We Vibe Code a $30K/month SaaS App in 64 Minutes (Replit)

I didn't think we can do it, but we did it. We took an idea that I think could print $2 to $3,000 a day. It's called invoiceunder.com. And we used Replet AI agent and resend.com to actually go build it. Now, this isn't just your regular live cooking AI coding tutorial video. know, we also included how you'd actually grow the darn thing. So, a bunch of marketing strategies, uh, tutorial on how to use Replet AI agent and resend.com. Why it's interesting. It's basically an email powerhouse. This episode uh, with these vibe coding boys is really fun

and I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know. [Music] Billy Howell is back on the pod. Uh then we got a new a new face, new character unlock Nicholas Conley. These guys are kind of like your your vibe coders next door, you know? They're they're they're the guys who you know, Nick is actually a sales guy who's just sort of been vibe coding on the side. He's learning, you know, learning as he he's going. And uh and Billy, Billy, I don't know. You're just be you're becoming Hollywood. You're becoming famous as a vine coder

right now. Yeah, sure. Sure, Greg. Uh I I have a lot of apps to work on. That's that's for sure. So, um yeah, h happy to get be back on and and build something cool. All right, Mr. Hollywood, we'll um we'll continue. We're going to talk about this idea that I posted and we're going to actually build it today. So, I posted startup idea someone should vibe code invoice nudger a product for free freelancers automatically follows up on unpaid invoices with increasingly assertive but professional messages until paid with no awkwardness. Let's get independent freelancers paid

and happy thank you. And the genesis of this, by the way, is I've run agencies in my life and getting paid is just it not not even that it's malicious, it's just people like forget. Um, so you need something like this and it doesn't exist. It's it's a total pain as well. And I think there were some comments on it saying like Stripe already does this or QuickBooks already does this. But just based off of what you know, I'm sure you guys have seen the same. When you send a personal note saying like, "Hey, are

you are you going to get this paid?" Or, "Hey, this is still outstanding." Like, that's going to convert or get that paid way quicker than an automated Stripe follow-up or or QuickBooks follow-up. Um, so I think that's a big key in this product that you have this coming from Susan in finance or you even have it coming from the CEO and it has CC the sales rep that sold it or whoever is the account manager on there. I think that's the the play here that gets this uh that that differentiates it and also makes it

super effective that you can sell this as like a revenue generator rather than just another tool. So you're thinking Nick that the solution is put in a custom domain like your your site's domain and send like from accounting or even just like a name. Yeah, I think a name is is key here. So it's not hey just a reminder your invoice is due in a day. It's like, "Hey, Greg, uh, your invoice is due tomorrow. Just wanted to make sure we're all still good here. Uh, anything that I can help with. Any questions?" And then

it put that on their calendar when it's due. Hey, just reminder, it's due again today. Uh, let me know if I can do anything. That's going to convert way better than Stripe saying, "You have an invoice due." Subject line: I'm going to break your legs. Yeah. I think there's an entire marketing campaign that you can put around this saying basically like we're sending the mob after after people. Uh and and we can put a knob on the aggression meter of like Conor McGregor or the mob sending after people or like play it down to like

a nice Post Maloneesque figure. That's nice. Why Post Malone? He just he just seems like a nice guy. I don't know. Have you seen interviews of him? No, I didn't know he was into accounting. He's a really nice guy. Like strangers will come up to him and they'll be like, "Can I have a photo?" And he'll be like, "Oh, absolutely. How you doing today?" You know, he's just like that type of guy. He's just like super nice. Um, okay. So, today's episode, if people stick through to the end, what are they going to learn besides

this really cool idea? Basically, the process on how to take a little single feature app like this and bring it to life. uh we're going to test it with Replet, but you can use kind of the same principles with any kind of AI coder. And yeah, basically it just kind of boils down to understanding like what tools you need to find in order to make these things happen and then like putting those tools together in the correct way. I think we should talk about some marketing ideas of how you could actually get this in front

