Discover the Power of “No Code” Apps.

Okay. I'm with my really good friend Jacob, who for the last several years has been building my app. So, Jacob, why don't you start by telling everyone who's listening a little bit about your background and what you're currently doing.

Yeah, sure. So I guess have kind of been all over the place in terms of career trajectory. So. I got my degree from the University of British Columbia. It's in Vancouver, Canada. I'm based in Calgary right now. But I got my degree in English Literature and didn't really know what I wanted to do after school. So I knew that I wanted to travel and also be able to pay down some student debt. And that led me to eventually going to Korea where I was teaching English for two years. Over there, I kind of, I guess started to dabble with just creating content online and entrepreneurship and I started teaching my own lessons to English students online, started a YouTube channel and started a company with another, another partner where we were just teaching people English Online. Around 2017, 2018, we were looking for ways to make our lessons and just the stuff that we were doing more interesting using tech. Neither of us knew how to code. I found this company called Bubble, which allowed you to build applications without code. And I started dabbling with that and got hooked on it pretty fast and over the next couple of years slowly became more interested in just learning about Bubble and software development in general and developing my skills on that platform that I eventually just transitioned full time to doing software development stuff on Bubble. Then the pandemic hit. I was freelancing at the time. That's how we met. You were originally just a client and we hit it off, obviously. And I at some point transitioned to working full time on Restart and for the most part, for the last like two, three years have been doing that. And here we are.

Explain what no code is because I think I was confused and I think a lot of people are confused when they hear no code if they don't know anything about it because they think of Squarespace and WIX and just kind of a drop and drag kind of a system. So just real quick, what is the difference in what actually is no code?

Yeah, I mean, I think for like WIX and Squarespace and website builders like that, those could certainly be. You could say that they're no code platforms too. I think when most people use the word no code, what they mean is building a full web application in this a lot of time, web application or mobile application, it doesn't really matter, but a full application that actually does stuff. So the difference between like where WIX and Squarespace and stuff like that is with tools like that, you're building more websites that people consume. A blog or something where a visitor can go to and just consume information. When we're talking about web applications or mobile applications, these are applications that do something. So you're often dealing with saving data, having users of your app that need to log in and authenticate. So really, I guess that's how I think of the difference between them is an application, whether that's web based or mobile based, is just something that does more things than a typical website builder. And this whole no code movement that has been developing over the past decade, I guess really allows you to build complex applications that do a lot of stuff without having to write code.

I mean, that's probably one of the biggest things that I learned being on wix and being on theirs and then seeing what you can do on Bubble is you can literally create anything, you can build anything. And at first I thought it would be kind of cheap because I'm thinking no code's cheap. And that really hasn't been the case. I mean, watching you build, you can't tell you're on a no code system.

Yeah, yeah, A lot of the time. I mean, that's the goal. Behind the scenes, there's still some limitations and frustrations that you deal with, but usually for the most part you can build whatever you want to build, which is pretty amazing.

Well, another thing that really stood out for me is when I log into any of those no code website builders that you talked about. When you log into Bubble, it's very overwhelming. If you don't know what you're doing. It looks like you have to know programming coding. So just talk me through your experience of the learning process because I've been exposed to a lot of people who can build on Bubble, but I've never seen anyone be able to do what you can do, how fast you can do it, and how did you get so good at it and how long does it take someone, if they want to get into this and break into this market?

You're too kind, but I would say so. One of the things that I've ranted about before, many times is I think that the word no code is maybe not the best word to describe what these platforms do, because you really are like Bubble, for example, or any of the major no code platforms these days that allow you to build pretty complex applications. You are writing code in the sense that you're building a program and you are engaging I guess with a lot of, A lot of concepts that are just general programming concepts that doesn't matter whether you're writing actual code or dragging stuff onto a screen, you're still. The underlying concepts are the same between platforms. So I think no code makes it seem. The word makes it seem like what you're about to do is really easy when in fact you do need to learn about things like, you know, like, how does a relational database work? What. How do we, you know, how do we write if, then statements, conditionals, all of these things that you're typically going to learn in programming, you will need to learn in no code as well. So there's that distinction. I think often people come in and like, no code, it's going to be super easy. And then you're kind of in for a rude awakening because it's not easy. It takes a little bit of time to learn.

