What Is the Easiest Way to Build an App Without a Developer? Watch It Done With AI

Have you ever had a genius idea for an app or for a tool that you just know is a million-dollar idea, but you don't know how to write a line of code? Today I'm going to show you how to build an app from scratch using a couple of AI tools that won't cost you more than $25 to $50 a month in total and can help you to create your app that you could commercialize and sell or simply use to make your business run more efficiently. I've been using this to create everything from online calculators for lead magnets all the way through to a custom AI-powered CRM that we hope to be launching soon for our customers at our digital marketing agency, Underdog Digital. First, let's take a look at the tools that we're going to use here today. So we're going to start with old faithful, ChatGPT. And that's crazy to call it old faithful after such a short period of time it's been on the market, but it's how we're going to get the project started. Started. Then we're going to use a tool called Replit. You've probably heard the term vibe coding lately. This is a vibe coding tool. This is a no-code builder where I can simply use a chat interface and build any app I want. Now I will give the disclaimer, it's not 100% there yet, but it is making progress every single time I log in. This company is growing faster than you can imagine. Multi-billion dollar valuation, continue to raise money, continue to be the leader in the vibe coding/no-code platform tools. I'm going to show you exactly why here in just a moment. And then we'll talk about Zapier and some other tools and how they can play nice as we start to get in here. Now, I'm going to tell you, I'm recording this live, and so anything could go wrong, anything could go well. Replit bugs out all the time. Things could go wild. But I'm going to go in here. I'm going to show you exactly what I've been doing with these tools and help you to build that fun new app for you or your company. Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now, here's your host, Matt Vadie. Let's go! Let's go ahead and dive right in. I'm going to share my screen. All right. So I want to give a special shout out to Matt from the payroll department, Matthew Gomez. Thank you for answering my question out on LinkedIn. I put it out there. I asked, what is an idea in the payroll industry for an app that your company could use to make your processes more efficient, more effective? Matthew answered with, how about an app to help clients submit their new client docs via their phone? They could take a pic of the document with their phone. The app creates a PDF of the picture and then uploads it to our CRM or PandaDoc, et cetera. This is an awesome use case that a lot of us could use. Maybe our CRM doesn't have this feature functionality. Maybe we just want something standalone. So I'm going to go ahead and try to build this in real time while we talk here today. So let's see what I would do first. So I went ahead and got started on this before opening up the filming. I put a prompt into ChatGPT. I want to create an app in Replit that does the following for payroll companies. Help me develop the prompt. So this is an important thing. Replit is a prompt-based coding tool. So what I'm trying to do in ChatGPT right here is develop the prompt that will be most efficient and effective for Replit to build this application. And so I've put a prompt into ChatGPT, and now there are other tools out here you can use to improve and refine your prompts. We're not going to talk about that today, prompt engineering is a big thing. Ton of awesome ways you can learn more about how to be better at that. So I put Matthew's comment directly in here. Got back the first response. I had another question for it. I said, hey, this is great, but let's add the ability for the payroll company to create lists based on the type of client, like a templated list. So for example, maybe you have a list of documents you need for a payroll client with less than 15 employees. Maybe you have a different list if they have more than that. Maybe you have a different list if they're ASO, what have you. So went ahead and made that update, got back the logic, and all right, give me the full prompt, no other text. So what I'm going to do here is just get that prompt, and I'm going to show y'all one other tool while we're doing this. So I love using these AI tools. One that is really, really neat is called Whisperflow, W-I-S-P-E-R-F-L-O-W. And it would be really effective for something like I was just doing there, and that it allows me to dictate into any field where my mouse is. So again, Whisperflow, W-I-S-P-R. Now, if I've got my cursor in this mouse or in this field, I click here to start dictating. I can speak directly into this. It's going to type all of this out for me. It's going to average typing 150 words per minute because speaking is a lot faster. Than typing, and that way it's going to allow me to type at 2 to 3x the normal time I type by simply dictating into a field. And it's even really cool because you'll see it starts to format it. It adds grammatical components, you know, commas, et cetera. And it even will put in bullets if necessary. So I've loved this tool. It's saving me a lot of time now that I'm getting more into it. Just quick, we'll show it here. So you'll see. I jumped in halfway. All right, so here's the prompt for Replit. So I've got my prompt for Replit. Again, Replit is a tool that costs $25 per month. Now