of the right people and and start getting your your first initial users um for a tool like this. I agree. A lot of people I've done a bunch of these videos where I talk about, you know, I'll bring someone awesome like Billy on and then people are like, "Okay, cool. But now, how do I actually grow the thing?" So, we're going to talk about how to build the thing. Um, with two guys who never graduated Stanford, you know, CS school, who didn't go work at Google, you know, your boy's next door. And then we're going

to we're going to figure out how to grow this bad boy. Cool. Cool. I do want to say for the record, Craig, I don't know if you know this, but since the last time I came on your podcast, I've had several people DM me that they've actually sold apps that they built in Replet to real people. Uh whether using like my Upwork strategy or just to people, friends and family or people like at their company. And one guy told me that he's closing a $30,000 app, which is just insane to think about. And I I

tweeted about this and a lot of people are like, "Oh, I don't believe it." But I've talked to so many people who have these red-hot pain points like Invoice Nudger, but for their specific niche or their company. And so if you think about all the time you could save like a a a real estate agency or like a PE firm or how much like SAS subscription you could cut off by building something with AI like I buy that you could put a $30,000 price tag on something like this because it it the savings are there

right off the bat. You're intimate with the users and it it's custom to them. So yeah, I'm I'm glad to be back on talking about this stuff. I think it's super cool. I think I could be completely dreaming this, so check me on this, but I'm pretty sure that guy was like, "I'm going to go buy a BMW." I think I tweeted that to be hyperbolic. I said, "People are buying BM or making BMWs off of my strategy." Okay. Well, let's learn, boys. Let's learn. Okay. So, to start, um, we kind of have to define

like our features. So, we want a way to set up a custom email address and use AI to write emails, right? Or to make templates. Yeah. So, so I think also we should think about what's V1 going to look like and then like what's V2 going to look like. So, like V1 I actually think could be built on something like Lindy or Gum Loop if you really wanted to test this market without building like the full Replet app. But V1, like you mentioned, is probably going to be able to connect to someone's um billing platforms.

So, call it Stripe or PayPal. You probably want to choose one and and sort of niche down there. And then you're going to be able to connect to the emails to just initially start sending those emails. I think you could probably pretty simply connect an API from OpenAI or or Claude and start writing those AI emails as well. um so that it looks more human written rather than the notification email uh that Stripe or PayPal would would send automatically. Cool. Cool. Okay. So my approach mine would be a little different. I actually for V1 would

go no Stripe or billing and and just get the email sending done because you know Stripe is going to be like a mess to set up and for the purposes of a demo you could just you know uh paste in your invoice link right and that also that feature is a good way I think to get users who you know may not want to switch over their whole billing to you right they just want to use this to push existing invoices so that's kind of what I would do I don't know Billy This is what

you bring the sauce, bro. You bring the sauce. It's such a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Expanding on that, could you actually just make a BCC email so that when you send the invoice, you have the BCC email that auto logs it back into the system and takes it from there. What would the purpose be of the BCC? So that when you send out that initial email, you're already copying the tool on it and it and it essentially takes it from there. So they don't have to take the invoice and go copy it. Yeah. So, I

actually what do I use for this? Um, I use some CRM and I shouldn't name drop them because no free promo, but in any deal that you have that's open, they generate a BCC email address for that deal so that if you're emailing someone about it, you can just BCC that. So, that's a great I think that's a great feature. Um, I don't know how I would set that up in an hour in Replet. I've never cuz that gets into like email SMTP stuff, but it's interesting. It's interesting. It's something to ask AI. Um, so

maybe next, do you want to switch over? Maybe I kind of screen share, get going on this bad boy. Sounds great. I like the BCC thing because it's so it's natural and it's easy. So, okay. So, I did some pre-work because I had time this morning and I know I have a call after this. Uh, and I actually kind of looked a little bit like like 15 minutes into how to do this. Um, I want to know Greg and Nick what you guys would use for email sending. I think most people would kind of use

