S1. Ep41 - How to Create Your Own Business App Without Coding

Katie: Welcome to the AI Automations for Business Podcasts. We're your hosts, Katie and Null, and we'll be discussing how you can use AI for your business along with the latest news, updates and automations to help you stay ahead of the curve, allowing you to grow and scale your business more efficiently. Please be sure to subscribe and I hope you

Noel: enjoy this episode.

Katie: Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hello, I'm Katie. And as always, I've got Noel here with me. Hey, Noel.

Noel: Hello.

Katie: How you doing this week? Oh, incredible.

Noel: Why so incredible.

Katie: Oh, you're getting into the Christmas spirit.

Noel: Well, why not?

Katie: So, Noel, this week, you wanted to come and share about creating your own apps for business. So, obviously, apps. Now, are so much easier to create than ever before. I know just like going back a few years, when someone said, oh, I'm going to create my own app, you'd have to get like a software engineer. It would be incredibly expensive and was totally not doable for a lot of business owners.

Noel: Yes, definitely it cost an absolute fortune and take forever.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: I mean, you'll get what you want, but it'll take a while to get there. Yeah.

Katie: I know, you know, some previous clients and also business friends who, you know, have created their own apps. You know, it has, or it did take years in the making.

Noel: Yeah. I can totally see that.

Katie: And I feel like now, just in like the past few years. years we've come such a long way from that haven't we

Noel: yes definitely yeah it's it's come on leaps and bounds especially over the last few years but i would say within the last couple of months it's got a lot lot easier uh to do so yeah really exciting times so

Katie: i guess like the age old question is like why would someone once create an app for their business i

Noel: guess as like a sort of small business or maybe a solopreneur, you know, you're going to be subscribing to lots of different services and, you know, sasses and things that, you know, or CRMs, there's all kinds of things that you would need to subscribe to. And every now and then, there's probably going to be certain apps where you think, well, why am I paying for that? Maybe I could try and bring that in house or, you know, and then link things together. Or maybe I want to create an app for my customers. to use. So it makes my services to them easier. So there's two different ways of looking at, I guess. But yeah, there's all kinds of different reasons. I guess they're that the top ones.

Katie: I think for me, like apps as a like say a solo business owner in like who is service base. I saw apps as it was always like you would create an app for your clients. and never like something for yourself. So I think I would imagine like a lot of other people who are similar to me would also be thinking the same. You know, you would only create an app because it's for your clients, whether it's to book in with you or it's to join a membership course, a program, a community, something like that. So I would be really interesting to hear. Here's some examples that you have of apps that aren't for clients, but are for the actual business owner.

Noel: Yeah, I guess one that I guess everyone could probably relate to is like, let's say you've run a shop. You could be running a physical store. You could have an online store with like Shopify or whatever. You could even have something on WooCommerce for on WordPress. you might be selling things on other marketplaces like Etsy. So you've got all of those different streams and none of those are interlinked. So yes, you could use automation tools like our favorite, make.com. You could use that to start gathering that information and putting it in a spreadsheet or whatever. I mean, that's helpful. That's a good start. But you could start to build an app that collates all of that information together. And then that could then be your central access point to all of your inventory, you know, all of your orders and things. So you know, you're not having to go around each individual marketplace and figure out what's going on. You know, you could have everything come into one simple location. And yeah, it doesn't really need to be like crazy complicated either. You know, you're just getting data in, saving it, and then you're displaying it. you know, to either you or your team. So, yeah, that'd be one way of looking at it. You might have like a client portal, you might then have a CRM, and none of those are interlinked, so you might then want to, you know, create linkages between those as well, so you get a full view. There's probably platforms out there that already do it, all that sort of thing, but then you're probably going to then have to pay, you know, a subscription fee for that as well. And it's like, well, then does it offer every feature that I want, whereas creating your own app, you could, you know, you could be having a cup of tea and think, well, that would be a good idea, you know, and then off you could go and then add that change, and then you're done, you know, it's fair and working.