But the advertising talks about how quickly you can get up and running and is it fake? Because, I mean, we've tried to teach people, we have taught people, but I don't know it because I've never done it myself. And I just don't have the courage to jump into that world. I know it's not a unique ability of mine. So someone has to really have to be passionate about this to really get into this, don't they?

Yeah. I mean, I think you definitely have to want to learn it if you think it's going to be something that, like, you know, over a weekend I'll be able to build the next Facebook with all these features. That's probably not going to be the case. It does take time and it is hard to build a good application that runs well and that is built to scale because it's just hard to do that, like, in general. So I think there's a bit of a mismatch between a lot of the marketing that's. That's out there in terms of how easy it is to do. At the same time, it's like, compared to, compared to writing traditional programming, it is still much faster than if you want to get an application up and running. And if you know what you're doing, it's way faster than what you'd have to do writing a lot of code a lot of the time.

So for people who are trying to figure out what they want to do, college kids who are graduating from college and they're trying to get in and you know, these statistics I see about what technology is going to do to the job market over the next five to 10 years. They talk about replacing 80 million jobs, but they always kind of preface that by saying that there's about 90 million new jobs that will be created by new technology. And all I keep seeing now is AI ripping through every industry. And they talk about coding being one of the biggest ones. Does this replace. I mean, people can now prompt in a certain amount of sentences and get an app built. How is that going to impact no code and the world that everybody's in in your world right now?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't think anyone truly knows. I've heard really good arguments on both sides as to why this will replace programmers or also why it'll just. It won't replace programmers, but make people make existing programmers just more productive. So one of the arguments is like, you know, when new technology comes along, like AI, let's just look at ChatGPT. I think instantly, certainly my experience has been I'm instantly ten times more productive. And a lot of the ideas that I had in mind that I wanted to work on, they seem possible now, and I can achieve them much, much quicker. So there's an argument to be made. I think, that, like every company that has a lot of software engineers working for them, rather than laying them off, because they can get more software engineers to do, or they can get fewer software engineers to do the work that they're currently doing, because everyone's more productive with this tech. They keep their existing development team and every single. And they're just 10 times more productive as a company. Right. So I think that makes sense. I also think, though, that a lot of the, you know, boilerplate stuff that takes up a lot of time at these companies that. That a lot of, like, junior developers will do. I think a lot of that work will be automated away. Now, again, whether that means that there's just less junior developers or whether that means that the role of a junior developer or developer in general changes, and it just means that they're more productive and able to do more. I don't know.

It'll be, can I build an app right now using AI and not need a programmer?

There's a great example of. I was listening to a podcast that I'm a big fan of called the All In Podcast, and they were talking about this this weekend. There are great examples of lots of people on Twitter in particular. I'm going to forget this guy's name, but we'll put him in the description. But he learned how to code, I think, in, like, 2019, 2020 was like dabbling with it. And he's already posting videos of just incredible prototypes that he's building. He built this like image recognition app where he's holding up this can of Diet Coke using his Device's camera, asking ChatGPT what this thing is and it's responding and saying, that's a Diet Coke it has. He asked like, how many calories does this have? And Chat GPT was able to recognize that image recognition, that's a Diet Coke. It doesn't have any calories and it's giving back this answer. So it's like, I think again, you still have to know fundamental programming concepts. You need to be able to know how to take some of these open source libraries that are out there and actually put them to use. But the gift gap between someone who knows nothing about programming to someone who is able to make really amazing products is just shrinking every day, I think.

Right. Because here's the thing. If I'm a college student and I graduate and I don't want to go work for someone and I want to have my own business, but I don't want to go grow a company because I don't know what I'm doing, but I have an idea, and if I can make that idea come to life through an app, which is really where kind of everything seems to be going today. If I could create 80% of the app using some sort of technology that is now out, that doesn't require me to have to learn what you've had to learn, and then I can just turn that over to someone on Fiverr who can clean it up and make it great. Is that, is that something I like? If you heard me say that, can people go do that?

I think, I mean, the devil's in the details in terms of what you want to build. But yeah, like it's getting easier and easier to do everything, generally speaking.

Well, how would I do, how would I do that if I, if I have an idea and I want to build an app? Yeah, I, how do I find someone? How do I, if I don't want to be the guy who's gonna go build it, how do I go get.

Someone to hire someone to build it for you?

Yeah.

I mean, again, it depends on your idea, but the first thought that comes to mind is just freelancing sites like upwork, Fiverr. I've used those before myself. And you know, it's tricky. Like, like it, it's tricky because hiring good people is tricky. Right. I've, like, when I was, before I started learning this stuff myself, and this is actually a very common thing that you hear for people who get into the no code space. I know that we've kind of been talking more about code now in the last few minutes, but when we were working on the English teaching stuff that we were doing, we. Originally, before I got into all of this, we had an idea that we wanted to build and we hired someone to build it for us with code. And it was the first time that I had hired anyone to do anything like that for me. And I had no idea how development worked or anything like that. And it's, it's pretty hard to do. I mean, you've, you've been in that situation many times. I know where it's like to take the idea that you have in your mind and to try to get a developer to build it. It's a difficult process. It's not super easy. So I think there's like, that's a whole other thing that has to do more with, with like hiring and finding the right person to work with. But if you want to learn how to build something yourself and get that up and running. Yeah, I think like it's, it's not easy yet. I think like, you know, AI is making it easier and easier and that the pace at which it's, it's getting easier is just picking up every day. But.

Yeah, but my question is what everyone wants to know, which is how much money can you make and how much am I gonna have to pay someone if I don't want to be the guy who's gonna have to go learn how to do it? So we got two people, you got one person says, I'm gonna jump into this world. I'm gonna try to learn how to do this. There's free courses you can take on bubble on different no code platforms. I don't know if it's worth it right now to jump into this career personally because I don't know how quickly it could get replaced. But I do know that people have ideas and there's no shortage of ideas. And because of all the new technology, if someone has the next unicorn idea and they just need someone to build it, and never in, before in history have you been able to just get an app up and running, but now you can. So my question to you is how much money is going to cost me if I don't want to be the guy who's going to have to build it, if I want to find someone like you to have to build my app or, you know, how much can I make If I jump into this world and I want a career in building no code apps.

Yeah. So I know again, the devil's in the details there in terms of what you want to build. Right, because you can build so something that is quite complex. Like if you like, take like a marketplace or something where you have multiple different types of users using your app, those tend to be a lot more difficult to build and require a lot more work to upfront to get something running. In terms of how much a hiring costs go, I mean, if you're building it on bubble, I don't know. I mean, there are agencies that charge still, you know, a lot of money, let's say like tens of thousands of dollars. And maybe even I've heard of agencies charging like over $100,000 for a project. And then there are also freelancers that are looking to get their start that are very capable developers that are charging much less. So it's hard to give a range on that. I would say though, like, that one thought that comes to mind is I think it is easier than ever to kind of hack things together and get a working prototype that you can at least prove your concept with for very cheap to even like to try to build it yourself. Just working with Chat GPT going back and forth, you see, you see people, stories of people who have zero programming experience who are just prompting Chat GPT in the right way to be like, how do I do this? ChatGPT will say, well, you need to, you know, take this code over here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you, you can, I mean, I'm sure that you've done this with Chat GPT before where you're learning something new. It's very good at allowing you to go back and forth with it and teach you the thing that you're trying to do. So I think that like, one option, if you are someone who has this idea and you're looking to, to get it out there, is to, you know, go back and forth with ChatGPT or just look at what, what tools are out there because there's, you know, an endless amount and try to hack something together. And then if you, if you have a proof of concept at that point, you know, that's something you can take to investors.

But go back to the other side. Go back to say, how much can someone make if they want, say, I have a year experience and I can.

Build, like being a developer.

Yeah, that's. Yeah. You know, people are jumping into a new career and they want to learn how to do this. Skill? Yeah. How much can you make?

Yeah, I think, like, I mean, if you're freelancing, you're your own business person. Right. So my route originally was freelancing. Right. And you, at that point, it's like, well, do you want to be a solo freelancer? Do you want to hire a team and grow this thing? There's lots of. Lots of different paths that you could go down that way. Working for a. Let's just say like a no code. Let's just say like a startup. So you get hired as like a developer working at a startup. I think like for top developers, at least in bubble, you see people going for six figures, like for a starting gig.

Yeah. And how long. And how long do you think it takes for someone to be good enough to be able to make that?

It again, depends on, I guess, how fast you go and your drive and your own just ability, like your own natural abilities, I guess, to pick this stuff up. But I think that you can get really good at this stuff in a year.

