March 31, 2025 • 39 mins
I sat down with Billy Howell to explore his journey into building and selling apps with AI as a self-taught solopreneur. Billy shared how he transitioned from defense consulting into the world of simple app creation. We talked about the power of AI-driven tools like Replit for rapidly creating simple solutions, and his first successful app. He talked about leveraging Upwork to find initial clients and build a freelance business. Billy also touched on his strategy for tackling "shiny object syndrome" and the potential for reselling custom-built apps. If you're curious about creating simple apps and potentially starting your own agency, Billy's experience is a must-hear. Find Billy on Twitter (Billy J Howell) and explore his work at https://stupid-simple-apps.com/.
Timestamps below. Enjoy!
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00:00 From Zero to Full-Time: The Journey of a Self-Taught Coder
02:59 Vibe Coding: Building Apps with Natural Language
05:47 Choosing the Right AI Coding Tools
09:06 Navigating Upwork: Finding Clients and Jobs
11:58 Building Custom Solutions for Niche Markets
14:56 The Last 10%: Overcoming Development Hurdles
17:49 Shiny Object Syndrome: Managing Multiple Projects
21:09 Scaling Your Freelance Business
24:01 Distribution Strategies for SaaS Tools
26:56 Personal Branding and Sharing Your Journey
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
ChatGPT rolled out, I started coding myself, I'm self-taught,
and then when Brad Put came out,that was kind of like a zero to
1. You could go from nothing to
full time freelancer or agency in two weeks.
Now I've run an app agency and I've got a team of four guys.
You just stay in the game and you'll win.
How do you know like this? I need to lean into this side
(00:21):
project or this client with all the opportunities out there.
It's really easy. What business ideas have you
seen or had lately that can be created with tools like these?
So there's a lot of stuff to build.
All right. I had a new guest on today by
the name of Billy Howell, and Billy is a Vibe coder.
Vibe Coding is basically using natural language like I'm
(00:42):
talking to you right now to talkto apps like Cursor, Replit,
Lovable, etcetera, to build stuff with code without knowing
how to code. And this guy is doing a great
job of it. And I wanted to learn from him
in public with you. So he talks about apps that he's
building, cool app ideas that hehas, how to make money on
Upwork, how to land jobs on Upwork, how to how to hire
people on Upwork to do work for you, which AI coding apps to use
(01:04):
for which type of app projects, whether it be a web app or
mobile app, etcetera. You're going to love it.
Share with a friend. We'll see you next time on the
Kerner Office. Yeah, so tell us who you are and
what you do. I'm Billy.
I make stupid simple apps for business owners and startups
come from a defense consulting background.
So not really the two don't really make sense.
(01:24):
But I think any good entrepreneurship path is kind of
crazy like that and kind of quitdefense contracting during the
pandemic. Started a marketing agency
because I knew I wanted to work with startups.
Learned a lot about kind of automations helping clients
automate marketing operations and things like that.
As ChatGPT and cursor and all that rolled out, I started
(01:49):
coding myself more. I'm self-taught.
And then when Replit came out, that was kind of like a zero to
1. Like, hey, I can make really
useful internal apps for my clients without taking too much
of my day up. And it's just really fun for I
think it's fun to tinker around and like cursor and replit.
Now I've run an app agency because I posted like a video
(02:09):
about selling an app and it wentviral.
I've got a team of four guys nowand we're making stupid simple
app. What are some examples of a
stupid simple app? The original one that I made is
just data entry for auto mechanic coaching business.
So there's this big need. Yeah, OK.
Yeah. Pretty sexy, right?
(02:31):
There, I've never heard those words strung together before.
He is a successful garage owner and he now coaches other garage
owners on how to get their techsto see more cars and have a
higher per car revenue. He thought he needed like a no
code solution with like air table and softer.
(02:52):
I'm on Upwork sitting at my deskand I'm looking at this.
I'm like, OK, like blue collar guy.
Like matter of fact, this soundslike my kind of guy and I'm kind
of in the process of writing a little proposal.
Like I use Airtel, former marketing clients, I can do this
for you. Here's some examples.
And I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, hey, like this is really
simple app. I could just make it in Replit.
(03:13):
And so I did and I kind of showed him, I made like a demo
and I kind of took a loom and showed him both solutions side
by side his custom Replit app orwhat it would be in like
software and Airtable. And the reason I did that is
because the software cost of using that no code stack would
be like 250 bucks a month for him.
Yeah, there's no reason you needto be paying that.
So let me build you one and thenI'll charge you 50 bucks a month
(03:35):
to run it. And he said, I like yours
better. And we went with that.
And it's just, yeah. Now he has car techs put in like
how many cars they sell each week and you can kind of track
their progress. Now, at what point during the
the Upwork application process do you build these MVPS for him
or was that early just to get the job or was that after you
had the job? I want to say he said yes before
(03:58):
I did a full demo, but I think Ialso may have just made
something in V-0 because it takes 30 seconds to visualize
what he wants. So I would say like, if you're
going to try to do something similar, you just have to find a
way. Whatever stack, if you're using
V-0, reply cursor, windsurf bolts, lovable, just get good at
(04:19):
making like a something that's like a clickable interface that
brings their idea to life. And if you can do that in 5
minutes, I think it's definitelyworth doing it to make the sale.
If it's your first job and you really want it and you want to
prove yourself, go ahead, all right?
Let's back up and educate the listeners a little more.
How would you define the differences and similarities
between V-0, lovable, bolt, repple and cursor?
(04:42):
Or is there anything else I missed there?
Windsurf. Windsor.
So there's local coding environments like cursor and
windsurf. They're pretty much like if you
were going to use like AVS code like.
That's a place where you can like store all your files, write
code, do terminal commands, Purser and Windsor for kind of
(05:04):
like that, but with an AI chat assistant that'll write code for
you or answer questions, debug little more advanced, like if
you have coding experience or anengineer, you would go that way.
Something like Bolt or Replict or Lovable or V-0 or browser
base. So you just go on your browser
and that's kind of more beginnerfriendly because you can just
(05:27):
type in your app or like I've done before, like put in a
sketch of an app and it makes itfor you.
You don't have to know how to install packages locally.
What kind of stack am I going touse to build this app?
Where am I going to put the directory?
How do I demo this locally? You don't have to know any of
that. So it's more beginner friendly
and it's quicker to MVP with those I'm.
(05:52):
Guessing most of our listeners are more on the beginner phase.
Not a lot of engineers in this crowd.
So if I want to build an app like, why would I choose Lovable
over V-0 over Bolt over Replit or vice versa?
It's a hard decision to make because as the underlying models
like open AI or clawed that kindof power, these things change.
(06:13):
Then you know, both might be better because of the the most
recent chat sheet PT release, but then maybe lovable is going
to go down right. So they all kind of are
changing. So it's really personal
preference and just putting repsin to one that that works with
your workflow. So what I would say if I'm
setting out to kind of start trying to build apps either for
(06:34):
my own business or to sell to people or just as a hobby, I
would think of a really simple one feature app that you want to
build and literally do it side by side.
Replit, V-0, Lovable, Bolt, whatever else there is and try
to make the same app and see what comes out.
Like see what frustrations you run into.
Maybe you really like the UI, for one.
Like I really like the UI from V-0.
(06:56):
So a lot of times I'll have it make UI and then pull that into
my main app in like Replit. So I would really, rather than
getting kind of pigeonholed and stuck in one, I try them all
first if I were to like, start this over.
Here's an example just because this is an idea that came to me
today with this new O1 image generation, right?
Have you played with that at allon ChatGPT?
(07:18):
I've done it and yeah, ChatGPT 40, whatever the standard model,
I don't know. The new like image editor, they
came out like a day or two ago. Yeah, I've been seeing it.
I didn't. Do I have to like select it I
guess? You just have to like prompt it,
right? Like users don't really know if
they have it on their pro account until they start like
playing with it. I was thinking it'd be
interesting to have just like a stupid simple web app where it's
(07:42):
just one prompt and you upload your resume and it converts your
resume into like an infographic,right?
For 5 bucks or something. And you just connect the API on
the back end, you connect Stripee-mail, something like that.
If you were going to build out, what would you use and why?
I would use raplet probably. That's kind of my go to for
starting point for a lot of things because you can just get
(08:05):
to MVPA really quickly. I know it plays nice with open
AI, which is what I'm going to use a lot of times if I'm
building something with AI features.
We could build an MVP literally in like 10 minutes.
Probably. The hard part that it comes down
to, I guess, is that consistent prompting, right?
So I might want to do more parsing of the resume upfront so
there's less ways for the open AI model to kind of go crazy,
(08:30):
right? Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, I think that's a greatuse case.
I think you could do it with anyof the ones we mentioned earlier
for sure. I'm glad you said replit because
that's the one I'm most familiarwith.
