The Golden Era of AI & Startups.

There has been unimaginable growth within the startup and AI app space over the past few months, and I feel like the average person has no clue how much the world has changed under their nose.

It’s honestly a bit scary how fast things are moving.

In just the past few weeks alone, I’ve learned how to fully ideate, design, build, deploy, and promote entire high-quality apps from scratch, without writing a single line of code.

And what’s crazy is that ~literally~ ANYONE can do the same, I am not special. I am just chronically online enough to be aware of these things.

You have heard of ChatGPT, but this next generation of AI tools will blow your mind.

Even if you have no interest in building an app for yourself right now, if you have even a few free hours in your week I recommend you at least check some of these tools out:

• v0 → chat-based AI that can prototype and design apps in seconds

• Claude → my favorite general AI chatbot, can take designs and code them

• Cursor → AI coding environment for implementing the code for your app

• Replit → Platform for deploying your app’s code to the web instantly

Combine these and you can literally build anything with a budget of less than $150 per month. I know this firsthand — I had a team of 3 spend 6 months building the first version of Uptrends, now I can build apps like this in days.

And I plan to do so. My first app, which I have started messing around with, will be called ColeslawNearMe. It will do exactly what it sounds like: help you find coleslaw locations in your vicinity, here’s a sneak peek:

It’s dumb, I know. But my goal here was exactly that — see if I can build the dumbest possible app on the planet entirely from AI without really writing any code.

And document my process along the way to show how even a dumby like me can do it. This is the new way:

1. Come up with an idea for an app

2. Design a prototype with v0 + Claude

3. Build it and deploy it with Cursor + Replit

4. Promote it with organic content (Twitter, Beehiiv, TikTok)

This is my test case. Because if I can do this, then maybe I could build an actually-useful app from scratch as my next project.

Let me iterate, this type of thing literally became possible within the past few months, all the pieces came together seemingly overnight.

And if you extrapolate out just 6 to 12 to 18 months, you begin to realize that the skill of launching a successful startup in the future will be in:

1) intimately understanding the most valuable real-world problems worth solving, 2) efficiently growing online following/community to sell those products.

The part that’s been historically difficult about startups has been the actual building of the product. That will become increasingly easy.

And the way things are moving, if you aren’t in the weeds learning how to do it in the next 18 months, you will be far behind my friend.

It is exciting, it is a bit scary.

One person who has taught me a lot about where to look in this new era has been Greg Isenberg. I think this tweet sums it up well: