AI + Human Ingenuity: The Future of App Entrepreneurship – ratio.dev

I think that you're going to be taking the lead in this discussion. Big hit. Because part of what I wanted to talk about today is just the overall evolution of what building applications and building software and you know, building businesses in general has, has looked like over the past 30 to 40 years. And I think you're going to have more meat to add onto the discussion than I have.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's one of the benefits of being old.

Yeah. So we're obviously looking at a new era. Not just us, but the entire world. It's the AI era. Where would you say that? We're just starting to get our feet wet.

Yeah. AI is just getting off the ground really, to be honest. But this is just another cycle. Okay. If you're going to ask me to be old today, I'm going to say I've been through all, all of the cycles.

What was the first one?

The first one that I saw was the age of the first personal computers. So the Apple II in high school. So I mean that's how old I really am.

How did you feel like when you first got to witness the first computer?

Oh, that's a great question. I remember so, and I'm really dated here. I remember going with my dad to, to. He had a, he had a computer science degree and he would bring home this terminal that had a roll of paper on it and it would connect to the mainframe on the university. And I could play adventure and it was a text based game where you would like. It would say you are standing in front of a wall and there are green sparklies around you and all of this is happening on paper and it's printing it out on paper. You're reading the paper and you're asking kind of like a fax, but you could type back to the. So you were, you were interacting with the computer but the computer didn't have a screen, it was just printed out on paper. On paper. And it was this roll of paper and I remember being told that I had to be careful not to use up all the paper.

That is so weird. I've never seen that or heard of that.

Oh, I even remember when my dad would bring home programs on punch cards. Punch cards, which were these paper cards that had holes in them. And the program was like a box of 200 or 500 cards that had to be punched. Holes in the right place. Really old stuff.

Was that the biggest cycle you've been through before AI?

No, no.

I mean probably the Internet revolution was bigger.

So the. Yeah, I Was going to say the Internet was, was definitely a really big one. But don't discard the just the ide.

Computers becoming ubiquitous. Having a computer in your house. I mean, when I went to college I had my first computer that had two floppy disks, no hard drive.

How'd you live like that?

Hey, I was proud.

You were proud?

Yeah, I could do awesome stuff.

So let's dive a little bit deeper into building businesses and companies. So what would you say is the real challenge of building a business today before we start tapping into building businesses with AI, which we're going to get to just the overall idea of, hey, I'm going to start a business. What is the main challenge or the main challenges that someone trying to do this is going to face in today's day and age?

That's a great question. I think that maybe the biggest challenge that especially newbie entrepreneurs don't realize is that it's hard. There's a lot of work to be done. You have to learn a lot of skills that they don't teach you anywhere else, such as cash flow management, such as going to the bank and being friends with the branch manager so that he will be nice to you in the future, such as learning to sell to your customers and learning to keep your employees from, you know, being a pain in the ass. I mean, there are a lot of real world skills that an entrepreneur has to learn and there's no way around it, you just have to learn them. And that's part of probably why a lot of businesses fail.

And that applies to both software and non software related.

Oh yeah, that applies to any business, even if you just want to open a pizza shop.

So, you know, we obviously specialize in building applications, more specifically bubble applications. But is building an app the big chunk of getting the job done?

It is a big chunk, but it isn't the big chunk.

What is the big chunk?

Well, there isn't one big chunk. Okay. So your product is always really important. Okay. So if your product is the app, obviously that's important, but it's probably never more than 30 or 40% of the overall things that you need to have. So you need to have a marketing strategy, you need to have a strategy for attracting team members that actually help you get to the, to where you need to be. You need to have business skills, you need to be able to keep the lights on, you need to be able to not go broke before you actually succeed. So there are a lot of holistic business skills that are really important. And one of, I think the really big benefits of what we. We do is that by using Bubble and using tools like Relevance and other no code tools, you can keep that product part of your overall budget in line. You don't have to. You can still have room for all the other stuff that you need to get done. Whereas if you're 90% into the product, that means you've only got 10% left for everything else that has to get done.