Do you find it to be difficult getting across the last mile?
Like getting it like literally asellable product that's
published? What are your shortcuts to that,
if any? It's paying someone to do it and
(08:53):
I actually haven't done this yetbut in replit there's like a
little bounties tab. Where you create a.
Bounty where you could pay, you could pay like 150 bucks to get
3 hours of dev time from I thinka pool of like agencies they
work with. I need to partner with them on
this. So actually I haven't done that
yet. I would go that route if you're
going to do it yourself. The last kind of 10% is starting
(09:15):
fresh with the agent or pulling that code into like a cursor or
windsurf and just talking back and forth with the agent, OK,
look at all my pages and tell meany concerns from a security or
whatever. And doing that just like with
literally each page, step by step with the AI like a partner
and being like, how can we refactor this?
(09:37):
How can we make sure it's tied up, it's tight and ready to go
like production? I hired a guy for a bounty once
but it it didn't work out like he had the same problem I did.
I guess he wasn't that great, but it doesn't mean I can't find
it's. Going to be hard because even
the best developer in the world,the guys I work with say this,
they're like really like it'd bequicker.
Rather it would take the same time to do that last 10% from
(09:58):
your code then for me to just doit from scratch so I don't have
to understand your code and yourbrain.
That's frustrating, but it is what it is.
The last 10%, it doesn't even take as long as the first 90%,
it takes longer, yeah. I'm I'm on it right now with a
client that I think I was supposed to rap with like 2
weeks ago. And.
It's a little bit of perfectionism too, where
(10:20):
sometimes like you'll get it to the client and they'll be like,
this is great and it's only going to be like two people
using it. But then you're like, oh, but
like, what about this like edge case?
What about this edge case? And especially when you start
thinking like, how are we going to scale this?
Then you get into those, I really need to fix this, but
like the approach of selling B to B to for really niche things
(10:41):
where one or two people are going to use it.
I think it's really easy to get to that last 10%, right?
Because you're not thinking about crazy edge cases and
redundancies and all that for atscale just minimizes complexity.
What like business ideas have you seen or had lately that can
be created with tools like these?
(11:03):
Is there anything that you're excited about or that you've
seen in the marketplace that excited you?
I'm excited about everything allday that's there's too much.
I can't sleep because I want to be doing personal projects and
projects for friends, projects for clients, projects for
proposals, right? So there's a lot of stuff to
build. I tell people all the time I
(11:24):
kind of just sound like a brokenrecord here, but I don't start
with direct to consumer. If it's your first app, like do
not it is a money pit, a pit of despair.
You don't have enough confidencein yourself.
Probably if you're just startingout to understand what to build
without bunch of people on Twitter or your friends telling
you, well, you should do this and you should do this.
(11:46):
They don't know what you should build, right?
Like they, they don't even know their own preferences.
So you need to get someone who'sgoing to pay you money to build
out features and then like have them use it and get feedback,
right? That's how you start building an
app. And then maybe you could, you
could resell a similar implementation, but everyone
wants little custom tweaks. So I think it's better to get
(12:09):
good with like using the same stack of AI tools and maybe like
your design components and then just sell kind of customized
ones to other people. And so I've totally rolled over
your questionnaire, which is like, what's an idea that you're
excited about? But every kind of white collar
business owner needs a smaller CRM like they're tired of
(12:30):
HubSpot. I'm tired of HubSpot.
It does too much. The pricing is opaque as ACEO
like I shouldn't be spending allmy time figuring out pricing
models and passwords for three different integrations, right?
So I'd rather pay up front to have something that I, that's
mine that just does ACRM for real estate or car dealerships
(12:52):
or something, right? Like your CRM that has only the
features that you want and use. Right.
And then everyone wants custom document templating, right?
It sounds like the easiest thingin the world, like, but everyone
still just uses Google Docs and it's sloppy and messes up.
I could automate anything. I could automate a horse, I
don't know. And I still manually do the
(13:13):
Google Docs thing because it's too fiddly to login somewhere
and then go to my templates, right?
It's it's just hard. It's too many clicks.
Docs dot new. Right.
What do you mean by a document template like?
What would that look like? What would be a use case for
that? Think about templates that are
for a business. Like you're starting a new
client, right? And you've got a bunch of
(13:34):
documents you need to fill out, some you need to sign, some you
need to sign, but they're overlapping fields with like
client name, my name, date, address, stuff like that.
So like putting in instead of pulling down a boilerplate
document from like DocuSign or whatever, just uploading your
own documents that you've been using in cool Doc and then being
(13:54):
able to like use those over and over, right?
It's like a custom DocuSign pretty much.
What are you working on right now as like a side project that
you're excited about and why? OK, so I've got a good one
actually that I need to finish again.
It's that last 10%, right? I'm trying to do like Stripe
integration and I'm fighting with old code from when I was in
(14:17):
as well practice and the models were all different.
So it might just nuke and start from scratch.
But it's ChatGPT, It's good Recipe generator.
I've got recipe generator.com. What?
How did you get that? Well, I think there's A-IN
there. Or generate a generate.
Hyphen. Recipes.com.
OK, OK. Generate hype.
So I had been finding myself like, you know, you don't like
(14:40):
with your with your fiance or your wife.
Are you married? Yeah.
Like figuring out what to eat islike the oldest problem.
It's been a thing for 200 years.So we would just go in and
literally just put here's the ingredients we have in a ChatGPT
make us a recipe. And it worked.
And like we would like make sauces we would have never
thought of before. I made an interface where you
can go in and save those recipe cards and then share them with
(15:04):
people. And it's super, it's sick.
And I think I'm, I'm trying to charge just like $0.25 per
recipe or something instead of having you pay per month because
that's annoying. Like you want, I want less SAS,
right? I want less recurring SAS in the
world for people. So that's kind of what I'm
really excited about that I'm. Trying to.
Is that out there yet? Yeah, if you go to
(15:26):
generatehyphenrecipes.com, if you go there, you can use it
just for one recipe and then it'll say you need to pay.
And I haven't set up the payments yet, so.
Now, Billy, you just told us to not do consumer apps.
So what we're doing here? This is 1 where I found myself.
This is a solution for me, right?
To save myself like I want. I want to have these recipes to
(15:47):
reuse, right? Instead of just losing them in
my ChatGPT app. I want to store them.
Yeah. So it was for me.
So and you're right. I did tell you not to do
consumer apps, but I'm not that the reason it's not finished
working yet is because no one's paying me to do it, right.
So that's why. It's there you go.
You did say that you're eating your own dog food.
And then the other one I found is that I like to do gardening
(16:09):
and stuff. And so like I have all these
different little plants, like succulents and little bonsai
trees that I move inside and then move outside every spring.
And I super like just micromanage them and end up
killing half of them. So what I do is like every day I
log, I take a picture in a ChatGPT of like a plant I'm
having trouble with. And I'm like, does this look
better or worse? Like what should I do?
(16:31):
And I really want to go back andsee how it's changed over time.
But then I'm scrolling through my photos app and there's
plants, screenshots, pictures ofmy fiance, you know random
stuff. So I just want to be able to
scroll and see how like my bonsai or whatever plans.
Yeah, like a time lapse. Time lapse, right?
And so I made like a demo of that, but it sucks, so I need to
(16:52):
like remake it. So it's good and I think it
would be super useful. I would use it every day.
And other people would. I mean, that can be an idea.
Like, but I don't want to do marketing, you know, That's the
thing with apps. But like, if you're solving a
problem for yourself, you're solving it for others.
Someone could build a time lapseapp for faces where you could
just upload pictures, selfies ofyourself over all the years and
(17:13):
they could just show you like a time lapse video of yourself
just because people are vain andthey probably find it
interesting. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Do you use like a specific API or LLM for images?
Specifically, a preference. So no.
And that was something I was wanting to figure out.
But now that like kind of the general open AI model is so good
(17:35):
at it, I would say probably if open AI has a machine vision, I
would use that model. I don't know if that exists
publicly, but right now like thegeneral all-purpose chat GPTI
think it does it. So that's what I would start
with, I think. Talk about your your Upwork
process like how do you find alpha on Upwork?
How do you find customers? How could people that have no
(17:56):
knowledge of Upwork, no account,log in and create an account,
get their first job, maybe it's free, and then like get more
jobs and then leverage those little, you know, 50 or $500
jobs into higher ticket jobs. That's a good one.
I'm going to look up this guy because Nick Sarev, he's got
really good YouTube videos from,if you're an automations
developer, how to set up your upwork profile.
(18:18):
I would say watch that video. Basically what he's going to
tell you is like do a professional headshot shoulders
up. If you're near a major metro
area, put down as your location instead of some suburb no one's
ever heard of, right? So do Washington DC instead of
Arlington for me. The next step.