I'm building a lot of apps in Replit. I'm building personal apps. I'm building an app that's helping me to organize baseball practices in my baseball team. I'm building an app that is, again, replacing our CRM in terms of pipeline management. One of the things I really don't like about the CRM we run is that it doesn't show me my sales versus annual quota on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, annualized basis in a way that's simple in how I am used to viewing it. So I simply built it. Now I've got an awesome sales dashboard that I can continue to refine any time I want and go ahead and update it on the fly. So let's put this into Replit and see what it comes back with. It's going to start out, it's going to read what we have. And it's going to create an initial plan. And one of the coolest things I like about when it's creating this initial plan is that it's even gonna come up with suggestions and ideas that might improve the app that we put in here. So I highly suggest taking that first step that I did, and that's creating a better prompt in ChatGPT or Claude. If you're not familiar with Claude, it's an amazing tool. I use both Claude and ChatGPT every single day. Sometimes I kind of pit them against one another and I will see what their responses look like, see which one I favor. I almost always favor Claude for anything copywriting related. Much better, much cleaner, much more sort of creative feel and vibe about the copy that comes out of it. Whereas ChatGPT seems to have a much higher logical thinking, if you will, in terms of when I'm trying to work through strategic problems, come up with plans, come up with more complicated projects. I far prefer their projects component versus Claude's projects component.. But as you can see, while I'm sitting here talking, burning eggs, as I like to say, it is building an app in real time and getting started here for us. So it said, all right, initial version, mobile responsive client onboarding platform for payroll companies with document upload, PDF conversion, and admin template management. So it's given me a feature list. AJ can work on these, ready to build, approve the plan when you're ready. I'm going to go ahead and approve the plan. And this is where we're gonna watch the magic happen, y'all. I mean, this is crazy. In real time, we're gonna see the code start coming together. You already see the frontend surface here on the screen. I mean, this is where we're headed. And so while this is not going to create a perfect application during the 20, 30 minutes that we spend on this YouTube video, it is going to get it started. And what I do with these apps, the ones that I'm working on, because you're gonna hit a whole bunch of roadblocks, so, The Replit app is going to do a few things consistently. One of them is it's going to make the same error over and over and over again. So I'll probably get an example here shortly in that once this app is up and ready, quote unquote, I'm gonna click on a button and something's not gonna work, or it's gonna bring me to a 404 screen. And that's fine. But you have to have some patience because sometimes you'll say, hey, it brought me to a 404 screen here. Let's fix this error. It will go through, write some code, do some updates, whatever, and then it'll come back and say, hey, yeah, I fixed that error. And you go back in, it didn't fix the error. And sometimes you go through 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times. A couple of things you can do to minimize that is you can right-click on the screen when you open it up, and I'll, I'll show you here in just a moment, and inspect the console, take a screenshot of the console and actually feed it back into Replit. And so it can see the errors that are coming up on the screen. And you can also simply just start a new chat sometimes is a really good way. When the chats start to get bogged down, Replit will slow down and stop to make as good a progress as it has thus far. And so as you can see, we're— it's working away here right now. It's starting to put the app together. It's starting to work through some of it. It's already created a visual piece here. And one of the things that I've really enjoyed about building apps on this again is like the ability to think in terms of everything we have here at the business now. I am now thinking in terms of, can we build a tool or is there something that we need that already exists in the market that can solve this problem? Right? So we have, you know, we're following sort of the same blueprint as any company now. You're hearing a lot of the biggest companies out there, the Spotifys of the world, the Facebooks, whomever, before they're posting any jobs, They're saying, hey, what can AI do from this job description? And there's a lot more AI can do from that job description than you probably want to believe. And now don't get me wrong, there are some things that humans, only humans can do. But I think if you pop your job description that you're about to hire for into ChatGPT and said simply, you are an AI consultant, help me to look at this job description and identify things here that could be done by AI tools or outsourced or automated in some other way. And help me put together some potential plans for automating these steps of the process. So maybe I don't have to hire for this role, or I don't have to hire for the entire role. And you're going to find a ton of opportunities to simply automate. And that's been a big thing for me is that I've taken every