Really. Okay.

Or less. Or less if you're really hustling and you're, you know, if you're really hustling and you want. Is as fast as you want to do it. Really.

And what advice do you have for people who, like, what would you say for young professionals who are trying to figure out what they want to do, if they want to put in an investment of time to be able to learn a skill like this? One, do you think it's worth it? And two, what kind of advice do you have for them?

I think it is worth it if you love it. I think, like, even if you. You're going to learn a lot of stuff that will be helpful regardless of whether you're going to be a bubble developer or not. You know, one of the. There's this conversation that I had with this. Her name's Hazel Lim. I interviewed her on a podcast that I was doing, and she made a point about when it comes to investing your time and things, and, you know, there's so many things that you can invest your time and we were talking about it in the context of like, different business ideas to pursue. How do you know, like, how much time I should invest in this one thing versus this other thing. And one thing that she said that stuck with me was like, if you can. If you can pick your investments so that you learning a new skill is a win no matter what. Like, if it doesn't work out, let's say you, like, you're learning how to build on bubble. And it turns out in three months that like, oh, maybe this isn't for me. If you can pick your investment so that it's still a win, that you're still going to get some sort of skills outside of that, then it's, it's a worthy investment.

Yeah, I mean, look, here's what I tell you. Working with developers like yourself and not being able to do it myself, very humbling. First off, and if I had the skill, I would have an entire library resources of apps because I have so many ideas as a visionary and a CEO that I just want to make them real. And so having a web builder where I can drop and drag, I can just create as much as I want. But I don't know how to build an app. And when I watch you guys, there is a certain type of an individual, I think a profile of a person who has to have patience and has to have the drive and it could be a job that you end up loathing if it's not for you. So I, you know, right now I don't think anything is more important than learning a skill. So to your point, you know, if you have that skill, even if it's not going to be a career for you, it is an amazing skill to have. Because no matter where you are, if you're able to whip something up, a form, a login, a payment channel, like whatever that is, that's very, very powerful and very valuable for an employer. If you're working for someone to say I can go build that or just build it and show them, it would literally turn their heads. I mean, you could literally increase your income because of that. So it's a pretty good skill.

What do you think as an employer? Because one thing that I've been curious about, people have been talking about this for years with the no code in the no code movement in particular, because you know, there are a lot of people who get into no code who will have like non technical jobs at companies and they're just kind of doing this on the side, like someone who's working a sales job or something. And people have talked about the idea that these people in traditional, traditionally non technical roles actually being able to build tech at these companies, you would like that as an employer.

Like if first off, nobody can do that, I had hundreds of employees, nobody can do that. And if they did that, not the turn of the discussion, but that is a way that you can negotiate a higher salary because if you're able to provide value, you're not getting paid for what you're already doing. You're already getting your $100,000 salary to be a salesperson. But if you can create different types of things for our clients, and if you can create things that would automate our processes and save us time and money, you could then go and you can leverage that with your employer, say, look, I love my job, but next year, because of how much value I've provided, you know, and how much I will continue to provide with the tools and the skills that I have, I deserve to make more money because I know I can make more money. I think people are. They forget that you have more control as an employee than you think. It's just the employer usually plays their hand because they're the employer. So everyone's scared. But, boy, you have power when you have this skill. And I've learned that through watching you and the team build. And again, when I say humbling, it's because, you know, I usually can attack something that I'm real passionate about, but there is a real skill and being able to build technology. And I don't care how easy it is, it's gotten easier, and I still can't do it. So you gotta. You gotta want it.

Yeah, you do. And I think also, too, you know, one of the things that comes up when people are. We've been talking about bubble quite a bit, which is its own platform and its own ecosystem and has its own way of doing things. But one thing that I do think is valuable in particular when it comes to no code, is that a lot of the skills that you're learning are transferable. If you did want to venture out and learn how to code or get into AI or do all of this stuff, like you're. You are kind of learning a programming language. I really do believe that. And once you start learning, you know, like, bubble was. Was my personal, like, gateway drug. I gu. You could say into. Into learning code. I just. I wanted to learn more about software development in general once I got into learning Bubble. And when you do start learning a little bit of code, you realize, like, hey, a lot of the stuff that I'm doing, even though I'm dragging and dropping stuff onto the screen, is the exact same thing I'm doing in code. I'm just like. I'm just typing it in a different way. I'm using a different interface for it. So I think it is a great skill and it will allow you to do a whole lot of things. And I think you'll also find that, like, know a lot of people A lot of people find their niche within the development space. You know, you're maybe you're more drawn towards designing user interfaces, which is an incredibly valuable skill to have too. So.

