The Key Ingredients: Uncovering the Secrets of a Successful AI Product (feat. Louis Pereira)

Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP, and on this show I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible We've had incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildinpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. All right, so in this episode, I'm sitting down with Luis Pereira, the creator behind Audiopan, and I'm using Audiopan as we speak.

to document the agenda of this conversation. So first, we're going to get into how he came upon the idea, how he built this, you know, some metrics, milestones, how he has been building in public. Then we're going to get into his history as a maker, no-coder, as a builder. How many previous projects has he built and all that lessons. And then we're going to get into his perspectives and predictions on no-code and AI, which I'm sure he has a lot of. I'm also going to ask him about the way he balances his day job and this nightlife. You know, where he's from India and then he's building during the night on the internet and the joy that he gets from building in public and the joy that he evidently exhibits as a maker building a lot of products in no-code. I also want to get into the building in public basic tips that he has, some lessons he learned, some non-obvious observations he made along the way. And we're just going to have fun. That's the agenda. What do you think, Darius? You ready?

Yeah, let's go. I hope AudioPen picked it up clearly.

All right, so we'll test it out.

Yeah.

So this is a live demo of how AudioPen works, and we wanted to kick it off by literally just letting the tool do the talking. And so while this does the transcribing and summarizing, we're gonna do a quick pulse check. How are you doing right now? How are you feeling, Louis? This is what— how many weeks has it been since you started AudioPen?

Since it launched, about 4 and a half weeks.

Yeah, this Sunday it will be 5 weeks as we speak.

Today's April 27th. Yeah, I'm doing good. It's been, it's, it's been extremely busy. I launched on, on March 26th as part of, of Half Day Build, which was like a 12-hour hackathon sort of thing.

That's right, that was your thing, right? You used to run these half— to run these half-day builds.

I do, I do them every 2 months at the moment, so the next one's in, in May on the— I think on the 14th.

But all right, look at this.

Yeah, not bad. Hopefully you did a good job.

Okay, so I'm gonna read this out quickly. Exploring AudioPen and no-code with Luis Pereira. Wow. In this episode, I sit down with Luis Pereira, the creator of AudioPen. As we speak, I'm using AudioPen to outline our conversation agenda. Firstly, we delve into how Lewis conceived the idea and built it while sharing metrics and milestones from his journey. Wow, it did everything. It captured all of it, summarized really well. The last paragraph is, lastly, expect insights on building in public, non-obvious observations, and just having fun throughout the conversation. What do you say, Lewis? Are we ready? And so this, the whole thing, it not only transcribed it, but it summarized it in the flair of Paul Graham, which is one of the presets that— Yeah. You have, and I chose that one because, you know,

you can even at the moment, you can even add your own custom prompts and save them to your library as well. In fact, I

just launched that this morning, and I saw what you had. Did you have Feynman? Richard Feynman? You have a few other presets, right?

Yeah, so depending on the kind of people that were using the product, I kind of built new presets. So I noticed that there were a bunch of academics using it because one particularly large academic account sort of shared it on Twitter. So that's why I added Feynman. There were a bunch of lawyers using it. I'm not sure how they found it, but it got pretty popular among the lawyer community. So I a preset called Ginsburg. And yeah, Paul Graham, just because I like the way he writes it and it's very universally understood.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes.

That was so legit. That's so awesome. So anyway, first of all, now let's do the formal, like, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here, Luis Pereira. Long time. This is— I mean, I've been a long time in the making. I think I've been wanting to have you on the show for a while. And watching the last 5, 6 weeks of you crushing it in public on Twitter and embodying all of the philosophy of building in public and just like, you know, being a great founder. I was like, okay, this is a great time. Got to pull him in. So thank you for being on the show.

Yeah, happy to be here. Quite excited as well.

So we go a long way, right? So everyone, anyone who knows you through Audiopen may find this interesting that it was not just an overnight success story. Like you just didn't wake up one day and like, all right, here's Audiopen, my creation to the world. You fall into the archetype that we all know is the real archetype of being a founder, which is you built a lot of products. mini products. And over the years, then finally, like, you know, this is one of your hits, as we were joking about earlier. Can you walk us through, you know, what that journey was like? When did you even begin, you know, taking building seriously? What was the inflection point that got you in?

Yeah, so I mean, I've always been interested in making stuff. I think I started my first company with a friend, like a formal company with a friend, back in 2015 in the real world, like in the non-tech world rather. Didn't do very well. It was a pretty rough experience.

Is it a boring business? Like, was it what they call like— No, so it was like a

Tech-enabled real-world business. Like, we were trying to build like real estate technology. Not, not as technical as that, but, but we were trying to basically build a platform for real estate agents and, and homes, etc. Sort of like Opendoor but for the rental market. Went pretty far, but it was just a very, very intense industry to try and disrupt. You know, very entrenched sort of participants that don't really want to move. Very high friction from all sides— regulation, even the agents involved. Sold off that company after a few years, not for much but for enough. Then moved back home. So I come from a business family, so Always had that in my DNA to kind of build stuff. But again, moved back home to the family business in like 2018, and that was again in the real world. So it was, you know, we— I still work there, that's my day job. But we—

Right. When you say home, you're in, in, uh—

I'm in Goa, Goa, India. So before that, I was— I went to college in Delhi, started a company in Delhi, worked there for a bit. Yeah, so I was there for about 8 years and I moved back here in 2018. But yeah, throughout I had only experimented with, you know, real sort of experiments in the real world. And while at it, I used to always experiment on the internet, just trying to build stuff there because it seemed like the friction barrier was a lot lower. You didn't need too much investment or permission to just get started. So I mean, because of that, I tried to teach myself how to code, and I failed a bunch of times. And then I started using no-code tools. This is again way back in like 2015-16, but the tools just weren't as good, you know. You couldn't, you couldn't really launch and earn stuff online. It was very hacky. That changed somewhere in like 2020, I think, when things started getting better. And I remember joining the Yondeck no-code fellowship, which is what where we first met, the one that you had hosted in, I think, 2021 it was.

