321 | How to Build an AI App Without Coding: From Idea to App Store with Replit & Claude by Bryce Rattner Keithley

Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Matis, your host, and I got a really fun, interesting, and helpful episode for you today. Almost everyone have an idea of something that can help them, either help them in their life, help the other people, help their business, and most of us just keep it as a good idea and don't actually do anything about it.

Now, they usually we don't do anything about it because you feel that you either don't have the knowledge or the time or the budget or some other reason or some kind of combination of the above of why not take your idea and turn it into life. But these days are over because AI enables you to take your ideas and turn them into whatever they need to turn into, including full applications that can do really amazing things for you and for other people. Now To do this, again, this used to take having a product team, and a development team, and a research team, and a deployment team, and IT people, and DevOps, and all these kind of things that mean nothing to most people.

But in today's episode, we're going to show you that literally anyone can do this with zero technical knowledge. Our guest today, Bryce Ratner, is a busy mom. She has other stuff to do other than developing applications, and she has no technical background whatsoever. And yet, right now she has an app in the App Store that people around the world are downloading and using.

And in her case, it's just to help other people. That was the whole purpose. But the goal of today's session is to inspire you to take the idea that you have in your head and show you the steps how to go from an idea in your head to a working application that you and other people can use. And like I said, first of all, this particular use case is really, really cool and really fun the way it actually works, and I will let Bryce share with you exactly what it is and how it is.

But the idea is not that. The idea is to show you, again, that with no skills, no technical background, you can actually build applications that can help you, can help other people, either in your personal life or in your business. It's because I think this will inspire many of you to actually take action and do these kind of things, I am truly excited to welcome Bryce to the show. Bryce, welcome to Leveraging AI.

Hi, Isar. Thanks for having me. This is so cool. Like, you know, we...

You and I chatted twice already about this thing, and I think your story is really, again, I, I used that word already, inspiring, right? Because you really don't have any technical background. So, I think what would be cool is to, first of all, take people back to how this whole idea started. and then we can dive into the actual technical details of what you built and then how you built it.

Absolutely. as Isar mentioned, while I have no Hard technical skills. I've spent most of my career in tech. I've worked in recruiting and talent strategy from, for some well-known companies, and I've worked alongside extraordinarily talented technologists and builders, and seen incredible products come to life.

And there's an interesting duality to that exposure of, interacting with some of the top paid, most sought after magicians of technology, and having it fully abstracted to me how they do what they do. And on the other side, spending time either bartering or going to head-to-head negotiating with these people, you also know that they're kind of blue-blooded, imperfect humans like the rest of us. And so the genesis of this idea, as Isar mentioned, I'm a mom. My kids were really young when the pandemic started.

And as a true survival mechanism, I started doing what I now know is called micro workouts, which was like doing 10 pushups here or 10 squats here while waiting for coffee or next to bed- you know, bath time or whatever. And I had this idea that if someone just told me what the exercise was every day, I would do 100 of them. There was a 100 pushup a day challenge for like a hot second. And so as some of the, buildable apps came to be last fall, I was like, "I should really, play around with this technology and see what's going on.

What's something lightweight?" And I thought I could probably push an idea to myself, a workout to myself every day, and why not start there? So that was the beginning of it. And like Isar said, I just kind of slippery slope.

It's now in the App Store. Very cool. So, so it really came initially as your personal need, right? You weren't thinking about building an application for other people.

You definitely were not thinking putting it in the App Store. What did you do? very, very first step. You're like, "Okay, I want something to send me a message every single day with an idea for an exercise and hopefully how to do the exercise," because some of them have weird names you don't really understand.

Totally. and before even leaning on technology, I tried to just beg my friends who know more about fitness than I do, "Can you just send me?" And, like, that's not reliable to do that. but it was sort of thinking, "Oh, this seems like a thing that this, AI, LLM could do," meaning to your point of the ideas.

