of dollars a year and has hundreds of thousands of users. What did you build and how did you come up with this idea? So when Chachu PT rolled out, I was like, "Oh, you know, now even though I don't really know how to do this, I have a tool that can help me get that rest of the way." So I built a couple of ideas. One of them was like at lunch with friends, I always feel like I'd want to take notes. Like people would say something interesting or bring up a certain thing and you'd want to kind of record that. And I built that as one thing. And I got very positive feedback from some people. I found a couple of areas where it was like really magic. computer can take a bunch of text and summarize like that is a killer app of AI. I felt like I got enough validation. I you know put it in the app store probably summer of 23 started getting sales once every few days and then once every day and then a couple a day. Just being sort of there at the right time helped it grow pretty fast during that first year. >> Cool. All right. If you could just give us a step by step on how you built it. What was the first feature that you built and you know walk us through the MVP? So the very first version of it I did in in Swift, a one-screen app on the device that records audio, transcribes it through an API, and then summarize it through a different API. Really, every single thing after that was like, huh, it would be great if a push notification would come at the end of the process so that the person knows to go back and look, I figure out how to do that. Every step of the way was like, oh, it it would be cool if how do I do that? And a lot of it was just asking the AI how to do that because at this point it's still not integrated in the IDE. There's no wind surf or things like this. This was a grind. This was like full day every day, highly disciplined for years. Like that's really what it took. >> All right. So you built this business over the course of a few years and it's grown into something pretty big. Can you give me some of the numbers behind Wave? >> So most notably people now use it to record about 8,000 hours a day of of audio. We have 30,000 subscribers. Anyone can open the app and use it for free for 30 minutes per month, but for unlimited you subscribe. There are about 10,000 daily active users. We're doing between 400 and $500,000 topline per month. Mostly through the app store, but also on Android, and then also through Stripe on the web. >> Cool. How does this go from those first 100 users to doing 6 million per year as a soloreneur? >> At first, I did post on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn audience was more interested in this than anywhere else. I think I benefited from getting search in the app store. So there was a bunch of organic. Once it hit 5 to 10k monthly, I started meta ads. I hit that at exactly the right time. Just sort of straightforward ads like this is what it does. There was also strong word of mouth effect with any good tech that's new. People are excited to share with their friends because it reflects positively on them. And I've also made sure to try to differentiate through like perfectionism. I do all the support. It does a couple of things. One is it signals that the app developer is doing the support. That's not a normal experience that people tend to have. It also has been a great way to get user feedback from real people who are using the app. Not sort of what I think I should do next, but what they think I should do next. That's sort of like been the approach. >> Let's go to tech stack. I mean, you went from not really knowing how to build apps to now you probably have a bunch of different tech that you used and you know your stack that you built this with. Can you just tell me what this is built in and and how you work? >> Sure. So, the app is React Native. I use Expo to kind of manage that. The website is Nex.js. The back end is Firebase for things like authorization and database. I really do Google for almost everything. For development itself, at the time of this recording, I'm using Windsurf. I use the anthropic models Opus 4 and I use Windsurf AI as my IDE. For transcription, I use assembly AI. They're very reliable. And then for summarization, I use GPT 4.1, which is the current OpenAI flagship model. Net income on this ends up at about 50%, mostly because I don't have any I don't really have a team. >> On a more personal note, I just love to hear about, you know, what a day in the life is like for someone like you running a solarreneur business that makes millions of dollars per year. >> I have a wife and two kids. We drop them off at school at about 8:30, so the morning is focused on getting them out the door. I run every morning in Central Park and I spend most of the day here from about 10:00 and I'm typically here till about 6:00. My schedule tends to be open. I don't like meetings. I just prefer schedule open so that I can make new parts of the app. I tend to start the day with a little bit of support just to make sure that anyone who has an urgent issue gets fixed. I multitask a lot cuz I'm fairly ADHD. At any one time, I'm doing several things at once. I enjoy that style. And then on weekends, you know, I try to make Saturday completely no computer. It's beneficial that the app tends to be underused on the weekends. So, it's sort of like okay to not do support or any work on Saturdays. I'll tend to dip back in a little bit on Sundays. >> All right. Well, last question that we ask everyone who comes on the channel. If you could go back in time and stand on Josh's shoulder, what would your advice be? >> For so long, I was the one to end guy. Wasn't the zero to one guy. I was the one to end guy. I'd come in early but after the thing was established and it almost sort of defined myself as someone who couldn't do 0ero to one. And I just had a lot of stories that I told myself about that. Turns out I can do 0ero to one too. And I think it was easier than I realized. And so if I could go back and tell myself something, it would be maybe start something sooner. Like I'm 43 right now. Guess I started this at 40 or 41. Like I I probably should have done that sooner. >> All right. Well, thank you Josh for coming on. I think what you built is amazing and uh it's just an awesome story of going from working for the man to building your own stuff and having this awesome life. So, thank you for coming on and hope to have you back soon. >> My pleasure, Pat. Thanks for having me. >> Thank you, Josh, for coming on to the channel. I personally love Josh's story even though he had this background in VC and working in tech. He decided to go the solarreneur route because building for him was exploring his curiosities and seeing if he could actually build something and put it out into the world. If you're also excited about the possibility of building something like an app, actually seeing it in the real world, customers using it, making money, then you should check out Starter Story Build. It's our program where in the course of 2 weeks, you'll come up with an idea, build it with AI tools, and launch it into the real world. If you want to learn more, just check out the link in the description. I think it's awesome. Otherwise, I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.