You Don't Need to Code to Make Money Building Software

pause it's okay. ⁓

Cool.

Cool. I'll do my best to interpret ⁓ what Boltz does. So correct me later if you can. ⁓ Hello, everyone. Welcome back to TwoSet AI. Today I'm talking with Alex Berger, COO and chief. Are you still chief of staff or just COO? All right. Great.

Nope, just COO now. I've left my position behind available for some other person to come along and fill.

Awesome. OK, COO at Bolt New. This is the AI platform that went from nearly shut down to 40 million ARR in just five months, if I'm researching correctly. Alex was employee number seven. Am I right? Yeah. And you're the first non-engineer hired. Am I right? OK.

Right, yeah. Yeah, and thankfully the engineers welcomed me in with open arms.

Awesome. And you are the one, you're the hero mastermind who build every go-to market function for from scratch for both. Alex, thanks for joining. I'm excited.

Thanks, Angelina. It was definitely a team effort, but I appreciate the kind intro and excited to be on your podcast today.

Yeah, I would love to start with this. Do you want to introduce yourself a little more? If you want, go ahead.

Sure, yeah, I think that was ⁓ a good start. I would say, hey everybody, I'm Alexander Berger. ⁓ And yeah, I would describe myself as a generalist. And so, you know, I've known the CTO and CEO of Bolt, our co-founders for a long time. We actually met back in the early days. Well, for me was the early days of Silicon Valley back in like 2012. ⁓ They ran a hacker house in Palo Alto and I came by one of their legendary parties that they used to throw, got acquainted with the founders ⁓ and the rest is history. So yeah, it's been a ⁓ awesome journey to get to join the team. And as you mentioned, yeah, was coming in as the first non-developer into a very technical ⁓ product focused team. And actually back when I joined in 2020, We were a developer tool. So I do always like to say I was the first non-developer to join because you know, it's a being the first non-dev at a dev tool company. You're stepping in with some heavy hitters.

Yes, yes, I wonder how you navigated that environment at time.

Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is just it was, it's a great team. ⁓ and you know, something that's so cool about our company is that I was employee number seven and all seven of those people, ⁓ including myself are still at the company today. ⁓ and it's really, you know, credit to the technical folks there that they were just super. inviting and I've always been someone that can kind of bridge the gap between the business needs and the technical. So I think that helped and it was honestly a pretty ⁓ natural fit once I got to know everyone on the squad.

Yeah, I know how it feels for technical founders, you go to market is really a mystery.

100%. And I mean, to be honest, it was largely a mystery to me as well at the time, you know, how I had actually ended up joining the company was I reached out to our CEO, Eric, and I was talking about some of my past experience and what I was looking to do with my career, really just looking for some advice. And one of the things that I shared with them is I've done a lot of different roles at companies before from IT. Finance operations, customer support, but I hadn't been involved in any of the teams on the go to market side that are really responsible for generating revenue. so sales and marketing was ⁓ top of my list in terms of wanting to add that to my my skill set. And I was really just looking for some advice on where I might go to develop those skills. But next thing you know, I joined the company as. with the remit of being our first enterprise sales rep. ⁓ And at the time we were selling on-prem developer tools into very security conscious enterprise companies. so, yeah, I got to work with our CEO and we figured it out, ⁓ built that motion from scratch. it... I learned a lot and there's still parts of it that are, I think, a mystery to everyone, but it was a really awesome experience to be able to make the first sale ever of a product and kind of bring that win back to the team that built the product. It was $13,500, which was...

How much was the first sale? I ask? 13,000.

Well, mean, for anyone who sold on-prem software knows that that's not the dollar amount that you want to be selling. It's a lot of work to onboard a new customer and set them up where you're installing your app in their architecture. And realistically, we were trying to target $54,000 as our minimum because just of all the work involved. I was eager to have a quick win for the team. we did that deal, ⁓ but it was followed up not too long after with us the first ⁓ six figure deal. so that really kind of got things rolling.

Yes, yes, congratulations. It must be hard. I know how it feels. I've sold to Enterprise and I know how, you on the outset, right, we all downplay ourselves.

Yeah. And when you're selling to a large organization, you know, it's not just one person usually that's involved in making the decision. So you've you really, and when you're a new company, you don't have existing relationships with these companies. You really have to dig in and understand how different companies make decisions and who you need to pull in. So, yeah, definitely, ⁓ challenging, but, ⁓ very interesting. learning experience, both on how to sell things, but also just how big companies make decisions and purchase things, which is really helpful for anybody that's trying to build a business to business tool.

Absolutely. I would love to hear more about your tactics of doing that ⁓ later. ⁓ Before we start, I would love to ask this question to all our founders building cool stuff. Can you explain what Bolt does at three levels? How would you explain it to an elementary schooler or college student or maybe an industry professional? This helps us, our audience, understand your product better.

Absolutely. So I think also, you know, I can do a little show and tell here so we can see exactly what this looks like. you know, the starting with the elementary school ⁓ description, I would say that bull is a tool that you can tell it what you want to make, whether that's a website or an app or a game, and it'll make it for you pretty straightforward. And that largely does capture. what the tool is and what does that look like? Well, ⁓ it's basically a box in which you can type in your idea and the tool will build it for you. So to give a quick demonstration here, I thought of something that might appeal to a elementary kid and typed out this prompt. So just gonna make a calculator app that looks the same as on MacBook, except it has a few interesting fun features. ⁓ One, is we'll have a little race car track around the edge of the screen. And the larger the numbers that you're working with, the faster the car will go. And then also just have some animated confetti effects to make things a little bit more fun. ⁓ I'm going to, yeah, just a fun little example. The other thing I'm gonna do, this is optional and I wouldn't really tell this to the elementary kid necessarily. mean, but.