Okay, well, let's, let's switch gears a little bit. So we've been aiming this conversation towards people who are maybe trying to figure out what they want to do, but you have a pretty big audience in the bubble world and I know people love hearing things that you can share your experience. So I want to talk about our current project because we've had quite an interesting run trying to build technology, trying to create things that have not existed before and we've run into a lot of problems. So my first question that I'd like you to share your thoughts on are what is your biggest struggle as a developer who knows how to build no code apps? What's the biggest struggle that you deal with on a day to day basis?

I think there are a few thoughts that pop into mind. One is I guess just prioritizing different features and managing tech debt. What I mean by tech debt is like there are certain decisions that you make when you're developing that are better in the short term or the long term. Right. So let's say that you're dealing with this feature and because of the way that things were built previously, it makes it more difficult to build things one way or another. So you have to make a decision and you make a large number of these decisions every day, really, that are like, well, should I spend the time to clean this up now or should I, should I leave it and like go fast on this feature? And there's, there's not always an obvious right answer. Many times you don't want to get into a situation where you're over engineering things in the short term because it'll take much longer to develop the feature. But it also, it's like the features change over time as the app grows and as you get feedback from people. So it's very hard to know, I think on a day to day basis like how much to invest in just building things in, let's say like a scalable way. That's the wrong way to put it, but like spending the time to avoid tech debt basically. So that's one thing that comes up.

So I want you to be transparent.

Yeah.

Because I know one of your biggest challenges personally. Personally me. So talk about our challenges because I think it's important for people to hear about it and you have real experience, you know, dealing with someone who's got thousands of ideas and wants to run fast and change things. So how have you, how have you dealt with the challenge of working with someone that is challenging to work with?

Yeah, I mean, I think like, so, so one thought that came to mind as you were speaking there, because I did take a gap and go work for another company for six months in between. And I think that you're. You wanting to move fast and get features developed as fast as possible. Like the CEO I was working for at my other job was similar. And I've come to learn, I think that that's more like a general founder trait and just something that, like there's a constant struggle, I think, or tension, let's say, between development teams and founders, where founders will want to go really fast and build things as fast as possible and the development team has to take these ideas and actually grapple with the underlying system and has just much more of an awareness of all of the different tensions that come when you're trying to build a feature really fast. So I think that's just kind of the nature of the beast of building an app to some extent. I think when it comes to working with you personally, one of the challenges. I'm just trying to think of the challenges that make you unique as a boss. I think you're just very particular about what you want in terms of UI ux. And I think we clash there probably more most often where it's like a particular. You have a particular idea of how something should be on a screen and want to change things quickly if it's not working. And I think grappling with that is more just like. And I think that's just like, honestly, just you and I, our personalities coming together more than anyone else.

So what advice would you give someone who has a boss? And I think, I think the relationship has a lot to do with it because if someone's scared to share their challenge there and if a boss is not willing to be flexible and open up ideas for the person, there's a couple of dynamics there that come into play. But your advice to people who are building that are working for someone and you know, have the same struggle where it's like, you know, someone's real particular about all the little details about UI ux, especially if there's not someone doing UI ux.

Yeah, I think, I think having a designer is always a good thing who's like, so like, like, like a clear responsibility where it's like this person is. Is owning that that's always helpful and.

Is that before or after things are like, when does that happen?

I think, I think perfect world, it's before like just, I guess speaking from a developer's perspective, if I have a high fidelity wireframe, when I say high fidelity, I just mean that like everything is laid out exactly how it's supposed to be on the page in a design tool like Figma or whatever. There's, there's thousands of them. Now something that I can look at that I know, I know exactly how an interface is supposed to look and not just how it looks in one certain state, but you know, when a user hovers over a button or when they click on a certain button and like this pops up in a perfect world. The more of that that I have as a developer, the easier it is and the less, the less surprises there will be, the less decisions that like, you know, develop the development team will have to make. Realistically speaking, maybe this is true in bigger companies. I don't know. I've never worked on like a large team with lots of designers and developers, but on a small startup team that's like, you're rarely in a situation where you have as a developer, you know, perfect wireframes to follow.

Although now, now you have them available.

Yes, yes. But even, even now it's like what you're saying now because like I'm going.

In, I'm saying that when we started our app it was like, hey, let's go. We came up with ideas. We had so many different iterations of everything we did. But now I can go on to certain cool websites and I could see templates, people have already done it. I could just show you. That's the look I want.

It's true, it's true to some extent. But then like you're still always, you know, your situation, your situation, our situation will always be a little bit different than the template. And it's like in those minor details where you still have to make design decisions that you see on the screen that are real. And so I guess what I was getting at is very rarely do maybe the development team will have to design a certain pop up in a certain way just because it's faster to do that than to go and build out a full wireframe. It can slow development down, I guess. So again, it's one of those decisions where it's like, do we just push things fast and then iterate later?

If I was a developer and I had to deal with a guy like me, like a CEO, so if anyone's listening to this and they, and they, and they work and they have the same, you know, challenge. I would. My advice to them would be, before you start building, go find three examples of different types of looks and say, hey, which one do you like? And let them choose. And so then they give you direction. Because the worst thing in the world is for you to go build and then show someone something and have them go, that's not what I wanted.

And like, you know, and 10 times, 10 times worse too, if you've already programmed everything to like, work like it's supposed to. So.

Right. And you know, you know, before, no code really took the scene over the last, you know, several years. You know, you tell your programmers to go do something, they'd come back two months later with something to show you. Well, that there's, that's a disaster waiting to happen because not only have you spent so much money, but you wasted all that time. So, you know, some people I know like to be more hands on. Some people just come back later on. But I think from, from, from a developer's perspective perspective, I think it's always helpful to have as much direction as you can. And today, with the amount of templates that are available, you can get 80% of what someone wants nailed down just by what's already been built out there. And I think that's, that's been a huge thing for us because we never had that when we first started and now all of a sudden we're using it every day. So it's great.

Another thing just to add on that point, for someone who's thinking, we've been talking a lot about people who are maybe thinking about getting into this space. I think one of the most valuable things that you can do as a developer is learn at least a little bit about UI ux, like learn some fundamentals. Because it's just, how do you do that? I mean, courses, udemy, like any, anything, there's, there's tons of resources that'll just teach you the fundamentals. You don't need to be an expert UI UX developer. But I think like UI ux, at least as far as I'm concerned, is one of those things where if you just learn what not to do and what rules not to break, then it's, that's, you know, a good chunk of it.

Good. So my last topic that I want to talk about is that now that ChatGPT and all the new AI technologies come out, the one thing that scares me not only for just everything that I'm seeing on a daily basis, but you see all these companies coming out with all this new technology, all these new tools, all this incredible stuff. And with no code, people can build things very fast if they're good. But we're also seeing things become obsolete, like overnight because, you know, Google just puts that into their email or their workspace now or, you know, Bing all of a sudden now offers that as a free thing. Right in. Right. Built into their already, you know, using products that everyone's already in Microsoft Teams. So, you know, how are you protecting against, like, things that you're building and that you're working on so that, you know, it doesn't become one of those things that just becomes like, you know, yesterday's flavor and you wasted all that time or money, you know, trying to build out something that, that it doesn't get disrupted overnight.