So once you kind of got your profile set up, like the next
step is to just randomly go on during the week because it's all
(18:40):
about timing. That's like the main thing is
you want to catch people when they're excited about posting
their job listing. Like think about from their
side. And as an exercise, you should
set up an up work like client account and try posting a job
just to go through the process and you'll learn, but think
about it. So you want to catch someone
right when they're excited aboutthe project.
And that just means you need to check.
You could try to do all these automations to alert you and
(19:03):
automate stuff, but I think really it's just timing.
And then get really good at doing a tight proposal.
The thing that'll set you apart always is to record a loom so
they see your face, see that you're real.
A lot of people who are hiring online have been burned in the
past, so they want to see that you're trustworthy.
A lot of people are also conscientious about am I hiring
(19:24):
outside of the USA? Lot of people have been like
tricked with like VPNs to hiringpeople they thought were in the
US and then they weren't and they might have been a little
lower quality. So just kind of reassuring
people on that stuff goes a longway on up work, right?
And literally just scroll through stuff that you've worked
on and show them. A lot of people will just ask
like, can you show me some anything you've built?
Just so I believe that you can do this because I guess a lot of
(19:47):
people are hiring people who saythey can do stuff and they
can't. I've been hiring on Upwork for
like 12 years since it was odeskand I even have like a creator
account. What's the other side of the
marketplace called? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have that account too because I've I've played around and like
you, Like you said, you can learn so much having an account
(20:08):
on both sides of it. You can just learn what your
competitors are doing. I like logging in as what is it
called? Like a client?
The client. Client and there's freelancer
and then there's like agency is a third one that not many people
do. So like if you log in as a
freelancer and just start trolling jobs like you said,
even if you have no desire to actually make money on Upwork,
(20:30):
you can learn so much. Like you can learn competitive
intelligence on what people are doing like this.
I saw this one job posting was like, I need you to walk around
the city and take pictures of cars in parking lots and upload
them to an app. And I was just like, what are
they getting at? Like what are they doing?
What is the play there? You know, like I'm just so
(20:52):
curious. You can learn a lot from doing
that. Anyway, what I was saying is
over the last three years, the bot from like the business side
of Upwork or out of control. Like I'll I'll post a job and
I'll have like 15 applications within 5 minutes with like this
much text and I put at the very top of my application.
(21:12):
Don't a use AI. Like don't use AI if it's
ChatGPT, I'm going to ignore youput this keyword, put the word
orange in in your application. All this, it doesn't matter.
Like how do you stand out from all those bots?
I have the same experience and Iwish platforms again.
I don't want to make fun of Upwork too much, but whatever
platform would build that in youwhere not even like they are
(21:35):
checking to see if someone's a bot, but you could just say hey,
if the response doesn't have this in it, filter it out.
That would be nice, yeah. So video is cool, but you know
what's better? Long form audio via podcast and
my newsletter, TKO pod.com. Go there to subscribe for free
to my newsletter. It's one e-mail a week, very
tactical. And then go to my audio podcast,
3 episodes a week. Stuff like this.
You're going to love it all free, no sleazy sales bitch.
(21:57):
TKO pod.com. The thing for you, if you're a
freelancer trying to land a job,is you can't be squeamish about
using connects to boost your proposal.
So in Upwork you can pay, it's like $0.15 per connect.
It's like a currency and whoeverhas the, you have to spend a
minimum amount to submit a proposal.
But then it's like a, you get bumped to the top if you spend
(22:18):
the most and you can see what other people bid.
So I just don't even think aboutit.
I, I spend the money every time if it's something I want to go
for because it's just worth it. If you're spending, you know, 3
to 4 bucks on a proposal, that'sa great CPA for a potentially
$1000 job and like lifetime relationship if you're doing
that kind of work. What type of like non obvious
(22:42):
things do you look for in jobs that you apply for?
Like I say, maybe the obvious ones are like you want to see
someone that has some sort of a hiring history.
You don't want this to be their first job because they might
flake out, right? Yeah, look for how much money
they've spent on homework. Make sure they've spent a couple
$1000 and I think freelancers can rate them so they have like
a star rating. Read enough proposals.
(23:03):
You'll be like, is this person writing like kind of defensively
or like, do they sound like a tire kicker?
Right? You kind of get an idea of that
tone. Someone who's like has too much
like weird requirements upfront.Like I think those are the main
tips really is is like think like, does this sound like
something a good client would write?
(23:24):
And have they hired people in the past?
You can see what kind of rates they're hiring people for in the
past. Or if they're only hiring people
for $5 a day, probably they don't want to pay you for your
time, assuming you're going to be charging more than $5 a day
if you're doing this kind of work.
The other tip I would say you talking about taking pictures of
cars kind of made me think of this thing you could do to find
(23:45):
out what to build and who to build it for is think of
companies or business owners that you have existing
relationships for. Think about what technology
keywords or just workflow keywords they have.
Look those up and Upwork both onthe client side and the
freelancer side. So see what kind of jobs are
getting posted from their industry and then see what kind
(24:05):
of freelancers have, because on freelancer pages you can have a
bio and then like off the shelf like like packages for like an
existing job type. So you can find out like what
kind of services and then go pitch them to your buddy or your
friend in the community or whatever.
And then you've got that, you know, competitive advantage
because you're saying in front of them and you're not on
(24:26):
Upwork, right? So it's how you figure out like
what needs does that market have?
Yeah. What types of jobs are you
seeing more demand and supply for?
Like what would be the lowest thing for for someone coming on
Upwork today? I don't know that I look for
just general jobs enough to answer that because I'm usually
(24:47):
looking at keywords for specificno code or integrations that I'm
used to working with. It's totally different, right?
So if you're anywhere global, like anything like copy or
editing or kind of automations that need a human in the loop,
that's there's all going to be infinite work for that.
(25:07):
And then for if you're trying todo kind of higher cost, more
developer things like building apps or building out
automations. So if you're new and you're
really good at likemake.com automations, instead of building
out like an entire automation system for, you know, like a
sprinkler company, whatever, maybe like start searching for
(25:32):
troubleshooting like they have an existing one that's broken,
right? Or look for existing like go
high level broken, right? Look for those kinds of jobs
because they're going to be smaller scope and you're going
to be able to build up. They're going to be, I think,
easier to get. But it's something that like a
big agency might not bid on because it's probably not worth
their time. I feel like up work is so
overlooked from especially Americans like someone that
(25:54):
wanting to quit their job or start an agency or, you know,
build these no code tools. Would you agree that like
there's a world where if you made-up work your full time job,
like just applying to job, making looms, making looms,
making looms, giving it enough credits to be at the top of the
of the pile? I just have a hard time thinking
that people wouldn't be successful, like assuming
(26:16):
successful, assuming they did a good job.
Like trying to convert those small jobs to more recurring or
higher ticket clients. Like if you if you literally
took it seriously like a 10 houra day thing, after a month you
would have you would have a solid business.
Oh yeah, yeah. But here's what's going to
happen. And like, I was that guy, right?
Starting my marketing agency looking for clients like on
(26:38):
Upwork all day crying. So there's 2 problems. 1 is that
you know, depending on how good you are at reading between the
lines, maybe half of your clients could end up being like
annoying clients. Not annoying, but not a good fit
I guess. High maintenance.
High maintenance and on in like with things like that, that's
also probably me not knowing my capabilities as well.
(26:59):
So it takes time to kind of figure out what your
capabilities are, not just say yes to anything or to everything
rather. And then the second thing is you
can definitely stand up in agency in a month, but you're
going to run out of bandwidth. So you need to have the
foresight and be good enough at hiring to hire early or you're
going to be on like a deliverable treadmill.
What you said is totally true that you could go from nothing
(27:22):
to full time freelancer or full time, you know, agency in two
weeks, 3 weeks, there's enough work.
I know several people that simply apply for jobs as
freelancers as an American, and then they get a job and then
they just hire people on Upwork Offshore and outsource all of it
to them like they're just playing middleman.
(27:44):
That's really hard to do. Well, I'm not saying it's the
ideal, but it happens. Like assuming you know the
subject matter, like say make.com or Zapier, like you
know it, but you're trying to offload some of the work a lot
of people would, You know, they check the box and say, I only
want to hire from the US and so everyone else is excluded from
those search results. That can work, but it's it's
(28:05):
hard. I mean, I made a lot of bad
hires overseas. It's just like a muscle you have
to train hiring. Yeah, well, like it with any
business, you pick your headaches, right, You'll you'll
never avoid headaches. I I see that all the time I post
about business ideas in the comments, like what about this,
what about that? I'm like, there's always going
to be headaches. Like what do you want?
