230 - The BEST tool we've used in years!

[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a calm business, one that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program, and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.

[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's sget into the show. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Here we are in 2025. It's the year of 2025. Do you think it's gonna be easier or harder to do year math? You know when someone's like, oh, 1986. And you're like, okay, that was. I think it's easier because I think we deal in fives. Like, we, you know why we deal in fives? Because like, the nickel, the dime, the quarter, like, you grow up, our generation.

[00:01:01] Caroline: That's true.

[00:01:02] Jason: And also these days, they don't know what those things are.

[00:01:03] Caroline: They don't know what nickels are. And also time. It's like 15 minutes.

[00:01:07] Jason: Exactly, 100%. So I think the five year is going to be helpful for all of us to do quick math because, like, someone. I was watching a YouTube video this morning, they're like, yeah, back in 1986, the study was done. And I was like, 1986. I was like, okay, 20 years ago plus. 

[00:01:19] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:01:19] Jason: Minus 1, 19. Easy.

[00:01:21] Caroline: Got it.

[00:01:21] Jason: 30 years ago. Sorry. 40 years ago. Sorry.

[00:01:25] Caroline: Okay, so as. 

[00:01:26] Jason: Okay.

[00:01:26] Caroline: As you've just demonstrated.

[00:01:28] Jason: Maybe it's more difficult.

[00:01:28] Caroline: It's more difficult.

[00:01:29] Jason: Yeah.

[00:01:30] Caroline: I, also related to that, somebody said something like, I know we hate to bring up the old C word around here, but they were talking about the COVID era. And they were like, 2020. And they were like, it's been five years. And I was like, no, it hasn't been five years. And then I was like, oh, 2020.

[00:01:44] Jason: Yeah.

[00:01:45] Caroline: 2021.

[00:01:45] Jason: You don't have to count it out. We got it.

[00:01:46] Caroline: 2022.

[00:01:47] Jason: I went to bed last night.

[00:01:48] Caroline: It has been five years. That doesn't make any sense.

[00:01:50] Jason: I went to bed last night having thoughts about Plaxico, our, our old doggo. And I realized that in that moment, it was five years years ago that he passed.

[00:02:02] Caroline: I... speaking.

[00:02:02] Jason: Does it feel like five years?

[00:02:04] Caroline: No, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:02:05] Jason: Buddy.

[00:02:05] Caroline: No, buddy.

[00:02:06] Jason: That's so.

[00:02:07] Caroline: That's so long.

[00:02:08] Jason: Also, that reel that popped off that we talked about. People found it really funny that I call you buddy.

[00:02:14] Caroline: Why? Yeah, we talked about this on last episode about how we had a viral reel. But if you want to just have a weird existential crisis, like, I don't. I'm not reading the comments, but every once in a while I get them in my notifications and those are the funny ones that. Why is he calling her buddy?

[00:02:30] Jason: Why is he calling her buddy?

[00:02:30] Caroline: It's like, let people live.

[00:02:32] Jason: Yeah. Also, like...

[00:02:33] Caroline: It's funny.

[00:02:34] Jason: Sometimes we do a babe, but like.

[00:02:35] Caroline: Yeah, but yeah, no, sometimes we're babe and sometimes we're buddy.

[00:02:38] Jason: Yeah.

[00:02:38] Caroline: But we just think buddy's funny because it's like, I'm your wife.

[00:02:41] Jason: What's up, buddy?

[00:02:41] Caroline: It's so funny to call me buddy.

[00:02:43] Jason: I have some pretty big breaking news as...

[00:02:46] Caroline: That's your pramble top?

[00:02:48] Jason: Ambassadors.

[00:02:49] Caroline: As your...? What's up?

[00:02:50] Jason: Ninja Creami ambassadors.

[00:02:52] Caroline: He's joking. It's not sponsored.

[00:02:54] Jason: We're diamond level. We're diamond level Ninja Creami ambassadors.

[00:02:58] Caroline: We're definitely high level.

[00:02:59] Jason: We received the Ninja Creami BMW, which is just a car made of ice cream.

[00:03:03] Caroline: It melts immediately.

[00:03:03] Jason: Because we referred so many people to buying it, which I think is three. But there is some pretty big Ninja Creami news that you're not aware of. And I'm pretty excited I get to break this to you here on the podcast.

[00:03:11] Caroline: Because I love it when you break break news to me.

[00:03:13] Jason: They released a new machine, which we aren't gonna buy.

[00:03:16] Caroline: We're not gonna buy it.

[00:03:16] Jason: Because I don't care. But it is pretty game changing. It.

[00:03:21] Caroline: This is all. I already know. You are gonna buy it. This is your.

[00:03:24] Jason: I'm not. 100%. This is me being...

[00:03:26] Caroline: 100%.

[00:03:26] Jason: This is me being honest. I don't care. It makes the regular ice cream and it does it the right. The same way we've always been doing it.

[00:03:32] Caroline: But...

[00:03:33] Jason: Then it also has a soft serve setting.

[00:03:36] Caroline: Oh, see, we don't like soft serve.

[00:03:37] Jason: 100%. This is what. But if you are a fan of soft serve ice cream, this is huge news in the Ninja Creami game.

[00:03:44] Caroline: We've never talked about this that we both don't like soft serve.

[00:03:47] Jason: All right, let's talk about it.

[00:03:48] Caroline: Let's open this up.

[00:03:49] Jason: For two to three minutes.

[00:03:50] Caroline: Let's open this up. What's your issue?

[00:03:53] Jason: I don't like it. I like my ice cream to have some girth to it.

[00:03:56] Caroline: Me too. I think that's what I feel as well. 

[00:03:58] Jason: Yeah. I like it to be strong enough that it can hold itself up. And I don't have to worry about it just falling apart in minutes.

[00:04:04] Caroline: Okay. I go one level deeper. I think it has something to do with, like, okay, when I was younger and, like, we didn't have a ton of money and we would oftentimes, like, some of the restaurants that we were, that we would go to as like, a family were... remember, like, cafeteria restaurants were, like, really big in the 90s?

[00:04:20] Jason: Cafeteria restaurants?

[00:04:21] Caroline: Yeah. Like, picture like Ryan Steakhouse or Golden Corral or... 

[00:04:24] Jason: Oh, like a buffet restaurant.

[00:04:26] Caroline: Yeah, yeah.

[00:04:26] Jason: Okay, let's use the right term, because no one went to a cafeteria restaurant. We went to buffets.

[00:04:31] Caroline: Okay. Buffets are one thing, but I do think cafeteria restaurants, like Morrison Steakhouse is slightly different. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. You better email us right now because I know there's somebody listening.

[00:04:42] Jason: I lived in Florida for 20 years, and I don't know what a Morrisons or Ryan.

[00:04:46] Caroline: You. You.

[00:04:46] Jason: Are you putting Famous Amos in the same category?

[00:04:50] Caroline: No, Famous Amos is like a breakfast, like, Golden Crossing.

[00:04:52] Jason: Okay.

[00:04:53] Caroline: First of all, you moved to Florida when you were in college. Okay? I have lived in Florida my whole life.

[00:04:58] Jason: In 1986, this is when.

[00:04:59] Caroline: So I was there in the 90s. You weren't there in the 90s. But a cafeteria restaurant is where you quite literally go through the line, like a cafeteria, and you, like, put things on your tray. They're like...

[00:05:09] Jason: Oh, I see.

[00:05:10] Caroline: Like, like, you know, like at a hospital where you kind of like...?

[00:05:12] Jason: You do this, like, yeah, I think, like, airports have some of this stuff too.

[00:05:15] Caroline: Okay.

[00:05:16] Jason: Really, it's like a buffet, though, to be honest.

[00:05:18] Caroline: It's buffet adjacent for sure, but it's a little different. 

[00:05:21] Jason: Anyway.

[00:05:21] Caroline: The point is they had always had a soft serve machine, and it was like, you know...

[00:05:26] Jason: Because buffet is the same thing. You always have a soft serve.

[00:05:28] Caroline: And so I think there's a little something deeply rooted and triggering for me about, like...

[00:05:33] Jason: Yeah.

[00:05:33] Caroline: Not having enough money. Like, like, and there's nothing wrong with those restaurants. But, like, anyone who has grown up and, like...

[00:05:39] Jason: For me, I really just don't like the way you have to eat soft serve. Like, I know you can put it in a cup and you can eat it with a spoon.

[00:05:45] Caroline: It melts so fast.

[00:05:46] Jason: But it also defeats the purpose of soft serve, which is, like, it should be in a cone and it should be swirly, and it should have a little dipple on top, and you, like, you know, it looks cute, but then you go to eat it and you're, like, attacking this, like, wet, drippy mess with your mouth, and that's just messy. I don't like.

[00:05:58] Caroline: Okay. You know what? Soft serve I can actually get behind, though, is soft serve custard, which is a different, different thing because my first job was at Rita's Italian Ice. This is really regional, regional references.

[00:06:09] Jason: The seven Florida listeners will love.

[00:06:11] Caroline: Rita's Italian Ice is my first job. And so we would do the gelatis where you do the little custard topper. And you really had to learn how to swirl that thing. That was like a big part of the job.