Yeah.

I joined that purely because I was like, okay, let's get back into the space. It seems like things have grown and I wanted to get to the bleeding edge of wherever that technology had reached. And at that point, my goal was just to find the one tool that would be this bleeding edge and learn it. That was it. Don't make money, don't launch anything, just figure out how to learn this one tool, whatever it may be. So after doing some research, I figured it was Bubble at that time, and I think it probably still is. So yeah, that was my goal. I remember I joined ODNC and launched retrospectively Terrible product at like the demo day, but I learned from it.

What was the product again? Remind me.

It was called Builder Bio, so it was like a LinkedIn bio tool, but it was like very, very basic.

Dude, like that was terrible in retrospect, but at the time it was because there was an explosion of LinkedIn bio tools, and I remember using it myself, I think, right?

I feel like that. No, you you you used a second iteration of that like a few months later, I think. But this was like the first version.

Creator Link.

This was Creator Link. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one. The one I the one I built during ODNC was. was called BuilderBio. That was like a predecessor, which was terrible.

But that's how, like, it's always fascinating to me when, you know, like the— it's almost like it's like a curse. The first products have to really take that beating, you know, so that the next evolution can come. I remember, if you remember, I built something called the Writer's Compound, you know, before I joined On Deck. And I had like a grand total of 40 writers on there, you know, which is ridiculous now, which is a sign that maybe I shouldn't have built it. But at the time, I thought that was 40 words grand, you know, it was total amazing. And I spent 2 and a half months on that recruiting heavily writers. I think I brought you into, you know, in early 2020.

We had a conversation about this. I think this was— this planted the seed for another product I built later called Read Something Great.

Yeah, you did something great. Yeah. So, and it was terrible. Writers Compound was the worst thing that I— I mean, one of the worst things that I built, but it taught me so much about Bubble. And so, I mean, I learned sort of all of the nicks andacks about building in Bubble and so on because it's the first real big product that I built. What happened though is within a month, the traction wasn't there. I like lost interest. COVID hit, I lost my job, and suddenly I'm unemployed, fun-employed. I was like, okay, what the heck? I'm just gonna build something called Copper, which, you know, Copper. And I completely repurposed all of the backend and all of the Bubble, you know, infrastructure from Writers Compound into this new thing, like sign up, sign in, all the flows, reset password, everything. And so within a day I could go live because of that previous shit show, you know. So it's like, it's often— And Copper was the runaway hit. Like right away I knew that This is a great one, you know. But oftentimes it's funny how, um, everything you build, like, it adds up to something, even though it's hard to see in the moment.

Yeah, I mean, and there's no way to predict what will be good or bad. Like, that's one thing I've learned. Like, I've, I don't know, I've launched quite a few products in the last 2 years, rather. At least 10. I would say more than that, but at least 10. Like, most of which have, have not worked out. I think there are a total of maybe 4, 3 or 4 that might have worked as well as I wanted them to.

So there's 2 points, you know. about that, right? There's 2 lessons from— just 2 observations to make about what you just shared. One is it takes a lot of iterations and bad products and hits. I mean, like a lot of mishits to get to the hit, like a product that really works. The other thing is it's almost impossible to know which is which. So my question to you is, as the builder, like, do you know, like, how do you know when you're about to launch an idea or about to like execute or take an idea and turn it into, you know, a project? Like, what is your narrative in your head? Like, do you know, like, oh my God, this is gonna be the thing?

Or— No, I mean, to be very honest, I think that, like, the top 2 products I've built that, you know, that have been hit so far, like, one is Audiopen and 2 is Read Something Great.

Yeah.