What's an example of a client you found on Upwork that you
(28:26):
were able to leverage into? Like something higher ticket or
more recurring? It'll be just like back to kind
of my marketing agency starting with like an SEO audit or can
you tell me why our pages are ranking like this?
And that call will just turn into like, OK, not Billy's my go
to. We'll have like a recurring call
(28:47):
just to get consulting. Maybe we'll have some special
projects or look at my analytics.
So like any sort of one off audit or troubleshooting for
like Facebook ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, things like
that can turn into regular consulting.
And I think the one of the keys to success there is it into not
getting stretched too thin or isto just keep that as like
(29:10):
instead of saying yes to some project because it's a really
good fit with the client. But if you don't have those
capabilities, just stick to consulting and analytics and
all, all like I'm going to tell you what you're doing wrong and
how to fix it. But if you don't have the team
to implement it, like I would just stick on that.
Consulting, like consulting versus building out projects to
me are two very different things.
(29:31):
Does that make sense? Am I just?
Yeah, it does. So stick.
Stick to consulting if you had to choose between the two.
Yeah, I would say stick. I think that's if you if it that
scales better for sure. Yeah, OK.
What is your framework for managing your shiny object
syndrome? How do you know what are your
signals of like this? I need to lean into this side
project or this client with all the opportunities out there.
(29:54):
How do you look at it? That's really easy money.
Are people paying me to do this,yes or no?
Are people trying to pay me to do this?
Yes or no? Otherwise I probably shouldn't
be spending time on it. How can I help answer that?
Less like a cave. No, it's just like, sometimes
this is the most, like, lame romantic thing ever, but you
just have an idea and it just resonates with you.
(30:15):
It keeps you up at night. And it's like, no one's paying
me for this, but this makes so much logical sense.
Like when do you make exceptionsto that?
So I think if it's something like me where I'm using ChatGPT
and I'm noticing myself doing this frequently or like every
day, but I think just like this AI helps you iterate and get
that shiny objects out of your body so that it's like way less
(30:37):
of a problem for me. So like think about like a year
ago, right? I would have an idea for
something for like a game or like an SEO tool and I would
spend all night on cursor and open AI trying to code this
prototype. I'm not like a full stack
developer by trade, but I can kind of get to it.
But then as soon as something breaks, it's another 8 hour
(30:57):
night of me trying to troubleshoot it.
And so then over two months, like I'm losing sleep over this
stupid little shiny object, but now I can like realize an idea
in 45 minutes in Replit or Bolt or whatever and it kind of gets
that shiny object. Scratches the.
And I'm like, oh, that's not as cool as I thought it was.
(31:19):
Or oh, like, dude, I should showthis to people or keep going.
So I think, yeah, I think maybe that's more of the answer, is
that finding how to scratch thatitch, it's easier than it ever
has been. But sometimes you just, you, you
have to scratch that itch, like you just have to check the box
to know whether or not for yourself.
You know, like me personally, I hate being years down the road
(31:40):
and thinking like, I should havetried that.
I just should have tried that. What would happen if I would
have tried that? You know, that's just the
opposite argument to focus on one thing.
And a lot of times, most of the time, you scratch that edge, you
realize it's not for you. But now you know.
Yeah, but. I mean, I say all that and my
entire kind of journey in entrepreneurship is the opposite
(32:03):
of what I just said, which is only doing stuff that people pay
you to do. I'm able to kind of do the
projects that I do because I spent a weekend with some random
idea I had and I learned about this library or because like I
worked for paying the people like in college doing gigs like
selling real estate or doing stuff like a waiter at the
(32:24):
country. All these random jobs, you know,
kind of coalesce into who you are.
So you're right, you do have to scratch that itch.
And before I ever sold my first like AI coded app, I look back
and I had 40 raplets I created for fun and 20 directories that
I had made with cursor locally. So that's 60 inches.
I tried to scratch before I was able to sell one.
(32:47):
So it is important to get your skills up.
You just have to be smart and kind of direct with with what
you're doing. I'm doing this give yourself
constraints. Say I'm going to try to make
this in two hours. I'm going to try to make this
thing that does these two features instead of setting out
to make the greatest 100 featureapp.
It's a lot harder. To take credit for the like the
(33:10):
compounding of experience that we have because sometimes we
don't have anything physical to show for.
Like I just kept pivoting. I kept, I had shiny objects I
kept. It's like all of those things
help teach you what you know today to get you to this one
thing that actually did work. A lot of times I hear people
just talk about the being wastedtime.
Like you keep resetting, compounding, quit resetting,
(33:31):
quit starting over. It's like you're really not like
you just stay in the game and you'll win.
You know what the? Funny thing about that is that I
never realized till you said that a lot of what consulting is
in freelancing people pay you totell them what shiny objects not
to chase, what rabbit hole is not to go down.
(33:52):
I could say, oh I've used those SAS.
That's SAS. That's don't use it, waste of
time. Not right for you.
I scratched that edge. So they're paying me.
They're paying me to, yeah, savethem on analysis paralysis.
At the end of the day, that's all that business is, is like
you're not selling like a product or service.
You're you're selling decisions made for someone who has limited
time and resources, right. Yeah, interesting.
(34:14):
Talk to me about the prospect ofbuilding out a custom app for
someone like your your garage consulting friend and then using
that app and selling it to otherpeople.
You mean reselling? Kind of the same.
The same app. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you done that or is that kind of harder than advertised
on the surface? I have not done that with.
(34:34):
That example, I'm doing 1 where I have a better example where
it's like a custom data visualization for HubSpot for
like a specific industry niche. And it's like this revenue
attribution. It's just like a feature gap in
HubSpot and they want me to build it out and they're OK with
me selling it to, you know, other clients or companies,
(34:58):
right? Because they just needed that.
It's not like a full app. It's like a, it's kind of like
your clients, OK. With it, yeah, it's kind of
like. It's like a custom dashboard,
right? But like it's on a server and
everything because I did the research and you can't make that
custom dashboard and the 20 SAS apps that are supposed to be
able to do it, right? So we just had to do a custom
and like the garage one. I mean, that's Dataviz too.
(35:19):
So I guess what I'm saying is that like basic like CRUD apps
and data visualization, like they're not like proprietary,
right? And you can kind of reuse the
same visual components and architecture without, you know,
hurting anyone's competitive advantage.
I think there's a world where you.
Could G2 reviews for those listening review site for SAS
(35:39):
products, you can scrape all those of for HubSpot and find
all the keywords like the the negative sentiment keywords
about certain features that are missing and build tools around
that. Yeah.
Totally. This democratization of software
development is going to change like how SAS works, because all
these big platforms have AP is where you can send as many
(36:00):
requests as you want. Like in a year, why would anyone
pay for 20 seats on whatever SASwhen they could pay for one and
then have a custom app built that just pulls all that data in
and out for them, Right? Like headless, it might push,
you know, more software to be more open source and more, more
headless solutions. I don't know what's going to
happen. Yeah, yeah.
(36:20):
What about the the hard part here which is distribution?
Have you find found any hacks outside of Upwork to distribute
these ideas or SAS tools or or apps no like?
That's why I'm kind of optimizing for selling B to B
relationship based because that's what I'm good at.
And I think there's just so manyburning needs there.
And I think they are all kind ofinterrelated and you'll learn
(36:43):
and you'll be able to compound easily.
So personally, right, So me, like my, my Twitter and YouTube
have been popping off because I just one day I decided to record
myself doing Replit for a client, right?
Or for like a personal project, post videos like that.
And then someone from like Replit, I think like the CEO of
(37:03):
Replit, like retweeted me with the video and the link.
So that just massively boosted me there.
I'm definitely like a replit chill and I like I use it a lot.
I'm not sponsored. I really like them.
That's one of the things about kind of picking a stack and
moving forward with it. Get really good at, you know,
Bolt apps for enterprise Oregon,Lovable apps for teachers and
(37:24):
try to put it out there and share with people.
I'm sharing like a lot of sauce on like the Upwork stuff and
even probably too much on some of these like app ideas.
So being open always, you alwaysget like 10X value from sharing
value with people. That's just really helped me
grow and get lots of inbound. And then the last thing is just
(37:44):
being ready to capitalize on anysudden like influx.
Like I've been posting stuff on YouTube and Twitter for, you
know, 4-5 years for different business ideas and my personal
brand and just like nothing sticks, right?
But finally this kind of app building thing really resonates.
And I was smart enough to kind of set up like an agency landing
(38:06):
page and paid calendly and all of that has kind of helped me
take advantage. And of of the extra eyeballs.
Well, it's like if you're building, cool.
Things. And you might as well hit
record. You might as well publish what
you're building, right? Yeah, yeah.
There's some industries like if you're in finance, right, you
can't do that as well or like healthcare, but.
(38:27):
And that's why those personal. Projects are important too,
because you can always record your personal projects.
Maybe not like a client. You have this agency, you have
all this. Stuff.
Where can people find you? I'm on Twitter.
Billy J Howell and my agency is stupid simple apps.com in
between the words. I'm like a hyphen guy now.
Yeah, those are my main two things.
My YouTube channel is the same Billy J Howell.
(38:49):
I have lots of tutorials on kindof replit and I play pick up
basketball outdoors in Northern Virginia.
So you might just find me there sometime.
OK. Well, Billy, thank you.
This was super enlightening and I appreciate your time.
Thank you all. Right.
What do you think? Please share it.
With a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.
ChatGPT rolled out, I started coding myself, I'm self-taught,
and then when Brad Put came out,that was kind of like a zero to
1. You could go from nothing to
full time freelancer or agency in two weeks.
Now I've run an app agency and I've got a team of four guys.
You just stay in the game and you'll win.
How do you know like this? I need to lean into this side
(00:21):
project or this client with all the opportunities out there.
It's really easy. What business ideas have you
seen or had lately that can be created with tools like these?
So there's a lot of stuff to build.
All right. I had a new guest on today by
the name of Billy Howell, and Billy is a Vibe coder.
Vibe Coding is basically using natural language like I'm
(00:42):
talking to you right now to talkto apps like Cursor, Replit,
Lovable, etcetera, to build stuff with code without knowing
how to code. And this guy is doing a great
job of it. And I wanted to learn from him
in public with you. So he talks about apps that he's
building, cool app ideas that hehas, how to make money on
Upwork, how to land jobs on Upwork, how to how to hire
people on Upwork to do work for you, which AI coding apps to use
(01:04):
for which type of app projects, whether it be a web app or
mobile app, etcetera. You're going to love it.
Share with a friend. We'll see you next time on the
Kerner Office. Yeah, so tell us who you are and
what you do. I'm Billy.
I make stupid simple apps for business owners and startups
come from a defense consulting background.
So not really the two don't really make sense.
(01:24):
But I think any good entrepreneurship path is kind of
crazy like that and kind of quitdefense contracting during the
pandemic. Started a marketing agency
because I knew I wanted to work with startups.
Learned a lot about kind of automations helping clients
automate marketing operations and things like that.
As ChatGPT and cursor and all that rolled out, I started
(01:49):
coding myself more. I'm self-taught.
And then when Replit came out, that was kind of like a zero to
1. Like, hey, I can make really
useful internal apps for my clients without taking too much
of my day up. And it's just really fun for I
think it's fun to tinker around and like cursor and replit.
Now I've run an app agency because I posted like a video
(02:09):
about selling an app and it wentviral.
I've got a team of four guys nowand we're making stupid simple
app. What are some examples of a
stupid simple app? The original one that I made is
just data entry for auto mechanic coaching business.
So there's this big need. Yeah, OK.
Yeah. Pretty sexy, right?
(02:31):
There, I've never heard those words strung together before.
He is a successful garage owner and he now coaches other garage
owners on how to get their techsto see more cars and have a
higher per car revenue. He thought he needed like a no
code solution with like air table and softer.
(02:52):
I'm on Upwork sitting at my deskand I'm looking at this.
I'm like, OK, like blue collar guy.
Like matter of fact, this soundslike my kind of guy and I'm kind
of in the process of writing a little proposal.
Like I use Airtel, former marketing clients, I can do this
for you. Here's some examples.
And I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, hey, like this is really
simple app. I could just make it in Replit.
(03:13):
And so I did and I kind of showed him, I made like a demo
and I kind of took a loom and showed him both solutions side
by side his custom Replit app orwhat it would be in like
software and Airtable. And the reason I did that is
because the software cost of using that no code stack would
be like 250 bucks a month for him.
Yeah, there's no reason you needto be paying that.
So let me build you one and thenI'll charge you 50 bucks a month
(03:35):
to run it. And he said, I like yours
better. And we went with that.
And it's just, yeah. Now he has car techs put in like
how many cars they sell each week and you can kind of track
their progress. Now, at what point during the
the Upwork application process do you build these MVPS for him
or was that early just to get the job or was that after you
had the job? I want to say he said yes before
(03:58):
I did a full demo, but I think Ialso may have just made
something in V-0 because it takes 30 seconds to visualize
what he wants. So I would say like, if you're
going to try to do something similar, you just have to find a
way. Whatever stack, if you're using
V-0, reply cursor, windsurf bolts, lovable, just get good at
(04:19):
making like a something that's like a clickable interface that
brings their idea to life. And if you can do that in 5
minutes, I think it's definitelyworth doing it to make the sale.
If it's your first job and you really want it and you want to
prove yourself, go ahead, all right?
Let's back up and educate the listeners a little more.
How would you define the differences and similarities
between V-0, lovable, bolt, repple and cursor?
(04:42):
Or is there anything else I missed there?
Windsurf. Windsor.
So there's local coding environments like cursor and
windsurf. They're pretty much like if you
were going to use like AVS code like.
That's a place where you can like store all your files, write
code, do terminal commands, Purser and Windsor for kind of
(05:04):
like that, but with an AI chat assistant that'll write code for
you or answer questions, debug little more advanced, like if
you have coding experience or anengineer, you would go that way.
Something like Bolt or Replict or Lovable or V-0 or browser
base. So you just go on your browser
and that's kind of more beginnerfriendly because you can just
(05:27):
type in your app or like I've done before, like put in a
sketch of an app and it makes itfor you.
You don't have to know how to install packages locally.
What kind of stack am I going touse to build this app?
Where am I going to put the directory?
How do I demo this locally? You don't have to know any of
that. So it's more beginner friendly
and it's quicker to MVP with those I'm.
(05:52):
Guessing most of our listeners are more on the beginner phase.
Not a lot of engineers in this crowd.
So if I want to build an app like, why would I choose Lovable
over V-0 over Bolt over Replit or vice versa?
It's a hard decision to make because as the underlying models
like open AI or clawed that kindof power, these things change.
(06:13):
Then you know, both might be better because of the the most
recent chat sheet PT release, but then maybe lovable is going
to go down right. So they all kind of are
changing. So it's really personal
preference and just putting repsin to one that that works with
your workflow. So what I would say if I'm
setting out to kind of start trying to build apps either for
(06:34):
my own business or to sell to people or just as a hobby, I
would think of a really simple one feature app that you want to
build and literally do it side by side.
Replit, V-0, Lovable, Bolt, whatever else there is and try
to make the same app and see what comes out.
Like see what frustrations you run into.
Maybe you really like the UI, for one.
Like I really like the UI from V-0.
(06:56):
So a lot of times I'll have it make UI and then pull that into
my main app in like Replit. So I would really, rather than
getting kind of pigeonholed and stuck in one, I try them all
first if I were to like, start this over.
Here's an example just because this is an idea that came to me
today with this new O1 image generation, right?
Have you played with that at allon ChatGPT?
(07:18):
I've done it and yeah, ChatGPT 40, whatever the standard model,
I don't know. The new like image editor, they
came out like a day or two ago. Yeah, I've been seeing it.
I didn't. Do I have to like select it I
guess? You just have to like prompt it,
right? Like users don't really know if
they have it on their pro account until they start like
playing with it. I was thinking it'd be
interesting to have just like a stupid simple web app where it's
(07:42):
just one prompt and you upload your resume and it converts your
resume into like an infographic,right?
For 5 bucks or something. And you just connect the API on
the back end, you connect Stripee-mail, something like that.
If you were going to build out, what would you use and why?
I would use raplet probably. That's kind of my go to for
starting point for a lot of things because you can just get
(08:05):
to MVPA really quickly. I know it plays nice with open
AI, which is what I'm going to use a lot of times if I'm
building something with AI features.
We could build an MVP literally in like 10 minutes.
Probably. The hard part that it comes down
to, I guess, is that consistent prompting, right?
So I might want to do more parsing of the resume upfront so
there's less ways for the open AI model to kind of go crazy,
(08:30):
right? Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, I think that's a greatuse case.
I think you could do it with anyof the ones we mentioned earlier
for sure. I'm glad you said replit because
that's the one I'm most familiarwith.
Do you find it to be difficult getting across the last mile?
Like getting it like literally asellable product that's
published? What are your shortcuts to that,
if any? It's paying someone to do it and
(08:53):
I actually haven't done this yetbut in replit there's like a
little bounties tab. Where you create a.
Bounty where you could pay, you could pay like 150 bucks to get
3 hours of dev time from I thinka pool of like agencies they
work with. I need to partner with them on
this. So actually I haven't done that
yet. I would go that route if you're
going to do it yourself. The last kind of 10% is starting
(09:15):
fresh with the agent or pulling that code into like a cursor or
windsurf and just talking back and forth with the agent, OK,
look at all my pages and tell meany concerns from a security or
whatever. And doing that just like with
literally each page, step by step with the AI like a partner
and being like, how can we refactor this?