Yeah.

if you really want visual accuracy in the design, a good thing to do is attach a screenshot. So I just took a screenshot of my calculator and pasted that in. So that can just help the tool nail the design a little bit better. So I'll send that off to build for a moment. ⁓ And while we let that cook, can say, OK, so how would I explain this to someone in college?

Mm-hmm.

I'd take it up a notch probably a little more advanced. So if you think about where, what is Bolt, how does Bolt fit into the ecosystem of tools you might be familiar with. If you were going to go make a website a year ago, you'd probably think of a tool like Wix or Squarespace and where it's this template based tool for making websites and you, you know, drag and drop things around and resize things and set colors and such. ⁓ Obviously with Bolt, you just describe your idea, but importantly, it's also unbounded in terms of what you can create. So you can, of course, create a simple like small business website like you might on Wex, but you can also integrate real deep functionality into what you're building. you can integrate, ⁓ you can have like login, right? You can collect payments. You can have users upload files and store those. You can create accounts and store databases and information that you're collecting from your users. So really you can build like a software as a service app, anything you could build, like an Instagram clone, a Twitter clone, you know, or just a website that has a lead capture form. And you could build that from scratch if you want to really excitingly, you can also integrate.

Anything.

via APIs with almost any other tool in the world. So you not only can you build your own software, you can make it connect and interact with other people's software. So that's that's probably like the college level explanation. And then I'll get back to the industry professional one in a moment. But as we can see here, after we type our prompt in the tools planning out ⁓ You know the different steps and going through them and you can see we've reached the final step here where it's testing and building the project the plans completed and Now we're going to get a preview ⁓ in the right hand pane here of the application that we just built so we Can check it out. So there we go. We've got a calculator. It's got the iOS color scheme and we can see we have a race car going around the edge. So now let's see what happens if we let's see multiply 500 by 500. There we go. The car speeds up and we get a confetti effect. Now we can maybe try some division. We get the confetti effect again. There you go. you know, that's just a very simple, like kind of nonsense example. I don't know why you would necessarily want to create an app like this, but could be anything, right? I mean, this is effectively a game at this point. not that incredible of a game, but you can make the car go faster with math.

Yeah, that's crazy. I remember when I was taking Python classes and doing this. This is one whole semester's project.

And that happened while I explained what BOLT is to elementary school kids. It's absolutely wild how much this speeds up your ability, you know, to take any idea you have in your head and get it onto the screen. And that's really the exciting opportunity ⁓ that exists for folks that are, you know, like professionals in this industry. There's of creating digital products. ⁓ these tools are really starting to redefine how, ⁓ how these digital product teams operate. And, you know, so I think as we kind of, ⁓ continue on here, we'll probably get a little bit more into the, the, the details of that, but at a high level, I would just say if you're on a digital product team, this tool can be used to massively accelerate the way you're collaborating with your teammates and getting your. products scoped out, designed and built ⁓ at work.

It does look very powerful. mean, you know, the now, would you say this is the, this is the starting point or this will carry you through your journey of product development?

So that's the whole question. And we're seeing some very interesting things developing in the industry. And my thinking on this has even shifted a bit since you and I first connected and planning out to do this interview. So. These tools didn't exist 12 months ago. just or 14 months ago. That's when that's when we launched. We were the first ones to bring a AI ⁓ powered coding tool into the browser. And the reason why they didn't exist earlier is because it wasn't possible. ⁓ The AI models were not good enough to reliably write code that would not have bugs and actually execute. So last summer, Anthropic came out with Sonnet 3.5, and that was really like the go point for this type of tool where the models were good enough. And they've gotten a lot better since then. And it's really exciting as we kind of see each evolution. ⁓ We are absolutely at a point in history where, depending on what you're building, for many use cases, this tool can get you

Right.

all the way across the line to a application that is deployed and used by your users and customers.

my goodness. Yeah, I definitely have more questions around this, but this is amazing. feel it's hard to believe that this is happening.

It's super cool. mean, for me, I've had this perspective for a long time since really my first job after college. It kind of dawned on me that in some sense, all jobs are really the same thing. You just have an objective, a set of tools and capabilities to go after that objective and then limitations or constraints on achieving that objective that are, you know, kind of imposed. on you by reality. And that's just only coming becoming more and more true, especially in the space of digital products, where a tool like bowl. If you have the idea, you're much less likely to be limited in realizing your idea by some detail like, you're not a programmer or you're not a designer. So how could you make a digital product like that? those constraints are going away very rapidly, which is awesome to see.

Thanks for Yeah, I think I should send a boat to my mom because my mom's over 60 years old and she recently trying to build an architecture related application. And she was chatting with Chai GPT and I should just send this to her. Like you should try this. You know, it's maybe it's carrying it, you know, this is making your life so much easier. Not just a trap. It will make it for you.