Okay, I could probably have it generate a list of 30 body weight exercises to start with so I don't have to do that thought exercise. Yeah. I can show you, I actually built the MVP, the V001 of it in parallel in Lovable and Replit at the same time, just to kind of see what would happen, and it was, it was in that, and I, I actually think to your point of me lowering the bar and making this accessible, it was having a beginner's mindset that asking a really high level- Greenfield question and seeing how much came, even if not perfect, but how much came in terms of progress lit a spark that really warmed the waters and made it interesting and friendly and approachable to continue.

Do you wanna see how I started? And, and lured you, and lured you in, right? Lured me in. That's exactly what I would say.

So while, while you're opening the thing, yes, I wanna see it. While you're opening it, I'll say a few things for the people who are not from the tech world. So MVP stands for minimal viable product, which basically means, what is the smallest thing you can build that still provides value? It's a big deal in the software world where you wanna build something and you don't wanna build for six months.

You wanna build for the shortest amount of time to see that it actually provides value and works. So that's kinda like the first thing that you said. The two applications that you mentioned are Lovable and Replit. So there's a pretty wide range today of applications that allow you to develop software while not really knowing how to write code or create anything.

They fall into different categories, and there's today more and more overlap between these categories. But on a, on a very high level, there is the more, entry-level, user-friendly, I don't need to know anything applications, which on the top of that list are Lovable and Replit and probably Base44 now. So these three applications allow you to basically come and know nothing about how is it stored and where the code goes and what the hell is a database and how it's deployed, and all these things that software people need to know are all built into it, and you literally just need to ask things in English.

So that's kinda letting you know. And then you get to the more advanced ones like, uh, Cursor and GitHub Copilot and stuff like that, that are built more for developers, even though day-to-day people like us can also use it as well. And then there's the stuff that's kind of in the middle, like just the raw Claude code, and stuff like that. So this is kinda like putting things in perspective so you kind of understand what we're talking about.

Now I'll hand it back to Bryce, that is already sharing her screen This is what the app looks like today. So this is what we're working with today, and if you wanna do standing hip circles, that's August 20th's challenge. I started- So be- before, before you move- Yeah before you move, uh, because a lot of people are gonna be listening to this. So what we're looking at is a really stylish page that has a cat in a gym.

A, a humanoid cat, right? It's not a cat, but it looks like a human that looks like a cat. and it's doing an exercise in a well-lit gym explaining, or demonstrating I should say, how the exercise looks like, and you can pick different things and variables, I guess, and timers and stuff like that, underneath that. So it looks very professional.

The video looks really, really cool. and so this is the current version, right? This is the current version. This is Daily 100 Is there a different animal for every exercise?

Not for ev- There's, like, maybe a dozen, like 12 to 15. There's a fox, there's a rabbit, there's a turtle. There's some anthropomorphic mythological creatures as well. There's a genie and, um- Very cool an angel.

There's a lot. There's... We've had- Let my kids choose what we make for some of them as well. This is so fun.

Um, but I started in a really basic way. So apparently, my Replit history doesn't go back this far, but I'm fairly certain I copied and pasted the same prompt, and this is where I started. "Create a text interface app that will prompt users on a daily, Daily 100, a different exercise each day selected on rotation from a list of about 30, and to complete 100 reps throughout the day. Users will reply back with numbers completed in each set, and the app will log and track the count and celebrate with emojis when hitting 100 each day.

App will also track with a yellow to r- y- red to yellow to green color continuum the streak the user has made out of 100 each day." That was where I started, YOLO. Just this is my idea. There you go.

And if... As I scroll, you'll see I actually never replied. I just wrote this, and it came up with, like, basically that. Isar, I don't know if you wanna narrate and talk a little about what you're seeing, but th- that was my magic.

It was in seconds, minutes. Yeah. so again, going from an idea to version zero that does the very basic thing you requested requires literally just that, just asking any one of these apps. And yes, the user interface is not as slick at the current one, but it still looks very reasonable and modern.

Uh, it gives you the exercise you need to do without any video and demonstration because that was not requested. It tells you what's today's challenge, how many reps you've completed, allows you to log, put in a number, and hit Log Set, and it adds it to the counter, and that's basically it, and shows you a streak. So- Oh, didn't get the colors right, but yeah. Oh, it didn't get the colors.