And both of those were accidents. Um, like, neither of them were, like, ideas that I thought were, you know, oh man, this is going to be great. Like, Read Something Great was basically I wanted to build Product Hunt for writers. And after we had a conversation about, you know, building a marketplace being hard, I said, okay, let me just— instead of building Product Hunt, I'll just build, like, a I'll bootstrap supply, find a bunch of good articles and see if I can get demand. And if I get demand, I'll open up the supply side and build Product Hunt for writers. But I just happened to get so much demand that I was like, okay, I'm just not going to change this. This is great. That was an accident. Audiopen was a complete accident as well. I was basically just looking at all the AI hype online and being like, okay, man, I need to at least figure out how to use this. I don't want to build anything of value. I don't want to ask people for money. I want to figure out how to use OpenAI's APIs. My earlier approach would be launch a bunch of websites separately. I mean, I was tired of like buying domains and creating new Bubble plans and paying for all of them on a monthly basis. So I was like, okay, let me just repurpose all of this into my own website. So I build one personal website on Bubble and I build what I call on my website tiny tools. Right. But I just build like multiple small tools that live under the same domain. So I don't have to worry about, you know, starting from scratch, buying a domain or building a new Bubble plan or whatever it is. And so my goal that week was just let me build a few tools using AI and learn how it works, right? Just a few fun tools. So I built one which was a bot that kind of talked like Trump. I built a— I think it was a cocktail generator. I built a thing that would explain stuff to you like you were 5. Basically, you could tell it an age that you wanted it to treat you like and explain whatever it wanted. I built something that would let you learn via analogy. So you ask it a concept and it'll give you an analogy that explains that concept. AudioPen just happened to be another version of that. Like, it was just a tool that I wanted to learn how to use the Whisper API with, which is OpenAI's voice transcription API. And I was like, okay, I'll just build a tool that lets people talk and transcribes what they say. And then let's see if I can do something fun with the transcription. Why not just summarize it in a few words? So I did that and it was just launched with absolutely no expectation. It was just this tiny website with maybe 3 lines on the entire thing with like one box. And then people started messaging me and sharing it and like commenting, saying, oh man, this is amazing. I could use this for this and that. And I was like, oh, that's weird. like, what's going on here? Like, and it just so happened that Half Day Build was like a week away from this point, roughly, I think 10 days to a week away. And I didn't really have a very strong idea of what I wanted to do for Half Day Build. I mean, for listeners, context is like I host an event called Half Day Build where a bunch of builders get together and we kind of try to take ideas from scratch, like from an idea to revenue within 12 hours, whatever the idea may be. Yeah, so I didn't have an idea for that. I was flirting with another idea which was like Productized service, and then I said, yeah, remember

like copywriting or

something, right? Correct, exactly. So then I was like, hey, you know, I don't know if the productized service will work. Let me just launch that before half day build, and then launch audio pen on half day build, like rebuild audio pen from scratch as its own thing.

Was it always called audio pen?

Yeah, it was called. I didn't put any thought into it. It was just called audio pen on my website. It so happened that audiopen.ai was available when I went to buy it for half day build. Yeah, I mean, it's. Then I was like, okay, let's just launch it in 12 hours.

So when you first launched it after that half-day build or during the half-day build, I think that was the first time you probably put a revenue page, like a pricing page, like a lifetime deal, right?

Yeah, it was $19 then.

$19? Yeah. And was it instantaneous, like the feedback on like people buying it right away?

Yeah, so I mean, I think I did something that worked quite well, which like was again a sort of accident where I asked people to, like before I launched the thing publicly, I asked on Twitter just like folks who wanted to be like beta testers. And like there was already interest around this tool because people had seen it on my personal website as a tiny tool. And I had been like tweeting throughout the day for the day of Half Day Build. So kind of sharing progress, talking about, you know, where the things reached, what it looks like, what sort of features it has, etc., etc. So I had a bunch of people that were following along trying to see if I could get from idea to product to revenue. So when I asked for beta testers, like I just got a bunch and obviously the website at that point was like password protected and stuff. And while they were testing it, I was also, you know, adding the payment link, which was like a $19 payment for a lifetime deal. At that point. And yeah, a bunch of them bought it. Like, I didn't even have to ask. They were just beta testers and they just picked up the lifetime deal. And yeah, I shared that on Twitter and then like more people bought it after I removed the password and stuff. And yeah, it's been a, it's been a good ride so far. I mean, I've been pretty fortunate.

It's been a crazy ride, right? And so tell me where we are right now. So let's say that half-day bill was the first day you got the first revenue figure inside, like, you know, like first paid customer. And you were saying earlier before we started recording that you were at what, 450?

Yeah, 500, 560 something.

60 paid customers, dude.

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty crazy, man. Like, I've, I've earned a lot more in a month than I, I would normally earn.

Okay, if you're— I know you're open about that. Is it about $10K, $15K?

Yeah, yeah, close. I mean, a little higher, but yeah, not bad. Crazy, right? Yeah.

And, and I think it's important to, you know, it's important to appreciate that and cherish and relish that because both of us know we've been broke before with products. Like, I remember like building so many products that had $0. In fact, some of them actually cost me more money to build and put it out there than any revenue I So yeah,

of course. I mean, I think it's like people think that it's, it's like, you know, one-hit wonder. I mean, that's true, but like to get that one hit, you need to keep on swinging, right? Like I was just thinking about it the other day, like I had to shut down like 7 or 8 Bubble projects last, like a couple of months ago because I was like, man, I can't just keep paying $30 a month for all of these. Yeah, each of them when like no one's really using them, like what's the point?

So tell me about this Louis who joined my ODNC1. I think you were, yeah, you were in the first cohort. Tell me about this guy. 2021, January. I remember, like, literally, I feel like when we had that one-on-one first before you got into ODNC, you were at ODW, or you just did ODW. Yeah, yeah. Which is the Riders Cohort. And I knew you through, I think, Max, who's the guy who ran the Riders Cohort. And I was like, okay, let me talk to this guy, you know, this other Indian builder from Goa. Let's talk to him. And I felt like towards the end of that conversation, it was like I was— I really desperately wanted to get you into ODNC because I sensed that builder energy, the founder energy. I'm like, I don't— all I remember is, I don't know if you felt that way, but I was like, I was begging you to join. I was like, you gotta get in, man. Like, because to me, the first cohort sets the culture, sets the tone, you know. And also, it's not just the— it's the kind of people that I want to be surrounded with who are builders, like doers, you know, not just like opinions and talkers. And you had so much of that energy. And so tell me about this guy, that what would he think if he found out that 3 years into— 2 and a half years into this, He has a product with 560 customers.