(09:37):
How can we make sure it's tied up, it's tight and ready to go
like production? I hired a guy for a bounty once
but it it didn't work out like he had the same problem I did.
I guess he wasn't that great, but it doesn't mean I can't find
it's. Going to be hard because even
the best developer in the world,the guys I work with say this,
they're like really like it'd bequicker.
Rather it would take the same time to do that last 10% from
(09:58):
your code then for me to just doit from scratch so I don't have
to understand your code and yourbrain.
That's frustrating, but it is what it is.
The last 10%, it doesn't even take as long as the first 90%,
it takes longer, yeah. I'm I'm on it right now with a
client that I think I was supposed to rap with like 2
weeks ago. And.
It's a little bit of perfectionism too, where
(10:20):
sometimes like you'll get it to the client and they'll be like,
this is great and it's only going to be like two people
using it. But then you're like, oh, but
like, what about this like edge case?
What about this edge case? And especially when you start
thinking like, how are we going to scale this?
Then you get into those, I really need to fix this, but
like the approach of selling B to B to for really niche things
(10:41):
where one or two people are going to use it.
I think it's really easy to get to that last 10%, right?
Because you're not thinking about crazy edge cases and
redundancies and all that for atscale just minimizes complexity.
What like business ideas have you seen or had lately that can
be created with tools like these?
(11:03):
Is there anything that you're excited about or that you've
seen in the marketplace that excited you?
I'm excited about everything allday that's there's too much.
I can't sleep because I want to be doing personal projects and
projects for friends, projects for clients, projects for
proposals, right? So there's a lot of stuff to
build. I tell people all the time I
(11:24):
kind of just sound like a brokenrecord here, but I don't start
with direct to consumer. If it's your first app, like do
not it is a money pit, a pit of despair.
You don't have enough confidencein yourself.
Probably if you're just startingout to understand what to build
without bunch of people on Twitter or your friends telling
you, well, you should do this and you should do this.
(11:46):
They don't know what you should build, right?
Like they, they don't even know their own preferences.
So you need to get someone who'sgoing to pay you money to build
out features and then like have them use it and get feedback,
right? That's how you start building an
app. And then maybe you could, you
could resell a similar implementation, but everyone
wants little custom tweaks. So I think it's better to get
(12:09):
good with like using the same stack of AI tools and maybe like
your design components and then just sell kind of customized
ones to other people. And so I've totally rolled over
your questionnaire, which is like, what's an idea that you're
excited about? But every kind of white collar
business owner needs a smaller CRM like they're tired of
(12:30):
HubSpot. I'm tired of HubSpot.
It does too much. The pricing is opaque as ACEO
like I shouldn't be spending allmy time figuring out pricing
models and passwords for three different integrations, right?
So I'd rather pay up front to have something that I, that's
mine that just does ACRM for real estate or car dealerships
(12:52):
or something, right? Like your CRM that has only the
features that you want and use. Right.
And then everyone wants custom document templating, right?
It sounds like the easiest thingin the world, like, but everyone
still just uses Google Docs and it's sloppy and messes up.
I could automate anything. I could automate a horse, I
don't know. And I still manually do the
(13:13):
Google Docs thing because it's too fiddly to login somewhere
and then go to my templates, right?
It's it's just hard. It's too many clicks.
Docs dot new. Right.
What do you mean by a document template like?
What would that look like? What would be a use case for
that? Think about templates that are
for a business. Like you're starting a new
client, right? And you've got a bunch of
(13:34):
documents you need to fill out, some you need to sign, some you
need to sign, but they're overlapping fields with like
client name, my name, date, address, stuff like that.
So like putting in instead of pulling down a boilerplate
document from like DocuSign or whatever, just uploading your
own documents that you've been using in cool Doc and then being
(13:54):
able to like use those over and over, right?
It's like a custom DocuSign pretty much.
What are you working on right now as like a side project that
you're excited about and why? OK, so I've got a good one
actually that I need to finish again.
It's that last 10%, right? I'm trying to do like Stripe
integration and I'm fighting with old code from when I was in
(14:17):
as well practice and the models were all different.
So it might just nuke and start from scratch.
But it's ChatGPT, It's good Recipe generator.
I've got recipe generator.com. What?
How did you get that? Well, I think there's A-IN
there. Or generate a generate.
Hyphen. Recipes.com.
OK, OK. Generate hype.
So I had been finding myself like, you know, you don't like
(14:40):
with your with your fiance or your wife.
Are you married? Yeah.
Like figuring out what to eat islike the oldest problem.
It's been a thing for 200 years.So we would just go in and
literally just put here's the ingredients we have in a ChatGPT
make us a recipe. And it worked.
And like we would like make sauces we would have never
thought of before. I made an interface where you
can go in and save those recipe cards and then share them with
(15:04):
people. And it's super, it's sick.
And I think I'm, I'm trying to charge just like $0.25 per
recipe or something instead of having you pay per month because
that's annoying. Like you want, I want less SAS,
right? I want less recurring SAS in the
world for people. So that's kind of what I'm
really excited about that I'm. Trying to.
Is that out there yet? Yeah, if you go to
(15:26):
generatehyphenrecipes.com, if you go there, you can use it
just for one recipe and then it'll say you need to pay.
And I haven't set up the payments yet, so.
Now, Billy, you just told us to not do consumer apps.
So what we're doing here? This is 1 where I found myself.
This is a solution for me, right?
To save myself like I want. I want to have these recipes to
(15:47):
reuse, right? Instead of just losing them in
my ChatGPT app. I want to store them.
Yeah. So it was for me.
So and you're right. I did tell you not to do
consumer apps, but I'm not that the reason it's not finished
working yet is because no one's paying me to do it, right.
So that's why. It's there you go.
You did say that you're eating your own dog food.
And then the other one I found is that I like to do gardening
(16:09):
and stuff. And so like I have all these
different little plants, like succulents and little bonsai
trees that I move inside and then move outside every spring.
And I super like just micromanage them and end up
killing half of them. So what I do is like every day I
log, I take a picture in a ChatGPT of like a plant I'm
having trouble with. And I'm like, does this look
better or worse? Like what should I do?
(16:31):
And I really want to go back andsee how it's changed over time.
But then I'm scrolling through my photos app and there's
plants, screenshots, pictures ofmy fiance, you know random
stuff. So I just want to be able to
scroll and see how like my bonsai or whatever plans.
Yeah, like a time lapse. Time lapse, right?
And so I made like a demo of that, but it sucks, so I need to
(16:52):
like remake it. So it's good and I think it
would be super useful. I would use it every day.
And other people would. I mean, that can be an idea.
Like, but I don't want to do marketing, you know, That's the
thing with apps. But like, if you're solving a
problem for yourself, you're solving it for others.
Someone could build a time lapseapp for faces where you could
just upload pictures, selfies ofyourself over all the years and
(17:13):
they could just show you like a time lapse video of yourself
just because people are vain andthey probably find it
interesting. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Do you use like a specific API or LLM for images?
Specifically, a preference. So no.
And that was something I was wanting to figure out.
But now that like kind of the general open AI model is so good
(17:35):
at it, I would say probably if open AI has a machine vision, I
would use that model. I don't know if that exists
publicly, but right now like thegeneral all-purpose chat GPTI
think it does it. So that's what I would start
with, I think. Talk about your your Upwork
process like how do you find alpha on Upwork?
How do you find customers? How could people that have no
(17:56):
knowledge of Upwork, no account,log in and create an account,
get their first job, maybe it's free, and then like get more
jobs and then leverage those little, you know, 50 or $500
jobs into higher ticket jobs. That's a good one.
I'm going to look up this guy because Nick Sarev, he's got
really good YouTube videos from,if you're an automations
developer, how to set up your upwork profile.
(18:18):
I would say watch that video. Basically what he's going to
tell you is like do a professional headshot shoulders
up. If you're near a major metro
area, put down as your location instead of some suburb no one's
ever heard of, right? So do Washington DC instead of
Arlington for me. The next step.
So once you kind of got your profile set up, like the next
step is to just randomly go on during the week because it's all
(18:40):
about timing. That's like the main thing is
you want to catch people when they're excited about posting
their job listing. Like think about from their
side. And as an exercise, you should
set up an up work like client account and try posting a job
just to go through the process and you'll learn, but think
about it. So you want to catch someone
right when they're excited aboutthe project.
And that just means you need to check.
You could try to do all these automations to alert you and
(19:03):
automate stuff, but I think really it's just timing.
And then get really good at doing a tight proposal.
The thing that'll set you apart always is to record a loom so
they see your face, see that you're real.