time we've had someone leave, we've taken a piece of their job, at least 10 hours, and either outsourced it, automated it, or found a different way to handle that process. Process. And I think that's part of refining things over time. As you continue to grow as a business, as you continue to evolve as a leader in your company, you're going to find ways to make things more streamlined, more blueprinted, more templated for the next batch of people who comes on board. So as you can see here, Replit continues to make progress on this. It's not a quick and seamless thing in terms of— it's not a 30-second thing, but you got to remember, this is about to spit out a prototype of an enterprise application in a few minutes. And let's just think about the majesty of this as human beings. I don't know about if you're— how old you are if you're listening to this right now. I mean, I'm 45 years old. When I was a kid, our, you know, we had TVs that were black and white first, then they were these massive console TVs that you'd have to go over. I often joke I was the remote control for our television. I would have to walk across the room when I was 5 years old, turn this huge knob on the front that went thunk, thunk, thunk. Comment below if you know that sound. Comment below on this YouTube video if you know that thunk sound. And I got my 40+ people out there with me. And so, you know, for me now as a, you know, still relatively young man to be able to build a piece of software with a simple prompt, something that I can just type into a text box and this application is going to build. This is showing you the power of where AI already is and where it's going. Like I said, if you follow Replit, they're one of the most unique companies, and I, I publicly criticize Replit a good bit because this app can burn a lot of your time if you're not careful, in that again, it makes the same errors over and over again. But if I'm valuing that time versus learning to code something that— obviously learning to code right now, while important in understanding how to fix what are the mechanics, what's under the hood— is not necessary for everyone going forward in terms of that code already exists. If we can find ways to verbally and/or with text manipulate and put code in place, then the need for coders will be lessened. It does not mean the need will not exist. We will always need people who can code, or at least for the foreseeable future, not always. But right now we can quickly see how we're gonna be able to expand our development teams. I talk to founders in the payroll, HR, and accounting industry every single day. They all tell me they need more of one thing. It's not more money, it's not more AI tools, it's more time. How do I get more time? Well, I hired a virtual assistant through OutsourceScale.com that helps me manage my inbox, manage my calendar, handles administrative tasks for me, helps support my marketing efforts, and much, much more. The cool thing about OutsourceScale is they actually train the virtual assistants on the latest and greatest AI tools to make sure that they can't only do that administrative work for you that you need to get off your plate, but they're doing it in the most efficient and effective ways possible. I've been so happy with my assistant from Outsource Scale that I've actually added multiple other teammates to our other companies through them. Their pricing starts at only $7.99 a month, and they make it super easy to get a new teammate onboarded and part of your team very quickly. Check them out today at outsourcesscale.com. You know, one of the biggest use cases that Replit is seeing, as I follow their CEO, I listen to him every single day, or read his stuff every single day because they're pushing so many product updates, is that they're seeing a lot of teams. So Microsoft, as an example, I believe just launched Replit inside their company for every employee, if I'm not mistaken. I think it's something along those lines. But what they're seeing is less in terms of, hey, this saved our development team a bunch of time, and more in terms of other people inside the organization are able to sort of quickly pilot ideas, quickly spin up prototypes of like, hey, what if we did this? And how would it look if we did it this way? And so it's allowing some unique creativity on how to solve problems. And I think that's how we all want to look at this, is to say, Can I solve a problem in a unique way? Now here's the other side of this equation. Many of you, I'm recording this on July 30th, 2025. There was recently a quote unquote data breach in an app called The Tea, which has been making its rounds. And it is rumored that this app was vibe coded, which is what we're doing here. Again, if you've heard that term vibe coding, that is what we're doing here. We're going to just simply prompt back and forth what, you know, I didn't come up with a massive plan when we built our just kind of put this in perspective and I'll come back to the tea thing here in a moment, but when we build the app at our company, so we have a payroll HR timekeeping application that we've developed over the last 6, 7 years now, you know, everything we do, we have to, you know, wireframe it. Then we create some designs in Figma. Then we prototype those designs. We click through different things. Then we have to work, you know, look at it on the backend. How is this going to play nice with other feature functionality inside the system? It's a very well thought out, well detailed process that then moves