I think he would be surprised that it took that long, to be honest, because at the start everything is like all rosy. You're like, oh man, I'm gonna just build products, you know, hit after hit after hit.

Okay, let me, let me also ask, go to indiehackers.com, see how many people there are bitching and whining about how they don't have one paying customer. How many people are there like, oh, I built something and nobody wants to buy it, or why is marketing so hard, or why is revenue so hard? And they're so like I feel there's so much— I'm not dissing thehackers.com, not knocking on them. I'm saying there's so much of envious energy if someone gets a hit instead of appreciation energy, you know, and saying like, well, this is possible, you know, so what it took 2 and a half years, right? Who's counting?

Yeah, for sure. I mean—

If some other guy in Bali did this in 3 weeks, does it mean that that was a better—

I think it's just the curse of how media works, right? Like if you have a win, it gets kind of blown out of proportion, but like the losses aren't really advertised. Like if you think of successful products, But they're— I mean, no matter how small, they still follow like a power law sort of distribution.

Yeah.

And the media just sort of picks up or whatever. The stuff that gets amplified on Twitter is just the point, or maybe not point, but like the top 5% that people kind of blow up. And everyone else feels like, oh man, why am I not there? But like all these people that have built anything of like whatever, that's grown more than they expected, most of the time they've built like 20 other things that just date. Right, like, and this is nothing. Like, the success that this product has, it's nothing. It's not even scratched the surface yet. Like, it could go 10x, it could go to zero, I have no idea. Um, right, but like, I'm grateful that I've got here because like I've basically been scraping the bottom for so long. The fun thing is, or like the interesting thing is, that to be able to get a product that, you know, is a success in at whatever sort of level, um, yeah, you have to be able to Keep scraping, you know, scraping away without getting bored. So, if you don't genuinely enjoy the process of building stuff, you have to then rely purely on luck to get a hit.

Yeah.

Which means you have to get it in like your first 3 swings, which is whatever, unlikely, but you could get lucky. But if you like the process of actually building, designing, whatever it may be— this doesn't apply just to building products, I mean, applies to most things in life— you just like, then it doesn't matter, right? Like, yeah, I mean, your bank account will suffer a bit, but you're still having a good time. I mean, as long as you're not going broke and kind of selling your house to keep doing this stuff, it's fine.

So I'll tell you a funny anecdote where 3 years ago, like, you know, I do journaling, right, every day. And I've been doing this for like, I think, 5, 6 years now. So every day I have like a little I'm grateful journal and like all this thing. Anyway, I remember 3 years ago, 2019-ish, before I joined On Deck or before I like, you know, anything happened, every day I would like scratch like almost to the end of the pen's ink. I would write, my intention is to become a SaaS founder and have 10 paying customers. My intention is to be a SaaS builder, 10 paying customers. And it was like in Atlanta, I would go to these meetups and I would hang out with a lot of wannabe aspiring entrepreneurs. And so many of them didn't have 10 paying customers. They've had other fancy things like business cards, logos, you know, like a fancy tagline. Some of them even had a pre-seed round, but they didn't have 10 paying customers, objective 10 paying, not like friends and family. And I once pitched an investor in Atlanta, which I appreciate now, but at the time he gave me the tough medicine advice, which is, KP, you have so much energy, you have so much all this positive traits of being a founder. But you're not doing the hard thing, which is asking for money, but not like begging for money, like, you know, like genuinely putting a pricing page. So you're dicking around, you know, like you're like navigating around the thing that really matters, which is revenue. The ultimate test, will somebody pay for this without any obligation? And it really hit me like a wave. And I felt that, man, I spent like 7 months on a startup like you, the previous startup. I spent like 7 months and $0 in revenue and I'm like, Okay, so that's why this— the 10 paying customers was a really big deal for me, as you know, whether it's a SaaS or whether it's whatever. So April 1st or April 2nd this month, I had 22 paying customers. I woke up suddenly and then I built this. You know, have you seen the little bird?

Little bird. Yeah, yeah.

Nobody gave a shit. None of my friends wished me anything. Like, my wife didn't care. Like, my fellows, the audience, the, uh, like, Andre friends, or even the Building Public Fellowship friends, nobody cared. They're like, congrats, thumbs up, happy. In my head, I'm exploding. I'm thinking, you guys don't realize how much this means to me. me, you know? And then I realized, I asked one of my friends like Chris Strobel, if you know, you know, from ODNC also. Chris is now part of BIPF. And I said, Chris, why the heck did you not care? Why did you not— you wished me happy birthday, but I couldn't give a shit about my birthday. This means a lot for 3 years, like pages and pages, right? And he said this thing, he said, KP, you transcended that outcome. You became the person for whom these things are normal and expected. And I realized there's a lot of wisdom and profound truth in that, When you're seeking out something, when you're writing down like, I want this, I want this, I want this, the real hack is trying to say, I intend to become the kind of person for whom these things are inevitable and like normal.

Yeah.

I feel that's how I feel about you. I felt about you before Audiopen blew up because you already became the person for whom these kind of things are normal.

I mean, 20,000 people. I don't know. I still feel pretty great whenever I get like an email notification saying someone bought it. I'm like, Yes, this is amazing.