Katie: Yeah, I feel like, you know, where different platforms and softwares and CRMs, they always have packages. So package, like the lowest face package, just includes this. And but maybe you, you know, one thing, but it's in the highest paid tiered, you know, so then you're paying a lot of money I was, you find, for a very few things that you want and actually a lot of things that you want and would never like integrate into your business so we can now are you saying create apps in order for us to like have it and to like skip you know paying for certain pieces of software so you know things all link together and you know or maybe things that we actually want them to do and only having the things that we want on there or being there able to add certain things to this app as in when we want to maybe look at different reports or, you know, track different things. Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Noel: All you would need really, I guess the big caveat is, you know, you would need API access to those platforms. So if you've got to pay more for that, then fair enough.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: But, yeah, as soon as you've got that data, it's then really up to you to think of the things that you would want to do, you know, what would be helpful for your business, you know, the world your oyster at that point, which is quite exciting really because, you know, I've been building a few apps myself and it's just like, that'd be a cool feature. And then within like 10 minutes, it's there and, you know, I can test it out and go back and forth and things out and figure things out. And then it's done within like half an hour.

Katie: Yeah, whereas before that would have maybe. have taken like a week, two weeks just to get back to like your developers and go, this is what I want. Is this possible? And a lot of

Noel: the times,

Katie: no, it's not possible. Yeah, it is possible, but it's going to cost you a lot of money. Yeah.

Noel: It's like the, it's all you get a build around and you go, oh, that's going to be expensive,

Katie: isn't it?

Noel: It's one of those.

Katie: When they do the sharp intake of breath,

Noel: it's going to cost you. Yeah. Yeah. It is, yeah. Yeah, we don't, AI doesn't do that.

Katie: And we love AI for not being able to do that.

Noel: Yeah. I think there's going to

Katie: be someone somewhere who's going to be able to make AI do that for us at some point.

Noel: Yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah. Give it the builder persona. Yeah.

Katie: Brilliant. Yeah. So we've briefly. spoken about like how much easier it is now to create your own app but like really how difficult is it and like what tech experience do you need like what I guess level of knowledge do you need for AI and yeah I guess I want to know with someone like me who's not overly techie be able to create their own app without wanting to like throw those. laptop out the window or without having to be contacting you know support multiple times

Noel: I would I would say you would need at least a little bit of technical knowledge you don't have to to get started you know you could easily create like a minimal viable product kind of things you know just to see what it looks like and test it but I would say having a little bit of technical knowledge does go a long way. You don't have to be some sort of coding wizard or anything like that. You won't need to figure out his thing, well, now I've got this far. Now I'm going to have to code the rest. That's not really what you would need to do. But if you have got that knowledge or any sort of background knowledge, that is actually going to make the process a lot quicker. But even if you've got no knowledge and you get started today, you know you'll find like within a couple of weeks you'll get that confidence and then start understanding like how things all linked together and things that so yeah you can start with nothing but a little bit goes goes quite a long way I find

Katie: yeah and I find actually just that like that basic knowledge can actually get you pretty far and I've seen that like with some of our AI business club members,

Noel: you know,

Katie: some have come in as complete beginners and actually being able to create things for themselves and being able to automate things by kind of just like playing around and, you know, building up their knowledge.

Noel: Yeah. Yeah. I think with anything within the AI space, it's kind of repetitive. Like the more you do it and then the more like you talk with AI or you use different tools, then, you know, you're building that skill set and knowledge without really even realising it most of the time. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah, it is very much, though, because it's kind of like, okay, that didn't work the way I wanted to. And it's actually thinking about why it didn't work that way. And it's kind of like, not you're doing anything wrong, but like, could I do something a bit better or could I be a bit more specific? here and is almost a bit like trial and error but it's it's kind of just trial in learning from it isn't it more so than anything yeah

Noel: definitely yeah yeah it all kind of comes back to prompt engineering as well so the the the the more that you're you know up on that sort of skill then I think you'll find you'll get there to an end goal a lot quicker because you've you very quickly learn the quirks of each model and how they work. And then, you know, you've subconsciously, especially for me, I just work my way around it. I go, right today I'm talking to Claude. Well, that's going to do things in this way. I'll, you know, I'll do it. Yeah,

Katie: it's going to talk to you very differently than Chachybti.

Noel: Definitely, yeah.

Katie: Chachybtee's just going to be in agreeance with you. Yeah. Like your hype person, whereas Claude's kind of like give you a bit more home truths, I find.

Noel: It does, yeah, yeah. Not too brutally.

Katie: I think that's why they're good for different things.

Noel: Yes, yeah, they all have their core strengths, yeah. I mean, they all try and beat each other on all these benchmarks and stuff. But yeah, when it comes down to actually sitting down and talking with it, you actually very quickly realize, well, that I'm not actually. actually going to send code off to this model. I'm just going to talk to this one because they're really good at this. You've got to kind of just got to learn which, you know, which member of your AI team is going to be best for each one.

Katie: I know we've done like previous episodes on like, you know, like say Claude versus ChachypT, but actually I feel like there is a place for both of them in people's businesses. kind of like what we were just saying, like if you want more of a conversation, then chat GPT is going to be your, you know, the one that you go to. Whereas if it's not conversational, then I think Claude is definitely, you know, the right one to use.

Noel: Yes, yeah. For me personally at the minute with Claude, I use that as more of like my serious stuff. So like works. stuff and then chaty BT is kind of like hey what about how do I do this recipe it will go off and I use that as less or more like fun things not quite so serious

Katie: well for me it's kind of like if I like want to talk to my business bestie but she's obviously busy working on her business so I might like have a conversation like that. But if I didn't want, if I didn't want it to agree with me and I just wanted it to give me like some facts, then I'm going to talk to Claude.

Noel: Yeah, definitely.

Katie: It's then like your business bestie who like can't help but tell you the truth.

Noel: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that about Claude. Yeah.

Katie: Okay. So going back to creating apps, like how do you even get started? on creating your own app?

Noel: So there's a couple of ways. You can, well, I would suggest you could start with Claude first. So that can build like really, really simple things. So, you know, if your app's going to be calculating or, you know, doing something, then it can create that within like its canvas. So you can have like a very early basic look. you know, and kind of get that look and feel of the app. But when you then need to start connecting to external things, you then need to kind of move it out. So for me, Claude is kind of like the ideas guy. You know, I'll very, very quickly draft something out. And then what I then tend to do is then ask Claude to then say, well, look, give me like the products bet for this app. And then it will detail everything. And then I take it off to my next tool, which would be Google AI Studio. that's at the minute is my absolute go-to. There's many other apps out there. You've got your lovable. There's bolt and other things like that. So whilst they're kind of, they do the job. They do make it fairly straightforward. But why I find with Google AIO Studio is, well, one, it's free, which is always helpful. That's a nice low barrier.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: And it just builds things. in like a really economical way. So, you know, you can give it something like really vague. It can come, it can produce that for you. And then it might look very vanilla. It might look a little bit basic. But with the new Gemini 3 model, you can then say, well, let's jazz it up a bit. Let's make it look a bit more like my brand and my business. You know, this is my website. Maybe I want it to look a bit, you know, so I'm kind of got the same branding all the way through and fonts and stuff. And they can go off and then do all of that for you. So, yeah, that's, so Google AI Studio for me is, is my, is my, is my go-to right now. This is, it's pretty awesome. Yeah.

Katie: But

Noel: I guess once you've kind of drafted out, like, the user interface in AI Studio, it's then going back to figuring out what you want to plug in. So you kind of, before you really even get to this point, you kind of need to. figure out, you know, what's the end goal that I want to get to, what, you know, at which point am I going to be, I'm happy with this, tick that off the list, you know, and I guess once you've done, when you've got that sort of information ready kind of thing, you can then integrate apps and things like into the app. And the real cheap thing for me is I use meg.com and I use the webhook functionality. So I'm just getting in Google AI Studio to say, well, look, once I enter this information, go and send it to make.com, here's the web hook, this is the information I want you to send. And that can then connect into all the thousands of apps that make and then send the information back into your app. So you're not coding the APIs for those platforms directly into the app first. to kind of like making it a little bit easier on ourselves, you know, and using either make N-A-N or Zapier to do that talking between the apps. And at least that way, if something goes wrong, you can actually see it, you know. That's been really helpful for me recently. It's like, well, once I've got that sorted out, I can see it's working. I'm getting the right thing. I can then be like, right, now let's migrate that into the app natively. And then, you know, it makes done its job for now.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: But you are saying that you still need to be able to use a platform like Make, and you need, you know, LLM like Chatchipiti or Claude. Yes.

Noel: So I guess really you can skip the make step. It depends on which app you're wanting to connect to or which service you want to connect into. Because if they've got really good API documentation, you can just copy that into like Google. AI Studio and then say, well, look, this is it, integrate it. But, you know, just to make life a little easier, you know, you can migrate it out to make.com and then do it there. You know, just because it's visual, you can see it all. And yeah, if there's any errors, you can be like, oh, okay, I can understand it now. Because with the AI studio, it just give you like a really vague error message in the logs. You know, I'm not that techie, so I don't, I don't really know what that means, you and then give it to the AI, they're like, well, I can have a guess at what that means.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: But, yeah, at least if we've, you know, kind of de-risked those sort of integrations outside, it makes life so much easy.

Katie: Hmm, okay. Okay, so we were saying earlier that back a couple of years ago, it would take years to create an app for our business. So you've just described the process and the tools of creating our own app. Realistically, how long is this going to take someone to create?

Noel: It kind of, well, the big factor is how complicated? How big is your vision, I guess? But if you've got something that's quite small and constrained, you know, it's only got a few things it needs to do.

Katie: Can you give us an example of that?

Noel: So let's say with the, like the CRM or, you know, you've got a client portal for your service clients and things like that. So that's only two integrations that you need to bring together. So, you know, depending on like all the different things that you need in there, it can only take like a couple of hours probably to get, you know, something basic and functional. So, you know, you could do this while having a cup of tea, you know, you can have, you can get AI started on the work, go off, do something else, come back, see what it's doing. So that's how I tend to work. I have AI working away in the background, doing its thing, and then I check in on it in an hour and see what it's done. So, yeah, like you could go from zero to something working within a couple of hours.

Katie: Right, okay.

Noel: I would say. If you've got something that's really complicated, you need. databases and all that sort of stuff then you know that's probably a couple of weeks but that's not a couple of weeks of you sat there 100% of your time you know watching it it's like a couple of weeks and you maybe you're doing mind no a couple of hours a day yeah yeah yeah the i guess have more time you could put into it than the quicker you'll get there but yeah for me it's just a couple of hours a day.

Katie: Yeah, as an example of the apps that you have built, how long did those take you?

Noel: So there's one I'm building at the moment, which is not quite finished yet, but that one's been going for about three weeks currently. So, but yeah, I'm doing, that's kind of like my 4pm to 5pm. At the end of the day, I'd be like, oh, okay, well, now I'm just going to do this feature. And then, you know, I've got a big tick sheet of all the things I want in the app. So I just go in there and go, right, this is what I want to do now. And it goes off, does it? And then the next day I'll come back. So right, I'll take that one off, right, next one. Okay.

Katie: So it's fairly speedy, depending on how much time we've got, how much tech knowledge you have as well. But apps, I mean, I always knew that they were very, very expensive to create. So only like the really big businesses were able to, you know, create them. What cost are we talking about if we're making it ourselves? Like, you know, you've just been talking us through the process and the different tools.

Noel: So if you go down the Google A or Studio route, that's free to start off with. So, you know, your development team is costing you. nothing, which is amazing. But, you know, obviously if you're then connected into Make or Zapier or any, and you might then have to pay your subscription fee for that little part. But if you've probably already got those anyway, if, you know, you don't actually need them, you know, you could integrate it directly, whatever. So, yeah, the costs are incredibly low. And then, I guess, going forward, the only additional cost you would have after developing would be, you know, where are you going to host it? If you're a solopreneur and you work from your laptop, you can just run it on your laptop, so there's no ongoing cost. But, you know, if you've got a team or you want to give it to customers, then you know, you will then need to look at like hosting it somewhere on the cloud. But there's loads of inexpensive ways of doing that. So realistically, I guess if you've budgeted maybe $50, $50,000, per month after, I mean, it'd probably even be a lot less. If you've got AI in there, obviously, would they need to factor in your token usage and things like that. So, so yeah, there's no massive upfront cost to pay to anyone, really. You're just paying for your usage and wherever you're going to host it.

Katie: Yeah, so there's not that huge like $10,000 upfront fee before you, you know, any work's even been done. Yeah, it's going to cost, you think, depending on what you're building from $50 per month.

Noel: Yeah, I would probably set that as your maximum budget, I would say. You could easily do it for a lot less, I reckon. It all depends on, you know, where you're going to host it. Yeah, if it's got AI in there, or if it hasn't, then, well, yeah, that's going to be super cheap.

Katie: Okay.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: Sounds great.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: And of course, we are helping people inside of our membership, AI Business Club, how to create their own app. So if you want some more handholding, step-by-step processes, or even someone who's going to be able to answer your questions and give you some support, and of course, cheer you on when you actually create your own app. We would love to invite you into our membership. You can find all the details with the link below or you can just go on to school and search AI Business Club and we will come up. We would love for you to come and join us. We'd love to see what you create or if you have created an app, come and tell us. We want to know what you have built Because what I have found is that people just create the most amazing things, whether it's doing something really cool for their business or it's helping them out in everyday life. Honestly, I love hearing about it and so do you, don't you know?

Noel: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it's incredible what you see. Yeah.

Katie: Thank you so much for listening and we will catch you next week for another episode. Take care.