A lot of people who are hiring online have been burned in the
past, so they want to see that you're trustworthy.
A lot of people are also conscientious about am I hiring
(19:24):
outside of the USA? Lot of people have been like
tricked with like VPNs to hiringpeople they thought were in the
US and then they weren't and they might have been a little
lower quality. So just kind of reassuring
people on that stuff goes a longway on up work, right?
And literally just scroll through stuff that you've worked
on and show them. A lot of people will just ask
like, can you show me some anything you've built?
Just so I believe that you can do this because I guess a lot of
(19:47):
people are hiring people who saythey can do stuff and they
can't. I've been hiring on Upwork for
like 12 years since it was odeskand I even have like a creator
account. What's the other side of the
marketplace called? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have that account too because I've I've played around and like
you, Like you said, you can learn so much having an account
(20:08):
on both sides of it. You can just learn what your
competitors are doing. I like logging in as what is it
called? Like a client?
The client. Client and there's freelancer
and then there's like agency is a third one that not many people
do. So like if you log in as a
freelancer and just start trolling jobs like you said,
even if you have no desire to actually make money on Upwork,
(20:30):
you can learn so much. Like you can learn competitive
intelligence on what people are doing like this.
I saw this one job posting was like, I need you to walk around
the city and take pictures of cars in parking lots and upload
them to an app. And I was just like, what are
they getting at? Like what are they doing?
What is the play there? You know, like I'm just so
(20:52):
curious. You can learn a lot from doing
that. Anyway, what I was saying is
over the last three years, the bot from like the business side
of Upwork or out of control. Like I'll I'll post a job and
I'll have like 15 applications within 5 minutes with like this
much text and I put at the very top of my application.
(21:12):
Don't a use AI. Like don't use AI if it's
ChatGPT, I'm going to ignore youput this keyword, put the word
orange in in your application. All this, it doesn't matter.
Like how do you stand out from all those bots?
I have the same experience and Iwish platforms again.
I don't want to make fun of Upwork too much, but whatever
platform would build that in youwhere not even like they are
(21:35):
checking to see if someone's a bot, but you could just say hey,
if the response doesn't have this in it, filter it out.
That would be nice, yeah. So video is cool, but you know
what's better? Long form audio via podcast and
my newsletter, TKO pod.com. Go there to subscribe for free
to my newsletter. It's one e-mail a week, very
tactical. And then go to my audio podcast,
3 episodes a week. Stuff like this.
You're going to love it all free, no sleazy sales bitch.
(21:57):
TKO pod.com. The thing for you, if you're a
freelancer trying to land a job,is you can't be squeamish about
using connects to boost your proposal.
So in Upwork you can pay, it's like $0.15 per connect.
It's like a currency and whoeverhas the, you have to spend a
minimum amount to submit a proposal.
But then it's like a, you get bumped to the top if you spend
(22:18):
the most and you can see what other people bid.
So I just don't even think aboutit.
I, I spend the money every time if it's something I want to go
for because it's just worth it. If you're spending, you know, 3
to 4 bucks on a proposal, that'sa great CPA for a potentially
$1000 job and like lifetime relationship if you're doing
that kind of work. What type of like non obvious
(22:42):
things do you look for in jobs that you apply for?
Like I say, maybe the obvious ones are like you want to see
someone that has some sort of a hiring history.
You don't want this to be their first job because they might
flake out, right? Yeah, look for how much money
they've spent on homework. Make sure they've spent a couple
$1000 and I think freelancers can rate them so they have like
a star rating. Read enough proposals.
(23:03):
You'll be like, is this person writing like kind of defensively
or like, do they sound like a tire kicker?
Right? You kind of get an idea of that
tone. Someone who's like has too much
like weird requirements upfront.Like I think those are the main
tips really is is like think like, does this sound like
something a good client would write?
(23:24):
And have they hired people in the past?
You can see what kind of rates they're hiring people for in the
past. Or if they're only hiring people
for $5 a day, probably they don't want to pay you for your
time, assuming you're going to be charging more than $5 a day
if you're doing this kind of work.
The other tip I would say you talking about taking pictures of
cars kind of made me think of this thing you could do to find
(23:45):
out what to build and who to build it for is think of
companies or business owners that you have existing
relationships for. Think about what technology
keywords or just workflow keywords they have.
Look those up and Upwork both onthe client side and the
freelancer side. So see what kind of jobs are
getting posted from their industry and then see what kind
(24:05):
of freelancers have, because on freelancer pages you can have a
bio and then like off the shelf like like packages for like an
existing job type. So you can find out like what
kind of services and then go pitch them to your buddy or your
friend in the community or whatever.
And then you've got that, you know, competitive advantage
because you're saying in front of them and you're not on
(24:26):
Upwork, right? So it's how you figure out like
what needs does that market have?
Yeah. What types of jobs are you
seeing more demand and supply for?
Like what would be the lowest thing for for someone coming on
Upwork today? I don't know that I look for
just general jobs enough to answer that because I'm usually
(24:47):
looking at keywords for specificno code or integrations that I'm
used to working with. It's totally different, right?
So if you're anywhere global, like anything like copy or
editing or kind of automations that need a human in the loop,
that's there's all going to be infinite work for that.
(25:07):
And then for if you're trying todo kind of higher cost, more
developer things like building apps or building out
automations. So if you're new and you're
really good at likemake.com automations, instead of building
out like an entire automation system for, you know, like a
sprinkler company, whatever, maybe like start searching for
(25:32):
troubleshooting like they have an existing one that's broken,
right? Or look for existing like go
high level broken, right? Look for those kinds of jobs
because they're going to be smaller scope and you're going
to be able to build up. They're going to be, I think,
easier to get. But it's something that like a
big agency might not bid on because it's probably not worth
their time. I feel like up work is so
overlooked from especially Americans like someone that
(25:54):
wanting to quit their job or start an agency or, you know,
build these no code tools. Would you agree that like
there's a world where if you made-up work your full time job,
like just applying to job, making looms, making looms,
making looms, giving it enough credits to be at the top of the
of the pile? I just have a hard time thinking
that people wouldn't be successful, like assuming
(26:16):
successful, assuming they did a good job.
Like trying to convert those small jobs to more recurring or
higher ticket clients. Like if you if you literally
took it seriously like a 10 houra day thing, after a month you
would have you would have a solid business.
Oh yeah, yeah. But here's what's going to
happen. And like, I was that guy, right?
Starting my marketing agency looking for clients like on
(26:38):
Upwork all day crying. So there's 2 problems. 1 is that
you know, depending on how good you are at reading between the
lines, maybe half of your clients could end up being like
annoying clients. Not annoying, but not a good fit
I guess. High maintenance.
High maintenance and on in like with things like that, that's
also probably me not knowing my capabilities as well.
(26:59):
So it takes time to kind of figure out what your
capabilities are, not just say yes to anything or to everything
rather. And then the second thing is you
can definitely stand up in agency in a month, but you're
going to run out of bandwidth. So you need to have the
foresight and be good enough at hiring to hire early or you're
going to be on like a deliverable treadmill.
What you said is totally true that you could go from nothing
(27:22):
to full time freelancer or full time, you know, agency in two
weeks, 3 weeks, there's enough work.
I know several people that simply apply for jobs as
freelancers as an American, and then they get a job and then
they just hire people on Upwork Offshore and outsource all of it
to them like they're just playing middleman.
(27:44):
That's really hard to do. Well, I'm not saying it's the
ideal, but it happens. Like assuming you know the
subject matter, like say make.com or Zapier, like you
know it, but you're trying to offload some of the work a lot
of people would, You know, they check the box and say, I only
want to hire from the US and so everyone else is excluded from
those search results. That can work, but it's it's
(28:05):
hard. I mean, I made a lot of bad
hires overseas. It's just like a muscle you have
to train hiring. Yeah, well, like it with any
business, you pick your headaches, right, You'll you'll
never avoid headaches. I I see that all the time I post
about business ideas in the comments, like what about this,
what about that? I'm like, there's always going
to be headaches. Like what do you want?
What's an example of a client you found on Upwork that you
(28:26):
were able to leverage into? Like something higher ticket or
more recurring? It'll be just like back to kind
of my marketing agency starting with like an SEO audit or can
you tell me why our pages are ranking like this?
And that call will just turn into like, OK, not Billy's my go
to. We'll have like a recurring call
(28:47):
just to get consulting. Maybe we'll have some special
projects or look at my analytics.
So like any sort of one off audit or troubleshooting for
like Facebook ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, things like
that can turn into regular consulting.
And I think the one of the keys to success there is it into not
getting stretched too thin or isto just keep that as like
(29:10):
instead of saying yes to some project because it's a really
good fit with the client. But if you don't have those
capabilities, just stick to consulting and analytics and
all, all like I'm going to tell you what you're doing wrong and
how to fix it. But if you don't have the team
to implement it, like I would just stick on that.