I think that's what I'm saying. Like, from 3 years ago when I first talked to you and during the ODW times to now, your identity has shifted. You know, maybe your skill sets and IQ and all of that stuff is similar, which is similar to me. I'm like the same guy from 5 years ago, but my expectations of what I do and like my patience with the journey and all these things have shifted. So of course I have 22 paying customers when I launch something. That's why I feel about you. Of course you have 500 paid customers for a tool that really works, and that's like really cool. But I think it's still important to realize that, man, a lot of people are fighting the fight.

Yeah, I mean, it's not easy. Like, the thing is, like, I was thinking about it the other day, like, you know, let's say whatever, something happens to Audiopin for whatever reason. It shuts down, I get bored of it, I sell it to someone, or whatever reason, I get sued and I have to shut it down, whatever it may be. If I'm forced to build another product tomorrow, I don't think I'd be better off in terms of my strike rate. I think I'd still have to swing a few times to find that hit. So like, it's one success, yes, it kind of benefits you because it, it kind of makes people trust you more. Like, you know, potential customers feel like, okay, this guy knows what he's doing, so I'm ready. If you have a proven track record of success, that helps. Like, for instance, if like Levels.io or, you know, one of these guys launches— yeah, Peter Levels or Danny Postma launches something today, everyone knows it's legit. Like, they'll go and at least try the free version before buying it. Whereas if someone else launches something that might be better than their product, but that person's not known or doesn't have like a track record, you might be averse to even trying it. Right. So other than that difference, which is your reputation, The odds of you actually making a product that people love, I don't think are significantly higher. Like, I don't think if I go and build a new product, there's a higher chance of it succeeding.

Agree fully. I think the subtle differences are the sort of intangible lessons you carry from one product to the other and your internal growth that you have. Because, you know, like you said, you don't get frustrated when you go back to swing again the first time you don't hit, because you're like, that's just part of the process. I have unbelievable patience now compared to 5 years ago. Yeah, because I know that it's not a game of, like you said, every time hitting it, you know, but it's a game of batting average, which means you just have to be patient, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it's all— it's almost an unfair advantage, man. Like, if you like what you're doing, it's, it's a proper unfair advantage. Like, I, yeah, like, I honestly don't— like, I'm happy this thing's made money for me, so right now I don't have to worry about my credit card being charged every month and, you know, having to pay that bill at the end of the month from my salary. But like, I would still— like, if this grows too big and it starts annoying me in terms of like, you know, I need to service customers or whatever, I might just raise the price so I don't get new customers. Or something like that. So I can just go back to building stuff without having to deal with the stuff that I don't enjoy. But like, it's just a crazy unfair advantage. Like, whatever it may be, if you figure out what you like to do, you can just play the long game and eventually you will hit gold. Like, there's no way you

won't. So there's this school of thought that I've been talking about and kind of riffing on, which is this— like, I don't know if you follow the NBA, but like, this guy Steph Curry, who I love, and I think so many founders can learn from— actually, a lot of people, not just founders, but like, can learn from his style of play. And you know, Every time he steps on the court, you can tell that he's having the most fun in the building. It's not the guy in the stands, not the guy who's with a date next to him. It's not the guy, not any of the announcers. Nobody is having as much fun as Steph Curry is having with the basketball. You can see this because he does circus shots. He does like some ridiculous tricks and shots before the game, and he shoots more 3-pointers before the clock started, which doesn't count, of course, right? than in the real game. But he's always running. He's always like doing his like, whatever his style of running. And when I see him, I realize that there is a sense of joy that he experiences that transcends the scoreboard and how many points he made each game. Ironically, he ended up becoming the all-time 3-point shooting status, like the greatest ever. I think he's crossed the 3,000 3-pointers, which is the greatest ever. But to me, I don't think he really cared about it. And that is where the magic, like what we were saying earlier, is, you know. And so when you want to really be a founder, be a builder, especially a builder, because if you're a builder, the game is so much of a one-player game, right? You're just building it. There's the product, there's a business case you're trying to solve for, just build it, you know.

Yeah.

And you really have to find joy in that journey, you know.

I mean, and like, because we live in 2023, um, the added advantage is like it's super cheap to build as well. Like there's— you don't need to buy like You don't need to have like servers to keep in your house. You don't need to hire a bunch of engineers.

Can I say some other thing? I want you to clarify this for listeners who might be wondering. Luis Pereira is in Goa, India. I don't think he has any unfair advantage over anybody who is in Berlin or Atlanta or Russia or wherever. Also, I don't think you're like Seth Godin level marketer, right?

Yeah, far from it.

I know that you're self-aware to admit that. But the crazy thing about you is the fact that it You build in public, it naturally lends itself to marketing.

Yeah, I mean, at least in the early days, it's very useful. So something I've been thinking about for a while is I think people like watching other people taking risks. Similar to, you know, how you go watch a game or whatever it may be. You like the excitement of somebody trying something that might fail, and you kind of respect that person for at least trying, even if they fail. And so that kind of lends itself to, you know, people being almost like cheering for you to win. Because they know that you could fail, but at least you're giving them entertainment and education while you're trying and maybe inspiration as well. I don't know. So yeah, I mean, in the early days it really helps because people feel like they're part of the process. They feel like if they cheer you on, you could win. And I think humans in general are nice. Most humans are nice, at least. As long as you have those kind of folks on your Twitter, you should be at an advantage.