Yeah, 100%. And we've seen all kinds of folks build interesting applications with this. know our CEO's mom made her first website using the tool. ⁓ And my wife made a website for her small business. So plenty of people that are not technical minded by nature can absolutely be successful. A great way to get started is if you've been discussing an idea with chat GPT or another one of these AI chatbots, just ask it to summarize and write out a prompt that would be appropriate to put into one of these tools. And you're probably not for the races at that point. Yeah.

Voila, right? Yes, yes, yes. And you mentioned that you just got promoted to the Chief Operating Officer at Boat. Congratulations.

Thank you, thank you.

What does your day to day actually look like now?

Yeah. So it's, it shifted a lot. Like as we talked about a little bit, you know, I came in and worked in sales and spun up that department and then kind of moved through most of the other departments at the organization from people ops and marketing and customer success and a little bit in product and. know, doing my best to fill the gaps at the time and then hire. experts, area experts behind me to take over and build those functions. So kind of got to a point this year where we had leaders taking on a lot of those core functions. And so there wasn't an immediate need to go zero to one, some new department that didn't exist. And so that's when I started kind of working towards this new role. Yeah, the way I've been describing it is my job is to ensure that the CEO's vision for the company turns into tactical execution across all of the teams. So my weeks are looking like spending time with our functional leaders. ⁓ Oftentimes it's working sessions, right? We're, we're a startup. We're not ⁓ Google or something. So there's of course, strategic planning that, that does need to go on, but A lot of what's really required to push a company at our stage forward is getting things done. So working sessions are with the leaders is a big part of the job. The other day I was sitting down with our interim head of marketing, Enrique, and we're working through some collateral that we're making for the sales team ⁓ and just thinking through and ideating. And I also am running finance. there's reviewing the month-end P &L and looking at how that ties into our product strategy and keeping track of margins and customer retention and communicating that out to the other leaders and figuring out how that fits into the strategy. Also, we're working on lot of partnerships right now. So that's another area that I'm owning and we're working on some exciting partnerships with very large ⁓ companies that have major distribution into enterprise. So having those conversations, laying the groundwork for co-marketing and co-selling activities there. it's, you know, it's the stereotypical, like it's always different, but it's a lot of, you know, essentially ⁓ diving into some of the tougher problems that we're working on cracking with the leaders and trying to get us to that, to the next screen of the game, essentially.

It doesn't sound to me any easier from 0 to 1. It just sounds like, won't work. I was thinking, yeah, OK, you're transitioning out of some of the functions that you actually build from scratch. then maybe less work. No, not less work. It's actually won't work.

Yeah, yeah Yeah, I mean, certainly don't come work at a startup if you don't like solving a continuous chain of very tricky problems, because that is effectively what the last five years has been. It's like it's ⁓ just constantly unwinding the next puzzle. And, you know, the puzzles keep changing, you know, and the the shapes of the pieces and the way they lock together and the size of the pieces and the quantity of the pieces. So it's it's it's definitely not boring. That's for sure.

Thank I remember seeing that you guys had a hard time like at least one or two years ago. What happened?

Yeah, so, you know, when I mentioned when I joined, we were a developer tool company and we were called StackBlitz. And the tool was basically the same thing as Bolt. It was a code editing environment in the browser, but there was no AI. So you needed to write the code yourself. And there was a few issues with that product. The most obvious one being Most people do not know how to write code. So the number of people that you can sell that product to was limited to software developers. ⁓ There was also some more, you know, that's a little tongue in cheek, but we didn't have, there was other, you know, things that it just, didn't have a hundred percent product market fit for businesses massively adopted in the open source community and in a lot of open source library documentation sites and everything. ⁓ But we were trying to sell to these design system teams in the enterprise, which are these really important teams that are actually very relevant today to what we're building with Bolt as well, where they make like the, what I think of as the Lego, the visual Lego building blocks of an enterprise application. Because when you go into a Google product, right, all the buttons look the same, all the search boxes look the same. So there's a team or in the case of Google, multiple teams.

Right.

that just build out those component libraries for reuse. And so we were selling to those teams and they loved us, but there wasn't really a reason to roll out our tool to everyone at a company because most people couldn't write code. Yeah, it was extremely niche and we, ⁓ as a result, ⁓ as we were coming up into the final stretch of 2024,

That sounds so niche. Right, this is niche. Thank

we were thinking about shutting the company down and returning the remaining capital to investors because we kind of had pushed that product as far as we could. And we were not getting the commercial success that we needed to justify continuing on. And so at that point, we decided that there'd be one more big experiment that we were going to run. you know, honestly, when Eric brought the idea to me initially for Bolt, I was not that convinced. This is really before it was these, now everyone knows AI coding is a major part of the AI revolution that's happening. But at the time, I was not sure that this was going to be the golden bullet that was going to save the company. at this point, we were four years in, we were under one million in annual recurring revenue.

Right.

and we had a team of about 15 people at that point in time. And so we decided to run this last experiment with Bolt and hook AI into our product and put it out there. And we launched on October 3rd of 2024. And had this experiment gone poorly, that very, very likely would have been the end of the company. yeah, thankfully, that's not how things turned out.

Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, it was just a year ago.

Yeah, it's been quite a whirlwind year for sure for the whole team.

What did you do differently? Do you think the product worked at the time it's the right timing? And what about the go-to market function you were building in the meantime?

Yeah. timing is, so important. And I tell everybody with, you know, our story, we were lucky enough to stay alive long enough until the core technology that we built became commercially relevant. They're, know, fundamentally what allows us to run our product. And this is kind of deep in the weeds nerdy stuff, but we developed this technology called Web Container that allows us to run the whole development environment in your browser tab. So that's always been a core aspect of our product. Instead of spinning up a remote server, yeah, we just run the code locally inside your machine, which is very...

the database, server, everything. Yeah.

helpful for security performance scaling. makes it way we can support millions of users without having to run millions of servers. So it's obviously a huge performance. It's a huge hack. The way the way I sometimes describe it is like when we're talking to like AWS or GCP, I'm like, you guys are renting out your servers to your customers. But what we're doing is actually renting out their own computers to them. So it's a genius business model.

It's a hat! Sounds like a hat! Right, right.

But that technology allowed us to do stacklets, right? And we had this niche tool, but it wasn't really until we could sell a development environment in the browser to everyone that the technology reached its real potential in terms of commercial viability. that would be like kind of the, before I would say anything about go to market. The number one thing I would say is if you're running a startup and you are not 100 % sure that you have product market fit, you figured out how to deliver value to your customers that they cannot live without and that they will pay you significant amounts of money for, be very careful with your cash because we ran the company very lean and we're very just focused on

Mm-hmm.

traditional good company building, preserving cash, having sustainable margins, not blowing money on flashy things that don't really help us improve the product and deliver value to our customers. So it was really that philosophy that even allowed us to survive four years without passing a million dollars in revenue, right? And had we not survived till that moment,

We're worth it.

nothing we would have done on the go-to-market front would have mattered because we would have had to shut down.

Yeah, so true. Yeah. Four years of resilience. I mean, how did you guys keep the mindset going? And you joined on the first year or second year, Mark?

Let's see, I would have been in 2020. It was about two years in to the company already. Yeah, I mean. I think it's a good question like one of the things is just the early team. People that are very product focused, nobody joined the team.

Mm-hmm.

you know, thinking of it like a get rich quick scheme, which I think is rarely the correct mindset. when you're trying to build something durable, maybe never, you could argue. I'm not sure. ⁓ yeah. So that was, you know, everybody came in knowing like, we're here to build a product that delivers value and that's going to be challenging. And everybody has like love for that game of, building a company. ⁓ the

No, I'm not gonna argue with you on that one. It's hard.

And I think, you know, I got to say a shout out to Eric and Albert, our co-founders for keeping the original squad together all the way through this day. mean, when you look around and you see people you've been with since the beginning still there with you in the trenches. mean, for me, that's been a huge, a huge thing that kept me going through the tough times because you really do, you know, I don't believe in this idea that a company is a family.

Yeah. That's, yeah.

We're not a family, we're a company here to conduct business, but we are a team and knowing that your teammates have been with you through all the ups and downs, you know, of the company, that is another thing that has contributed a lot to just our resilience and surviving up to the point where we finally had the right product idea. Yeah.

You had a breakthrough. Yes. Was there a Did it happen fast? Did it feel like really fast? And what happened? What was the moment?

Yeah, that's the thing is we've done a lot of product launches together and you know, some of them you think it's gonna be the best thing ever and you put it out there and it's a total flop and other ones you put it out there and this was more our experience with what success looked like in the past was you'd put it out there, you'd get a big spike in new users, you know, as you talked about it and pushed it out on social media and everything. But you know, then you'd have that big spike and then it would be a good fit for certain people and they would stick with the product. But the excitement would die down and you would have a, you know, a tapering off of new users joining until sort of the next, ⁓ you know, launch. So I wasn't sure which one of those to expect when we, when we launched ball, we. We launched it with just a tweet, a tweet thread on. Twitter. That was it. We were thinking of it as a bit of a soft launch. Put it out there. Get some feedback from our core StackBlitz fans and then kind of go from there in terms of trying to push the word of mouth further outside of the circle. ⁓ But that is not at all how it played out. I have never experienced and probably will never experience another product launch like this. We put it on Twitter. It immediately went viral. YouTubers started ⁓ making videos about the product and people were talking about it, telling their friends and we, it just exploded immediately like we could not have ever imagined. ⁓ So yeah, it was a very different experience than any product launch we've done before.

Who sent out a tweet? Was it a company or it was Eric?

⁓ that's a good question. I can't remember whose account we we put it out on. usually we we'd pick one or the other and then amplify from the from the other account. Yeah, but.

Did, at the time, did either Eric or the company had a lot of following on Twitter? I was wondering like, the virality, where is it?

Yeah, I think at the time, probably between those two accounts, we're talking roughly 40,000 followers. ⁓ And most of them front-end software development people involved in design systems or open source software development. And so we really thought that we were just launching it to some developers to kind of give us early feedback. But very quickly what we saw is over 70 % of the people signing up didn't have any previous experience coding. So it immediately broke out of our bubble of sort of software development fans and started getting shared into more like, I guess, broader tech Twitter.

Hmm. That's very interesting journey. And you think those new 70 % new users are actually coming from that tweet or the.

Well, now at the time, at the time, yes, now we're obviously 14 months in. And so we've expanded our efforts to get the word out there. But yeah, in the, in the early weeks, there was not anything else that we were doing. And it was just people were retweeting and, and next thing we know, you know, we, had a bunch of new, new fans of the product from a whole, whole different kind of backgrounds than our previous customers.