So you've said that the product is obviously important, but it only accounts for maybe like 30 or 40% of this big pie of, you know, getting the job done. What makes up the other 60%? Marketing.

Marketing. Building a community.

What comes first? Product or marketing?

No, they come together. They're both necessary.

Can you be successful with a shitty product and a good marketing campaign?

Well, Microsoft did it for an awfully long time.

Can you be successful with a. Actually, yeah. Can you be successful with a great product but a terrible marketing campaign?

Yes, you can. It's possible. It's hard.

Do you think it's harder?

I think they're both really essential. You need to have a good product. It doesn't have to be a perfect product. It needs to solve a problem. But then you have to have a community. You have to have an audience. You have to have somebody that wants it, and you have to be. And it's not just that they have to exist, because there probably is somebody out there that exists that wants what you're building, but you have to be able to find them.

I sat down with a billionaire once who told me that people are going to come for the product, but they're going to stay for the community. You think that's true?

I think that they come for both. Because if you're not building the community as you're building the product, you're behind the game. So I don't think it's.

Nay. I dare criticize something that a billionaire might have said, although if he builds electric cars, I'd have a lot of criticism. But having said that.

They'Re both really important.

All right, let's transition into how this actually relates to AI tools and some of the work that we actually do.

Sure.

So.

What are the building blocks to building an AI product today without hiring maybe like 10 people, 10 different developers?

Well, I'll tell you what it isn't. It isn't just going to one of these flashy new AI sites and filling out a prompt and blinking your eyes three times and turning around in circles four times, and then bling. Magically it appears in your hands. And you have a working, functional, production ready product. That's what it isn't.

You know what's funny is that we actually went through this like the other day because someone recommended that I check out Lovable. And so I was able to just, with a very simple prompt, tell Lovable to give me a really slick, minimalistic looking homepage for. I can't remember what prompt I gave it. Like, you know, just a regular homepage for, for a blog or something. And it did a really slick job. Like it even included parallax, effects, animation, stuff like that. But the moment I gave it a second prompt, it got almost everything wrong. And I realized that okay, if I want, if I were to fix this, I can't just ask it to fix it by itself. Like I need to actually go inside the code and do a lot of the fixing myself. Yeah. And that completely illuminated me in terms of okay, this is clearly still not for non technical users. Like you need to be a goddamn computer scientist if you want to. Yes, it might help computer scientists speed up the process of building applications on websites and stuff like that. But if you're a non technical founder man, you're in for.

Yeah, I think that's why the recent bubble launch of their new AI strategy in there and when they presented just, just a few days ago, their, their vision for how to incorporate AI into building bubble applications is so cool because it's not only fast and we're going to be doing, I'm going to be doing a, an actual walkthrough of having done this in, in the next, in the next week or so I'll be putting out a video about this. But it doesn't just generate the future is, it's going to help you. You need dummy records in your database. You're just going to be able to say, hey, fill this table up with some dummy records or you want to add a new feature and it's going to look at the structure of your application and add it in. And the cool thing is that any founder can at least understand what's what what's in their bubble application.

It's easier to understand bubble than it is to understand Python.

Yes, yes.

Yeah. So I think the conclusion that we can draw from this is that the tech plumbing is definitely easier in bubble.

It's non existent. They do it for you.

Well, right. If you know bubble.

Oh, of course. Yeah.

So let's, let's. I really like to be, to be as transparent as we possibly can, but there's still a learning curve to using Bubble.

Oh far, yeah. And no code is not no work.

We keep saying this. No code is not no work.

I try to put that into every video because it's so important that people understand it.

So you've sort of touched on this idea of being able to use AI within bubble and still not having to be like a full on computer scientist to be able to use bubble. So do you have any examples of instances in which we have personally done this that you can share with people?

Well, I just mentioned that I'm going to be setting out, putting out a video about it. So I'm going to just let people hold on the edge of their seats and wait for it.

But yeah, so there's this concept called the prompting black hole problem that you often talk to me about.

