# The 5 Steps to Building Apps People Actually Want [#11 Stephen Pope]

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** n8n
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5MS_mQZMxk
- **Дата:** 15.12.2025
- **Длительность:** 1:01:29
- **Просмотры:** 2,671
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/15171

## Описание

In this episode, we sit down with Stephen, a tech founder who built and sold a seven-figure software company, to uncover the real steps behind building SaaS apps that people actually want. Stephen shares his journey from agency work to productization, revealing how he created the Content Engine Database and scaled it to $50K+ months.

00:00 – Introduction & Stephen’s Background
01:23 – The Drive to Build: Early Entrepreneurial Spirit
02:45 – What Does Automation Really Do?
04:47 – Building a $5K SaaS Product with AI
07:11 – The Value for Listeners
08:47 – Stephen’s Process for Engineering SaaS Products
10:16 – Solving Your Own Problems: The Content Engine Database
12:54 – Going Viral and Finding Product-Market Fit
15:12 – From Agency Work to Productization
18:20 – How the Content Engine Database Works
22:03 – Organizing Content for Scale
25:00 – Repurposing Content & Automation
28:15 – Using AI and Automation in Content Creation
31:00 – The 5 Steps to Building SaaS Apps People Want
36:

## Транскрипт

### Introduction & Stephen’s Background []

That's a transformational story going from having nothing to a product that makes 50k a month. — Steven is a tech founder who built and sold a 7figure software company after scaling in 12 years to millions in a 25 person team earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 magazine. His company has created products and back-end systems for more than 75 startups, midsize firms, and Fortune 10 giants like Apple, NBC, and more. Now he's turned his tech expertise into a content engine and a plug-and-play content system designed to give any business a full production department for only a few,000. — Since I was a little kid, I liked building things and trying to get people to buy it. That force in me is stronger than all of the insecurities I have, which I have a lot of cuz like what does automation do? It only helps you scale or save money. It doesn't do anything other than that. Most people try to automate things before they've even actually done it in real life. And when there's an interest in the marketplace, that's usually a good sign that there's a product there. How does someone get to making a $5,000 SAS product using AI? — We'll talk about how do you build an AI product that you can sell for 5K and uh not have to actually do any work for anybody. You're very exposed. You're fumbling. You're making mistakes. You're getting harsh comments. If you don't get complaints, then you've got nothing to improve. How do I find it? Where do I go? What do I do? What have you done? Stephen, thank you so much for being on the show. Real quick question. There's going to be a lot of people that are going to watch this show want to get value from it. So, could you let the audience know

### The Drive to Build: Early Entrepreneurial Spirit [1:23]

what is the value they're going to get from watching this podcast? — Yeah. So, on today's podcast, we're going to talk about how you can go from not having any product at all to going to a product that you can sell for anywhere from $2 to $5,000 per sale and it scales. It's not done for you work. So, we'll talk about how do you build an AI product that you can sell for 5K and not have to actually do any work for anybody. Yeah, I think a lot of people are creating these AI agencies and that's one way you can go into or you do these ad hoc one-off type of things, right? — But one of the things I've seen you do really well is you create these SAS products and then you bolt these SAS products on to then scale it out and you do it also to build your brand online. Can you talk to me a little bit about your process of how you go about engineering these highly complex systems and what you've built at the SAS product? Yeah, the way I do it is I usually am just looking at something that I have to do myself anyway and I start to solve the problem. So the way I ended up creating the product that I have now, the content engine database, which is a AI automation product that helps you streamline your content creation at the core of it. That's what it helps you do. And the way I got started, I was creating a lot of content on LinkedIn and all these different platforms. It was a pain. So, I started to solve those problems and then I just started to make videos about those problems in various different ways. And

### What Does Automation Really Do? [2:45]

when I started to see that those would go viral, it just started to make me think. It's like, oh yeah, a lot of people are interested in this topic. don't want to create content. So, things that help them create content faster is interesting to them. When there's an interest in the marketplace, that's usually a good sign that there's a product there. Now there's a lot of work that needs to be done to go from that interest to product but that's how I did it and I come from an agency background so I've helped people build technology for my whole life and it is a way to make money but I have found that creating a product that you can sell over and iterate on just that one product instead of having to build all these custom solutions for all these different clients which gets real hectic just a cool way to make a living. — Great. And with the product you make is this content engine database. Can you talk to about like you started it in one way, but what have you been able to generate in terms of like income for yourself? — Yeah. So, I've had months where I've generated well over 70,000. I think we had a $100,000 month. In general, I was able to keep it at about 50 grand a month and so selling what is that 10 of them a month and then not having to actually do a lot of work for each of those specific clients. — Can you talk to me about a bit of the flow of what the content engine database does? Are you taking content? How does it work? Yeah. So, at the core of it, it's a content organizational system. So, you see online there's a lot of content automation stuff and people take this and they do all these different fancy things and those are cool to an extent, but when an organization is actually creating a lot of content, not like just building a fancy toy that looks cool that people that will get a lot of views because people do like these solutions. They are cool. But when an organization is actually creating content, there's a lot of organization that needs to take place in terms of creating folders and managing ideas and managing the process and managing team members and you got thumbnails and videos and reviews and notifications, all this stuff that's going around. And there's all these fancy things you can do with AI as well, but at the core of

### Building a $5K SaaS Product with AI [4:47]

it, what an organization needs is tight organization without having to think about a lot of that stuff. Because when content is hard and if you have to add in all just the organizational difficulties, it just makes it a pain. So trying to attack some of those core issues is what the database really does. — Got it. So it's a way to be able to take this data, organize all the structure and then really make the I would say like a content production schedule a lot simpler, more streamlined. — Exactly. And then once you have it organized and streamlined, then of course you can add on all the cool AI stuff that we have now where you can repurpose things and but it has to be organized first every otherwise everything's a one-off. So if you create a document that has an email in it and you feel like that could be turned into tweets or all these different things that's only possible if it's organized. You have the idea where all these things are so that you can then build these other automations that are going to help you scale that. — Do you have kind of like a core piece of content that then gets repurposed? Like for example, you have a podcast, it gets cut up into a social media. — I think that's what most people try to do. Yeah. So, I've got my YouTube video. — The thing is that it's interesting is because every source piece of content has its own ability to be translated into other things, right? If it's a tutorial, it's harder to find good clips. It's not impossible, it's just harder. It takes more time and more energy. And maybe something is missing. Obviously on a podcast it's tends to be a little easier because there's a segment of the podcast that could just be pulled out and it makes sense and everything but yeah like ultimately in most people's content strategy there is a core piece and you try to get creative on how you repurpose that as best as possible. — Yeah, with podcast you have these like hot clips or hot takes that you can then pull out and repurpose. It is easy. How do you do that with YouTube videos — as the same thing ends up happening? You have to be careful. You have to go through it and look. There's not always a clip, but somebody has to take the effort to go look. Usually what you're looking for is, hey, does this clip have the complete idea? Like, can you pull it out from the clip and have it make sense? — Cuz I know part of it would be like humans going through and watching it. What are the areas do you use AI and automation for the systems? What things are automated especially within it in um what parts you use for that? — Yeah, where you can automate things is like where you've developed a real good process manually. And so if most people try to automate things before they've even actually done it in real life, you've once you've identified, hey, I've got this source piece of content. I have a school community and on that school

### The Value for Listeners [7:11]

community, we have a Q& A call. So it's pretty easy to take that Q& A call, take the transcript, break it up into, hey, what were all the topics discussed — and this is just a very simple in automation. It's not very complicated at all. It's just taking a transcript and then analyzing it for what are the good topics and then asking it out of all these what was the best topic and then having a basic format of how it can turn that into an email. And that works really well and it's very simple. It's like a four or fivestep process. But you need to be organized in order for this to happen. So that's the key is that all of these files, the Zoom recordings or wherever these things take place, — they're just all scattered about when somebody goes to sit down to do these tasks. It's just very cumbersome to try to do that on a day-to-day basis. Like you're reinventing the wheel every day — when you do this when you start to build out these systems because part of it we're moving through an evolution, right? The evolution of okay, first I got to find what's working in the marketplace. Where is some interest? And then you go, you start to build that out, do manual process, shift that to some automated processes, and then throw AI on top of it. — I'm curious about the elements that you do. So once you find something that is needed in the marketplace and you talked about you saw some hits let's start there and what I'd like to do is go through these phases of okay this is one junk and then how do we evolve it so in the beginning the needs in the marketplace what suggestions would you have or have you seen to be able to find what AI automation SAS product should I build — you got to think there's not as many options as people think content is obviously in the lead generation space so it's like the making money space and then there's funnels and CRM which is

### Stephen’s Process for Engineering SaaS Products [8:47]

going to be more like chat bots and voice agents and stuff like that. So when you break a business apart, there's lead generation and then there's funnels and CRM which is going to be chat bots and voice and then on the back end which I don't see as many people talking about is like project management and like that kind of thing. So depending on where a business is, those topics are going to be interesting to different people. And so the thing is within each of those industries like lead generation, I picked content and my whole thing was okay, here's how you're going to make a bunch of content with as little work as possible. So you're trying to find something like that in each of these little spots is like a cuz what does automation do? It only helps you scale or save money. You got to put it down into simple terms like that where somebody's, oh, this is interesting. Cuz the reality of most of this stuff is that it's boring. It's just it's really just an automation. when it's really working for a business, it's probably pretty simple and it works for 6 months without anybody touching it. Otherwise, you don't really get the value from an automation. — Yeah, there's the razzledazzle of seeing these amazing 50step multi- aent systems that may not really produce any business value versus at the back of the day, there's a thing that I've noticed that when you try to put that razledazzle inside of businesses and it just doesn't work, then you lose trust. The — Oh, yeah. To be honest, like most of the stuff is it's all junk. From what I've seen, the things that the basic boring stuff are the things that actually work and scale. And one of the things is organization. And I know on the front side a lot of people want you either have need more leads or I need more time. And that's usually the one of those two sides. So front end is leads, sales, marketing. The other one is

### Solving Your Own Problems: The Content Engine Database [10:16]

really operational type of things where — or it's both. It could be both. But yeah. — Yeah. It usually I need I'm I got nothing to do. I need some more leads. And then on the other side is okay, cool. Now I've got all these leads. The problem with the lead thing is like the lead like if you're an automator, — you're not going to be able to help someone generate more leads unless that person already has some sort of lead generation system in place. Cuz when you think about an automation, the only way you're going to be able to come into a business and implement something pretty quickly that does something that's valuable is either there is an existing lead generation system that works that you can analyze and improve. So you can say, "Oh, look, like you've already got this system. It's producing three leads a week, which is pretty good. " You don't realize that you're missing this, and now we can make it six. — It's very easy to justify your price if you can do that. But that customer would have already needed to have that something in place because if they don't have that first thing in place and you don't really know much about lead generation, it's going to be very hard for you to come in as an automation expert and set them up a lead generation system because you don't know anything about setting up leads. Maybe — it depends on what the company is. If you're a there are AI automation companies that do lead generations. They do cold emails. They do a bunch of different SEO. They probably, but if they Yeah, they may have specialized that. I'm talking about somebody that's brand new. If you're brand new to automations and you have a hard time getting leads for your own business, then you probably shouldn't be helping people set up lead generation systems to start cuz you're probably not going to do a very good job at it. — For sure. Yeah. You wouldn't want someone out of shape telling you how to get fit in the gym. It makes sense of the same kind. But if you're learning AI automations and somebody already has a lead generation system or they already have processes, it is easier to just evaluate it and say it could be better. — For sure. Yeah. Cuz I think a lot of mistakes that people make is essentially is they try to go in and build a system that is not a necessarily a an additive, but it's more of a brand new thing and it's — and they don't really they don't know enough about the business to do a good job. — Yeah. — So like if you So the thing is if you go into a business that has a lead generation system already — and then you work with them and you learn about how their system works and let's say they're financial adviserss. I'm just picking that out. And then you learn, okay, this is a way to generate leads for financial advisors and then you help improve that thing, then you're probably more capable of going to financial advisors and saying, "Hey, I could set you up a lead generation

### Going Viral and Finding Product-Market Fit [12:54]

system from scratch. " Right? Then it makes more sense. In the beginning, it's better to find things that I think saving people time is easier when you're starting. — Yeah. Going in and automating a process that someone's already doing is out the gate the easiest thing for to add value cuz simple boring automations that grabs data from an email and then puts it into a database or it sends a Slack notification. A couple of these little nodes that are connecting dots, they're these little micro slices that add value. I think people they try to get into the a lot of people want leads but then you're compounding the I got to get good at leads and automation it's just — it's too many things to get good at it at in a short period of time. Yeah. — Talk to me about the part of the things that you've built a content automation system that you create a database. Primarily what it does is brand awareness and lead generation. Do you primarily bring those into businesses that already have some sort of existing content pipeline or — it does work better with people that know how to create content because they're going to get the most value from it? — Yeah. — Because what automation does is that it draws in people that are interested in things because they're not doing it and they just think it's going to make it easier. So when someone sees a content automation system and they're not creating content yet, a lot of people do buy the system because it makes it look easier, but you still got to create something. And so businesses that are already creating, they don't have that initial hurdle. If I give you a nice shiny system and you buy it because it's going to make it easier, it will make it easier, but it won't create something out of nothing. It works better with someone that's already creating cuz getting someone to create is not an easy thing. There's so many other things that they need other than a system. — Yeah. I've seen that with really in the case of I know I need to market but I don't really want to make content but then you have a balance of I want to be authentic and myself and that kind of stuff. It goes okay you can do an AI clone but it's not going to be you. It's not necessarily going to be the highest value. Has there been anything that you've done seeing people whether it's a company that needs to make more content? Is there things that you've been able to help them with to be able to make more content? Have you had any like real talks? — Yeah. Yeah. when a company is actually making content already, there's so many things that can be done to help improve the process because part of it is just getting a lot of the time back from the people that already are doing things and giving them more time to do

### From Agency Work to Productization [15:12]

creative stuff. Like if you're in the minutia of tracking things down and reinventing the wheel every time, always having to find documents or ask people where things are, that takes up a ton of time. And so just to get rid of that and then to give people a lot of their creative time back, it can easily double their output. And not even double the output, but just make them more make the stuff that you're creating a lot better because the more time you put into something, usually the better it is. There's a there's diminishing returns, of course, but when you spend more time on a video, it's usually better and it usually does better and all the things around it are better. — Yeah. So if you can free up your time with the in between the producing of the content to the actual output of it, publishing of the content, then yeah, you have more time to focus on what matters, which is I think one of the things I've seen you be really good at is you are good at abstracting out and cutting out any of the things that don't serve you to be able to focus on this deep work. Deep work of building, deep work of creating. Can you talk me a bit of that philosophy? — The philosophy is simple. It's just that I've learned that like when you're doing a business, there's only a few things that really matter at any given stage. And if you don't have any customers, then you got to spend most of your time getting customers. That usually means spending four or five hours a day getting customers, which is usually hard for people to think about cuz they think, "Oh, I need to be going to doing these other things. I need to be building a website and doing this and doing that and building out all these automations and setting up a big studio. " In a nutshell, that's the philosophy. It's just people need to be better at being realistic with what they really need and what they want and then making sure that they're building a business that makes sense that can actually achieve that. The reason why I tell people to try to target a $5,000 automation is because anything less than that, you're going to need a lot of customers to get to your basic requirements for living. So, you want to build something of value and something mey enough to where when you make a sale, it's a significant purchase so that you need fewer customers and so that you can do a better job for each of those customers. How does someone get to making a $5,000 SAS product? — If you're really systematic about these things, I think it's a lot easier than people make it out to be. I think the problem that people have actually is just that there's a lot of different advice online and you're every day you log on, you're following a new process. But what's going to make an automation valuable? Like we talked about in the beginning, if somebody is already producing two or three leads already on their own, if you double that and each of those customers is worth a couple thousand dollars, it's not very hard to generate value. So, you have to be good at like interviewing people and getting to know their business very quickly. You want to get good at meeting people so that you can ask them about their business. Hey, where's the main bottleneck right now? and helping them diagnose like where the bottleneck in the business is so you can focus on it and offer them something because if you can tie it to generating more leads or saving time and if you can legitimize it and show people, hey, not only can I give you this result very quickly, but

### How the Content Engine Database Works [18:20]

you won't have to do any work, it'll be installed in the next 2 weeks. People are like, oh, in 2 weeks you're going to be able to give me this result. it starts to become a little bit more math than just this kind of fungeible thing that's in your head. You're trying to say, "How could I charge 5,000 bucks? " If you give them a result that increases leads or saves them time and then you compound that over a year and you install it in two weeks, starting to sound pretty valuable. — So you first step process interview customers in the space, ideally not starter companies like helping solo founders that have lead. That's the thing, like if there's so many people out there that are interested in automation that will use up your time to talk to you about solutions for their business, but you want to be talking to people that actually have a real need. Who should be automating their business other than a business that's got real customers and has some revenue coming in? Don't talk to people that don't have money. Well, that's the part where you get started with by doing, hey, I'm going to do either some at cost or ad hoc or free work for you to get that base in. So, you start to deconstruct those valuable businesses and you're building things for those types of people and then you can service those needs. Obviously, you want to work with family office that's got their own funds is definitely much better than Bob who's trying to quit his day job to start a business. And this seems so obvious, but this is probably one of the more important points that people should be realizing is because when you're out there online and you are making videos, — a lot of the times you are a starving entrepreneur. And so sometimes your language will be to attract other starving entrepreneurs just because you're using language like a starving entrepreneur. So you want to talk to real business owners. If you want to be respected by a real business owner, you got to say stuff that matters to them. Hey, if you're making more than a couple hundred thousand a month, your business is growing and you realize that you're wasting a bunch of time managing your team, then you should be thinking about this automation. And now you're talking to people that could actually afford to do something meaningful with you as opposed to the guy that will just talk your ear off. poor entrepreneurs and poor entrepreneurs coming together. They'll waste a bunch of time just talking to each other and neither one of them will hire each other. — You get stuck in the they call it entrepreneurship kind of thing. — Exactly. Yeah. You don't want those customers. Not only will they waste your time, but they will also pull your focus away from something that's more meaningful. finding these highv valuable potential customers, interview them, going through the process of figuring out what their needs and wants, whether it's a front-end marketing or back-end operations and go, "Okay, this is the thing that I think that they could need that I could build. " — And there's two types of people, too. There's going to be business owners that have money that are interested in automation already, and they maybe that business owner has thought through a couple of things that they have ideas for already. So, you want to be able to you want to sus that out early. you want to know, is this person just like interested in this stuff and they have some of their own ideas that we need to flesh out a little bit or is this somebody that doesn't even know anything about these AI automations, right? — Yeah. And it's better when people are interested and they do know that there's a need they need to get behind it. And I think a lot of business owners know that they should. They sometimes just don't have clarity on the what and or the how. — Some people's ideas are better than others, right? So sometimes business owners come up with these ideas, but they probably shouldn't build them. What you always want to do is regardless of anything you want to tie it back to how will this actually make an impact because there's really like we mentioned there's only two types of automations like ones that help you scale or make more money or save money but there's really a third type which is just experimental. This is interesting and just building things. — Yeah. — And there's some room for that. — Yeah. That can bite you in the butt

### Organizing Content for Scale [22:03]

though. — There's some room for that. That's what but usually companies that do that have more money to spend and experiment. It's really R& D than it is. — Yeah, the R& D can be interesting. I just notic whenever I've built things for clients and it's more of like exciting but doesn't really move the needle. There's a point where they get frustrated. — Nothing. — It actually does. It backfires. Yeah. — Yeah. They're excited and then all a sudden nothing's working, throw their hands up, quit, rinse and then go back to old behavior. There has to be we'll experiment for this amount of time and then at this juncture we are now going to make a decision on what is the best thing because there's explore exploit model, right? You explore to see what's the possibilities which is R& D. Exploit means you've picked the path and now you're driving down that path to get results. — Yeah. When you're working with clients, you should be trying to exploit. — When you're maybe creating content or marketing, you can do more experiments that are interesting. Compartmentalize these things. Simple. Just understanding how to compartmentalize these things so that you don't turn experiments into businesses. You know, it's actually quite obvious when you talk about it out loud, but people do these things all the time. They'll experiment. They'll create something cool and think that's an actual business, but it's not really. — Yeah. I've seen so many developers that want to start their own business and they get an idea in their head and then they spend 6 months building that idea thinking it's going to be the bee's knees and then they come back, they show the world and they realize that nobody wants it and then they're like, "Oh man, I'm going to go get my day job again. " You know, — yeah. The secret here is, okay, and this is really hard for people to do because it's very regimented, but you basically want to come up with an idea that you think is very practical, that you think will exploit something. Then you want to create a very small prototype of it that isn't necessarily the full thing, but it allows you to demonstrate your idea. And then you can make content around that. You can gauge people's response and you can play around with it that way. And then depending on the response, then you can know whether you're going down a good path or not. It's not to say that whatever your idea was is a good one. But if there's no response at all, it could be just that you had a bad video, but it could also be that just whatever you're trying to touch on, it's not making sense to people. The idea might be good, but you might not be explaining it well, or it just doesn't sound that interesting enough, like you haven't presented it in such a way that it takes off. — Yeah. And with that, what I've seen interesting is that there's this kind of thing that I've seen you do really well, which is you have a core product concept, this content engine database, and then you build this in public over time, right? And then as you then have a series of this content showing the thing that you made, and then you slam that all together as one full product, release that into the marketplace, and then move on to something else. — Right? — Or don't move on to something else, just keep iterating on, making it better. — That's what I'm saying. because that I don't think the content J base was with you I don't know what version you're on but I think you've had several versions of — I've had many versions of it yeah I just keep reinventing it — so it's that willingness to come back if you write a book you can write a book in a day if you really wanted to but

### Repurposing Content & Automation [25:00]

then it's going back to that same book and then iterating and making it better. Yeah, that's the key. That's the hardest part because you'll create something and you'll go create something else and it won't have a thread. You won't be like continuing to build on an idea. Cuz if you think about what is it that really makes an automation good, it's probably that you have experience in the topic. Like you understand the business part. If I don't create a lot of content, if I don't have my own YouTube channel, if I don't actually produce a 100 pieces of content per week, then I don't really know how to do it. So there's a difference between building the automations and then having the business expertise that tells you what automations that you really need to build. So that's what that like when you get into a topic, if you get into content creation, voice agents, if you go deep on these topics, you'll have a much more nuanced ability to have discussions about these things and you know that'll make the difference. Like you want flashy marketing, which is that cool stuff, right? factor that gets people's attention. But then you want that mature point of view that makes it so that like when somebody actually watches more videos, they're like, "Oh, he actually seems like he knows about this process. " Like he didn't just make an automation around content. Like he actually makes content. — Yeah. And that's the eating your own dog food. And we're talking about the difference between logs and kindling, right? So kindling is this kind of quick fire, quick start, razledazzle. Gemini 3 probe or something came out, right? — Yeah. Do whatever. Yeah. Whatever it is. Yeah. That gets interesting. Then there's these evergreen products which you or evergreen content that you're saying, "Hey, watch my series of the last 37 videos that I've made on the content engine database as I've been evolving this database over time. " And that's something you can go into and watch that series and get value from it. — Exactly. Yeah. I think that's the key, just making these things practical and useful to make a $5,000 AI automation product. It's not that hard. You just have to show people that, hey, this is going to have a measurable impact on the sales or savings of my company. And if I look at that over 12 months and I can get this thing installed in the next two weeks, it becomes a no-brainer kind of thing. The only way you're going to develop something like that is if it's small enough in scope that you can just install it, right? Because it does everything automation and it touches into the whole thing. It's like it's too complex for it to be that easy. — Yeah. The drag and drop automation. That's the difference between AI automation agencies that come in and say, "Hey, I'll build anything that you want for your business versus I have a standalone product that is highly valuable that we can install into your business that produces value like immediately," which is also not a template, right? — Yeah. — So, that's the thing, right? So, there's the agency. I'm not knocking agencies. If you want to build an agency, fine. But to me, that is building a time and materials type business. You're not leveraging AI for yourself. you're helping other people leverage AI with your time and materials. That can be very profitable, but that's not what I want to do. I want to build I want to use AI to create leverage for me in my business. So, that's either creating a template plus the process to really make use of that template. The template's worth nothing. It's the expertise of installing the template smoothly so that it works and the business is getting the value from it. That's what

### Using AI and Automation in Content Creation [28:15]

you're charging people for. that instant the instant transformation of yeah I've got this cool template but that's not the point is that it's going to be seamlessly integrated into your company in one week and when I do that you will see this that's what people are paying for talk to me about the wraparound of inadin and other services I know you do a lot of air tableable and I know you integrate in and air tableable talk to me what's this SAS stack that you would say works well so it's not just hey buy my template — yeah I think Air Table works well because it's like not a true SAS in the sense that everyone wants that, right? Like it's you have a completely separate login and you log in and it's like completely separate and it's all your custom dashboards and all that stuff and you can build that but that takes a long time to build even with VI coding. Air Table's really cool because you can even though it's a database and you can store data like that if you invest some time in like how things are set up you can make it feel like an application for someone. So you have like a login on the front end like there's a cut — not a login you can do that if you give the person a user I don't mean SAS in the sense of it's got the login — more although you can do that but you have to pay for each user's license so people are always trying to avoid that cuz it's but like once they log in like what is that feeling it's like you can interact with the data and make things happen as if it's an application but it's not and so you can build very complex things with air tableable and make it feel like a user interface without it having without it actually being one and having the cost of building an interface. — A lot of people use like Google Sheets to get started and then you hit like rate limits, you hit other issues. — It's a little it's a little funible like it's easy to make mistakes and delete a cell or anything like that. Like Air Table's a little bit more resilient. — Yeah. I had an old client that was we in it in they were on Google Sheets and they ran their whole operations so we initially started there but then when you run in it in you have the rate limits I think it's maybe 60 API calls per — minute or something. — Yeah. In a minute like that then it starts to freak out and crash on you. Then all of a sudden now you got to rehaul the whole system which I've done in the past. sort of I'm like are you sure you want to do Google Sheets and they're like okay we probably should switch over to Air Table or something else because also they would move around columns inside of Google Sheets and that would break and so the in automation couldn't connect to like that — and so in terms of the primary benefits compared to the Google Sheets what do you think those things are especially integrated with it in — it's a real database and so the data integrity at scale is going to be better less chances for mistakes better automation support in terms of API limits and stuff like that. And then beyond that, you can really make it feel like as close to a user interface as you

### The 5 Steps to Building SaaS Apps People Want [31:00]

can make it without it actually being one. And that saves a ton of time cuz I know vibe coding is cool and you can build out the interfaces really quick, but to build out something like what Air Table gives you, that's not going to be easy. Air Table's very flexible. — What do you use in for in terms of your operational flow? What do you how do you integrate it? What are the benefits of using that system versus others? I mean in general I like Naden because I it's very transparent like I'm a software developer so it gives me it feels like it gives me more access to lower level stuff but I personally find NAN very useful for building endpoints essentially almost like web hooks all the time like to power either GPTs or to power SAS frontends or to power air table applications you know I'm often hooking into to end mostly through web hooks The HTTP node is one of my favorite nodes of all times because it's just so flexible what you can do with it. — Yeah. And just being able to stand up processes and backend like endpoints very quickly. I think it is pretty cool. — And you said you hooked up into custom GBTs. Can you talk to me about like some use cases that? — Yeah. So when I think about products that people can build, I think there's the one I built which is a template plus like a process and coaching essentially. And then I think there's a lot of room for stuff more like a GPT where you've created a few different GPTs that are also hooked up to some automations that allow your customers to do something that they can't couldn't normally do. So like I built one a couple weekends ago which I which is really useful. So there's a two-stage one, but I'll talk about the second stage one because it has more of the NAN automations. Essentially the way it works is you go there, you tell it the YouTube video that you're about to create. I've got a certain format where this is explains all the cool things about this video and why people should watch all that kind of stuff. And then it will create a few different searches hit a couple of NAN automations that I have that do like YouTube searches on that information. So it's a very simple automation on the back end. It's just a web hook that takes some search results and does a query against the YouTube API and then pulls all that data together and sends it back to the GPT and then it helps me like you know do title research and like thumbnail research and puts all that information there. Pulls all those relative searches for me and then helps me generate not necessarily the full thumbnail but image artifacts that I might use in the thumbnail. And so it's just hooking up to a couple of NAND automation. So you got the GPT plugged into a couple of NAN automations. Super simple but very practical. — Mhm. — And that's huge because when you make YouTube videos like all that research takes time and if it takes time you might not do it and then your video suffers. And so that's one of those things where it's it was a pretty simple idea but the value of it is actually quite high. And I think people should be looking for those kind of opportunities where it's like high value low work. That's the best when you can find them. Yeah. You can find those great and then — but they show themselves when you start to get into something — because you see where you're wasting your time versus this. — Right. Because if you get into content Yeah. Exactly. creation, you'll come up with cool solutions. — But if you jump around from like content creation to voice agents to like CRM to project management, if you're jumping around, you never really become like an expert at one of those things to come up with the cool ideas. — Yeah. Jack of all, master of none. And with the GPTs, I'm pretty sure this is how you do it, but tell me is the way that you communicate the GBTs like inside of OpenAI and then you have action trigger is schemes and then calling in flow. — Yeah, if you get stuck cuz the schema is a little weird if you look at it, but if you just go to a cloud or whatever and you just say, hey, I have an N automation. It has a web hook and I want to connect that to my GPT action. What's the what's that text I need to cut and paste into OpenAI? It'll create that little block of text that you can just cut and paste. But if as long as you stay present and ask things like how you do things like you can make it happen pretty easily. — Yeah. It's got it's gotten way easier. When I first did the action schemas back, they had to look at it and understand it and figure it out. But now you can very easily ask AI and how to solve that for you. — But people have to be people have to stay aware to that, right? Because a lot of times people like they go look for help from some other person. And it's nothing wrong with that either, but it's like people don't do if you get stuck. If you articulate it well to the AI, it will show you what to do. If you remind yourself that you should even ask. That's the thing. — Yeah. I feel like you need a little note card off to the side, sticky note, when stuck and do this. — I think people do need that cuz they'll forget and they'll make it more complicated. They'll use some other resource that is harder or they'll try to understand it. Like understanding the open AI like format for an action is not worth committing to your brain. — Yeah. — It's not worth it. So just ask somebody how to do it. — Ask AI. So now you got this concept right now of interview people. Figure

### Lead Generation, Funnels, and Project Management [36:00]

out the needs and wants stay in a niche specific area. Then what you can start to do build in public create content around it. Start to have a series of videos. — Make it more concrete. Make sure you make one video a week — minimum. And if the video is taking you too long so that you can't do it, then you need to make smaller projects. — Yeah. — That way you can test more ideas cuz this isn't like a go spend 3 months building something and then show it is no, it's come up with a lot of mini ideas that get you creating getting you in a place where you can show people stuff. I like that. So step one, you interview these people, figure out what's going on, and then when you're talking about this other phase, okay, this is what I think I should work on. If you make a series of these micro videos, let's say micro SAS ideas. I'm going to do doctors. Let's just say that. So I interview a bunch of doctors for what they want. And then maybe I help out a couple of highle doctors. Generally doctors have income for what maybe they're in their own doctor practice. Then from there you can say, "Okay, I'm going to make a series of these little micro videos at least once a week if not more. " And see which one of these core concepts pop off. If one pops off, let's just say, I don't know, I'm gonna make it a peptide calculator system or something like that. Yeah. Sure. — Yeah. Sure. And then they go, "Okay, cool. This is great. And that one really popped off. Okay, great. Now I'm going to go deep in this area and I'm going to start to build out this uh crazy old peptide system that I can then install into doctor's businesses that allow them to whatever. — Yeah, but you Yeah, but like you can go into it, but before you I still think you want to keep it iterative. If you get lucky enough to come up with the idea and you make it and then the video pops off, I would go then try to sell that right away. — So, you sell it before it's even built or how does that work? I would try to find a few people that were interested in something small. It's going to be different for every little project, but I would try to turn it into a little community that was interested in this topic. Maybe the peptide thing is a little that's a super niche. Sure. — But if you were to find I would start to if it's around doctors, I would try to create a little community around lead generation tactics for doctors in AI automation or something like that. — Yeah. someplace where you can create this little ecosystem all these little automations and — you create a channel that maybe let's say you do want to serve doctors and we're just picking doctors this one thing right you then start to test all these different ideas that maybe might hit that looks interesting then here's saying is maybe make a community maybe a school community or circle or name a thing and then you can say hey this is what we're about helping doctors with this core issue come on in as we start to work this together now you have this combination because I think what's really powerful whether it's school or any other community that you get to is that if people are interested around a certain topic and maybe do make an initial product or something like that, you are going to get a ton of feedback from those people and said this little ecosystem — as long as you keep it iterative, right? putting new little test things out there for people to get interested in this space, at least this space in particular, you got to keep coming up with like little ideas that people grab on to. And you want to hear people saying, "Oh, that's cool. What if it also had this? did that? " Not that you want to build all those things, but if you're not getting those kind of interactions, then something about your philosophy isn't working. And the key though is not to feel like you have to have that perfect thing in the beginning cuz you unless you get lucky, you probably won't have it. The real key here is you want to build a system for engagement, for systematic testing, and just iteration and just being able to have a dialogue with people. That's what you're really trying to get. I 100% agree in the areas of if you can find people that are interested in what you're doing and giving you consistent feedback on the things that you're experimenting with that is going to be your northstar of all especially the right type of — totally agree that's what you're trying to build and I think anybody can build it and the more niche you make it the more risk there is in terms of it being wrong which is actually a good thing because it just helps you sift through things faster but the upside is that it's more meaningful to people. — Yeah. there there'll be a small passionate community of people that get

### The Importance of Organization [40:00]

into it. And — yeah, because when you think about like most people don't have these endless budgets to just experiment like a big company, so you probably shouldn't play that way. Like most people when they go to start a business, they need to make money pretty quickly. Like you got a couple of months. — Yeah. — That is not a lot of time. — Yeah. And so if you shorten the feedback cycle, I've known that cuz I've ran my own agencies even before AI and what I've seen is that they spend a lot of time building especially like you have client you're building from they want to get it out into the marketplace but they instead of getting it out there in one two months they wait a year and then it gets out they find out all the things that they need to change and then that 11 months worth of development is now scrapped because you now got that initial feedback from that core. How quickly can you have that feedback cycle spin up? And the quicker you can do that with experimentations and feedback and also creating content and driving content into your community, you're now able to make a much more valuable content and system. — It's more Yeah. And it's more interactive and people Yeah. People have to move a lot faster. And the hard part in that process is that you're very exposed. That's what people I think really have the hardest problem with is that you're very exposed to if you're doing this right, you probably you're fumbling, you're making mistakes, you're building things that people don't like that you're getting harsh comments and that should be a good thing. That should tell you that what you're doing is working. But it's very hard when you're not used to that to go through that process cuz it's very distracting. — Yeah. There's the fantasy of being an entrepreneur in terms of I want to create a SAS product or whatever and it sounds magical and wonderful, but then you don't want to show that ugly baby. That's the whole thing is you're like, "Oh, no, don't. Then you're gonna judge me. You're going to judge my product. " And then I have to My fantasy gets dissolved. But that's the way truth comes out. That's the way that we make a better product. — Yeah. I think luckily for me, I like to show people my stuff. — Since I was a little kid, I liked building things and trying to get people to buy it. Luckily, that force in me is stronger than all of the insecurities I have, which I have a lot of, but the need to show people stuff and try to encourage them. Like I like to show I like to call you Dylan up and be like, "Dylan, dude, you got to check this out. this is your podcast. What if it could do this? that? — Yeah. — And I like to try to pitch it. And that urge inside of me is greater than all the insecurities I have. If it's not the case for you, people have to become aware of where they're stuck cuz my stuck is different than you're stuck. — Yeah. And the thing is, if someone says, I want to make a SAS product, then okay, great. Then how do you do that? And I think a lot of people, they had to translate from fantasy to execution to improvements. And that just is a thickening of the skin. And then just understand it can be exciting because the at least for me the end result of getting feedback knows that I'm building something that's meaningful and matters because if you ever built software before there's nothing more painful than putting a ton of time into something and then you giving it away and then it just gets thrown away. It seems fun until that output and then you do that three or four times. You're like you know what I'm going to go to the front. So I can tell how your software — that's a good insight right there too. Like I was thinking about it is most people have to fail a bunch of times on their own to get the perspective to stop messing around because the thing is once you have a business that works you realize oh crap that actually took me like 3 to 5 years to even get going. So the price that you pay to start a business is not the 3 months that everybody talks about. It's no it took 5 years. And so then you start to realize oh like if it took 5 years I don't really have as many at bats as I thought I did. Yeah. And you have to stay out long enough otherwise you're going to perpetually do two years and then jump to five other ideas and you're going to spend 10 years have anything. — Yeah. So people have to realize is that yeah you have you everyone has time to make mistakes and recover. But a real good business is going to take two to five years to start. You don't have as many at bats as you thought. Like how many fiveyear periods do you really have? You have not as many as you think. You have four or five or six or seven of them. — Yeah. you like you got to treat those blocks with respect. — Yeah. Sounds like we're coming through this process now and I of this basically

### Finding the Right Customers [44:00]

community-based SAS model that you build in public try to see if people are interested and interested not just smile and nod cuz I've seen that in businesses so many times when you say hey what do you think about my product and they just could say this conversation is really awkward and I don't really I'm just going to say this seems nice but — you got to get somebody to pay for it. — Yeah. If someone actually pays for it, then they're invested. It's just the hardest thing for the fake signals is what people get. I did an event in LA for Nad and someone came up to me and they had this idea of this like workflow system kind of stuff and he wanted direct to consumers pay per workflows and he was going to make it for everybody and I was like who are you serving? And he's like the consumer. It was such a broad concept of what he was trying to get done and I was like man you got to pick like one get one person like what who are you trying to get? And then after that it was it you asked so many different questions but I've just seen that of trying to boil the ocean. It's not doesn't really serve anybody at that time. — I think it's like a defense mechanism sometimes because I think when you don't have specialized knowledge then you come up with generalized solutions and also that's going to be natural right if you don't really know how to do lead generation then you're like I'll just start automating like automated DMs and that's the solution and it's not really it's not going to work. So when you really start to learn an industry better, you're more nuanced and you have more experience to talk about things. — You want specialists, right? You want specialists in almost everything. If someone is like a really high level specialist, then they're going to just going to outperform anybody else just cuz it's just time in. So when we're talking about this, it sounds like we've got a path from ideiation to content creation to building in public to creating a community to then iterating on that model. And then if they iterate enough times in that community and are able to then now repeat and sell this and then and stick with that for a good period of time, then they start to build this valuable SAS application. — Yeah. And I think they should try to be as aggressive as possible. Like you should go from, okay, make a couple of basic ideas. Maybe try to sell that template for 50 bucks. See if somebody will buy it. Like I'm not against templates as a whole, but I don't think you should build a business around it. But if you could sell a template for 50 bucks, that's a good thing. — Signal. — It's a signal. — Yeah. — And then you what you want to do is then you want to see how does that person implement it? Do they use it? And then you can start to you just want to keep giving people things. And then you probably want to move quickly from the $10 or $50 template to a $9. 99 deal where it's, yeah, I'm giving you this template. It's been refined. It's been tested. And I have a specific process to walk you through that gets you installed. And then we have a call. I show you how to use it. It gets installed like that. you want to jump to there as quickly as you can to see if somebody will pay for that $9. 99 version and then if they do then you're really on to something. — What I want to talk about I'm I want a specific use case from you that I'm going to call out that you did that I want you to expand upon paying for APIs. — Yeah. So I was making a bunch of videos on how to make faceless videos and I was using all these different API services to do that because you have to splice videos together and splice audio together and a lot of people started complaining. And they were just like, "Yeah, this is a really cool automation, but like running it costs like 10 bucks because this subscription service when you try to make a bunch of videos, it ends up costing a lot. " And so then I was like, "Oh, okay. That is a real issue, right? " It dawned on me just because I wasn't really worried about that. I was just trying to create the cool automation and whatever it cost didn't matter. But then once people are actually using these things, it matters a lot. And so I just ended up I'm a software developer. So, I realized that the things that I was using weren't that complicated. So, I built an open- source API project that you can install on your own server and get the benefit of all of these APIs that we were calling, but it's just like almost free. But you have to try something to see the thing. You can't always see these things from the outside. I would never have known to create that had I not created something before. — And that's my whole point with this. So if anybody's listening to this, you want to start a SAS company, a SAS product around AI and automations and figure out this thing looks like when you build a

### Iteration, Feedback, and Community [48:00]

community around this core Stevens here was core content and it was working the system was working but there was a pain point. The pain point was it costs money? Number one thing whenever you show video on social media about a new AI tool they're like is it free? That's like the main question you get from anybody. So by seeing that and go, "Okay, cool. This does work, but if I can lower this number one complaint that people have by building a solution and then installing for them, now your system gets even better because it has the stacked value of what it delivers. And now you're reducing the friction of the cost of the system. " And that only came about because of the complaints that you got from your community about the cool things you were building, which highlights the [snorts] whole point. — Oh, you got to get complaints. — If you don't get complaints, then you've got nothing to improve. Complaints [clears throat] are the key way to success. Like — it's okay to be flashy and to create templates that get people's attention. But where I have a problem is where people fool you into thinking that those templates are going to be the things that actually help you build a business. They're not really. — No, it's a component of the whole solution. And that's the part of this the whole situation here is like how do we build these whole solutions for the right audience and then iterate on them so the value stacks over time. The hardest part about this process is that you won't stick to the process probably. That's the hardest thing is you'll start to do it and then you'll get distracted or you'll have one bad day. Like you'll you won't record that video and then it'll cascade into something else and then it's hard to stay focused like that. It's not very easy. It's our brains are programmed to get distracted. you'll see somebody else's brilliant process for some other product al together and you'll start to combine 20 different processes into one. You know what I mean? People can't keep it simple. — Yeah. And the thing is the we live in an attention economy and they're constantly shiny objects that can pull you away and if you can iterate on a core problem a long enough time, it stacks value. Assuming that it's a real need in the marketplace, which is part of the whole soup to nuts on this You always have to guess in the beginning unless you're just blessed with a bunch of people around you where you can just talk to them. Some people have that. If you have that's great. — Yeah. — But usually I think like ideas come from probably different for everybody. But it's a little bit inspiration and a little bit of discussion. — Yeah. — And a back and forth and going through that process. And unfortunately it means that you can't do what you want to do every day because there's things you got to do. — That's the problem. — Yeah. I worked with a high level really high level designer and she was one of the top people in San Francisco and built thousands and thousands of products and one of the things that I got from her which I thought was incredible. It's like how do I find these people and how could I get them and what does that look like? One of the things that we did as a strategy is basically made this little template that was like, "Hey, if you are busy moms who are trying to take care of two-year-olds or whatever, we're looking for you. We're going to give you 50 bucks for a 30-minute session to just get some feedback. " And if you put that online and if you're willing to pay five people 50 bucks and then you just give them 30 minutes of the time, you could interview those people and then figure out. Yeah. Well, it's one way to get in front of people if you want. — It's one way. Yeah. The thing is like usually a way to talk to people, you usually have to spend a little bit of time thinking about it creatively because you have to make it worth the other person's while. Either you got to pay them money. — Yep. — Or you got to say, "Hey, if we have this call, I know you're going to be giving me some time. You acknowledge it, but like in return, — I'll be able to give you some good ideas or give you this or give you that. " It's like you got to come up with something valuable to the other person. — Yeah. And that's the thing is, you know, what I saw with her is she, look, you could try to build a relationship and try to get them and see if they'll come in or you can just give them 50 bucks in Amazon gift card, call it a day and then you could have all of your interviews done in the next 3 days. So, it's like speed to how you want to do it, Stephen. — Yeah. If you Yeah, that's a very valid way of doing it. — Yeah. There's trying to I'm trying to highlight all the blocks that people could have from getting started to creating the content to building the systems to building the community and then sticking with it long enough. You know what the funny thing is though?

### Overcoming Distractions and Staying Focused [52:00]

I guess there's going to be commonalities between the blockers and I'll be able to help people with the block with better with the blockers that I've had. But people have to get good at diagnosing themselves and figuring out what's really the blocker. People really aren't really that honest with themselves. And the problem is usually more obvious than people think. And I almost feel like it's better to teach people how to like diagnose themselves and not lie to yourself than it is than giving you the perfect process because if you're starting a business and you don't have any customers like that's the obvious the biggest problem. But sometimes people will say no it's because I don't have the skill to I don't know the NADN skill. I don't know how to do an AI agent yet. So that doesn't really matter because you don't have any customers. But people don't know how to just be just dead honest with themselves. If you don't have customers, it doesn't. Nothing else matters. It just doesn't. — And the only way you can get customers is to provide something that's valuable. And only provide something valuable is to understand what is it that people really need and want and get them to be honest with you to say, "Yes, I really do find this to be valuable and I'm willing to commit time or money to this thing because I think it is valuable. " — And which means that you have to spend the time to articulate that to enough people. Yeah. — And that usually means not so much building an edit automation. It means like going out to a networking group or creating content or texting people in your address book. — Yeah. Whatever. — It's all really boring. It's super boring stuff. I don't want to do that. Who wants [clears throat] to go on to LinkedIn Navigator and like — search for a bunch of people to talk to? That sounds deadly boring. But that's what you have to do. — And it's either that or spend six months building something that nobody wants. — Yeah. See, that's even more painful when you do that a few times. Then you won't do that anymore. Some people just have to have that experience. I see people they say they're starting a business and then I see them disappear and they say it didn't work and I'm like what didn't work and it's what they didn't even do anything. — They literally didn't do anything. They just sat around in their house. — Yeah. — And just tinkered with stuff for 6 months and then was like oh I don't have any money anymore. It's actually quite obvious that this is going on but you're people are not facing their true fears. They're not facing the reality of things. — Yeah. And that's the thing is if you look at your system, you yourself is your personal operating system and there's 100% productive where all you do is do highly focused signal mostly signal no noise 100% of the time. I wish that was true. — You're saying that's like the go then you look your actual day. One of my favorite things I actually I end up doing with one of my old people is they had me do a 15minute audit through my entire right and I realized wow I am wasting so much time. that's what's really going on. Then how do I carve back and get more time to w focus on things that are the values of my life? Whatever that might be, how much — Yeah. Most people try to optimize their time — when in reality what they should do is just get rid of the stupid stuff. — Yeah. — You know what I think it is? I think it's more just when you remove everything else, you're left with nothing else other than your thoughts and what you're going to do with yourself. And I think that's an uncomfortable place to be for a lot of people. — Mhm. because you're just you're like when you have a boss, the boss will tell you what to do. But when you have a business, you're responsible for essentially deciding what that thing is and that makes you accountable for your failure or your losses or for your success or your loss. I think that in itself is the struggle that people have. It's just like and so then they just find a way to just fill themselves with distractions and then those distractions dictate their day. Whether it's a new thing you have to build or do or a new special process that's going to give you the secret business or whatever it is and you just never get around to just facing your own mind and the things that you have to do. — Yes. If you look at anybody that wants to we'll say get good at nin, right? Okay, cool. I've seen people that when people ask me like how do I get good at and because I want to be an agency or whatever. They'll do is they'll watch a bunch of different YouTube videos and maybe they'll try

### Final Advice & Where to Find Stephen [56:00]

something here or there. I'll do and I say here's what you need to do. Figure out what category you want to go into. Say voice agents or rag or content creation. Okay. Find some — and it's just a guess. Like you might not even really know. It's just like you're guessing. You don't even you might have an you might be interested in one but you might not. So you just better pick one. — Pick just by saying pick one. Figure out who's the best at that. Join pay some money. Go join that community or something. And then only go through that course. Delete your YouTube. Delete your Tik Tok. delete everything you've got and just commit to that one path until you can complete a transformational cycle. Go through a learning path until you get that and that's otherwise you kind of you watch five minutes of YouTube video or you watch a Tik Tok you watch something else and there's all these like micro steps versus this one big — Yeah. just Yeah. I do hope they picked the right person but yeah think they could crush through that in a couple of weeks and then be done and then they would know oh that's it. — They would know whe Yeah. — They know it's true. — Yeah. And if that doesn't work, great. Drop it. Shift to another one. Try something different. Okay. So, it's not just interview people. We're going to go a step in front of interviewing people, which is interview yourself. All right. Well, — I do think that's important because you have to have your own direction. To me, it doesn't make sense. You're going to follow this perfect process, which is going to the only way that could only create some other product that existed before and then you're just a copycat. I guess if you want to be a copycat, it could work. But yeah, all of the good stuff is in figuring this stuff out for yourself and being able to just look at what you're doing and does that make does it make sense? Am I putting my time in the right place? Does it logically work out? Like the most basic thing, if you're going to sell SAS, that can project something very specific. Like most SAS products are like it's like a SAS that you log into and it's 50 bucks a month for if you're brand new to business, does creating a $50 a month business make sense if you've got a three-month runway? Like how many customers are you going to need? That's why I often talk about the 5K product is better because you don't need as many customers to meet your basic living standards. Like in order to have a SAS that's 50 bucks a month, you're going to need a lot of customers that stay there. — Yeah. — And how are you going to get that many customers? That's a lot of work. That's probably not if you don't have any audience yet, that's going to be really hard. — Yeah. — But that's just that's just thinking about your business model practically. — You don't need like special training to do that. it. That's more just stopping for a second and saying, "Wait, does this even make sense? I need to make money by I need to be making 10 grand a month by three months from now. Am I going to be able to come up with a SAS product that gets me there in 3 months? " Maybe, but probably not. — Especially not at like 50 bucks or 20 bucks. But it depends on how quickly you can move down these stages, right? Identify what is — most people are not going to be able to do that in three months, you know? Like there is the entrepreneur that has that mindset that could, but that's not most people. — Yeah, there's a lot of 100%. There things or I mean there's if you've done it before you can do it again right well but if you haven't then you got to get through — how am I wasting my time or spending my time how do I interview these people to get through the things and then you march down those steps and then you can move through that and just figure out if you get stuck is there different ways to get stuck I don't maybe you can challenge — that's why when you sell something for 5k — in 3 months you only need six customers that's much more doable for them for more people — that's re that's real that is realistic getting three getting six customers in three months each paying you five grand a month. It's very practical, very realistic. — Yeah. — Not easy, but And as long as you're building something that delivers value to those types of customers and you've identified a core need and then you're able to create something for them, even if you are doing a little extra work for the initial couple of customers, you solve those problems. — Yeah. — Sure. — 100%. Love it. Uh Stephen, this has been awesome having you on. I think we've been able to identify a pathway here from soup to nuts. From — Yeah. The pathway is get off your butt and do something. Yeah. Seek those complaints out, iterate on them, remove the distractions in your life. And I think it's beautiful. Is there anything? — Yeah. The hardest part is not this is not a technical — Yeah. — challenge. — If people think about it, it's like AI is only getting easier. It's the technical pieces of it are all getting easier. What it is a it's a personal challenge to allow yourself to do the things you need to do. That it's much more of what it's much more about that than it is a technical thing. like tech. The tech is only going to get easier and easier, more accessible. — Yeah. It's just the is mostly overcoming the natural human constraints of distraction and shiny objects, staying consistent. It's the basic, you know, what's so funny? The automation, the basic boring, the ones that work. And the same things with what you need to do in life. It's the basic boring things that get all the results that people want, right? You want to get fit, really easy. Eat less than you burn, right? Kind of thing. And then go to the gym and just do that for 10 years and it'll be great. — Yeah. Exactly. — Steve, is there anything else you'd like to let people know about before you can tell them how to get a hold of you? — Yeah, you only got one life, so you know, to use your time wisely. — Cool. And if people want to find you, how do they do that? — Yeah. So, you can find me on my school community and I teach people how to set up these businesses and think them through. And so, if you go to school. com with a K and then go to no code architects, then you'll find me there. — Stephen, been an honor and pleasure, my friend. Much love and I will see you on the other side. — Yeah, man. Awesome. Thanks for having me. See you. Bye now. Appreciate it. —