Did you do any sort of analysis on that viral tweet because maybe you want to recreate that kind of virality again?

Yeah, and we try to kind of follow the similar approach we did for major product launches. And it's actually not a... It's a formula that we've done before. So the approach we take is just very straightforward, educational tweet thread, right? Where the first tweet is by far the most important. And you'll just see that if you look at any viral tweet thread. gets 90 % of the views and then no matter how good your thread is, the rest of it, the views are gonna drop off significantly. So it's very important that you get the most succinct and compelling version of your idea in that first tweet. I mean, Eric and I spent probably... 12 hours at least, bare minimum, constructing this tweet thread. we will agonize over, I mean, your character limited on Twitter before it gives you the dreaded show more to read the rest of the tweet, which we do not like. So we will agonize over those first 240 characters and do many iterations, trying to get just the most clear and succinct.

Yes.

version of the simple idea that we want people to walk away ⁓ from the thread with. so we've done this. then I'll continue down in the rest of the thread. It's about going deeper for the people that were curious enough to click than what are the components that you want to educate them And ideally you have a nice GIF ⁓ or static graphic for each of the points that you're that you're trying to make. And this is a format that we've done in the past and, and that worked really well. And we've continued to do for new product releases ⁓ later on. And it's, it's nice because you can then turn that into a blog post. You can turn it into an email. can, you can expand. You basically have the most succinct.

Yeah.

version of the narrative because you're so limited on space and then you can expand that out for other channels.

So you mentioned 12 hours. Is that per tweet or every product launch tweet because it's so important that you spend more time on

Yeah, I mean, I would say. That's the first week gets by far most of the time. So if we spent 12, I mean, we honestly probably spent more than 12 hours on that tweet thread, but let's just say it was 12 hours. We probably spent, you know, nine hours on the first tweet and getting that messaging perfect and just sort of making sure we had the right bullets for the follow on tweets. And then usually we'll just pop out the follow on tweets pretty ⁓ much quicker, because at that point.

Yeah. Yeah.

If someone's already opened your tweet thread, they're engaged, they're interested. They now are there just for the information and to learn. So, ⁓ I think it's, it's the first, the first tweet and you know, the second tweet, I guess is very important as well. ⁓ and then, you know, after, if you weren't able to get the every aspect of your, your idea into 240 characters, I'll allow you a second 240 to hit kind of a second point.

Yeah.

And then from there, it's basically the only people reading beyond that are already hooked, already interested. And you might as well just educate them on what they need to know to succeed with the product after that point.

So today, are you still using Twitter to be your major launch platform?

We are, I do think that that'll be shifting a bit in the new year as we're really honing in our focus on business to business. But the reality is, that Twitter and AI Twitter sees it first. so it's still where we announce our new features first. think the most. One of the most recent features that we dropped was, for example, supporting the new model that Anthropic came out with Opus 4.5. And even though, you know, we are focusing on B2B, people who work at companies are also on Twitter and a lot of learning about what's new in AI happens on Twitter. So that has remained so far our primary feature launch channel.

That's Yeah, makes sense. your first tweet have any videos you mentioned GIF or maybe graphics, but do you have videos as well?

We haven't been putting videos on the first tweet. ⁓ We put them in the thread and no hyperlinks in the first tweet for sure. The thing is the Twitter algorithm changes all the time, but as of now, you get algorithmically punished for putting a URL into the first tweet. So maybe Nikita will rescue us from ⁓ debuffing hell of URLs in the first tweet, but for now you definitely.

you

⁓ want to save those for lower down in the tweet thread.

Yeah, for the thread, right? Okay, wow. These are great tips. And when you are launching on Twitter, are you doing relaunches? Like, you know, the same thing you're just announcing multiple times?

We haven't done that, but that could be an area that we've overlooked because frankly, like some of our favorite features of mine that we have in the product, a lot of people don't know about them. like one feature we have, we call a visual inspector where you can, a little cursor, you can actually select a particular element of the visual. Yeah. It's really helpful if you're making fine grain tweaks to a particular component in an app or on a page.

Mmm, I love that.

I think only 5 % of our users use that feature. So maybe we should, maybe not. Yeah, we need to rely. Yeah.

Maybe that's needed. Yeah, because we don't know. Yeah. I remember I used actually earlier version of Bolt to build applications, right? I've used ⁓ DeepSight. I don't know if you know about DeepSight, just building. It's a hugging face. So it's like a hugging face based by DeepSeek. And then you can also build like landing pages. And part of it for fine tuning is I just still using the user chat. but sometimes it will modify other parts that I don't want it to change. So that's the, the back and forth is the part that very tiring for using.

Yeah. And that's where, you know, some of these lesser known features really can come into play. Like there's one inspector. The other one is like planning mode, right? Because the worst feeling is when you send off a prompt and then you realize that the LLM has kind of misinterpreted your intent and goes off and maybe it, you know, doesn't implement the plan exactly how you would have liked. Maybe it changes some things you didn't want it to change. And so that's another feature that

Yes. Yes.

we should perhaps relaunch on Twitter is plan mode that it'll, you give it your prompt, it has to generate a plan which you can then review and revise before approving it, ⁓ which gives you a little bit more of a tighter fist of control over your LLM.

Bye bye. That's mimicking the real workflow from the PM team, I feel. And it makes sense, right? If you're working.