[00:06:19] Jason: Make any of that. You just scooped it out of devices. Right. Or like poured it out of the things. Yeah. You didn't have to, like, do any work of like, making the custard or making the stuff.

[00:06:26] Caroline: Did we?

[00:06:27] Jason: I don't think. I don't think so. I think you would know more about culinary exploits.

[00:06:30] Caroline: I, I'm gonna be. No. Yeah. I don't think we made it. I think the managers made it. But you did to like, you had to set timers and you had to really stir it. And so there's this like, special big steel stirring device. So I, I got some muscles working there, actually.

[00:06:45] Jason: Anyway, that is the big news is that the new Ninja Creami.

[00:06:48] Caroline: This is what you tune in for.

[00:06:49] Jason: Exactly. It, it does have a soft serve thing. So you like, you do the hard, normal hard serve. You do the regular ice cream setting where it's...

[00:06:57] Caroline: Hey, we're big hard serve ice cream.

[00:06:59] Jason: Hard serve ice cream people. And then you...

[00:07:01] Caroline: Getting hot.

[00:07:01] Jason: You take it off and you slot it into the soft serve and then it actually like, comes out as like a softer thing. I just think it's a really cool feature. If you're a soft serve fam, you're going to love that. But as hard ice cream people, we prefer our ice cream to have its own girth.

[00:07:15] Caroline: Listen, I know we spend a lot of time talking about some of the awful things that this modern era has brought us. And there's plenty. There's plenty to be dissatisfied with. But I don't think we spend enough time being grateful for, like, we exist in a time where you can just have ice cream made for you at your house.

[00:07:29] Jason: Fantastic.

[00:07:30] Caroline: What? Let's have a little gratitude.

[00:07:31] Jason: Yeah. And honestly, I think I have perfected like a go to simple vanilla recipe.

[00:07:36] Caroline: It's so good.

[00:07:38] Jason: That doesn't. It doesn't taste terrible. It's not really bad for you. There's no added sugar. We just sweeten it with stevia.

[00:07:43] Caroline: How I know I hit the lottery life. You make fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.

[00:07:48] Jason: Yeah.

[00:07:48] Caroline: And then you serve them to me warm in a bowl with homemade ice cream on top.

[00:07:53] Jason: Let's stick regional for just 30 more seconds.

[00:07:54] Caroline: And that's what I get in my life. Like, once a week.

[00:07:57] Jason: There was a chain of restaurants in Florida because it's the most Florida thing ever called One Hot Cookie. And you would basically...

[00:08:03] Caroline: Never heard of it.

[00:08:04] Jason: It didn't last very long. You would. You would choose your cookie. So it'd be like a chocolate cookie, a chocolate chip cookie, a rainbow cookie or whatever. That's your base.

[00:08:12] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:08:12] Jason: Then you choose your ice cream. And while you're choosing your ice cream and they're like getting your toppings ready, they're microwaving the cookie for you so that it's like, piping hot.

[00:08:20] Caroline: This is a great concept. What happened?

[00:08:22] Jason: I think it's just really too bad for you. I think you're having like a 1500 calorie dessert.

[00:08:26] Caroline: And they were like, we can't be having that all the time.

[00:08:28] Jason: Yeah. But I loved it. You know, it was in the little.

[00:08:30] Caroline: I'm not ready to move on. I'm not ready to move on. Okay, because that just reminded me, you know, it did do really well, which I think proves the point of. You're right. It was just a little too calorie dense.

[00:08:38] Jason: Yeah.

[00:08:39] Caroline: Is, remember the entire frozen yogurt?

[00:08:42] Jason: Yoga Berry. Yoga...

[00:08:43] Caroline: Like, yeah. What was the...?

[00:08:45] Jason: Green frog?

[00:08:45] Caroline: Green.

[00:08:46] Jason: Something like that. Yoga blitz.

[00:08:49] Caroline: We were on a real.

[00:08:50] Jason: Of course. Sweet frog. Yeah. I mean, this is just like it was an era.

[00:08:54] Caroline: Is that still going? What happened?

[00:08:56] Jason: I'm sure it is. But I think also people realize, like, it's not food. Like.

[00:08:59] Caroline: Yeah, I think people did some deep dives. 

[00:09:00] Jason: Yeah. Yogurt. And like, not really. All right, let's move into the business part of the podcast. We're going to... Well, for this episode and then we'll see if it continues moving forward, we thought about doing like a little business update section after we do any Ninja Creami news that's necessary for everybody.

[00:09:15] Caroline: After the pramble tops. We do just a little check in.

[00:09:17] Jason: Yes.

[00:09:18] Caroline: Because we always say this, but we wish that more people, like, basically updated you on just like, what are you working on in your business? Where, what are you thinking of? Priorities are shifting all the time.

[00:09:28] Jason: Of course.

[00:09:28] Caroline: And I think it's important for normalizing that. But also it's just like, it's very curiosity inducing to hear about where someone is at with their business.

[00:09:36] Jason: Yes. And then we will talk about an AI tool that honestly, to me feels as game changing as GPT felt when it came into our lives. Like, this, this tool feels absolutely incredible. And that's not hyperbole. I'm also saying it like, nine minutes in. So, like, this is not to, like, get your attention. It's just to say that that's how I feel about it.

[00:09:53] Caroline: Yes, I agree.

[00:09:53] Jason: All right, let's go with business updates. Would you like to start with WAIM?

[00:09:56] Caroline: Yeah. Simple updates over here. Again, for those of you who are just tuning in and maybe have skipped some episodes, we're trying something new in 2025 where Jason is sort of taking the reins with Teachery and I'm taking the reins with WAIM, and we're splitting them up in that way. We still love both of our children equally. Business children. But, you know, we had to do. We had to move to zone zone defense or whatever instead of trying to double team both businesses. 

[00:10:18] Jason: All right.

[00:10:18] Caroline: Is that a sports metaphor that works?

[00:10:20] Jason: We'll let it pass. We'll let it pass.

[00:10:21] Caroline: We'll let it pass. Okay. So for WAIM, the focus right now is I'm not. I'm not trying to come out of the gates blazing in 2025. I'm trying to get the foundation strong. I'm trying to be honest with myself about my time constraints, which means I have to prioritize the projects that are very timely, and that means servicing our existing customers. So we have a, and we're going to talk about it in this episode, but we have an accountability game called WAIM of Stones that I am working on the second version of creating a better experience for our WAIMers for that. I'm very excited about it. We'll talk about it in this episode because I'm using the tool that we're talking about and then trying to have that done by the end of January. The second thing is we have a new coaching format. So we do our monthly coaching sessions, and we're testing out a new format for the first three months instead of teaching on one specific topic because you've.

[00:11:08] Jason: Done 60 plus.

[00:11:09] Caroline: We have such a huge library of everything from, you know, sales pages to launches to marketing, copywriting, everything under the sun. And so we had this format a few years ago, years ago, called Unsolved Businesses, which is fun. It's like Jason and I are detectives trying to solve the problems of your business.

[00:11:27] Jason: Yeah.

[00:11:27] Caroline: So we're trying to kind of a twist on that format where people can submit their business problems and we can offer solutions. And the reason we love that is because it is sort of real time coaching, and then everyone in our community can learn from each other's specific problems and apply everything that we teach in the more topic based sections.

[00:11:45] Jason: I have a... Real quick. Um, you're doing little, this means nothing to the listener really unless they're a WAIMer and they will see this. We're doing little animated characters of us. 

[00:11:54] Caroline: Yes.

[00:11:55] Jason: I say animated. Little cartoony characters of us. Those who are familiar with Chibi style animation. Chibi anime. That's kind of what we look like. Is it easy enough if we were to give it a photo of the WAIMer who submits their question to make a Chibi character of them?

[00:12:08] Caroline: I could definitely do it with Mid Journey. Not probably based on a photo. I mean I could try but yeah, just describing them.

[00:12:14] Jason: So I just thought it would be really cute of like keeping that going.

[00:12:17] Caroline: That's a cute idea.

[00:12:18] Jason: So okay, that's just a little thought that jumped.

[00:12:19] Caroline: Unrelated but yes.

[00:12:21] Jason: Things that we will spend time on that no one really cares about but will make it more fun for us to do our jobs.

[00:12:25] Caroline: That is the name of the game for us in our business. It gets us more excited. Yeah, Jason. Jason's alluding to I've created all these little detective themed graphics for our coaching sessions because why not? And so those are the two things I'm focusing on this month. Just to get those set up. And then secondarily I do have a goal of at least like get getting started creating YouTube videos again. 

[00:12:48] Jason: Yeah.

[00:12:48] Caroline: I've already done the hard work of like creating all the ideas that I want to do this quarter. But I just am being honest. Like it is a time commitment and it is hard to film when you're kind of rusty. Um, and so I'm really not putting pressure on myself quite yet to like really stick to a schedule. Um, just my goal for January is just to get going with that.

[00:13:09] Jason: Yeah. Are you trying to have a video to published?

[00:13:11] Caroline: Yeah, of course.