It lets you add some. Yeah. But there is a slide bar that gets added as you add more reps, which again, for what you needed in step one, it is completely a workable solution Exactly. And so I did this AB tested, if you will.

I did the same prompt in Lovable as I did in Replit. It was a relatively similar v0 that came up in both. My advanced decision-making process was that one of these talented technologists that I've known in my career is a director of engineering at Replit, and I decided it might be valuable to be able to phone a friend, in one of these companies. So I stayed with Replit, and that's where I built, 0.

1, 0.2, et cetera. Um, it- my history doesn't go back that far, but I, I, I do think there's some interesting t- things to see. You can...

if you're watching this and if you're looking at the experience, the interface for the app that you see in the preview panel is what the app looked like when I first launched it in the App Store, so let's call it version one. Uh, it had a dark mode as the primary. It has a circular, interface, where when you add the reps, it fills it out around this sort of in a clock rotation, and it does become a gradient along the way. but I built it in here.

the top prompt from five months ago, which is as far back as it goes, starts with me saying, "Is the agent down? Can we resume building?" Because this is- generally how I approach things with the robots. Uh, my preview panel went away, but perhaps it will come back.

It, it's coming. Um, any questions so far? I can talk you through a couple more examples from here if it's useful. Yeah.

So before you do that, I just wanna say the obvious for those of you who didn't get it. Like, all it requires is talking in English and explaining what you want it to do, and when you're not sure what to do, you do exactly what Ry said, and said, "Oh, is this done?" Like, "How do we continue? Where do we stop?"

And it will tell you how to continue or what's going on or what's the next thing to work on and all these kind of things. It is... Most of these work in a very similar way. There is a chat interface where it's just like all the AI chats that we know.

There's a preview pane that shows you the code as it's running, so what's gon- what it's gonna look like when you actually deploy it, and then the slightly more advanced one, like Replit, also has like files and folders on the side where you can upload documents and see the code, which is completely not necessary if you don't want to, but if you do, then it's helpful One big unlock, which I really think actually leaned into my posture that a beginner's mindset can be a competitive advantage when building with AI, uh, was learning the concept of plan mode- Mm which in Replit is this small checkbox down at the bottom of the screen, right in the, in the chat interface, where...

And it, it took trial and error to be like, "Oh, wait, I didn't actually want you to make that change." But when you click the plan mode, I think it's cheaper on tokens too, you can zoom out or press pause on development. And my approach was like, "Hey, robot, what are we gon- This is what I think I wanna do," and talk about it. I'll often ask the robot to ask me, "Here's what I told you.

What else do you wanna know? What questions do you have for me? What am I missing?" When it will tell me its strategy, I may ask it to evaluate its level of confidence in that strategy, what other strategies it might have considered, not knowing any of the pros and cons of these strategies myself, mind you, just putting it out there.

asking it, "Are there risks to this strategy or vulnerabilities that might be created?" Again, no horses in these races, no knowledgeable, no knowledge about it, but like kinda asking itself to pressure test a little bit. And so the plan mode can be really nice as like a de-risking a low-risk situation even further I love it. I, I wanna say a few things about, about what you said.

One, as far as the plan mode, what it basically does, it allows you to, A, brainstorm and, B, plan. So the brainstorming part is, okay, here's an idea. How do we develop it? What are the pros and cons?

But the, the design is, okay, if we're going to do this, what do we actually need? Oh, we will need three new pages for the application. One will be this, excuse me, the second will be this, the third will be that. We need these things in the back end.

It needs to connect to this kind of API, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And again, when you don't know, like, okay, but what if - what is this API going to do? What is an API? Like, why do we need it?

So you can go back and forth. Uh, so this is one thing about the plan mode. And then once you're ready, you get it out of plan mode, and then it can actually write code and, and make changes to the application. So this is one, and it's available on all these tools, in a very similar concept.