100%. Yeah. And I think that's a pattern actually that comes through in a lot of AI tools where they're trained on human generated data that came out of human generated processes. even the whole practice of how we build digital products, the way the teams are constructed ⁓ and the different handoffs between product design and engineering. It's a human process. And so when you're working with an AI tool, it's been trained on the outputs of that human process. Oftentimes, the more you can mimic that or borrow words and phrases from the discipline, the better outcome that you're going to have.

Absolutely. Yeah. How'd you feel about the term vibe coding? Is that what both is?

I don't like the term, ⁓ but it is the term that has caught on that absolutely describes our space. I liked it at first. ⁓ I did think it was cool at first, but now I've gotten pretty less hot on it. And I think that it's gotten a bad rap for the idea that you just. throw half baked prompts over the wall and like let the AI figure it out. And you don't really have responsibility to be implementing your plan and using your, your control over the tool to get the outcome that you need. ⁓ And so the term I really prefer is software composing or software composer for the person doing it, because I really think that better captures what's actually happening, which is you're more like orchestrating and composing the app ⁓ from various inputs. And it's your job to ensure that the tool you're using has the correct context loaded in at any given time to accomplish the task. And I think software composing captures that ⁓ better than the term Vibecode.

the web coding. Is this new? I haven't heard about it yet.

It's not new. It was one of the original terms. know, I think Andre Carpathy came up with vibe coding and Riley Brown is where I think software composing came from. And Carpathy is a bit more well known than my Riley Brown. That that term really caught on. And I mean, it has a certain catchiness to it. ⁓

Right. Yes, that's why.

But yeah, very early on, I remember seeing software composing and I liked that from the beginning, but it hasn't caught on yet.

Absolutely. has been taken off. Yes. Yeah, it's like writing music, isn't it? But you know, in your mind, who's qualified? Who can write? Who can compose software?

At this point, it's extremely clear to me that anybody can do it. And if you don't believe me, just DM me on Twitter and we'll work it out together.

You will with me on this one.

And I mean, the argument's gonna be easy for me to win because all you have to do to start is just describe your idea and paste it into the box, right? I think as the concept gets more and more complicated, the skills required to create software ⁓ come more and more into play, right? So with the little demo we did at the beginning, an elementary school kid can go make a game now. They can make a game. Like you think of those old mini clip style games 100 % kids in elementary school are making those all day every day. If you're trying to make something significantly more complicated. Then you're going to need to do more than describe it in the way that elementary school kid would describe their game. That's that's correct. There is a skill set that can be developed and needs to be developed to compose software at a professional level, but the skill is not software engineering. Well, so I'd call it software composing. And what is that made up of? It's multifactorial. And I think people are still figuring this out. But if I could highlight just a few points of what I would focus on, one.

What is this skill? I'm curious.

You want to get extremely good at describing very specifically what it is you're trying to build in the language of digital products, right? So if you don't know the language of digital products, the beauty is AI will teach you everything that you need to know. So hop into your favorite AI chat and just talk to it, ask it to educate you on the words and phrases that product managers and designers. use specifically. Those are the most important words and phrases for you to understand as you're getting started with composing software. you'll come across things like, ⁓ you know, talking about user interfaces and there's like a hero section, right? Talking about the at the top and different ways of talking about menus and navigation, like a pancake menu is that little thing on

Alright, you're right.

on mobile that looks like three stacked pancakes. So if you want one of those, you say pancake menu. Yeah. And so it really is like kind of like in fantasy novels where it's like with magic, I feel like it's always you got to know the name of the thing and that gives you the power over it. That is actually how it works in this space. And so, you know, there's also a lot of for the specifics of the visual interface. There's these concepts like padding.

And now you know the term for it, right? Right, yeah.

and margin and alignment and font weight and all of these design terms, right, gradients and

Those are used to do entry barriers, you know, because it's intimidating because everybody's speaking, every domain is speaking a different language.

Totally. you know, that's something that you, that is a real skill set that you, if you want to be serious about building software as a non-developer, you know, whether you're a founder, entrepreneur, product manager, designer, executive at a company, and you want to be able to put your ideas on the screen, there's definitely things to learn, right? And, Those words and phrases are a great place to start. Now. Well, yeah, I was just going to say if you're, if you want to take it further, right? That stuff will get you the user interface. ⁓ now when you want to start thinking about backend functionality, there's that's where you'll dip into a software developer or systems architect, or maybe, you know, ⁓ it lingo.

Sounds like, go ahead. Mm-hmm. Right.

right? Understanding, being able to speak intelligently about APIs. You just what is an API? Exactly. Like you don't need to know how to make these things, but you do need to be able to describe accurately what you want to occur inside your app. So just to give you a good example, if you're not familiar with like an API.

and then security, right, all kind of stuff.

It's not rocket science. You'll be able to figure out the concept pretty quickly. It's basically how two pieces of software talk to each other. There you go. That's probably actually a good amount of what you need to know there. So if you want your piece of software that you're building in bolt to talk to another piece of software, let's say open AI, because you want to build an AI powered app. Now, you know, I want to connect to the open AI API and send the text that I put into my app. to open AI and then it's gonna send some texts back and I wanna display that here, right? That's it, like being able to use the real words and phrases to just describe what you want to occur will get you extremely far. And I'd say that's like, you know, we don't have a time for the whole course on everything I know about software.