into a development sprint. And so in this world, I'm simply going to go, oh, you know what? I really don't like the way this dashboard looks. Can we move this over here and that over there? And oh, can we add a new feature here? And it's gonna make those updates, which is really cool. But you'll also start to see what happens in real life, which is that when I just say, hey, I want to change, I'll give you an example. We were making an app for our customers at Underdog Digital, which is a tool where they can submit their task requests when they need a marketing piece of work done. So right now we use Trello. Customer goes in, says, hey, I need some social graphics for an upcoming campaign we're doing about local payroll services. And they submit that task request. Our team grabs it from the Trello board and starts to work on it. But the problem is our team has to create a separate Trello board because we don't want you as the client to see our communication back and forth, everything that's occurring to get, you know, how the sausage is made. So we basically have redundancy of everything we do. Well, I've started building out a Trello replacement that not only has those card features where the customer can log in, submit a task request, it creates a card, our team works on it, but now we can hide the comments that we're making back and forth so the customer doesn't see them. And we can do a lot more things that are native to our workflows instead of using Trello, which is clearly not built for this use case. As a matter of fact, I even added an AI chat feature where the user can log in and say, hey, I need a PDF. And then the chat's going to say, what do you mean? What's the PDF for? Is there an event coming up? What's the intent of it? It's going to chat and walk you through putting in the appropriate amount of detail as the customer to make sure you get the right product back from the marketing agency on the other side. Now, what I've run into, I've been working on it for about 2 months. I'll work on it for maybe 2 or 3 hours a week. So nothing super intense. But somewhere along the line, the hierarchy of clients to projects to tasks got sideways. We don't actually track projects per se in our system. However, when I initially put this prompt in, it had mentioned something about projects. We keep them in their own individual task cards just from a cleanliness perspective in terms of the client interface. But so it had added this projects layers on top of tasks when I simply, you know, In my head as a non-developer, I said, hey, let's remove this projects layer. But there were so many dependencies on the projects layer that it started breaking a ton of other things. So I go in and I say, hey, let's remove the projects layer. It does remove the projects layer, but then what happens? A whole bunch of other things break because they were dependent on the projects layer. And in a real quote unquote coding environment, my product manager would've said, No, it's not that simple, Matt. We can't just remove projects because this and this and this are dependent on it. We're gonna have to build out a plan to make sure nothing breaks. While Replit will simply take your command and do it, it doesn't care what else breaks and it's not really looking at it as well as you'd hope. All right, so let's turn back over here to the screen. And if you're listening to this on Spotify, well, first of all, good for you that you listened this long to something where I'm talking a lot about sharing my screen. I haven't been sharing my screen a ton, so you're not missing a ton, but you need to be over here on YouTube where I'm showing everybody exactly how this works with a screen share. And we're going to look right now at what is happening here in real time. So I've got the response back from Replit. Looks like it's done. I've built a mobile responsive client onboarding platform for payroll companies with document upload, PDF conversion, and admin template management. The app concludes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The app is now running. Please test the onboarding flow by selecting a service type, PEO, payroll, HR benefits, choosing employee count, uploading documents. Documents. Okay, so we're going to go Payroll Services, 6 to 25 employees, start document upload. No matching template found for your selections. Please contact support. Okay, so one thing that I have not done is added any templates. So let's try that again and then I'll put that error in and let it know. And so we'll work through this and I, I do just want to get to a point where I can show a little bit of functionality just to show the power of this, and then we'll talk about some other tools that play nice here. But yeah, there's a lot of this back and forth, as I mentioned, and that's part of the process. And so it does take some patience. I think that's the thing that I've had to kind of remind myself is that what requires more patience, learning how to code over the next several years, or figuring out the best way to work with tools like this so that I can be more efficient. Because one of the kind of steps forward I took over the last couple of weeks is that understanding of, oh, it needs the errors and it can read the screenshot. Well, great. Well, I'm going to go to the console every time. And just as an example, I'll show you right now while it's working on this on another screen. So if I right-click here on any page, click Inspect, and then click Console, if there was an error loading that page or anything failed to work, it's going to show up here. So I'll screenshot this console area. And send it in. So again, I'm right-click, inspect, and then click on console. And while we're here, one of the things that you'll find, one of the, one of the other challenges. So Matthew and his original request requested that it integrate with other tools like PandaDoc or maybe your CRM. Sometimes it's going to have direct integrations. So Replit has, let's see, what, what is the current list of Replit integrations? Let's ask that and I'll do it right inside the Whisper Flow so we can see that again. So you'll notice once I see in here, what is the current list of active Replit integrations? And of course I was talking over it when I first started it. So I've got a little bit more text in there and what we want. So for example, things like Mailgun are in there. Like we use Mailgun for our app already, but Mailgun does SMS and phone calling. And so we use Mailgun, or excuse me, Mailgun is for email and SMS, I believe. But so they have, they have this OpenAI integration. So I can add, like I was describing in the marketing project management tool, I added the AI-powered chat window, which I'm using the OpenAI integration for that. I am also using things like the, I do have a Zapier integration to a couple because I want them to trip workflows. And sorry, I'm going back now to finish up the story I forgot from earlier. I'm all over the place this morning. I haven't even had that much coffee, y'all. Well, I mean, look, I did have one pre-workout, which was just, you know, got my eyes buzzing for a minute. The T app. The T app recently had a quote unquote data breach. Well, you know, somebody put it to me, it would be like, you know, their, their data breach was the equivalent of you walking into a bank and all the money is laying out on the floor and you took some of the money off the floor. They had a public link available with users' information, including photos of their driver's licenses, photos of themselves. I think it was some sort of app for women to connect and come together. The gentleman who built it, vibecoded it, is what they are accusing him of, and did not do a very good job securing the database. And by, I mean, securing the database, I mean, there was literally a public link you could just click on and see all their user information. So it's not like nobody hacked it. It was just simply some bad form in terms of testing the system. So be very careful using anything outside of your organization or even inside of your organization without properly testing security, if especially we're going to do something like this payroll onboard app, which is going to require a lot of sensitive information. So maybe if this were me and I was independently pushing this to the, you know, 99% finish line, maybe I would hire somebody from Upwork at the very end and say, hey, I need you to go through and inspect this code and look for security flaws and places that we could possibly run into issues. A tester at first, and then maybe somebody else after that. You will see here now we're back inside the app. I've successfully built and fixed the mobile responsive onboarding. Ba ba ba. How does user experience feel? You will see it has the ability to add a database to store user data. Now I have had issues with the databases in the past. I did once have the information get shared between accounts. So I logged into the CRM forecasting tool that we built and I was in as one company. And when I logged over to another company, I could see the other company's information. So again, a lot of testing, a lot of iteration before you bring anything live. And so this is awesome. Let's just take a look at this. I'm going to go back. I'm going to pull this out. So again, if I'm in a Replit now, I've got this agent over here, which is where we're going to chat. I've got the preview over here, and then I can pop it out and take a look at it. And now I've got this app. I can test it right here. I've got a payroll services, start document upload. They're going to be able to upload those documents and they're just going to walk right through that workflow, put their contact information in. And submit those documents. And now I can start to, hey, add in the Mailgun feature where it's going to email me all those PDFs when they're done, or maybe I have a Dropbox integration where it's going to put them all into a secure file afterwards. But as you can see, there is a ton you can do in here. And I hope that this was a valuable way for you to think about, hey, first of all, what is this vibe coding thing I'm hearing people talk about? Well, this is it. And what, what about that great idea you've had for the last couple of years, either for yourself or for your business, that are going to help you to be more efficient or create something commercial? Now you have the opportunity to create it. Let me know if this was helpful. And let me just tell you all, I'm really grateful. The podcast and the YouTube channel have been growing like crazy lately, and that's all because of you. I know you've been sharing it. I've been seeing people coming in and saying, you know, hey, so-and-so told me about it. So please keep sharing it. Send a link today to somebody on your team that you think might benefit from this, or somebody in your peer group that you talk to weekly, monthly, that you think, you know, maybe one of these topics came up recently. And I appreciate it so much. Have a blessed day. Thanks for coming by.