The second thing when it comes to planning, the way I now develop really complex applications is I actually start in ChatGPT or Claude, in my case, to do all the brainstorming and planning. And I actually took the concept that Bryce mentioned of ask me questions to the next level. So I actually have what I call a PRD process. PRD stands for Product Requirements Document, where the AI will ask me, I don't know, 100 questions on who's the target audience, what technology it's gonna be running on, why do we need this, what does it need to connect to?

Like a lot of questions. I answer them to the best of my knowledge, and sometimes I say, "I don't know. Go and research this and come back with three options, and then we can figure it out together." and then at the end of that, it generates a requirements document that is between 20 to 70 pages long that now has a very clear definition of the broader vision of what we wanna develop.

Then I go to the next step and say, okay, now let's develop a development plan. Kinda like what Bryce is saying she's done on a small footsteps, uh, you can now do big, like plan the whole thing out. And only then I would go into a Replit, Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, whatever the case may be, to actually do the development because I have a much broader planning. But the concept is the same concept.

Allow AI to interview you, to ask you questions about what you're trying to develop. Question AI's decisions. It's like, "Oh, why are we doing this? Give me other options.

Between, uh, one and five, how would you rank this compared to the other one?" all these kind of things. So even if you don't know anything about this, you still have judgment. And once you get the information, your judgment kicks in, and you can make better decisions helping the AI guide the overall process in the right direction.

So awesome information Thank you. Okay, so, so now you had... Y- you said let's go through a few of these prompts. Let's just s- see some of it.

So again, people see that's just a conversation in English. Just a conversation in English. I had just told it, like, "Something seems wrong with you, friend." Like, "Are you back online?

Can we get back to work?" And it's figuring things out. Okay. And then it says we can get back to work, and I just start nitpicking.

We can remove the words like and dislike from the up vote, down vote b- buttons. I was letting people rank if they liked or vote if they liked an exercise. Simple fix. Thank you, Replit.

Done. Dee, dee, dee. And then I said the thumb looks weird when filled in. What are our other options here?

this might have been in plan mode. It looks like it gives me some options. Said great, let's go with option one. it's just, it's...

to Isar's point, I don't need to know anything about the how I can just talk about my wishes and hopes and dreams. Uh, I, a guest on a, a podcast I listen to, describe... I think he was also non-technical, described his role as just being the pickiest customer, and so sometimes I think of myself as that. It's like, "No, I just don't like that.

Like, let's try something new. Let's fiddle with it until we find something that's more palatable or delightful for me." And you can just... I had this whole thing with these two-sided exercises.

Think about, like, a lunge or, um, a bicycle crunch where you're not sure, does one side count as one, or do you need one of each side to count as one? And what were the semantics gonna be about how to tell people they had to do 100 on both sides? So I could fiddle with that however I wanted to. there was a problem.

I had a, we were, I was playing around with metrics, and I was realizing that at some point, th- I think it was probably 'cause I have a daily double, meaning you can add a second exercise if you wanna be an overachiever, and, it, the, the metric was showing someone having done eight out of seven days, which I was like, "Well, that doesn't work." Um, so it, that's a good example of, like- That's a, that's a super overachiever. It is super... Exactly.

You found extra time in your week. but it was a good example of, like, you know, it's like kind of the robots are stupid. Like, sometimes you can't assume judgment or that, like, they have common sense for the things humans think about. But as always, it's just natural language interactions.

Awesome. I wanna ask a few, two interesting follow-up questions. One is how long from the moment you start dev- started developing it to the point you're like, "Oh, I can actually share this with other people"? Not still on the App Store, but just, like, you felt comfortable that this is a real app that people can actually use.

That's question number one. Uh, and I'll, I'll hint on question number two, but we can go to it afterwards, is when did you start adding all the cool bells and whistles of, like, videos and animals and stuff like that? but let's start with the first question of how long when you said, "Oh, this I can actually give to other people," or maybe it was the other way around, and people saw you using it and asked you for, like, I don't know what was the process. So that's a great question.

It was pretty quick. it was pretty astounding, and again, I- I've built my career working with technologists, and so part of me felt like a child with show and tell, like, "Look at what I did. I built a technology product." and the- like, there, there were...

I, I did integrate Twilio to set up, like, SMS, uh, notifications, and I mean, that was a whole Everest, so there were a lot of phone-a-friends in, in that process, so there was some, like, necessity of sharing. I also, like I said, I'm a mom. My kids are a little bit older now, but, like, the journey of fitness and, feeling strong again has been a thing, and, I, I've gotten questions about getting back in shape, and now my answer is Micro Workouts. And so it was both.

It was both me showing off the app and then also people asking about my exercise regimen and pointing them to it. so pr- I, I think by the chat it showed Unlovable was October 21st of 2025, and I think I was probably having people look at it the first or second week of November, so maybe two weeks later, and I was just working on this intermittently. I was pretty quickly, Uh, if I- I'm a fairly generalist, uh, recruiter, but if I've done anything the most, it's design recruiting.

So for better or for worse, I'm ruined with UI and UX, and it really irks me when things are poorly designed. So I, I... and please, there's lots of notes. There's lots of room still for improvement, but it was pretty quick that I was like, "Oh, dear.

I can't look at this every day. I'm gonna need to- to fine-tune this and improve it." So I started sharing it, I'll tease one thing, which was, as I shared it with people who, including my parents and my family, who are less technical than I, and they were getting URLs like .replit.

app, you know, and like, "What do you mean? I can't find this in the App Store," that sort of begged the question of when was it gonna be a real app and how could I make it something that was more shareable? But it was also, that audience where you can oftentimes I was truly waking up to text messages from my parents saying, "What's a bridge walkout? How do you do the bridge walkout?"

And, bleary-eyed being like, get into a glute bridge and..." What are you doing with your body? How do I describe this? This is not gonna be the limiting factor of the app, and so I figured there had to be something that was more scalable to show my handful of users what to do every day so I wasn't having to write out the instructions.

and so that was what prompted building more things and adding some videos in. Did I miss anything in those questions? No, this was great. So, I think the two critical things are that the road from having nothing to having something you can actually give to other people is very, very short.

So this is not your full-time job. You, like you said, you're a mom and work at the tech space in San Francisco, which means there is no clear hours of the day where the work ends. And yet, in that timeframe between all the other things, just by chatting back and forth every now and then, you were able to get it to a point where other people can start using it. You can continuously improve it over time, and it's literally endless.

Every time somebody else gives you an idea or every time you see something that you're like, "Ooh, this could fit well," or every time you say, "Ooh, I wish I had this and that," all you have to do is go back into whichever platform you're on, explain in English what you want the improvement or change to be, look at the results, make whatever fine-tuning, and then ship it off to wherever it needs to get shipped. Which leads me to the next question. How do people get access to this thing, right?

So you work on it on Replit or Lovable, and now you wanna give it to your parents or your friends. And before you even get to the App Store, how do you actually, quote-unquote, "deploy this" so other people can benefit from the application you're creating? Replit made that so easy. there truly is just a Publish in the upper right that...

I mean, it, it uses a lengthy URL. iPhones, uh, non-iPhones allow you to save a web app instance directly to the home screen, which again, was, like, a thing that I had to, overcome and make an onboarding screen for, um, to just make it more usable. But to me, again, like, having grown up in technology in, you know, Web 1 and Web 2, it really felt like The true accomplishment was getting this- Yeah into the App Store and just saying- Yeah "Yes, it is a true, it is a true app."

So you could share the URL. Again, Replit made it really easy to just have it be a publicly accessible thing. it was a self-imposed, milestone to get it published in the App Store. I've not put it in Google Play yet, mostly 'cause I don't have a testing device and nor the time.

Right. But, but it is in the App Store, and that was just something that I felt would be a crowning achievement for my own- So- my own hall of fame. Okay. So there are many companies who spend many, many days figuring out how to get their stuff into the App Store.