I think Mail Gun or like Send Grid or something is probably a pretty good plug-andplay. Um, what would you guys use for this task? So, I we're incubating a business. I I'm literally cannot wait to talk about it. Um I've I don't think I've been this excited about a business in a long time. And we're using Reend. No way. Okay, so that's what I found this morning. I literally have it pulled up and I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying it. That is so crazy, dude. Yeah. Wow. I'm like I'm a resend convert. You

said no free promo, but it's like we promo. It's like I want people to know the sauce. You know what I mean? Like Resend is sick. Yeah. Yeah. I And I just found out about it literally this morning doing research and I was like we should we should test this out. It looks great. Yeah. Um so do you want to explain maybe then in like a sentence or two what it is cuz you probably do a better job than me. I mean I'm curious. I mean you you can you can talk about it. Okay. But

it it seems like it's just like a uh SMTP like server that you can use just with like Node. It's like and it's built for React uh versus kind of other ones where they're it's it's React based like it's made for these kinds of projects that we're doing in Replet. Uh and it seems super easy like an inbed. Uh I haven't done their little like their first like tutorial, but it's like a couple lines of code. Uh so I was Yeah, I was pumped to see this. Yeah. And it's just like a really beautiful It's

like easy to for for especially people who aren't super technical to like go in and see what's happening and just read what's h you know what's going on. And I think they did a really good job of um I think they do a good job yeah of onboarding people and and um we're using it just to we have a SAS app that we built and we're using it just to power all the emails automatically and like the person who's leading that project like has no experience you know doing email um and you know it worked.

So, so if you want to, so it's a simple way to, you know, sort of set this up using and and like I think we're kind of understanding it for people who who may not know, but like that doing setting up transactional emails for your SAS is like such an annoying step and all the traditional ones like are for some reason like such a pain to use, like an arduous setup process, weird billing, like a zillion features. And so when I found this, I was like, "Okay, this is like two steps and then like all

the tabs over here are super simple." Like it it seems like a really good it seems like a godsend honestly for someone who like wants to iterate and make some MVPs really quickly um that send emails. So yeah, let's use it. Cool. Okay, so I cheated um and I I basically just put in a prompt into Replet ahead of time um that says make me a web app. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it says, "Make me a web app that lets you draft and set automated sequences of invoice follow-up emails using the resend library. Here are the

docs." And then I embedded like uh the links in the the email libraries like docs for like using Node.js and then the GitHub with an example of it. Uh, and then I said use shad CN for styling, which is just the component library that I think looks best and that I'm kind of familiar with. Um, and so I put that into replet. And actually, I might want to show you guys, I just found this out this morning, but when you paste a link into the agent now, when you're starting, it gives you two options, which

are take screenshot or get context, get text context rather. Um, and you choose one of those and the agent will either take a screenshot or just pull all the text and then it'll have that stored um in in the file tree like in a context folder. So, that's like a really cool feature that just kind of shows you what you're actually doing when you're we're pasting in a URL. So, I like that. And so, it's it's I think it took maybe 5 10 minutes and it built this dashboard for us. And I haven't used it

yet. Um, but I'm going to poke around real quick. Um, Greg, maybe do we want to first of all, do you guys think the prompt is good? Do we want to have another one going like just on the fly? Did I miss anything? I think the prompt looks good. Something that I've been finding super helpful recently is going to a chat GBT or Claude, whatever your favorite one is, and explaining your idea to it first and then saying, "Does this sound right? Is there anything that I'm missing? And like talking to it almost like a

like an engineer and then it it'll lay out your prompt for you and and grab things that you would have missed on your own. Maybe we try one like that. We explain it to chat GBT and say what do you think the prompt and you can even tell it I'm trying to put this in replet or whatever coding agent you're using and say what do you think I should prompt it. I think that's a good idea. Yeah, that's a good starting point and it's kind of more exciting uh when we're here watching it kind of

get built brick built brick by brick. So I think that's a great idea. Let's see what I got pulled up on chat GPT. Oh talking about the app. Nothing too embarrassing here. Let's go. Let's start with this prompting. Okay. So what do we what do you guys want me to put in here? Automated AI drafted emails. I want to build an app that sends automated AIdrifted emails in order. Yep. You know what might be fun is even just taking Greg's tweet and popping that in there and we can take out what we don't want but

seeing what it what it gives us. All right, here we go. Okay, that's a great idea. I want to build this app. I want to use resend for email sending. Please write a PRD that goes through um the requirements, screens and database schema for building this app. The reader will be my AI software dev. Do not be opinionated about the stack we use. How's that sound? I like the do not be opinionated piece. Yeah, because I think it just will cross too many wires if chat GT chat GPT is like use like Nex.js JS and