[00:13:12] Jason: Cool. Awesome. All right, my update. I have talked about it a few times here with Teachery that we have been doing a paid ads experiment and with that we are paying a company to do all of the ads for us. So they set everything up and we're really specifically only doing Google Ads stuff right now. So pay per click PPC ads. We have been doing it for three months and in that three month time the total advertising spend is $7,000 spent on ads. The management fees on top of that, so what we pay the company is $2,500 per month. So it's $7,500. So this was a big expense.

[00:13:46] Caroline: Biggest money you've ever spent in Teachery.

[00:13:48] Jason: Absolutely the biggest expense outside of developers. And there was no guarantee that we were going to make that money back. But we had really, we had a really good start. And the commitment was three months. So just to see how it works.

[00:13:57] Caroline: And part of the reason you did this is because after last year and some of the experiments we ran, like you just acknowledged the fact that you don't want to be creating organic content and use that to market Teachery.

[00:14:07] Jason: Exactly.

[00:14:07] Caroline: So if you don't create organic content, you have to get eyeballs somehow. What is another tool at your disposal? Paying for those eyeballs.

[00:14:14] Jason: Yes. So as of recording this episode, we have 29 successful conversions, paid conversions of new customers to Teachery whether it is a lifetime plan purchase, a monthly plan purchase, or even a yearly plan purchase. And it's about 50, 50. So it's like 50% of those purchases were lifetime deals and then 50% were split between the other plans, mostly the monthly plan. If we say that our average customer lifetime value is $550, which is what historically it has been, it's what the price of the lifetime deal, that is $16,000 in total return for that. And so basically, if you take our ad costs, our management costs, we're at a 1x a little bit over return on ad spend or ROAS, as they say in the business. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, okay, so you're spending $15,000 to make $16,000. Don't you hate doing that? Yes, 100%. I do hate doing that. But three awesome things are currently happening. Number one, we knew at the end of three months we were going to hopefully be able to get that cost per conversion down, which we absolutely are. So.

[00:15:15] Caroline: And the trend line is going down.

[00:15:17] Jason: 100%. So we started out at like, it was like $360 to, to literally average out a paying customer. We're at 170 now. So we've halved that. And they even believe that we could be able to get that lower, which is fantastic. And I think the lifetime deal is really helping that. The other thing is that the management fees should also go down drastically after this month.

[00:15:37] Caroline: Amazing.

[00:15:37] Jason: So they've already gone down a little bit, but there should be a point where, and it might take another couple months where the management fee is like $500 a month because it's just them checking in on things, but they're not creating new assets all the time, which is what they're trying to do now to fine tune everything. So I am very hopeful about that. I'm definitely going to keep it going. I wasn't sure if I was going to after like the second month because they're just. It was. We were very negative on it. But the fact that we have passed it being profitable and it's not much profitable, but there's a lot of really good opportunity there. So.

[00:16:06] Caroline: Amazing.

[00:16:07] Jason: That's really fun for... for me. It's just. I also enjoy not having to do the grind of like, I'm not doing the ads, I'm not thinking of the creative, I'm not tweaking everything. I'm just able to pay a company to do that. I know that is a very privileged place to be for Teachery. Teachery is also 10 years old. So like when your business is 10 years old, you hopefully have some profitability that you can use to grow. And then also I should be seeing our new landing page builder on our staging site this week. That does not mean it will be out to customers this week. Probably by the end of the month at this point with testing and other things.

[00:16:35] Caroline: We haven't even talked about this, but have you thought about using the tool that we're going to talk about in this episode to prototype features for Teachery?

[00:16:42] Jason: I have. I've been thinking a lot about this and I've been trying to figure out.

[00:16:46] Caroline: I'm curious what it would do. I know you're already in so deep on the page builder.

[00:16:50] Jason: Yeah.

[00:16:51] Caroline: But like...

[00:16:52] Jason: The tricky part about this, we'll get into this. But like I think the tool that we're going to talk about, which we're going to talk about later, in 30 seconds, it's really good for starting fresh. 

[00:17:02] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:17:02] Jason: I don't think it is very good at all integrating with existing.

[00:17:06] Caroline: No, I don't want it to integrate with the code. What I'm talking about. Well, let's save it because we need to introduce the tool. Okay. So put a pin in that. We'll talk about this tool being used for Teachery. Let's introduce the tool now to the lovely listeners. So what we are going to talk about in this episode is a new tool that full credit.

[00:17:22] Jason: It's the Ninja Creami Soft Serve. Just kidding.

[00:17:24] Caroline: New tool that Jason discovered, like beginning of December.

[00:17:27] Jason: Yes.

[00:17:28] Caroline: And it is one of these AI. How would you describe it?

[00:17:33] Jason: It's a. It's a what used to be called an AI agent. They are like changing what that means. The name doesn't matter. It is a developer that writes code for you and also can do design for you. It is using a prompt box, like a GPT prompt box, to have this thing build and write code and create applications for you. 

[00:17:55] Caroline: And have a, like a working app right in front of you as you are prompting with natural language a AI kind of chatbot. And the reason that this is so kind of revolutionary is because, yes, like, like I remember when ChatGPT kind of rolled out their update and was like, you can have it like write some HTML for you, you can have it write CSS for you. And I was like, whoa, game changer. No, no, this is like you can have the tool tell you how to like do authentication, meaning like have people log into your app. You can have it connect to databases so that it can do advanced functionality. It's writing code that I do not have the time. I know basic HTML, I know basis, basic CSS. I do not have the time to learn all these programming languages to be able to build tools. And the fact that it can create functioning apps just from natural language is absolutely mind blowing.

[00:18:48] Jason: Yes. Okay, so the name of the tool is Lovable with no E. So L-O-V-A-B-L-E. Lovable.dev and we actually I have a link in the Show Notes. It is an affiliate link. They do have an affiliate program. We will get a commission if you sign up and you end up using a paid plan. But they do have a free plan that can definitely get you started and it has...

[00:19:06] Caroline: Just so you can experience the magic of it.

[00:19:08] Jason: Yes, exactly.

[00:19:08] Caroline: And we'll talk about the pricing in a little bit. But like there is a free plan just to be able to feel what it feels like to use it.

[00:19:13] Jason: I want to shout out how they describe it because I think this might help some people understand it, although some people these words don't make any sense. So maybe how we said it was better, but the their headline is idea to app in seconds. Lovable is your superhuman Full Stack Engineer.

[00:19:27] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:19:27] Jason: So Full Stack Engineer doesn't mean a lot to people out there. It would to us. Like that makes sense to us. But essentially like I said, it can write code for you, it can do design. You're basically talking to... think about talking to GPT, Claude, any of these interfaces and it's building a thing for you and you're not doing any work with code.

[00:19:44] Caroline: It's truly amazing. So I want to, before we. We're going to dive into like all the things, how we've been experimenting with it, how we're using it in our business, what we think the implications are for creators, why this is important to you and we think you should at least log a few hours playing around with it because nobody really is talking about how this tool can be used for online business and creators. Right now, it's sort of, I think, isolated to the startup software space.

[00:20:10] Jason: Yeah.

[00:20:10] Caroline: And I think if you can get on this early as like a digital product creator, it can be a huge advantage.

[00:20:16] Jason: I think there's one huge learning curve to using things like Lovable. There's also another one called Bolt. There are a couple other different ones you can check out. We just like Lovable because the interface is so good and we just find it really, like, easy to use. But I think the very difficult part for a lot of you listening to this, who are going to go and try it is you don't really know what it means to build an app. You don't really know what it means to build a product.

[00:20:40] Caroline: If you're not someone who has any experience as an engineer or coding or anything. You don't know what you don't know.

[00:20:45] Jason: Exactly.

[00:20:45] Caroline: I just learned, like, what databases do.

[00:20:48] Jason: But here's my, my huge, big, like, think this way when you use this. Just talk to it like you would talk to a developer human that you want to build something for you. 

[00:21:00] Caroline: Right.

[00:21:01] Jason: Just say, hey, I want you to build a digital planner library for me.

[00:21:06] Caroline: I'm not actually sure how, like, how I need to be thinking about architecture to make this functional. Can you explain it to me? Because my... I'm not very proficient.

[00:21:15] Jason: I wouldn't even do that. I wouldn't even ask you to explain things to you.

[00:21:18] Caroline: Oh, I do. See. So we should talk about our different, like, approaches to prompting.

[00:21:22] Jason: I literally want it to treat me like I'm a dummy. And I'm like, I don't care technically how this is going on. I just want you to do this thing and then I ask it questions. So, like, hey, okay, I want to build this digital planner library where everyone can, like, put their digital planners and have them online. And it's like a showcase for your planners or whatever. And then I would just ask a question to be like, hey, like, what do you think I need to add to this to make it better?

[00:21:41] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:21:41] Jason: And then would give me ideas, which I think is really helpful. So I think we want to talk about our projects that we've started to create with it.

[00:21:47] Caroline: Yes. So that's what I was going to say is before we get into all the implications, I want to just walk people through our personal story with kind of how this evolved over the course of December because we were sort of taking time off work. But this was sort of what we were doing in the background when we weren't puzzling and we weren't doing Christmas stuff. We're such nerds that literally Jason and I were both on our laptops. Like, oh, do you see what it just did? Look, let me show you what I just got it to do.