How, as a non-techy busy mom, did you figure out how to go from, "Oh, this is running on a URL on Replit," to, "I have an app running approved in the Apple App Store"? I'm so glad you asked. I told Claude. "I have a fairly advanced app that's built on Replit, and I'm interested in turning it into a real app that's ready for the Apple App Store.

How can we go about maturing the app for submission?" And it asked me, "Here are the key steps to mature your Replit app into an App Store-ready iOS app." It says, "Choose your tech stack path. Set up Apple developer infrastructure.

Harden the app itself. Meet App Store review guidelines. UI/UX polish. Backend and data."

It's a nine-point test, and it says, "What's your app built with? React, Python, Swift, et cetera. Knowing your current tech stack will let me give you a much more concrete migration path and tool recommendations." And my response was, "I don't know.

What can I send you from Replit to figure this out?" This is brilliant. I still don't really know. so that's again a question.

It's like every time the robots tell me to do something and I don't know exactly what it is, I just say, "You're gonna have to explain that differently or try again," or, "Absolutely do not tell me two things to do at the same time or in sequence. We do one thing at a time because that's all I can handle." but I think that's the willingness to just truly ask dumb questions or just ask and clarify, it will do better, and you needn't be embarrassed 'cause it doesn't judge you. It like It's like, "Oh, I get it.

Let me do a better job. That was on me." They make it so friendly. I love this so much, like from so many different aspects.

I think the one thing that I will add to this that now all these tools have either built in or with a simple few clicks that it can walk you through, they have browser access, right? So in, back in the day, three months ago, you had to go to Replit and figure this out on your own. But now you can literally say, "Oh, open your browser and open Replit and just ask me to log in." That's the only thing they would still not do, uh, for safety reasons, not that they can't.

And you log in into the browser that it has opened, and now it's in Replit, in your Replit account, and it can see everything, including where's the code and what code is it and how it can be deployed and which component it has, what it's connect- Like all of that. You have to copy and paste nothing, you have to explain nothing, you have to find nothing yourself. And it's happening to me every single day, where Claude will say, "Oh, you, you need to go there and that and find this information."

No. Open the browser. Go figure this out for yourself." And it does.

And really the only thing it needs me for is credentials. Like, it's like, "Okay, I'm, I'm stuck. Go Like I need you to log in." And then you log in and it will take over and do the thing.

Now, there are cases where you probably need to be a little more careful, right? I'm not sure I'm gonna give it access to my bank account, as an example, or to my, uh, live software deployment environment, with full access to everything because all my clients depend on it and stuff like that. But- For things like this, 100%. I'm not going to do any work for you, Mr.

Robot. You go and figure this out on your own. and 19 out of 20 times, it will. So I literally had one of those just before our call today with something similar, like a technical aspect of an application where it needed me to log in because the API didn't work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It cannot connect to it from a sandbox. Again, all these things that nobody should know anything about, and you're like, "Okay, go to the browser, figure this out." And it goes to the browser, and it figures it out. So great stuff.

So you follow the checklist. You have an app on the App Store. What are kinda like the biggest takes you think people should take from this, and what other ideas you now have after you know how easy it is, like, "Ooh, I should also probably do this," or, "I should do that," uh, maybe related to this or maybe not? Yeah.

I think the first one you've touched on already, which, m- mimics or reinforces the sort of 80/20 rule, is you can get to 80% so fast, and then it's the 80 to 100 that, like, you'll spend so much time on, and that was a really interesting paradox, and I think was an interesting learning to have of what... how to think about inputs and outputs in my collaboration with the robots of, gosh, it's great to see it spin up something, and also zero expectation of, like, perfection or getting to a stopping point or, like, that my role as a human of judgment and ideas and tuning w- would be obsolete a- at least now.

Um, so the 80/20 is interesting, and, and I think continues to be true. I... like, you can see the difference to what it is now. I've fully re-skinned it.

It's still far from perfect. a girlfriend of mine and I, we're building a mom mode, so there's, like, a prenatal and postpartum version that we wanna add in, which we think will be cool. so the work continues. the...

a- and I think it's kind of a lesson for life. Like, I I spend my career operating in and discussing things where I have a knowledge disadvantage to the other person and the subject matter I'm talking about. so in general, I've gotten fairly comfortable operating at a disadvantage and asking questions to clarify or to translate whatever we're talking about to something I can make sense of and, and pattern match to. But I especially think that while it's terrifying to depart from things you know and w- ways that you've done things that have been successful or made you successful in the past, there is such a thing as success inertia, and basically overstaying the welcome of something that's worked to the point of it being your or a company's demise.

And in this time of change, your willingness and your comfort with zooming out and asking a bigger or a different or a less attached question can lead to better and different outcomes than you might imagine, I think is really powerful. We see this parallel actually. es- I, I'm... I generally do technical or technical related hiring, and especially with engineers that have spent their careers interviewing for jobs by being able to find the fastest working solution to a problem.

If they're interviewing like they were a few years ago and jumping in to find the fastest working solution versus zooming out and thinking about, "What's afforded to me? What is the tech stack? Who am I working with, and how are robots a part of the equation?" You're kind of missing the forest through the trees.

And there's an opportunity, I think, to, as long as we can, preserve the dominance of humanity By not staying low, but instead by zooming out and asking these bigger or different or open-minded or challenging questions. And I think the experience th- uh, that has reinforced has been profound. I love it. two things, one very technical, but first I will add something.

I think what you're saying, and it's really amazing how important it is today, it is enforcing us to be comfortable feeling uncomfortable or doing things that we're uncomfortable with usually. And it's awesome because it's not with people. the biggest fear people have is they're like, "Ooh, I don't want to look dumb. I don't want to ask dumb questions.

I don't want to say something that would look stupid to people who know." This is a machine. It doesn't judge. It doesn't care.

It will do whatever you want. It will do it as many times as you need. It will explain it as many ways as you wish, and it will perform in a way that you cannot perform as long as you give it the right feedback. And so it is an amazing opportunity to learn that skill of like, "I'm perfectly comfortable being uncomfortable in what I'm doing."

And you saw a lot of examples from Bryce. He's like, "I don't even know what you're talking about. What can I get to you to get the answer yourself?" And so it is allowing you to then do things that were practically impossible previously if you're willing to go that step of like, "Okay, I, I don't have a clue, but I'm willing to try."

So this is one thing that I want to say. The other thing that I want to ask about the 80/20, 'cause it's something we talked about earlier, uh, before we started recording, that I think will help people a lot. That is in that 8- i- in that last 20% is user interface How do you... 'Cause again, you grew up in the tech scene and you know what good looks like and so on, but how can you show it what you like and don't like or explain in a way that will actually be able to build stuff that you will, you/your audience will find attractive, user-friendly, et cetera?

I'm so glad that you asked this, and I just wanted to pull away and make sure I had things available for you to see. this has been a really interesting exercise of trial and error, because I was definitely... I'm a talker. I spent my career talking.

I felt more comfortable describing things, and I realize that big subscriber to definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, and I think that holds true too. It's like, don't beat your head against the wall, and be willing to try new things. And so again, I knew from that first lovable example, I'm like, "Yeah, this gets me minimum viable exercise, but, hate it. Hate it.

Will not look at this every day." And so I thought about Inspo. Like, I, I just truly thought about wellness apps and found different things that just spoke to me, you know, Pinterest-ed myself, if you will, in a Google Doc, things that were interesting. I'm now just showing and scrolling things that I found online that I thought were interesting.

So again, for those who are not watching, these are just screenshots of applications, and they're not necessarily training applications. They're just applications with different styles of u- user interfaces, uh, that you can use as examples. Exactly. And so then, you know, for example, I did build in badges.

And so there's badges that I have on the site. it's not super sophisticated, but, like, I found badges that I liked, and I could upload screenshots and say, "Let's build badges inspired by this picture." Isar, if you're interested, I can extrapolate on the UI question and talk about how I've learned how to do that with the videos, which was certainly the most, complex and precise, uh, side of the visuals. I don't know if that's interesting.

I can keep going down just the general UI if that's helpful too. No, I think, I think let's stick to the general UI for now. Maybe we'll do a whole other one about the videos- because I'm sure it's more than 30 seconds to figure out how to create, uh, videos of different animals doing exercises. One example though that I think is really lightweight that I can talk you to is sometimes the robots have a hard time with precision, and- Right now on the screen, this is a credit app, I think, but it has a red to green continuum on sort of a horseshoe dial.

Yeah. And it was the 80/20 rule held, right? I probably posted this and was like, "Let's do a continuum," right? They're not discrete colors.

They fade. These are the colors. You're not introducing a full rainbow here. But, like, it maybe made the horseshoe, and then it was like, "No, make it a circle."

And it was, like, fine on the horseshoe, and then when you asked it to go 80 to 100 on the circle, it was, like, a new shape or, like, had images in there. Like, it just will go from close to totally far off in a split second. And so then the breakthrough there was I drew a picture of it. I just hand-drew on a paper in chicken scratch what I had in mind, and it was like, "No, make a combination of these things.

Keep the gradient, but here." And s- I did the same thing with this version of the buttons. Like, I wanted to try having the buttons within sort of like a watch face. yeah.

And the alignment of them was tricky. Like, getting some of them, getting the stack, getting them not, oriented to a circle, but getting them fixed on the X-axis. there was some, there was trial and error, and so my instinct was to talk to it. When that wasn't working, there were images, but a- again, it's like, what got you here won't get you there, and being willing to not...

Sometimes you start yelling at the robots, and I think that's not a healthy place to be, so when you're tempted to yell at the robots, it's also like, "What can I do differently in this equation for a different outcome?" And if you think creatively, you can often, you can find a, you can... We ran into the same thing on the video side too, and it's a- y- again, as long as you're willing to think about it differently, there are tools that can get you the results that you want.

Awesome. I think the biggest take here is that these tools thrive on context. and especially when you're trying to develop something visual, like a visual int- like a user interface, visual context matters a lot. It is very hard...

uh, think about, you know, the little kids' game where I describe something to you and I'm trying to get you to draw a cat, I'm just not telling you it's a cat, right? I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to describe. You know, it has a head and ears and, and a tail. I mean, this could be any animal.

I'm like, how do you, how do you describe a cat that would look like a cat? You show me an image, oh, it's a cat. And so it is exactly that. These tools thrive on context, and if you give them the right context, in this particular case, here are visual examples of what I like from a style perspective.

Here's the visual example of the kind of badges I want. Here's the visual example of the scale of colors that I want, like, I like the, the red to green, uh, merging kinda like into one another. Uh, here's this back of the napkin sketch of how I want it laid out. Whatever visual reference that you can give these tools, they can pick up and they know how to mix and match.

They know how to take the color from the image and the sketch from your back of the napkin and merge them into one thing, and they're very, very good, uh, at doing this. So again, kudos for figuring this out. For those of you who are listening, uh, that can save you a few, uh, nights that you're banging your head against the wall not figuring out how to describe in words the vision that you have in your head. Bryce, this was fantastic.

first of all, if people wanna find the app, what is the app called on the App Store? And then if people wanna connect with you, learn from you, uh, in any way, how can they do that? Yes. The app is in the App Store, and it's called Daily100.

You will see me on the leaderboard every day. Awesome. Feel free to join me or just operate in the shadows and do it on your own time. That's fine, too.

like I said, my background is in talent and recruiting, so LinkedIn is my social media of choice. You'll see me there. I do share some thought leadership and just some learnings from the field, interview tips, hiring tips, and the like. And then if you wanna check out my side projects, uh, you'll find me on GitHub.

My, uh, username is brkbot, uh, and you can check me out there as well. Awesome. Thank you so much. This was absolutely fantastic.

I had a blast. I know that this will inspire a few people to take action, hopefully more than a few. So I, uh, really, really appreciate you taking the time and sharing with us. Thanks, Isar.

It was a pleasure.