I know you should just come to my podcast and then we can just throw a course. Do you want a side hustle Alex?

We do. Yeah, we could absolutely do like a deep dive session on like what are the core skills, but I'd say that's a good intro to the first skill is learn the language.

Yes, yeah, yeah. I feel you're almost telling me the core skill is having a curious mind so you can keep digging because the biggest fear I have is you know what, I don't know what I don't know.

100 % and that kind of that goes back to my whole philosophy about all jobs being the same, right? It's like if you are if you have a objective and you're you're curious about how to solve it and you're willing to dig in and learn and ask questions ⁓ of people but also very conveniently of AIs which know that stuff extremely well, ⁓ that's really ⁓ at a base level, all you're gonna need to figure out everything that you're going to need to figure out to be successful with making software in 2025 and it'll be even better in 2026.

Are you seeing this as a trend that more people, because you originally were targeting at developers and then you wanted to position to everybody. And are you seeing this as a, in the trend, where are we in this chasing chasm trend of adopters from everybody, tools like this.

Yeah, it's interesting question because I think in some sense, everybody's asking that question at a societal level. Like are we on this adoption curve where AI is going to permeate every part of society and be adopted by everyone. So my feeling is that we're still in the relatively early phase. Like we're in the early adopter phase of the curve for sure. So if you're watching this and you're you feel like, this started 14 months ago, I'm behind. I yeah, you are a so, but you're also ahead of 99 % of the population that haven't even heard of these tools and don't even, maybe they saw something about AI on the news or something, but we're still at the point where the majority of people in society have not actually picked up one of these tools and tried it, which I highly recommend you do because it's so easy.

I love you!

to get started and your mind will be blown and then now you'll be off to the races from there.

Yeah. Can I make money off these apps, live coded through Bolt? What more do I need beyond Bolt?

Yeah, 100 % you can. And the only thing that you need beyond Bolt is a good idea. And maybe some distribution. I think what we're really seeing is that the importance of distribution and go to market is becoming a lot more important as it becomes easier to take an idea and turn it into software.

Really?

getting it out there in the hands of users becomes more important. But there's always, you know, there's always some excuse for why you shouldn't try and you can't succeed. The excuse used to be you didn't know how to write software. So, hey, now it's just, you got to tell people about it. So that's a heck of a lot easier of a problem for you to go figure out. You know, you could start a YouTube channel like Angelina's done here. That's becoming a topical expert in the space that you're trying to.

Yes.

spread your product into is, know, tried and true. ⁓ but yeah, the reality is we're seeing a lot of people making money with bull. And one of the, one of the really awesome early ways that I've seen that I would, this is where I'd put my money if I wasn't working at bull and I needed to start a company with bull instead is, ⁓ agencies. So there's so many small and medium businesses in America that could use much better software. As you well know, if you've ever interacted with a small business that has software or looked at a local services business website or tried to make a reservation to have somebody come out and inspect something at your house on through their website, there's a lot of companies that would benefit from having better software. They are not gonna hire software development teams. They're busy serving their customers and they need cheap,

Yes.

fast solutions and that is what ⁓ web development software development agencies are able to provide with tools like bowl. So that's a big, ⁓ big opportunity that we are leaning into and looking for ways that we can support our agency customers more. But that's where I'd start and then develop your skills, you know, get some cashflow going and then along the way you'll have like that idea, right? Where you could really turn it into a

Yeah.

product or service and go from.

Yeah, I saw a recent episode with DOAC Steven Bartlett. He was interviewing Chris Korner. ⁓ He's the king of site hustles. And he was talking about that this should be ⁓ maybe at a moment one of the hottest small business out there or freelancer opportunity is AI consulting, which is helping SMBs integrate AI. ⁓ And you can use both to do that.

Completely agree.

All you need to do is, like what you said, distribution and reach out. Go to market. Get to talk with the small businesses.

100%. And you know, it's never just a little free sauce here. It's never been easier to land a client for a business like this because in five minutes you can have a prototype of whatever it is you want to sell them with their marketing copy of their website, their images off their website, the same sort of color pattern if, if it's not atrocious. So it, you, you can really show instead of tell in the sales calls. So it's never been easier to land a client.

Yeah, yeah. I have two more questions before my last question about the book. Do you mind if I ask those two questions? OK. So this is important to help my audience understand, or anyone who wants to do this to understand, how do you compare Bolt with your direct competitors, like Lovable, Cursor, Vassal? And also, there's also the clock hold, and now the Google anti-gravity, right?

Let's go. It's almost like this market is a pretty good idea because it seems like a lot of people have entered. Yeah, absolutely. So the way I would position ball is that we are easier to use than cursor, especially for non developer users. And we're more powerful and enterprise ready than the other vibe coding tools in the space. And.