[00:22:09] Jason: Yeah. Which is very... well, this jumps ahead a little bit. But Lovable. The first hour is magical of any project that you're working on.

[00:22:16] Caroline: Literally, you'll never have a better feeling.

[00:22:18] Jason: And then it can go downhill.

[00:22:19] Caroline: Prepare yourself. Hour two is a slog.

[00:22:22] Jason: But one thing I want to remind you all of as we continue to go through this episode and talk about Lovable, and I think you'll probably hear us talking about Lovable quite a bit in the next couple months because it truly is a game changing technology. You really have to think about how much time this saves you in if you are working with a developer, if you were trying to do this yourself, even just setting up like a sign in authentication system of like logging in and creating password and all that, that is like a multi day setup for a lot of developers. You do it in like 15 minutes with Lovable.

[00:22:51] Caroline: And by the way, we are not saying, and we'll talk about this later on in the episode, but we are not saying that there is no use for developers, that developers are obsolete, that this is going to replace developers. I think it's going to impact the industry. 

[00:23:04] Jason: Yeah.

[00:23:04] Caroline: Of course, as all these AI tools do. But I think that there is still a huge need for deeply knowledgeable, extremely experienced, you know, engineers and developers to be able to work in tandem with some of these tools. So anyway, we'll get to that.

[00:23:17] Jason: But I also do think that like this opens up the doors for the entire audience that listens to this podcast who has probably, I would wager 80% of you have never worked with a developer before. So you were probably never going to work with a developer anyway. So this doesn't affect you hiring someone because it's not even in your sphere of like what you do. Like maybe a WordPress developer is who you've hired. But like that doesn't even really count based on what we're doing here. So anyway, let's talk about our first project.

[00:23:41] Caroline: Okay, so yeah, so you saw this video online of this tool and you're like, that looks cool.

[00:23:45] Jason: Yeah. I want to thank the random lady who popped up in my Instagram reel feed while I was on the toilet and basically said like, this is one of the most game changing tools. And what caught my eye is she was like, it's the fastest company to get to $1 million in monthly recurring revenue that we've seen in the AI space.

[00:24:03] Caroline: And that was a month. So just imagine.

[00:24:03] Jason: And I was like, what? Like, first of all, I don't care that you're making that much money. Like, that's... But that is shocking to me that like an app to do that. So I am curious to be like, okay, well what does this do? And then I went and used it and I was like, okay, this is amazing. So the first project that I tried with it was... I have always wanted to see... because we have two businesses and because those businesses make money through different sources, it's very hard.

[00:24:27] Caroline: Stripe, PayPal, et cetera.

[00:24:28] Jason: Et cetera. It's very hard to see them in one place.

[00:24:31] Caroline: Right.

[00:24:31] Jason: And we've always had to manually do it ourselves. So it's like we get the Stripe things and we count them all up. We get the PayPal transfers, we count them all up and like, we can do it. But it's very manual.

[00:24:40] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:24:40] Jason: And... And I know that there are apps that kind of do this, but like, it just is really difficult to see. And I think a new one that came out called Kick is one that actually does do what I tried to do here, but you're paying for like 27 other features in this app. All I wanted was a dashboard.

[00:24:55] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:24:55] Jason: So I worked with... we call Lovable, Laz, in our house.

[00:24:58] Caroline: Yeah. We call ChatGPT, Tobor.

[00:25:00] Jason: Or Chad. 

[00:25:01] Caroline: Or Chad. Sometimes they call them Chad. And then...

[00:25:03] Jason: So Laz helped me, it was... This was the first thing I ever did with it. So I had no clue what I was doing. And I just started with actually a screenshot of, we use this tool called Bare Metrics, which has a really nice revenue chart. I was like, hey, can you use this as a reference? I want to make a revenue dashboard for our two businesses and like see a chart. And then also I want to see, like, I want to be able to sort it by day or month or whatever. And I want to connect to our Stripe account. I want to connect to PayPal. I don't know how to do any of these things. Help. Help me. I don't know what I'm doing. And so basically just through asking it questions, I... I literally had a version of this built. It imported in all of our data from our two Stripe accounts for the two businesses. The only thing we didn't get to was PayPal because, honestly, I got excited about other projects and just kind of moved on. But I will say I think I probably spent in total 20 hours working on this revenue dashboard. If I was to ask a developer to build a revenue dashboard, 20 hours would be laughable because, first of all...

[00:25:59] Caroline: Gone in an instant.

[00:26:00] Jason: Where's the design coming from? So if I would buy like a UI kit or whatever, like, it still probably wouldn't look exactly as I wanted. But I just was having so much fun doing this. So that was my first project. I showed it to you. I finally got it to a working place.

[00:26:11] Caroline: And actually you didn't even really show it to me that much. What really got me was you showed everyone. We did a little virtual pizza party with our WAIMers at the end of the year and you showed everyone. You said, I've been looking at this tool, it's so fun to use. And I was like, hold on, this is really cool. And it got my wheels turning because you and I had talked about trying to take our accountability game, WAIM of Stones, which is very manual right now. So people, Jason posts in Slack, people check in in Slack. And then he basically, I created like a little Notion system where he can check off the milestones for each person and they...

[00:26:46] Jason: It's basically a habit tracker weekly with a monthly goal where you check in every week. And then we kind of created these fun little game boards that you created in Keynote.

[00:26:54] Caroline: Yes, but it's all done super manually by Jason having to check people off in Notion. And we were like, okay, this is not probably a good use of your time. So version 2.0 is, we were like, how can we figure out a way for people to check off their own progress and track it all and have like a fun place for that to live. Well, I experimented at the end of November, I think with trying to do it in our Framer site because you can do some fun things with like forms and CMS. And so I was really trying to hack together this like, no code solution using tools that I knew. But when you saw showed everyone at that pizza party, I was like, I wonder if what I could do with Lovable.

[00:27:29] Jason: Yeah.

[00:27:29] Caroline: So that was my first project and I was hooked. Like you said, the first hour, within the first hour. I have authentication, meaning people can create accounts and sign in. I have the quests where people can see what the quest is. I have all the stones uploaded that they can earn. I have the little checkboxes for the milestones. I mean, all within the first hour. Now I will tell you, has it been that easy since then? No. But the fact that I have such a complex. I mean, simple in some relative sense, but also complex to compared to what it would have been had I done this like framework hacking thing is so wild to me. And so my goal is to try to finish out that project by the end of January and I make... the amount of progress that I've been able to make in probably like you said, 30 hours of work, is crazy.

[00:28:14] Jason: Well, and so what's really incredible is like, you know, I... So I think this is what's really interesting about projects like this, and this is what you hear a lot about people who are working in kind of like no code or like AI tools is if it's going to take you 30 hours of work to build this application, would we have better been spent using that time to just literally redo what we did before? And then like, you know, it takes me an hour per week. So it's like 52 hours in the year, although we don't do it year round. So it's like it's probably a net net on like the amount of time. 

[00:28:45] Caroline: Sure, on just the time.

[00:28:46] Jason: But the scalability becomes really interesting and also the cost and the time savings.

[00:28:53] Caroline: The scalability in the sense that we have talked about, if we get this thing working, this version of the game working, there's nothing that says that we then can't come up with a white label version of it for other creators to be able to create this fun accountability game for their communities. And so like Jason's saying, it's not just a hours in, hours out, direct comparison because no one's going to buy a Notion system where they have to manually check off their members. They would potentially buy. I could see someone buying a lifetime deal to this, you know, stone tracker game system where they can create this very fun themed, gamified element to their community and plug it into whatever community tool they use. Right now ours relies on Slack. And so yeah, I just think the sky is the limit on being able to, if you are an idea person...

[00:29:41] Jason: Yes.

[00:29:42] Caroline: The sky is the limit on what you are now able to create and create potential revenue streams. And not to mention it is just fun. Like Jason and I talked about at the end of last year, we always check in on how can we bring more fun to our business, how can we make what we're doing more enjoyable. And don't get us wrong, we love sharing educational content, we love teaching everything that we've learned. But what lights us up as entrepreneurs is building things. And it has been so fun to like marry those two things to take our education and our passion for that and to be able to build things that, potentially, can help other people. So before we get into the... I'm sure we'll touch on the other little projects that we've done here and there, but I think that this is a really good segue into like why we're even doing this podcast episode, why we think this could be huge for creators. That is just one example that I was talking about. Like, imagine not just the, like the deeper relationships you can create with your customers and your community members. If you have a coaching program, you can now create these bespoke custom software applications for your community based on features that you get to decide on, which is... It's crazy.

[00:30:46] Jason: I think the really powerful part about this is, is a lot of what we've talked about in like the where's the trend going with online courses? Which is like, we really believe you have to have some done for you elements. Like you can't just give you a bunch of videos and texts and be like, good luck and like, hope you figure this all out yourself. Like, yes, you can still do that. But that is not where the trend is going. And I think what we're seeing is, you know, these tools make your business look way more attractive because they solve a problem for someone very quickly. And a lot of people, you know, we're in this, this kind of like curve of AI adoption where those of us who are using it every day, like GPT and etc, like it feels like it's just, you know, it's almost over. You know, like it's just like it's in our lives, everyone's using it. And like that is not the truth at all. Like we are still such in the early curve of it. And so I think if you're looking at tools like Lovable, this is really an opportunity for you to be able to go, you know what? I have always wanted a client portal for my clients that does X, Y and Z. You can use Lovable to build your own client portal that just you and your clients use. And it's a tool that can be completely custom to how you run your business. And you don't have to pay a developer at all. Now, you do have to pay for Lovable and we'll get into some of the costs here in a second. And it, it's not, I would say, a cheap solution.

[00:32:01] Caroline: Definitely not.

[00:32:01] Jason: But in comparison to a developer, which we are two people who have used developers for years for projects.

[00:32:07] Caroline: And yeah. And to your point, like these are, I think the people that this tool is perfect for are probably people who would never even get the chance to work with the developer to build that custom dashboard regardless. Right.

[00:32:18] Jason: And especially because I think a big part of that, like I said earlier, which is kind of my big caveat, is the people who listen to this podcast, you're not really even sure how to talk to a developer or how to architect an app project because it's so big and it's so hard for you to comprehend. And that's not a criticism of you. That's just... It's very difficult to think about building an app. Like it's, there's so many movies. 

[00:32:37] Caroline: It's even difficult for Laz, trust me.

[00:32:39] Jason: Yeah, but... Yeah, but what I was going to say is if you just talk to it like a human being and ask it questions, you can get so far in creating something that's just like a little twinkle of an idea in your brain.

[00:32:50] Caroline: Exactly. So just to recap there, why I think it's huge for creators. You can build tools for yourself that you have wanted to exist that are completely bespoke to your business and your needs. You can create tools that maybe you, you found a software tool that you'd like to create for your, or that you'd like to pay for for your business, but it's bloated with all these other features and it's so expensive. And so it's like you just want to pull out like the chat support feature or the, you know, organization feature, whatever, and build that for yourself. So there's a, I think a cost savings there potentially. You can, I can see a huge opportunity for no longer for your lead magnet, lead magnets, do you need to put up like a PDF or an ebook or anything. It's like, oh, no, here, get access to this tool. And like Jason said, I think that is just such a huge value add because people are now at the point where they're not looking for more information. They are looking for ways to make their processes more efficient. They're looking for people to move the ball forward for them, which I think is a huge opportunity. You can create products for yourself, new revenue streams, white label tools, all these amazing things. And I just think that, you know, I, I alluded to this before, but we are just on the very beginning edge of this and it is definitely getting more popular in the software, SaaS, sort of startup world. But I think being really creative about how do you as a digital product business, use some of these tools to your advantage and really invest just a handful of hours to see if this is something that even, like, kind of jives with your brain. It's not going to jive with everyone's brain. Like, some people are going to spend 10 hours on this, and they're gonna go, you know what? This is just... is not worth it. I do think it helps to have, like, a little bit of basic knowledge of tools and, you know, user experience and some of those things.

[00:34:30] Jason: Yeah.

[00:34:31] Caroline: But I just think the sky's the limit on the way that you can integrate some of these tools into your business.

[00:34:37] Jason: Yeah. And I think one of the hardest things about it, and we'll talk about a couple of the things that, like, you know, Lovable and these types of tools are not all sunshine rainbows at the moment. Like, there are some hiccups because they are very new and early on, but you... you really have to, again, zoom the lens out and be like, okay, I spent one hour on this, and I'm frustrated. However, look how far I got in an hour. And, and I think even simple things, like, I watched a guy it was actually using not Lovable. It was a different product, but you could do the exact same thing in Lovable. And he was just building sales pages for his different, like, services that he has. And so he was like, oh, I have my, like, SEO package that I do. I have my, like, coaching package that I do. And then he had, like, some, like, you know, hobby business he runs, like a custom chess pieces or something like that. But he just used the tool to build the landing pages as opposed to going into a landing page builder and, like, having to think through all the sections. He just told it. He was like, I want to hear a section. I want to this. I wanted that. And just, like, make it. And here's the design that I like the look of. Don't copy it exactly. Just get inspired. And it was literally done in, like, 15 minutes. And I was like, this is even an idea I didn't even think about was just, like, a landing page generator that just, like, spits out landing pages that, like, you can set up as different domains.

[00:35:46] Caroline: Yeah. Well, I do want to get to sort of, like, the implications of all this and where we think it's all headed. But before we do that, you alluded to how it's not all sunshine and rainbows. And I feel like we've been doing a good job of, like, hyping it up, but I do want to set people's expectations of, it's not perfect, it's still in its infancy. And so I want to talk about some of the more frustrating parts of using Lovable. And, like, just give people a realistic view of you're going to have that first 30 minutes and it is going to be like any... unlike anything you've ever done. You're like, what? I just made that. And then the following, like, nine to ten hours are going to be like, wait, why are you stuck on this one thing?

[00:36:25] Jason: Yeah, and I think that some of this, you... you have to be like, you have to have some awareness of, like, what frustrates you. So, like, for me, I get very frustrated when I, like, I can't think of another way to tell the AI to solve the problem. And so I just am like, just fix it. Like, I just get frustrated.

[00:36:41] Caroline: And this is something that I actually love about it is like, I love coming at things from different angles. So works pretty well for my brain.

[00:36:48] Jason: But I do think, like, I've even learned now that I've created a probably like five or six different projects with this. And what I'm realizing is like, okay, this is the key, is don't just saying, fix this. Don't just say, fix this error. Like, I have to come at this with, like, different ways of asking it. And what has actually worked really well for me is to just ask it to be like, hey, we keep getting the same error. Can you analyze this more deeply, further than you have before and just let me know what you're seeing?

[00:37:11] Caroline: Yeah, let me give people a little bit of context because we didn't really set this up. So when you're chatting with Laz, Lovable, you will inevitably, you know, you'll tell it to, hey, can you create this Digital Planner Marketplace app or whatever? And so it'll start with creating all the sort of, like, page structures and the UI elements and everything. Pretty soon you're going to run into, I want to do some sort of functionality. So, like, oh, I want to be able to... 

[00:37:35] Jason: Drag and drop. 

[00:37:36] Caroline: Drag and drop this, or upload my own planner listing or whatever. And that's more advanced functionality because now I have to create a database and I have to be able to make sure that it can store information and all these things. The second that you add some type of advanced functionality, you will find pretty quickly that it will... it will do a couple things. Number one, it will... it will flag errors. Thankfully, Lovable has built in a tool for this where you can just hit fix error and it will try to kind of like, rerun the code. Sometimes, that worked. A lot of times it doesn't. So what Jason's describing is you have to kind of prompt it to analyze its own behavior, analyze the code it's already written, and go, hey, why do you think this might be breaking down? And what is the solution for you to fix it? The second thing is, sometimes, if you're not careful with your prompting in your language, you will get an area of your app working and you will be fixing some other feature. And in order to fix that feature, it will break something else. And you have to be like, hey, buddy, I don't really know why we touched that code. And it'll be like, oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't know I was supposed to. And you're like, okay, we're not there yet in terms of the advanced knowledge. But all of the hours that you log in working with this tool, you learn certain little key phrases to use. You learn, as Jason was saying, new ways to prompt it, new ways to communicate with it so that it can analyze its own behavior and start to understand. For instance, I'll just give you a concrete example. I learned very quickly that if I tell it something, if I don't say the words, small modification, when I'm talking about a UI change, meaning, like, oh, I just want to change the... the color of this button or something, it will make that change and then it will sort of like affect the... everything around it. However, if I tell it exactly, I want to focus on this component and I want it to be a small modification. It'll kind of like keep the parameters just to that area. These are the little things that you learn having to go down a million different dead ends and, like, get frustrated and be like, why did you change that? We had it working so well.

[00:39:27] Jason: And again, this is where, like, my point, if you do start to use Lovable or any of these apps, like, it, like, like asking it questions to say, like, hey, I... I asked you to do this. Why did you... why did you just do it that way? And again, like, I'm a dummy. I don't know what it's doing behind the scenes, but it tells me it's like, oh, I was doing this. This is like, oh, that was actually just like a color change. That's all I wanted. And like, you, you actually wrote, like, other code. It was just a color change. Like, oh, okay. And then I learned, okay, I need to be really specific. I'm just asking for a color change on this... this thing. And they do have a really cool feature where there's this little select button when you're writing a prompt, and you can basically select a portion of the page. So you can... you can like identify like only fix this on this part.

[00:40:06] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:40:06] Jason: Which is really helpful. I'm also excited because I heard this. They do a like a weekly office hours video on YouTube. Lovable does on their YouTube channel. They are going to have dictate to prompt pretty soon. So you'll be able to just use your microphone because when you start using this, you will, you will know this very quickly. It gets frustrating to type out what you want to say because you're like, I'm thinking faster than I can type and I want to say all these things. 

[00:40:28] Caroline: Totally, and you're submitting so many different chats and you're accomplishing so much, but it is a lot of chatting back and forth. It is a really fun experience though. To have something in your mind and to see it be able to come to fruition so quickly is so exciting. I will say this is where it's such a lesson about maintaining curiosity with a lot of these tools because the only reason why I'm able to, I think, effectively use this is because I've been using ChatGPT for a year and I've been honing my skill of prompt engineering and, you know, watching YouTube videos on how to prompt things better. And so all of these sharpening of the knives, like, none of that time is wasted because, in this new era of AI tools, I do think every hour that you invest in trying to go deeper and learning how to use some of these tools, they all sort of like work together. And so I do think this is going to be a very important skill set for creators in this new era. It doesn't mean that you have to jump on every trend. It doesn't mean that you need to be overwhelmed. Please hear me. It doesn't mean that you even... It doesn't even mean that to be successful you have to even use any AI tools in your business. I don't believe that. I just think there is going to be a tremendous amount of opportunity for people who do feel like this is something that's interesting to them. You and I have always loved kind of not being on the forefront, so to speak, but just we are curious people by nature and we know that we've been in online business long enough to see the changes come and go. And so you do have to stay a little bit nimble in understanding that the landscape changes fairly frequently. And I think leading with curiosity is a good idea so that you at least have the option to use some of these opportunities to your benefit.

[00:42:08] Jason: Yeah, I think one of the other downsides that I want to talk about with Lovable is, like, it again, that first hour is so magical. But I think what can happen is it's like you almost get like a dopamine rush of, like, look what I can do. But then you get stuck and you get a place where, like, it's throwing errors or, like, it's just not understanding what you want to do, or it's not doing it in a way that you want. And then it starts to feel like doom and gloom. Like, I know I felt this in, like, two of my projects where I'm like, I am... and I gave up on one, which was a little puzzle game, because I'm like, I'm never going to get this to do what I want it to do. Maybe I could, but I just don't have the patience for it. Like, I don't have the time to do it. And I think that's... That is where we're in the infancy with these, these applications and these types of tools is. They're just not there enough. And, and if you don't have the persistence and the patience to like, slog through over and over again, you're probably not going to get the result you want. However, that being said, I think for many of you listening to this, there have been so many ideas that you've had in your head, but you've never had a way to create them. And I think this is the first tool that will actually allow you to get a version of that, that even if it's not like, totally working, it's something that could show you, like, oh, maybe I do want to actually hire a developer for the first time to build this project because I have a prototype that, like, I actually built with this, which I've never been able to do before because, like, I don't know how to use Figma. I'm not a person who can write any sort of code whatsoever. And I think there's a really big unlock with that. But I will say I do think another downside of these products is, like, they're not there yet, I don't think to be released to the masses because I just think there's a lot of scalability issues which we can talk about.

[00:43:38] Caroline: And we take for granted how much of a foundation of basic engineering that we do have that probably makes these tools a little bit more accessible to us because we have that experience versus a complete newbie who, quite literally, I know I joked about not knowing what a database is. I basically do but someone who's, they don't even know what to ask, you know, they don't even know what authentication is, which I think is a lot of people. But I think that that is a good transition into talking about some of the implications.

[00:44:05] Jason: Well, before we do that, before we do that, let's talk about the price. So we did want to talk about that. So the price of Lovable, again, it is free to start. I think you get like five messages before you have to start paying for it. But you could literally get a prototype up in five messages. That's what I got with the revenue dashboard that I created.

[00:44:21] Caroline: Yeah, you could at least just see. I mean, you probably can't get a lot of functionality up in five messages, but you can see what it would like. 

[00:44:26] Jason: Exactly. Which immediately maybe be like, here's some of my money.

[00:44:28] Caroline: Which I know they've... They've perfectly done that.

[00:44:31] Jason: So it's $20 a month for, I think it's like 100 messages. It's $50 a month for 250 messages. And then it kind of goes up from there.

[00:44:40] Caroline: But here's the key that you really need to know as two people. Well, first of all, we're two people working on several projects. But let me... when I say that a hundred messages goes by in the blink of an eye, if you're actually trying to build something that's functional, it goes by in the blink of an eye.

[00:44:54] Jason: And they are getting better. Again, I heard this in one of their weekly calls is if you're trying to work on the same error over and over, they're not counting.

[00:45:02] Caroline: I was wondering about that because also I've been trying to group some of my, like, modifications in one message. But something that I've found is that when you're trying to work on two features in one message, it does a terrible job.

[00:45:14] Jason: You really have to give it focus. Like, if you give it too much to do, it's like, it's... It's really better at small, like individual tasks.

[00:45:20] Caroline: Yeah, exactly. But anyway, the way that Jason and I think about it, again, I know that for some people, you might just be at the stage where you're like, I can't make that investment to really try to get this off the ground. But at least the $20 a month level, 100 messages will get you... You can test out trying to build in some functionality to whatever your idea is. And I think by that point it will become clear whether the upgrade is worth it or not for you.

[00:45:45] Jason: Yes.

[00:45:45] Caroline: And Jason and I are always like, okay, but what are we comparing this cost to?

[00:45:49] Jason: So that's exactly what I wanted to say. So we are at the place where again, we're working on like seven different projects in Lovable right now. We're paying $294 a month. That is a lot for like a monthly tool, right? Like, there's not many tools in our business where we pay that amount per month. But when you compare it to hiring a developer, which we have done so many times, just in general, we tend to spend $10,000 to $15,000 a year in like ancillary developer costs. I mean, that alone breaks down to like twelve hundred dollars a month.

[00:46:16] Caroline: Totally.

[00:46:17] Jason: So even just in that, like, again, we're none of these things are like launched projects yet and they're not solved projects yet, but that alone is like a third of the price of what we're normally paying. And so to my, my point here, like, for people like us who are making lots of things, I think if we end up paying $1,000 a month for Lovable, on its surface, that is expensive. In the grand scheme of our business, it's actually saving us money and we're getting more value out of the projects that we want to create. And so, again, that's our use case. I think like Caroline said, for most of you listening to this, $20 a month can get you so far to get some of these ideas out of your head. And again, it doesn't have to be Lovable. It could be Bolt, it could be any of these other tools. But, like, this is just, it truly feels to me like the game changing tool for people like us.

[00:46:59] Caroline: For sure.

[00:47:00] Jason: All right, so you want to talk about some implications?

[00:47:02] Caroline: I just want to talk about implications because I think with all of these AI conversations, you, yes, it's so easy to talk about the magic of it all. But I do think it's worth taking pause and kind of going, like, what are then the implications moving forward? How do we think this affects the creator economy? You know, I think an easy question that comes to mind is like, how does this affect the demand for developers? And if I was a developer listening to this podcast, like, should I be nervous? And it's like, you know, so we, maybe we can start there. I think also when you were talking about the landing page thing where it was like, easy to spin that up, I'm like, okay, there's already so much garbage, kind of AI garbage floating around out there. What do you do when it becomes so easy to spin up, like, like, you know, how many more grifters come about, how many more scams come about when it's just so easy to spin some of those things up in minutes. But so I want to just, I want to kind of.

[00:47:53] Jason: Yeah. Can I share a thought that I've had recently?

[00:47:55] Caroline: Please.

[00:47:56] Jason: I, you know, you hear, you know, 10 years ago, not even 10 years ago, five years ago, I think there was this big conversation around like, there's too many online courses, do we need another online course in the world? Blah, blah, blah. And this formula, this thought has been formulating kind of since that time. And I think we can with AI tools. And again, talking about like the, the carbon impact is a whole different discussion about that.

[00:48:17] Caroline: And I don't know enough about that to be able to like really.

[00:48:21] Jason: I don't want to, I don't want to just like poo poo that. But I want to share this overall thought because it has helped me in understanding like the contribution of junk in, in spaces. So I think we would all agree that like there are a lot of shitty books that get written every single year of our lives. So many. But there are also some literal life changing books that get released. And that can be fiction, it can be nonfiction, and it's... We're so grateful that we have books. And I think this is the same thing with online courses. There are so many shitty online courses that get released every single day. But there are so many great online courses that are literally changing people's lives and giving the ability to learn things, especially like free courses that are just like available everywhere. So like, I think that mechanism for stuff.

[00:49:02] Caroline: I mean, I think about even like businesses, like brick and mortar businesses. Like think about how many like brick and mortar businesses, like little restaurants get created every year. And I'm not saying like, I hope that they succeed, but like think of how many businesses you've been to where you're like, that was terrible service.

[00:49:21] Jason: But not a good business.

[00:49:22] Caroline: And you know what, and what happens is they don't survive. Like those businesses don't survive. The good ones stick around and the other ones don't survive. And like, I think you're right. I think... 

[00:49:31] Jason: So, anyway, to my point with AI tools, what I wanted to say is like, I think AI tools are leveling the playing field on a lot of us being able to do things that have kind of been, for lack of a better term, gatekept by all these other software companies, big businesses, people with skills that none of us have.

[00:49:48] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:49:48] Jason: And I think actually giving us a really interesting opportunity that we have not had before. Now, am I saying that like, like we all, we need 60,000 AI tools that build support chatbots because, like, that was the first thing the AI tools all did? No, we don't need that many of those things. But I do think that, like, all the crappy ones are going to get fallen behind, just like all the crappy books get left behind, all the crappy courses.

[00:50:11] Caroline: Which is why I think in this new era where the tools are becoming commodified and the skills to a degree are becoming commodified, the thing that cannot become commodified is creative thinking. 

[00:50:21] Jason: Yeah.

[00:50:22] Caroline: Like, I really think if, if I'm a creator right now, the thing that you want to hone is, A, you need to have the discipline of carving out time apart from consuming so that you can start to, whether it's journaling, whether it's coming up with ideas, going for walks, things like that, honing your own creative thinking skills because, even like using Lovable, the thing that separates someone who, like the technology is the same, but the thing that we can very clearly see that goes from someone being able to be like, okay, I actually can't create something with this tool that's very compelling to being able to push through those like, and persist through some of those roadblocks is you have to have creative thinking. You have to have a vision for the end product because Laz is not going to do that for you. You have to be able to come to roadblocks with different creative solutions of, hey, we haven't tried this method, let's try that method. Like, it's the creative thinking, it's the divergent thinking, it is the vision, it is all of those things I think are going to become even more important. And so it's like the most optimistic view I have of AI is where it's like, it's human amplification, not human replacement. Now, that being said, I'm not naive to the fact that it is going to skew the product or the supply and demand curves of certain industries, of course, but that has been happening in business since the beginning of time. If I'm a developer, right now, I am logging hours learning the ins and outs of Lovable so that I can be a Lovable proficient developer because, I'll tell you right now, what would be, you know, really helpful is having a developer who knows how Lovable works so that I can hand off the last 10% to them and say, hey, can you just like, clean up the code? Can you make sure the database is good? Can you make sure the privacy settings are good to go. Like using the deep knowledge and expertise of someone who has spent years as a human being crafting those skills that a robot cannot at this stage really kind of like see the big picture of.

[00:52:16] Jason: Yeah.

[00:52:17] Caroline: And so if I was a developer right now, I would see that change coming and I would say I'm going to be a fully proficient AI, you know, engineer, but human. So it's like I'm going to be able to be the bridge where I can take that project the last 5% where a person who, you know, has been using this tool is like getting frustrated.

[00:52:36] Jason: Yeah. And I think that like we both kind of wrote this down as a note, which is, you know, if you're a developer right now, there are going to be so many people who they don't want to use AI to, to build things. You're still going to be in demand because like they're just going to be against AI and like they don't think it's going to be able to have their vision come true. So like you still have an opportunity, but I think another crucial way you can position yourself as an AI code cleanup developer. Exactly like you said. And, and I think like I even watched a couple videos of like, like extremely well known developers who are looking at these tools and they're looking at the code and they're like, this is kind of crap code. Like this, this code is perfect for an MVP, but if you were to have this hit scale, it would crash and burn and like it would just fall apart. And so there is a real need for people who are good developers to clean things up, make them better. But all that being said, I think the point that you made, which is kind of the point of like everybody who was making horse drawn carriages when the car came about, sorry, but like no one's going to want a horse drawn carriage anymore. And I think this is just like...

[00:53:36] Caroline: Do you know what I just thought of?

[00:53:37] Jason: This is what it's like being a human.

[00:53:38] Caroline: Totally. I just had this thought while you were saying that because I think it's a really good point. It's really easy to focus on the customers who previously would be hiring developers for let's say a $10,000 project, but maybe aren't anymore because they're building it themselves, Lovable. And maybe they still hire a cleanup dev for $1,500, you know, whatever at the end. Okay, let's say that. So, so it's so easy to focus on the net loss of like this developer was being hired for $10,000. Now it's gone down to just $1,500. What we're not focusing on is what you mentioned earlier, which is the whole slew of people who have never hired a developer and would never hire a developer because they didn't even... They had these ideas, but they were like, I don't even know how to get started to build this. But now Lovable is creating that MVP for them. They can see the vision, and now there's actually more demand for a developer because so many more ideas are being spun up. And so there's a need for, like, taking, like we were saying, taking it over the goal line. And I am just thinking to myself, again, going back to, if I was a developer, I would be honing my skills so that I, like, knew how these apps work so I could speak the language to my potential clients. I would also be riding the... the coattails of the SEO of again over the next two years as more and more people are understanding what these apps are, Lovable, Bolt, like, all these different things. I would start creating content using those keywords so that my new customers, who never would have hired me before, but now they're in that realm because they see the vision that they can actually create tools. Now I'm going to be the real human developer who has the Lovable skill set that they can hire as the cleanup dev on the back end. And that's a new opportunity for me. That's not an opportunity that was taken away from me.

[00:55:16] Jason: Yeah. All right, before we wrap up, let's share our other projects that we have created with Lovable, because I think they are fun. I want to start with the puzzle game that I tried to create, which failed miserably because basically what I wanted to do was it was like a daily puzzle that was all one color and it was 24 pieces, and you would basically do it for time. So you would like kickstart the timer.

[00:55:36] Caroline: Yeah. You're very much in this place right now where you're like, I want to create some type of daily puzzle.

[00:55:40] Jason: Yeah. Just something fun. And... and so I started working on this, and I think I probably spent like six total hours going back and forth with Laz about this. Boy, we could not get it to work.

[00:55:50] Caroline: The puzzle pieces were very...

[00:55:51] Jason: You finally helped it get over the hump of, like, I could not get a puzzle piece to look at a puzzle piece.

[00:55:55] Caroline: Really. I don't mean to like, I am a really good prompt engineer.

[00:55:58] Jason: You're a great prompt engineer.

[00:55:59] Caroline: Thank you so much.

[00:55:59] Jason: You are, of the two of us so much, you are the better prompt engineer for sure. You also have more patience than I do.

[00:56:03] Caroline: That's true.

[00:56:04] Jason: So that one kind of sucked. I gave up. However, when I was thinking about it, I was like, I still want to make, like, a daily game. And so I actually went to GPT and I was like, hey, I loved Wordle. It was fantastic. It's still going. I don't really play it anymore because I kind of just like, got my joy out of it. But, like, can you give me some ideas of the game? Gave me, like 14 absolutely horrible ideas. But one of them sparked an idea that I thought of was like, oh, it's kind of like a combination lock where you can see the numbers, you know, coming and going. But what if you saw the letters coming and going? Excuse you. I'm explaining my own project. And I was like, what if you could see the letters coming and going and you could see spell a word? And I was like, okay. So I just essentially was like, let me just run with this in Lovable and I'm just gonna have it work with me and, like, go for it. Within about four hours, I had a completely working game. 

[00:56:51] Caroline: That I was like... that you sent to me that I was, like, playing and having a good time with. And it even had your little, like, share your score, like, love or like a Wordle.

[00:57:00] Jason: But the thing that I want to share with, like that specific example is there is no chance that I could ever have hired someone to make a version of that game because I didn't even know what the version of the game was going to be. I just worked with Lovable to create it, and in four hours it was a working thing. And I don't know if I'm ever going to release that game, but I might, and I might just have it be a fun thing that, like, our WAIMers can play. Like, we can play, like, we can send to our email list and just be like, this is just a fun game that Jason came up with that is like Wordle. And if you kind of are bored with the, like, the way that Wordle plays, it's a different way of playing a word game. And you get that kind of fix every day.

[00:57:33] Caroline: I know we've talked about this, but it also just... It gets my wheels turning because it makes me wonder. 

[00:57:39] Jason: Let's just shift our entire business.

[00:57:41] Caroline: No, no, no. But when you think about time investment and, like, hours invested, right? Like, arguably, probably for a lot of creators, one of the thing that takes up the most time investment in their business is content creation. And we've talked about this often, which is... I mean, it makes sense, right? You're trying to build an audience. Like, that is an important thing because you need customers and that's marketing. But it's like so often you can start to feel like you're creating content and you're just on the... you're in this, like, sort of factory and it feels ephemeral because, yeah, of course, like for YouTube, you have like a back catalog or whatever, but especially with, call it social media content, it just kind of like disappears to the ether of time. Right. I just imagine, like, imagine this year. Like, I'm not saying I'm gonna do this, but I'm just, we're... we're brainstorming. Imagine, I spent all the time I would... I would put into building a YouTube channel.

[00:58:28] Jason: Yeah.

[00:58:28] Caroline: And I spent that building these tools that are focused at creators. And, you know, we shared them to our newsletter and encouraged people to share them online or whatever. I just wonder, with the impact of getting new eyeballs and people into our ecosystem, would that be more valuable than creating content, like static content, you know?

[00:58:49] Jason: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a... it's a very interesting question. And I... we've been on this train for years of wanting to build tools, and I think we now have a tool that allows us to build these tools ourself and doesn't limit us to having to hire developers. And I think it would be a really interesting experiment this year to try and build some of these things and not worry about going back on Instagram. And maybe our YouTube content is just a lot more chill and like, we just upload a video a month just to like, hey, we're here, we're doing this. Maybe I want to upload a video per month. It's like, hey, here's the Lovable project that I created. And like, it's the puzzle game. It's the what not.

[00:59:21] Caroline: I'm not saying we're going to do that. I'm just saying it has me thinking about time investment in a different way mainly because I just enjoy myself so much when I'm working on these things.

[00:59:30] Jason: Well, let's talk about your other project that you're working on, which is really fun.

[00:59:33] Caroline: Which one?

[00:59:33] Jason: Your other Lovable project.

[00:59:35] Caroline: Oh, the content factory?

[00:59:36] Jason: Yeah.

[00:59:36] Caroline: Yeah. So then I had this other... speaking of, one of the use cases that we told you about of why I think this is big for creators is because you can create the tools for yourself that you wish existed. And as I... This Is about a couple of weeks ago. I sat down and I made a list of YouTube videos that I would want to create in, like, the first quarter of the year. So I think I came up with like, whatever, 12 weeks worth of videos, but I was like, man, I really wish I had a tool similar to, like, I've built a version of this in my notion database, but it doesn't do all the things that I want it to do. So I really was like, I wish I could create a tool called, like, a little Calm Content Factory where I can plug in the channels that I want to create content for. And not only can I see a content calendar, but I can set kind of a strategy for each one. I can hook it up to my YouTube and I can say, you know, help me build an audience profile for who's going to watch my videos. And then you can run it through some of these AI generators for, like, help me come up with topics and ideas. And here are some other channels that I think are adjacent to mine. So I started building that and it looked really cute.

[01:00:35] Jason: Yeah, I mean, when you showed it to me, I was like, first of all, this is your expertise where, like, you're a designer kind of first more than anything else. It looked beautiful. Like, you got an amazing design. I'm like a, you know, a early 2000s designer first. So, like, everything of mine looks like Photoshop, you know, 6.0, but, like, you know, it's some... it's something. But I, when you showed me this, I was like, this just looks really fun. Like, it looks more fun to use than, like, the kind of, like, cleanliness and emptiness of Notion, which can feel very, like, bare bones unless you can, like, really spruce it up. So, yeah, I will be curious to see, as we move forward, will some of these projects come to life? I think right now, like, you can probably hear it. Like, like, we're just so excited to use this tool and that's why we wanted to share that it exists.

[01:01:18] Caroline: And, and it's something we're experimenting with on this podcast is kind of bringing you all new things we're discovering that are in the digital product space, the online business space, the... The kind of creator economy space so that you don't have to feel overwhelmed trying to go out and find all these things yourself. Like, hopefully this is a place that you can come to... to find out about these things so that you can decide whether you want to put it aside, not care about it at all, or you want to dive deeper into it. By no means are we saying that, like, the tone that I would like to have if we are going to continue to be a podcast that's like, hey, here's this cool new thing is different than most out there, which is not like, you're... Like, you have to know about this thing if you want to survive on YouTube in 2025. That is not the vibe. That is not the vibe. The vibe is like, hey, I found this. Hey, friend, I found this cool new thing. Here's a little bit about it. But yeah, a big hurdle that I can already tell you is neither one of us has completed an app on Lovable.

[01:02:13] Jason: Yes. 

[01:02:13] Caroline: So what... so the new frontier that I can tell you is going to be very difficult is like, how do we then get it ready for users? How do we get it ready for, like, how do we do the domains? How do we do all of that? But that is going to be a frontier that I'm going to have to cross if we're trying to use WAIM of Stones and get that started in February.

[01:02:31] Jason: And I think my letterlock game is close enough to completion that even if, like, by the time this podcast comes out, because we're recording this a week and a day before the podcast goes live, I could probably finish that and include a link in the description to the game.

[01:02:45] Caroline: And especially because that one doesn't take authentication.... authentication.

[01:02:49] Jason: It does if I wanted to have, like a leaderboard.

[01:02:51] Caroline: That's true. Well, you haven't done that yet.

[01:02:52] Jason: I don't know. I'll try and figure that maybe this weekend, if I get excited and I want it to be done before this podcast airs, I will finish the letterlock game. I already bought a domain for it, which is letterlocks.com, which I thought was, like, it's good to find a good dot com domain. And, yeah, and we'll... we'll see if that's up and we'll see where that kind of goes. In closing, we... we are in the AI era of existing and like...

[01:03:16] Caroline: A whole new era.

[01:03:18] Jason: You can completely ignore it. And if it is not your thing and you hate the implications of it and you just don't like it, that's totally fine. I think the reality of it is, like, AI is for our generation, our age group of people who listen to this podcast is what the Internet was to the people who, like, it didn't exist in 2000.

[01:03:35] Caroline: Totally.

[01:03:35] Jason: Good, bad or indifferent. The Internet has completely changed the way we do everything. And like, this is where we know we're getting older, is when we have to, like, tell people like, hey, this is just the way it is. And like, I'm sorry that...

[01:03:47] Caroline: The only constant is that everything is always changing.

[01:03:50] Jason: You can still use your horse drawn carriage. You absolutely can. It still functions and it still works. But it is not going to get you from Los Angeles to New York in a time that is reasonable whatsoever. And you might die along the way. As opposed to you can get on a plane, you can get there in four hours and like, you'll probably find statistically you're going to be okay. And I just think that like, there's no perfect answer here to using any of these tools, but some of it is really exciting. This tool to us is extremely exciting. I also love that, like it's not a huge conglomeration that's behind Lovable. It's a small team in Europe that is building this product. They seem really nice. Again, you can only go off of what you can go off of.

[01:04:26] Caroline: And a part of our mission at Wandering Aimfully is just empowering people to use online business to live lives that are fulfilling and the lives that they dream of. And so I think part of that is having awareness of these tools because you've never been able to leverage your time and your creativity and your vision to such a degree as you can with tools like this.

[01:04:52] Jason: Yeah. The other thing that I'm gonna say. We haven't talked about this personally, but I'll just share it here on the podcast because I think other people maybe think about this, and I saw it in a video was like, anytime you use an AI tool and like as much as we're using Lovable, to think about donating to one of the services that like plants trees to like offset the carbon emissions.

[01:05:07] Caroline: Yeah.

[01:05:08] Jason: I do not think that is a perfect solution.

[01:05:10] Caroline: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:05:10] Jason: But I think it is...

[01:05:12] Caroline: Something.

[01:05:12] Jason: It is an easy thing to do where like if you're voting with your dollars to use an AI tool.

[01:05:16] Caroline: Yeah.

[01:05:16] Jason: You can also vote with your dollars to at least, least counteract some of the negative carbon footprint stuff. And that's something for us to talk about that I think is probably an easy thing for us to add into our monthly expenses. To be like, listen, if we are going to use tools like this more, then the least, very least we can do, besides getting educated on the implications and everything and making sure the people who run the tools are good people, is to donate to some causes like that so that at least we're feeling like we're doing something there.

[01:05:40] Caroline: For sure.

[01:05:40] Jason: And that's not perfect.

[01:05:41] Caroline: No.

[01:05:42] Jason: But it is something.

[01:05:42] Caroline: None of these things are perfect. And you know, the hope is obviously, as more and more people are using these tools and AI and just the computing power that we are now sort of tiptoeing into is that I know that there are smart people out there trying to figure out solutions to these problems. And I want to be educated on kind of what the cutting edge is of some of those solutions so that we can make sure that we're... 

[01:06:07] Jason: Go ahead. 

[01:06:07] Caroline: Aware of it.

[01:06:11] Jason: Fantastic.

[01:06:11] Caroline: But couldn't finish the sentence, but you know what I'm saying.

[01:06:13] Jason: We're at the end here, cinnamon rollers. If you are a true cinnamon roller.

[01:06:16] Caroline: Yeah.

[01:06:16] Jason: And you are going to use Lovable and you're going to click our link and we're going to make like $6 off of the $20 that you spend in a month. That's going to be awesome because we're going to be able to afford so many more Ninja Creamies in our lives. I'm actually so curious if any of you get to a place in your Lovable project because it gives you a shareable URL if you want to share directly. I would never share that URL, but if you do create anything with Lovable. 

[01:06:38] Caroline: Yeah, we want to see what you make. 

[01:06:39] Jason: Oh my gosh. And no judgment if it's like kind of crappy and wonky and doesn't work.

[01:06:42] Caroline: Ours are crappy and wonky too.

[01:06:44] Jason: My letter lock game couldn't get the third lock to work properly for a long time. Feel free to send it to us, hello@wanderingaimfully.com. Would love to see what you're cooking up and what you're playing with.

Would 

[01:06:52] Caroline: Lovable to see what you're...

[01:06:54] Jason: Nicely done. And again, this was not sponsored by Lovable. They didn't know we were recording this. We...

[01:06:58] Caroline: They don't know us.

[01:06:59] Jason: Love this tool and have really enjoyed it. So hope you enjoyed this episode. If you really liked it and you want to let us know that, feel free to leave a review on Apple. Feel free to leave a review on Spotify. You can do that as well. And also send us an email if you want to let us know what you're up to and that you enjoy the podcast. Okay.

[01:07:15] Caroline: We just love your faces and I hope you have a good week.

[01:07:18] Jason: Bye. 

[01:07:18] Caroline: Bye.