I think that's where, of course, the Build in Public philosophy and all these things that I've been talking about and I've been trying to get more people to give it a shot, right? They'll be surprised. Because if you're on the sidelines, you're never gonna see the power of the taste of this. You have to really put yourself out there, break out from your shell a little bit. And with you, I think it was just so natural to you, which I'm really happy about. You know, you just are the kind of person who's like, all right, I'm just gonna put this out there.

Yeah, I think of late I've been feeling like I'm sharing too much, like I'm talking about AudioPen too much, but it's, it's basically all I'm thinking about. So I like, I don't schedule my tweets or I don't try and like write them to optimize anything. I just try and say what I want to say or like share something that I want to share and let The only planned thing is I try and make sure there's a link to the product in the tweet. So in case somebody finds it interesting, they could at least go to the product rather than having to come to my profile.

You want to hear another funny thing? So all of— most of your products, when you put them out there, I try to be one of the first customers. You know, it's like one of my weird— like, not just you, I just want to be a first customer for as many of my friends and friendlies. It gives me a joy. With this one, ironically, I think I bought some of your dumb shit too, by the way. Yeah. And I'm like, you know what, that's fine. But also, what's the power? What's the— my whole philosophy is like, what's the point of having money if you're not like having fun, right? Like, that's like my version of, I guess, uh, whatever, like, you know, uh, partying. But anyway, so with Audiopan, it's funny that you said that, you know, you've been tweeting a lot or you feel like you've been tweeting a lot. The first one week, I think I missed some of the tweets and actually didn't see much of it. I remember the tiny tools aspect. Yeah. And I thought it was one of the many tiny tools on your website. I didn't think of that. I guess I missed a few tweets here and there, and then I just didn't see the .ai website or anything. So, I actually missed the whole wave of the first 100 customers probably. And I bookmarked it saying, okay, I'm going to get back to this in a while and I'm going to check it out. Because I was like, this is cool, but I don't know what I'm paying for unless I test it out. So, I'm going to get to it. It took me 5 days to get to it. And by the time I think you hit like 150 customers, I'm like, why am I— the narrative in my head is like, I'm forgetting this shit constantly because I'm doing other things. I'm busy. So, one Saturday you made another tweet and that was the day I was free. I was like, okay, Lewis, I got to do this for you, man. So I just went and spent some time playing with it. The moment I played with it, I was like sold. I didn't even look at how much the price was, $19, $29, $50. As long as it's not breaking the bank, F this, I'm going to buy it. And you know, when I bought it, I took a screenshot and I put it on Twitter, which was retweeted by Robert Scoble and a bunch of other people that went viral. And then I got 4 DMs from other like investor friends, a few other people from On Deck and so on. They're like, hey, PM, I'm buying this. Thanks for sharing this. So the reason I'm saying all of this is because if you just thought on Saturday morning, maybe I'm tweeting too much, maybe let's give a break, I'm not going to talk about Indian Bollywood movies for a week, you would have like lost a wave of people who wanted to be in.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm kind of hoping that Twitter's— not hoping, but I'm expecting Twitter's algorithm to like not show all my tweets to all my followers. So I'm guessing everyone sees maybe one every 4 or 5 tweets. So I'm telling myself that and just Honestly, I usually just tweet what's top of mind. And at the moment, for the past like 5 weeks, that's literally all that I've been doing.

I mean, that's what you're doing. I haven't done anything else. I feel like that's the beauty of building in public though, right? Like it's just what's up, right? Like there's nothing much— like no one can live 8 interesting lives in the same life. Like you're just living the chapter where it's called AudioPen and all you have is about that, you know?

Yeah.

So anyway, I used to feel that initially when I joined On Deck because I had all these people, some of these like Gary Tan follows me, you know, who's Vice CEO.

Yeah,

I'm like maybe I'm like annoying too much. Like I respect Gary Chan. I want to be. I want to bring him on the podcast someday. I don't want him to think that I'm a complete maniac. But at the same time, who gives a shit? I want to be me, you know. And I know Gary's if he really doesn't, if he really feels it's too noisy, he'll unfollow and I won't take it personally. You know. Ironically, nobody's unfollowed me and I think I tweet a lot, a lot. So it's just you know. It's just that's how yeah.

I mean it is what it is. I don't know.

It is what it is.

I don't want to put too much thought into the whole Twitter strategy. I just tweet what I want to say and see what happens.

That is the best strategy, by the way, right? That's like Peter Level's strategy. Like, if you just watch his stuff, he just doesn't care, you know? It's all like whatever comes to mind.

I want to, I want to actually try that on LinkedIn as well. I, I don't use LinkedIn at all, uh, but I like, I've, I went on, on there a couple of days ago and today again just to search like audiopen.ai, and I've seen a bunch of people that have like posted about it. So Like, I see the use of the product in like their lives, and I want to like go there and kind of start building in public there as well. I have no idea how to do it because all of my connections there are from like the startup world back in Delhi, or like my consulting life before that. Um, and like my college friends who are like academics, they have no idea I do this stuff at night. They'll just be like, what the hell happened to this guy? But I might start, let's see.

So that brings me to the— there's 2 more questions I want to ask before we wrap up. One is balancing this day job and this nightlife. A lot of people that I talk to who are either on the podcast or talk to you in the fellowship and so on, they're like constantly so frustrated that they have to live 2 lives and they just can't wait to go full-time. They just can't wait. And I feel like you're one of the few anomalies that I've seen who's actually made peace with this. And instead you're going on the offense and saying, it's okay, I'm gonna be like this for a while. So tell me about that.

So my day job is like, I work with the family business here. So like like it's not some— it's not a job that I can like, you know, quit and leave. But at the same time, it's a job that I can design to like suit my lifestyle. So I'm kind of fortunate like that. Like I can imagine if someone's like an investment banker, they've probably got no time for anything else. Their brain is just fried throughout their day. For me, it's not like that. Like the day job kind of— it ebbs and flows. Like when there are new projects that we're doing, it's extremely hectic. So then yeah, the online life takes a hit for a few weeks or months. And when there aren't any, you know, brand new projects that we're building, things there are like sort of slower. So I can, I can kind of balance the two. Like there were a couple of weeks this month where both sides of life were crazy. That was horrible. I would not recommend it. I lost a lot of sleep. I think it was up till last, early last week, just barely sleeping, just working my ass off during the day and at night. But now fortunately, again, I feel like the day job's calmed down a little bit for the last 3 or 4 days. So I'm able to catch up on sleep and work on this stuff at night. But yeah, I'm just privileged that because I work with my own business and my family's fairly understanding as well, I can kind of design around things. For instance, if I have a Product Hunt launch, Next week, I'll probably just take the day off work and focus on that for that particular day. I mean, I know not everyone is in that position to do it, but yeah, I mean, for me, that's— it's a blessing. It gives me like stability as well. So in case like the online life, you know, I'm swinging and missing too many in a row, that gives me like a nice source of income as well as like it makes me feel good because I'm working on things that are working, you know, like not working on things that are sort of failing all the time, which happens a lot on the internet. So yeah, it's an interesting balance, man. It's an interesting balance. They're both very different worlds. They don't touch each other at any point. Like, that's a completely offline business. This is completely online.

I struggled with that for a while, you know. I think I had to get— wrap my head around the fact that it is what it is, and what choices do I have, and what constraints can I play with, you know. I was like, I didn't have a green card for a while, and I was on this H-1B visa train, and that took me to jobs that I just didn't enjoy. And I was like, oh, I'm stuck. But I realized, you know what, I still have an hour in the morning an hour in the evening, and I can control those 2 hours. That's how I got in touch with all my no-code friends like Ash, Ash Wesley, and these people. We were like building this, you know, no-code mastermind thing before On Deck. And, you know, you always have a choice even in like the, like, most imbalanced situation. I think you can dig yourself out of that hole.

Yeah, I mean, it's very, it's very easy to kind of lose perspective on life by looking at how other people are living their lives, right? Yeah, it's very easy to kind of forget that you and your situation are still unique. And you need to optimize for that situation, but not for someone else's goals or whatever it may be. Right. They might— they'll obviously, they'll show you all the highlights, right? And you'll think that that's all that there is. Yeah, typical Instagram story kind of stuff.

Exactly.

But yeah, it's nice to just step back and kind of optimize for you.

Yeah, just do you and then do what's possible for you. I mean, like, there's another thing too, like a lot of people are like so desperate to— not just desperate in the sense that they're just like like they're trying to reenact the lifestyle of Peter Levels or whoever. Like, take an example like that, who's like 15 hours coding and building and shipping. And but maybe in your situation, it's only an hour a day, you know. And that's for an hour, you can— can you be Peter Levels for an hour, you know, for example? Or can you be like whatever, you know, pick any example. And I was like that. And I have a lot of patience in that. I have like a lot of empathy and patience for these people because for 3, 4 years, I was just like an I

mean, the good news is that like an hour today is like helps you do a lot more than an hour maybe 6 years ago would just because of how the tools have evolved.

Yeah, today the whole leverage, the tools leverage.

It's crazy. Like the kind of stuff you can do, like I was just mind blown with like OpenAI's APIs. Like just using them was just like, what the hell? Like this is ridiculous. Like I didn't, I didn't think they would be that crazy like when I started using. But like those things just like they've just made it so much easier, like 10x, 100x easier in some cases to build stuff that's valuable. Whether AI is good or bad for the world is a different argument. Like, if you're just building small tools online, like, it's insane.

So tell us, as we wrap it up, tell us like about your non-obvious observations in this journey, you know, from 2020 to now as a founder, as a builder, serial maker. What were some things that you learned that were like not very obvious back then?

A couple of things. I mean, I've learned the hard way. One is it's sort of— it's very important to think of like the maintenance cost of projects that you're building. By cost, I don't mean the dollar cost only. I mean like the sweat that you have to put to keep a project running, whatever that may be. Like, so for instance, I had dabbled in the world of writing when I— before I got into no-code and even after, just realized that being an online writer is a lot of work that doesn't ever reduce, right? Like you can— Yeah. If you have 1 follower, if you have, you know, 1,000 followers, it makes no difference. You still have to write for whatever, 20 hours a week. Maintenance cost is very high. Similarly, if you're trying to build like a productized service, same thing. You get a customer, you've still got to work. It doesn't scale without added effort. So that's just one thing I sort of learned I learned the hard way where I slogged for a while on a few projects and then figured that, okay, when I build new projects, I need to make sure that the maintenance effort required from my side is low because I'm aware that I enjoy the process of building, not the process of maintaining. So I need to only build products that can maintain themselves. Yeah, that was one. Another non-obvious thing would be probably what I shared earlier, that like you just can't predict what will be a hit. Like it's impossible. Like every time I think an idea is genius, I go and buy a damn domain, spend whatever, $8 on it, get excited, build it, launch it, and then just watch it slowly fail. So like, just build, build as much as you can, throw what you can at the wall and see what sticks, and then double down on that. Yeah, it sounds— I feel like that's advice that people will not heed unless they actually go through the pain themselves of like building a bunch of products and not letting go of them because, hey, it's just one more day away from being amazing because I'm going to add a feature.