Getting crowded, getting crowded.

to just give a quick nugget of, know, it's easy to understand why we're easier to use than cursor. We're in the browser, you just go to bolt.new, type your text and hit enter. There's nothing to install. There's no scary developer looking interfaces or VS code or local dev servers or Git required or any of that. ⁓ But on the side of how we're more powerful and enterprise ready, this is a little shout out to the digital product teams. folks that are on product design or engineering teams at big companies. And this is where I'd love to work with you guys. As you well know, coming back to early in the episode, we talked about design systems. In order for any of this AI generated code to get implemented at the enterprise, it needs to align with your enterprise code requirements, correct tech stack, security, et cetera. And visually, it needs to be built using your company's design system and visual styles. And that is where a lot of these tools are really falling down and where we are here to help you and your team succeed. We come in, we help integrate your enterprise code requirements so that your engineering team, instead of being maybe a bit apprehensive about this AI generated code you're sending their way, instead they're

Mm-hmm.

they're thankful because it's compliant and it uses the design system and it can actually be used and merged into the enterprise ⁓ code base rather than just being a prototype.

How do you ensure accuracy and then like you know the amount of control the level of hallucination right this is a big problem I've used cursor and then they give me a lot of hallucinated results and I stopped using it

Yeah. So to be honest, like this is the hardest problem at the cutting edge of what we're working on. And the way we're solving it is we are actually deploying our engineers into our customers companies to work with them to actually build their, their code requirements into bolt for their organization. And we're sort of doing R and D with our customers to get that perfectly dialed in. Cause the reality is that's not a completely solved problem at this stage in the market. I highly suspect that by next year we'll have a very productized solution where it's just kind of like you feed in your design system code here. You feed in your documentation here. You put your enterprise security and tech stack requirements here. And we, we will have like a fully automated way of handling that. ⁓ but yeah, at this point it's us working hand in hand with our customers.

Mm-hmm.

to ensure that the output that they're getting meets their requirements.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I also have a big question about how this impact organizations structure, right? So you mentioned this will enable the PMs and then to iterate through their ideas and have validation before they move this to get executive bias or move the actual implementation to the engineering team. Would that give them a lot more power than the engineers? And what does that mean? I mostly want to know how we should think about building a startup. How do we build a team in the future? Because the dynamic is changing, right? Before I'm thinking maybe I need five people on the product team and 15 people, or at least on the engineer team. Maybe I should think this different.

Yeah, well, it's a great question and it's one that everyone is asking themselves right now. The book has not been written on this question, but I'll give you my take right now. Certainly we're seeing the role and... structure and operating flows of the product design and engineering teams in flux at the moment. And I don't think anyone knows exactly where it will land, but. My encouragement to everybody is to lean in and work together to figure out how these tools can improve your processes and flows. I don't think that by definition they disadvantage any member of that product design engineering ⁓ collaboration team. I think when used properly, they're bringing those teams tighter together. they're reducing the friction of the handoffs between those teams. They're ensuring that the fidelity of the idea that everyone's trying to build together can flow through that iterative cycle between those teams in a higher fidelity way, in a quicker way, and in a more collaborative way. So time will tell how that affects exactly the structure and the number of people, but. This is exactly what we're working with our customers on is how do you integrate this tool and improve the collaborative workflow for everybody on all three of those teams.

Yeah, there's more to see and definitely maybe I will chat next year again. I'll ask you, are you seeing more organizational changes? Right. So affecting everybody's work. I have a, I just started a closing tradition for the podcast. If you were to recommend one book to a 20 year old, one to a 40 year old and one to a 60 year old, what would they be and why? No pressure on all three, but whatever you can recommend.

Okay. Absolutely. So for the 20 year old, ⁓ I would recommend a book that I read a little bit before 20, you know, when I was, I think around 11, but you know, if you haven't read it by 20, it's not too late. It's called Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And yeah, I think that's a book that you need to read before you graduate college. It's not a technical how-to manual on how to make money whatsoever. And if you read it that way,

I don't know.

I pray for you because it's not gonna work out well, but it does instill some really important concepts that I think are important to understand before you start your career.

Anything else? Any other books you like? Or doesn't?

So for so I like the framing of this question. So it really made me dig in and think about different different books and like a lot of my books are probably just you should read them all before you're 20 because you know, I haven't really figured out necessarily the ones you need to read at 40 and 60.

40 years old? Yeah. Are you yourself 40 yet? Not yet, right?

have not hit. So I just don't know, you know, but I, but I took some stabs, right? So I figured another one that would be good would would for the 40 year olds would be this book, The Intuitive Parent. ⁓ It's by my father in law, Stephen Camerata. And it's about child rearing and how the most important thing that your ⁓ child needs is you and not necessarily, you know, Mozart for babies and all this stuff that you're probably getting bombarded with when you're a new parent.

you Mm-hmm. Yes.

So that one I thought would be good for 40 year olds and then for 60 year olds I just had to go back to my favorite book of all time which is Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and if you make it to 60 and you haven't read that book you should go read it. It'll remind you of what it's like to be a young curious adventurer so those would be my recommendation.

Awesome, I love those. think I can get prepared for all those. I'm a little late on maybe the... I probably should reread the Rich Dad and Poor Dad, the book. ⁓ Maybe I'll have some new takes.

Perhaps, well, hey, DM me about it if you're reading it. Always happy to chat about real estate and investing.

Yeah, see that on your LinkedIn. You have that like rental on your LinkedIn.

Yeah, you know, we'll have to save that story for our next podcast.

Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Alex. Thank you so much for joining me with the chat today. I really enjoyed chatting with you. And I know that you shared a lot of the insights about how to make, you know, both go viral and went through this hard moment and become the true, you know, the true product that you are you guys are all building towards. Right.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me and I ⁓ really appreciate the invite and look forward to chatting with you again.

Yeah. Thank you so much.