Yeah, well, I mean, like, right now all I'm working on is restart stuff. So that's a conversation for both of us to have about what we're building. But I think it's really hard to predict the future and to think about what's going to happen here. You know, like a few. A month ago, I think, and the fact that it was a month ago is insane because of just how fast things change. But a month or so ago, maybe two months, Chat GPT OpenAI they announced that they were going to be releasing Chat GPT plugins. And what a, what a plugin is for Chat GPT, if you don't know, is it's a tool that developers can build on top of Chat GPT that will basically just augment Chat GPT and just make it. It's like a toolbox that Chat GPT can use. So the classic example is like Airbnb, if you're having a conversation with ChatGPT and you want to book an Airbnb, ChatGPT will judge. You know, that at this point, this user wants to book an Airbnb. Well, I have this plugin that Airbnb developers have built. I can actually use their API now to go Airbnb is to go and book a, an Airbnb for this person. Right? So anyways, it's like a toolbox of plugins that, that make Chat GPT better. And when this came out, there were many people and I, I was thinking this for, for a few days that thought, well, this is going to be the next interface that everyone uses. Like, why would we need to use Google to go book an Airbnb or to get to Airbnb, why would we need to go to Airbnb's website? Maybe Chatgpt will be the interface to that everyone has been, I guess like aiming for building, which is just like the one interface that everyone uses for everything right now. In the months that followed, I don't know, it could, maybe it will still pan out like that. But the excitement around plugins, at least from what I've observed in myself and also just from seeing things on the Internet, has definitely dampened a bit. I was sampling their plugins like I was on their, I was on their wait list and got access to it and was playing around with it and it like it felt. Even though I can use plugins right now, I find myself still going and changing the default mode to just either GPT4 or the default 3.5. And I use Chat GPT in a very particular way. So all of this is to say that like, I don't know, I mean I think there are some tools and, and businesses that like, like a lot of like transcription businesses. For example, I remember years ago I was using one for videos that I was making and I would send in the video and they'd use whatever AI tool they were using for transcription. And it was, was an okay tool at the time. But I think a lot of those companies are, are in a lot of trouble and that's just the nature of this technology. So I, I don't know, I mean, I don't know how you build something that's like Jasper AI. They were one of the biggest, the highest valued AI companies. I think that before ChatGPT came out, I'm not sure what they're at right now, but I imagine like, because Chat GPT is free and because all of these open source language models are, are being developed that they're in trouble too. They've raised, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. So you had the, the CEO of Google on 60 Minutes two weeks ago saying that AI is going to be as important as an invention as fire was for humans. So like, in an environment like that, with this new technology, who knows, man? I don't know.

So you know, I agree with you that you don't. No one can predict the future. But I will say that 25 years in business, I've never seen anything like this ever. And the way it's changed the way I do my job every single day is unbelievable. And I'll just give you one example. I wrote down everything I could about restart everything. I call it my Restart DNA and I put it on a Word document and every time I go to Chat gbt, I cut and paste, I Throw it in and then I can have ChatGPT do anything I want. Write me copy for emails, write me copy for my website, you know, give me pricing, different examples. It's unbelievable. And I just keep making my DNA more and more tailored so that GBT chat GPT can like take that and then create whatever I want. Now these are things that I would pay thousands of dollars for and I'd have people working for me and outsourcing freelancers that couldn't nail it. And chat pt it does it in 3 seconds which is so mind blowing for me that it has changed the way I work. And when I talk to people and they don't even use ChatGPT, they don't even know what it is yet, my head spins. I just can't believe like people are in for a big wake up call and they say right now that 50% of people's jobs will be able to be enhanced or replaced by, by AI. And I can see it. And when people say that they have used it and it's not that great, you know, and people are saying it's because you're not that great because you don't know how to prompt it, you don't know how to tell it what to do. And, and I guess my point is when I'm, when I'm talking about disruption and I'm talking about all the jobs being disrupted in different industries and companies and builders like you developers who are building tools, I think it enhances everything. So like, you know, for us we help people get jobs. So eventually you'll be able to use a ChatGPT, an AI to do some sort of that process that's going to work really well and better than any company can provide. But they're not going to be able to give you the entire nuts and bolts experience from A to Z and I'm talking about from your resume to an all in one all wrapped up. And I think adding the human element into it is really going to be the key factor for companies who are going to fly by their competitors because either they're going to adopt AI and use AI and have a cool product that uses AI that someone else can duplicate or something. But when you add the human component like we're doing with career advisors, live career advisors that I think, you know that you can't replace that you can't, there is the empathy, there is the support and AI is a robot, I mean it's a computer and it can get really good. But I think there's still, there are going to be limitations, period. And I think the companies that are able to be flexible and adapt to the environment and add a human component to it and give people more of an experience, I think that they're the winners, the big winners. And you know, again, we can't predict it, but I know that's what we're trying to do.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think, look, at the end of the day, I mean if you're building something that is useful to people, then people will use it. A big thing right now is like these auto GPTs, autonomous, autonomous AI agents that you basically give it a goal and it has its list of things that it can do and then it like doesn't stop until it reaches that goal and intuits along the way what it has to do to get to that next step. And you know, those are great. You see people doing things like build me a business that is profitable with $100 budget, go. And people are trying to do that online and there's who knows how much money pouring into these things in terms of trying to just, just build the next platform where people can build their own auto GPTs or whatever. I think if it gets to a point where like auto GPTs are, are running the world, then we're going to be in tricky places of society in general.