Consulting, like consulting versus building out projects to
me are two very different things.
(29:31):
Does that make sense? Am I just?
Yeah, it does. So stick.
Stick to consulting if you had to choose between the two.
Yeah, I would say stick. I think that's if you if it that
scales better for sure. Yeah, OK.
What is your framework for managing your shiny object
syndrome? How do you know what are your
signals of like this? I need to lean into this side
project or this client with all the opportunities out there.
(29:54):
How do you look at it? That's really easy money.
Are people paying me to do this,yes or no?
Are people trying to pay me to do this?
Yes or no? Otherwise I probably shouldn't
be spending time on it. How can I help answer that?
Less like a cave. No, it's just like, sometimes
this is the most, like, lame romantic thing ever, but you
just have an idea and it just resonates with you.
(30:15):
It keeps you up at night. And it's like, no one's paying
me for this, but this makes so much logical sense.
Like when do you make exceptionsto that?
So I think if it's something like me where I'm using ChatGPT
and I'm noticing myself doing this frequently or like every
day, but I think just like this AI helps you iterate and get
that shiny objects out of your body so that it's like way less
(30:37):
of a problem for me. So like think about like a year
ago, right? I would have an idea for
something for like a game or like an SEO tool and I would
spend all night on cursor and open AI trying to code this
prototype. I'm not like a full stack
developer by trade, but I can kind of get to it.
But then as soon as something breaks, it's another 8 hour
(30:57):
night of me trying to troubleshoot it.
And so then over two months, like I'm losing sleep over this
stupid little shiny object, but now I can like realize an idea
in 45 minutes in Replit or Bolt or whatever and it kind of gets
that shiny object. Scratches the.
And I'm like, oh, that's not as cool as I thought it was.
(31:19):
Or oh, like, dude, I should showthis to people or keep going.
So I think, yeah, I think maybe that's more of the answer, is
that finding how to scratch thatitch, it's easier than it ever
has been. But sometimes you just, you, you
have to scratch that itch, like you just have to check the box
to know whether or not for yourself.
You know, like me personally, I hate being years down the road
(31:40):
and thinking like, I should havetried that.
I just should have tried that. What would happen if I would
have tried that? You know, that's just the
opposite argument to focus on one thing.
And a lot of times, most of the time, you scratch that edge, you
realize it's not for you. But now you know.
Yeah, but. I mean, I say all that and my
entire kind of journey in entrepreneurship is the opposite
(32:03):
of what I just said, which is only doing stuff that people pay
you to do. I'm able to kind of do the
projects that I do because I spent a weekend with some random
idea I had and I learned about this library or because like I
worked for paying the people like in college doing gigs like
selling real estate or doing stuff like a waiter at the
(32:24):
country. All these random jobs, you know,
kind of coalesce into who you are.
So you're right, you do have to scratch that itch.
And before I ever sold my first like AI coded app, I look back
and I had 40 raplets I created for fun and 20 directories that
I had made with cursor locally. So that's 60 inches.
I tried to scratch before I was able to sell one.
(32:47):
So it is important to get your skills up.
You just have to be smart and kind of direct with with what
you're doing. I'm doing this give yourself
constraints. Say I'm going to try to make
this in two hours. I'm going to try to make this
thing that does these two features instead of setting out
to make the greatest 100 featureapp.
It's a lot harder. To take credit for the like the
(33:10):
compounding of experience that we have because sometimes we
don't have anything physical to show for.
Like I just kept pivoting. I kept, I had shiny objects I
kept. It's like all of those things
help teach you what you know today to get you to this one
thing that actually did work. A lot of times I hear people
just talk about the being wastedtime.
Like you keep resetting, compounding, quit resetting,
(33:31):
quit starting over. It's like you're really not like
you just stay in the game and you'll win.
You know what the? Funny thing about that is that I
never realized till you said that a lot of what consulting is
in freelancing people pay you totell them what shiny objects not
to chase, what rabbit hole is not to go down.
(33:52):
I could say, oh I've used those SAS.
That's SAS. That's don't use it, waste of
time. Not right for you.
I scratched that edge. So they're paying me.
They're paying me to, yeah, savethem on analysis paralysis.
At the end of the day, that's all that business is, is like
you're not selling like a product or service.
You're you're selling decisions made for someone who has limited
time and resources, right. Yeah, interesting.
(34:14):
Talk to me about the prospect ofbuilding out a custom app for
someone like your your garage consulting friend and then using
that app and selling it to otherpeople.
You mean reselling? Kind of the same.
The same app. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you done that or is that kind of harder than advertised
on the surface? I have not done that with.
(34:34):
That example, I'm doing 1 where I have a better example where
it's like a custom data visualization for HubSpot for
like a specific industry niche. And it's like this revenue
attribution. It's just like a feature gap in
HubSpot and they want me to build it out and they're OK with
me selling it to, you know, other clients or companies,
(34:58):
right? Because they just needed that.
It's not like a full app. It's like a, it's kind of like
your clients, OK. With it, yeah, it's kind of
like. It's like a custom dashboard,
right? But like it's on a server and
everything because I did the research and you can't make that
custom dashboard and the 20 SAS apps that are supposed to be
able to do it, right? So we just had to do a custom
and like the garage one. I mean, that's Dataviz too.
(35:19):
So I guess what I'm saying is that like basic like CRUD apps
and data visualization, like they're not like proprietary,
right? And you can kind of reuse the
same visual components and architecture without, you know,
hurting anyone's competitive advantage.
I think there's a world where you.
Could G2 reviews for those listening review site for SAS
(35:39):
products, you can scrape all those of for HubSpot and find
all the keywords like the the negative sentiment keywords
about certain features that are missing and build tools around
that. Yeah.
Totally. This democratization of software
development is going to change like how SAS works, because all
these big platforms have AP is where you can send as many
(36:00):
requests as you want. Like in a year, why would anyone
pay for 20 seats on whatever SASwhen they could pay for one and
then have a custom app built that just pulls all that data in
and out for them, Right? Like headless, it might push,
you know, more software to be more open source and more, more
headless solutions. I don't know what's going to
happen. Yeah, yeah.
(36:20):
What about the the hard part here which is distribution?
Have you find found any hacks outside of Upwork to distribute
these ideas or SAS tools or or apps no like?
That's why I'm kind of optimizing for selling B to B
relationship based because that's what I'm good at.
And I think there's just so manyburning needs there.
And I think they are all kind ofinterrelated and you'll learn
(36:43):
and you'll be able to compound easily.
So personally, right, So me, like my, my Twitter and YouTube
have been popping off because I just one day I decided to record
myself doing Replit for a client, right?
Or for like a personal project, post videos like that.
And then someone from like Replit, I think like the CEO of
(37:03):
Replit, like retweeted me with the video and the link.
So that just massively boosted me there.
I'm definitely like a replit chill and I like I use it a lot.
I'm not sponsored. I really like them.
That's one of the things about kind of picking a stack and
moving forward with it. Get really good at, you know,
Bolt apps for enterprise Oregon,Lovable apps for teachers and
(37:24):
try to put it out there and share with people.
I'm sharing like a lot of sauce on like the Upwork stuff and
even probably too much on some of these like app ideas.
So being open always, you alwaysget like 10X value from sharing
value with people. That's just really helped me
grow and get lots of inbound. And then the last thing is just
(37:44):
being ready to capitalize on anysudden like influx.
Like I've been posting stuff on YouTube and Twitter for, you
know, 4-5 years for different business ideas and my personal
brand and just like nothing sticks, right?
But finally this kind of app building thing really resonates.
And I was smart enough to kind of set up like an agency landing
(38:06):
page and paid calendly and all of that has kind of helped me
take advantage. And of of the extra eyeballs.
Well, it's like if you're building, cool.
Things. And you might as well hit
record. You might as well publish what
you're building, right? Yeah, yeah.
There's some industries like if you're in finance, right, you
can't do that as well or like healthcare, but.
(38:27):
And that's why those personal. Projects are important too,
because you can always record your personal projects.
Maybe not like a client. You have this agency, you have
all this. Stuff.
Where can people find you? I'm on Twitter.
Billy J Howell and my agency is stupid simple apps.com in
between the words. I'm like a hyphen guy now.
Yeah, those are my main two things.
My YouTube channel is the same Billy J Howell.
(38:49):
I have lots of tutorials on kindof replit and I play pick up
basketball outdoors in Northern Virginia.
So you might just find me there sometime.
OK. Well, Billy, thank you.
This was super enlightening and I appreciate your time.
Thank you all. Right.
What do you think? Please share it.
With a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.
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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
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Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com