Oh, it's just one feature away, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I had it Yeah, one feature. That's cool. Awesome, man. Anything else you want to add or what are you going to— what are you going to—

No, I mean, nothing else. I'm happy to chat about whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you. I mean, just thank you for having me and for sort of introducing me to the world of no-code back in 2021 as well.

You know, I'm grateful for our friendship. I'm grateful for the fact that our paths crossed. And I remember actually, if you recall, it's something I actually wanted to share with you privately, but I'm, you know, it's been the Build in Public ethos. You remember we had a call where I was driving and we had a video call and then we were talking about this maybe last year. year newsletters. And I was— my frustration at the time was like, Lewis, how do I get to be more consistent with writing, long-form writing? And which, you know, lo and behold, I have some good news. I feel like I finally cracked the code on that one. I'm grateful. I had 32 long-form publishing pieces this year, you know, I mean, not this year, but like last 6 months.

Cool.

And I've been loving it, really loving it. And like, to your point, there is a maintenance cost, but like you have to really go into it knowing that this is the cost.

No, I mean, if you enjoy the process of doing it, then go for it. For me, writing was just becoming more of a pain than— it was taking away time from building, and I enjoyed building a lot more. So I was like, okay, I gotta—

But it's also interesting how now I'm not building as much. So I think that has replaced, or that void has been replaced by the long-form writing. So it's interesting how I think maybe they're correlated or something. Maybe one of them, you can only do one at a time probably. But I've been enjoying writing long-form. I thought you would like to hear that. Finally, someone has a partner. Yeah, that's good.

That's good to know. I mean, I've not given up, but I've not been writing off late.

You know, there's 3 specific things I'll share about what was it like sort of a turning point or inflection point that got me. Number one, I stopped— this sounds so cliché, but I genuinely stopped caring about subscribers. It was like hard to let go. And I think since I started, I probably have lost more subscribers than I gained, but it doesn't matter. I've, you know, so I generally start— so the narrative I've been telling myself is that for a year, I am an apprentice writer. I'm not going to care about— I'm not there yet to even like say, oh, I'm going to measure the followers or whatever. So that liberation has been really helpful. The number 2 is I'm really attaching a lot of meaning and pride to shipping a piece, not how many paragraphs, how many words, how many syllables and all that bullshit. Like, I just want to convey an emotion. That's not a tweet. So, that's why it's called long form. But I genuinely sit there and then I let the writing process dictate how long it should be. And this is a pain because in the past I used to think, oh, I got to write like David Perel, 8 paragraphs. Now I'm like, screw that. I'm going to write like me. So, sometimes that's 4 paragraphs, sometimes that's 10. That was like another. The third thing is publicly committing to a cadence. I think I'm very much a person who gets embarrassed very quickly publicly. So I care about public perception a lot, I think. So I publicly just said, hey, every Wednesday I'm going to ship KP's column and newsletter, blah, blah, blah. And then that's how— ironically, there was a day, there was a week that I missed. Nobody cared. But something about me wanted to just go back and just ship it anyway. So I got back from the skip and got it to streak again.

Yeah. And that's cool. I mean, writing is very difficult. Most people think it's easy. Writing is definitely a lot more difficult than building. Writing a good piece is even more

difficult.

It's hard.

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's so true. I think that's another thing. I think mismanaged or misleading expectations was probably what I had to struggle with. I assumed that writing was just like—

I mean, I hope Audiopen helps in some way. Like, I, I've been meaning to write with it, but like, I have like mixed feelings about AI-generated content. But I feel like Audiopen's an interesting middle ground. It kind of helps me structure my thoughts so I can ramble at it, and you know, it gives me like at least, you know, let's say a 3-paragraph sort of structure, and then I can go and write from there.

Yeah,

rather than trying to structure my thoughts internally.

That's, by the way, that's my current, you know, sort of curiosity for the next few weeks because there will be some weeks where I'm going to be busy. I'm like, I'm trying to do a lot of drafts in Audiopen. So the week that I'm really busy and don't have time to write a brand new draft, I'm going to copy this text into my newsletter and then, you know, rearrange it or rewrite it from my voice and hit publish. So

you could also, like, eventually I do want to figure out a way to let people train AudioPen on their own writing. So if you have, let's say, you know, 10,000 words written somewhere, you could basically feed that to AudioPen so it would write in your own style. That's still a few weeks away, maybe a month or two away, I don't know. But I want to do that. So that kind of shotguns that. Yeah, let's see.

Let's see. That's awesome. Cool, man. Thank you for being here. Appreciate you. And

yeah,

wish you all the best with the rest of your, uh, Maker trajectory.

Thanks, KP. It was fun. Cheers.

Have a good one.