Different conversation.

Exactly, exactly. So like, and I mean, I don't know, we could talk about, try to play armchair quarterback and predict what's going to happen with all that stuff, but long term, like who, who the hell knows?

I think, I think have you chat GPT to teach you things on Bubble.

Not on Bubble, but I learned with, I'm using it all the time to do things that I couldn't do with code before.

But can people do that? Can people go on to ChatGPT and say, teach me how to, how to, how to use Bubble.

There's a, there's one company who released a Q and A bot built on Bubble's documentation that was pretty good. I think one of the challenges with Bubble and one of the challenges they're going to be facing is that it is a closed system and you know, you can go and ask Chat GPT questions about, you know, JavaScript, Python, whatever, and, or a particular library that's, that's open source, that it's been trained on because it's part of its training data. You know, like they scraped a lot of stack overflow questions, which is like the, the holy grail for developers in terms of questions and answers. So there's a lot of benefit right now for developers using ChatGPT to write code. It's really good at that.

Explain open source, just so everybody knows what that is.

It's basically just open for the public to see. So like, for like there are a lot of open source repositories on, on GitHub, which basically just means like you as a developer can go look at the code that someone else has written and you can take it and build on top of it or do whatever you want with it.

Why do they do that?

I mean I think there's probably a lot of reasons but you know, sharing code so that other people don't have to, don't have to do the work, sharing some sharing an awesome solution that you've built and building.

I would imagine they make it better, they find solutions for things.

Yeah, there's like a, the whole, you know, a lot of, a lot of libraries that, that, that companies use are like massive companies use are open source libraries for all sorts of different things.

That just such a weird concept, right? Because for Bubble being not open source, it's like, hey, here's our playbook, you know, like what makes them unique if they share an open source. I mean that's kind of like their, their secret sauce is their platform, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean they, they've, they've built their own tool, this like editor that allows you to drag and drop stuff onto a page and they've just organized the entire development process and that, that is their proprietary work, right? Like their, their editor that they've built and all of that stuff. A lot a big, a big discussion in the no code space is about exportable code. So being able to like take what you've built on Bubble and if you need to export the code so that you can run it on another server, wherever you want to or whatever it is, Bubble doesn't do that right now. That's a whole other conversation that we could get into.

Like I'm a big fan of Bubble because I built my entire company on their platform. I've also run into a lot of problems with Bubble and I also have a lot of experience working with their internal team on different ideas and things that we've been able to collaborate on and I've seen them go through a lot of changes and I've seen them do things and communicate things to their audience that have really created chaos. And I'm curious, you know, your thoughts, opinions on the future of Bubble and are they in trouble?

I think it's going to be a challenging time for them just because of, you know, when I, when I discovered them in 2018 or yeah, 2018, I think it was the no code landscape looked a lot different than it does today. There are a lot of competitors that, you know, Bubble was. They were the innovators in this space, I would say. I think they started in like 2011 and when they were building their product, there just wasn't. There weren't no code tools. The word no code didn't even exist. Now there are tons of players in this space that have built their tech stacks on a lot of libraries that are standard for web development. Now, outside of the no code movement, that didn't exist I think when Bubble started building their own. So a lot of these new companies just have the advantage of having a better tech stack, I would imagine, than Bubble does behind the scenes and have the advantage of seeing what Bubble did and iterating on it to build their own solutions to this problem. But I also think too that if I had to bet, I would say that AI is going to solve no code better than any of these other existing companies will. And what I mean by that is that like you already see people who don't know how to code getting Chat GPT to write code for them and kind of piecing things together. And I think probably the winner in this space is going to just be using, using AI to help people build applications. Whether that's a company that comes in and just like does it in a totally innovative way or whether it's just like open AI people talking to Chat GPT, I don't know. But the AI landscape has certainly, I think, changed things for the no code space. I think, I think it's very different.

All right, well, it's always a pleasure, my friend, always pleasure. I think people will enjoy hearing, hearing your thoughts and I appreciate you sharing everything about the no code space. And until next time.

Until next time. Thanks for, thanks for the interview.

You got it. All right.