Yeah. And you personally experienced it just with your little lovable experience. And by the way, I have to say that when you started, I was excited on Slack. You were excited. I was like, oh man, look at what I've done. And boom, boom. And there were, there were emojis flying and it was, it was. And I sat in my. And I wasn't with you physically. I was in my office and I started laughing and I said, I put my watch, I looked at my watch and I said, let's see how long it takes. And it was literally 15 minutes.

It was like 20 minutes.

20 minutes. And that is the black hole. Is that because I happen to know that you don't know the code.

When it screws up. And it has to screw up because.

Even experienced coders screw up. And these aren't experienced coders, these are AI models. Well, when it screws up, you have to somehow illuminate it on how to fix the problem. But you can't just say fix the problem because it'll say, oh, I will gladly fix the problem. And it will do so. And it will fix that problem and create four or five or six new ones. And you can just kind of go back and forth like this until you have a collection of 558 new problems. And that is falling into the black hole of AI coding. In my opinion today, maybe it will be much better six months down the road, a year down the road, two years down the road, I don't know. But as a business person, even if it's really good, do I really want to bet my future on something I can't understand?

It's scary, right?

You're putting your eggs in a basket that you don't know if it's got holes in the bottom Right. And if it does well, the eggs in the basket fall on your feet.

So how does bubble fix this?

Well, bubble, I don't think bubble fixes this. Bubble makes it a lot easier to not have these problems. Now, you're going to still have bugs in your Bubble application, especially if you're new and you're going to do things wrong and you're going to make things slow, and you're going to get a gazillion plugins in your application that are bogging things down and aren't producing what you really want. And you're probably at times going to get frustrated because, like we mentioned, there's a learning curve. But the difference is, is that you're getting frustrated over something that with a, you know, a reasonable amount of dedication and even starting from scratch in a. In two, three months, you're going to be decent. Okay. You know, you're going to, you're going to get a lot better and you're not going to need a university degree and you're going to be able to produce much quicker.

And I think that one of the key things that is worth noting here is that, man, if I had continued down the rabbit hole of using Lovable without actually knowing what the heck I was doing at one point, I would have had to start from scratch all over again. Just building my, Building my app, because I've built a Frankenstein application that I don't really know what, what it's doing right. And I'm gonna, at one point I'm just gonna be like, okay, I'm gonna start from scratch. And this time I'm going to try and figure out where it went wrong or what issues is created. But since I don't really know what it's doing, it's kind of hard. With Bubble, if something goes wrong, there's not really a need for me to start from scratch. I mean, the interface allows me to really get a better understanding of how the architecture of the app has been set up.

And let's face it, I mean, Bubble is a solid platform. It's mature, it's been evolving, it's getting better.

It's got an amazing team of people behind it. It's the number one no code platform in the world. So, I mean, those are a lot of real tangible benefits that, you know, hey, these other platforms just don't have yet.

Do you want to touch on maybe like, some more very technical things that Bubble really does very well? Workflows, API connector.

Yeah, it's mobile. Responsiveness is.

Really powerful. I mean, it's it's easy. The fact that you can now build a single application that has native iPhone, Android, Apple apps that communicate with the same backend as your web application, man, that is powerful stuff. I mean this isn't, you know, this.

Isn'T.

Cheesy five minute, you know, mvp. This is a on ramp to a successful business, you know, in the future.

So is there an example that we can give people watching at home of a business.

That we've built that has gone from small MVP to full operational business?

Well, I mean, almost always we mentioned Zircle. So I mean, I think that is a, a really cool example of a, of a, an app. IT is a web3 blogging platform that started.

In bare minimums really and as a hopeful proof of concept and it is now probably, I would say one of the world's most innovative web3 blogging platforms.

Do you know what I kind of just thinking about this life, but one thing that we should probably do one day is talk about our appsumo launch because we almost always bring up circles. But the one that I actually love the most is option track because it's a product that we actually built for ourselves and we use it every freaking day.

Yeah, we could have done better on the appsumo launch.

I want to talk about what went right, what went wrong, but I'm sure that there's many bubblers out there that want to get a better understanding of, okay, I've built a bubble application. How do I design the architecture to allow for an appsumo launch? Because we've done it, we've done the work and if you need help, reach out to us, we'll help you. But I think it could lead to a fun discussion because let's face it, I think we slacked or we dropped a little bit. We dropped the ball a little bit on the appsumo.

We did.

We were busy. But still, I think it was still a fun experience.

It was. And it actually is a good Apple and it's a great app and we've made it a lot better recently, so we're still improving it.

So if you'd like to trade Options, go to OptionTrack IO. It's fully 100% built with Bubble. We use it every day to keep track of our option trades. And yeah, it's just one that I think we could do a case study on one day.

By the way, that was a shameless pug.

Anyways, I want to see, I want to talk about the vision of how you think people. Well, people like Founders are going to be building in five years. Is it just going to be. I mean, you've already sort of implied that it could just be AI building. But what do you truly believe is going to happen in five years? How do you see Tony building his app in five years? This is going to be in Bubble, or is it going to be somewhere else?

Gosh, you know, you. You want me to bring out a crystal ball here?

You're pretty good with crystal ball.

I. Well, you know, sometimes when it's not politics, you're pretty.

Let's not go there.

I don't know if Bubble is going to be the place to be in five years from now. It would be presumptuous of me to be able to put myself out there and say that definitely it will be. My gut instinct is that Bubble is getting better and it has more than five years of road ahead of it. So I think that it's going to be a really powerful platform, but there may be something that somebody comes out with that is even better and disrupts the entire marketplace. I don't know.

It's really hard to.

Predict, but I think that the real future is going to be with the platform that can bring more pieces of the puzzle together. Okay. Bubble right now is without a doubt the world's best. No code development or let's change the name because they just recently changed it Visual development platform. And I think that's a great new name, by the way. But that's what it is. Now, if Bubble were to also bring me users and were to bring me marketing skills and were to bring me business building skills and. And help me with all of that part of the puzzle, then wouldn't that be just nifty? Wouldn't that be something that a founder would just be thrilled to have? Because, let's face it, the marketing landscape is just as chaotic and confusing as the tech landscape. There's no doubt about it. It may overlap and it gets really complicated. You know, SEO. Well, we just launched serpy, and just because there is a real difficulty with. With SEO, you know, bringing in AI tools and incorporating them into your Bubble application. Well, I wrote a book about that and that you can do now. But what about all the other pieces? If they could be a more cohesive structure so that a founder could come in and say, I have this idea, I have this problem that's in the market, and I want to build a solution that not only solves the problem, but I want you to help me make sure I can get to the people that have the problem and help me solve that problem for them. Man, where do I sign up?

Because at that point, you're not just building an application, you're helping someone launch a business.

That's right. And that, in the end, is the real mission of ratio.dev.

It is. How does that tie into the idea of someone that wants to start building something today?

You just shared your vision of what you think is going to happen. Or what would you like to see things moving? Or how would you like to see things moving forward in the next five years? But if you're a new entrepreneur getting started today.

Okay, so what I would say is.

Concentrate on the problem that you want to solve. Really think through how you're going to get your message across.

Then pick up the phone or go to ratio.dev and give us a call. Because you're gonna get it wrong if you just start building yourself in bubble, probably. And not because you're not smart enough, not because it's too difficult. It's just because you don't know how to do it yet. You could start off building and then you'll probably get to a point where you'll give us a call.

Because that's. That's our bread and butter. I mean, people do this all the time, but because they realize that there's a lot of stuff they need to do. And I think we'll leave it there because that almost leads into next week's video, which is going to be all about exactly that.

Well, once again, I have to thank you for being able to show up one more week.

I just love this. This is so much fun.

I'm going to have you.

I have to say, I'm just so proud of being able to be here with my. With my boy.

I'm just a doting dad now. I.

Well, I think that we're at least gonna do a hundred of them.

At least.

At least.

Yeah.

I mean, you still have like 10, 15, 20 years more left before you retire, so.

You'Re not that old.

I'm not that old.

Anyways, thank you. And I'll catch you next week.

See you then.