Node and this and that because that's what that's what Replet's good at is kind of picking the stack that it knows how to do. So, let's send this full send. Okay, what are we looking at? We're looking at product requirements document for invoice nudger. Uh it's listing the core features here. Invoice upload and creation, automated nudging, nudge history. It's got the user roles which is important. uh getting your access control like set out the gate is like so like this is what a user can you use can see like this is what an admin can

see and do and then laying out the screens that you expect to be in the app like the dashboard the off screens this is all great this is very useful so I think this is good I think I'm just going to copy this is a lot I'll be interested to see what it says cuz Uh, that's a lot of features. We may want to take some out for the initial prompt just to make sure we're not overloading it. Unless we want to give this whole thing to replet and say what should we prioritize. That might

be confusing. What do you want me to take out? The invoice upload and creation. Authentication. We probably don't need right now. We definitely don't need oath. That's a nightmare. Watch out for this. If it if chat GPT tells you, "Oh, like that's probably gonna confuse your AI agent." It's just more steps. Yeah. User roles acts those. I mean, what you're doing right now is like I think whenever you're creating any any piece of software, you're trying to think like what's like the one killer feature that I need for this and you can always add on

later. Yeah. I I I think we've got we don't need invoice upload and creation. Um probably need client management to some degree. I I think this is pretty solid, honestly. Yeah. Let's um you've convinced Nick. Well, Nick, the email templates eventually it would be great to have those written by AI, but I think just starting with templates is uh is a good start. Just say like, hey, these are these are proven templates that we've seen convert. Just start with these ones. All right, let's get to the fun stuff. Uh we're going to paste in this

whole PRD from chat GPT. You can see pasted here. All right, we're back in replet. I went ahead and pasted in that PRD that we edited. I'm going to say we've got the PRD pasted into Replet. I'm just going to say build this web app based on the PRD I gave you. I've attach also here's the link to the I said based on the PDR document. That's interesting. So the agent's going to come up with a plan and we're going to be like the product managers here and be like this is what we think. So

it says let's build the initial prototype and use basic username and password authentication. That's good. That's very easy to implement. It says let's use a Postgress database. That's good. That's also very easy to implement. And let's use shad CN for UI. That's good. That's what we told it to do. It's asking, do we want to add in any accounting platform integrations? We definitely don't want that yet. That's a lot. Uh, automatic payment detection via payment processor APIs. That's another nice to have. Uh, and then custom invoice generation with PDF export. That's another nice to have.

Um, analytics dashboard. I think that was in the PRD already, so I don't know if we need to put that in again. Um, I'm tempted to just let it go. What do you guys think? Send it. Send it. Okay. So, now it's going to scaffold. If you guys haven't seen this before, it's pretty cool. It's just going to start scaffolding like a UI of the app for us. A visual preview. And it's going to be really cool. The first time I saw this feature, it blew my mind because it's just like it visualizes your idea

in, you know, like seconds or minutes. Like, it's amazing. This would be a really cool um for people out there that are dating, this would be a really cool first date idea. Um just, you know, bring the girl over and tell her we're going to build a SAS app. Uh it's really cool. AI is amazing. And see what she thinks. It's called Invoice Nudger. You're going to love it. It's called Invoice Nudger. That's so good. It's a good icebreaker for sure. Hey, you can even do it on your phone. There's an iOS app. So, like

if you're at dinner and there's a lull in the conversation, be like, "Look at the invoice nudger." It is funny how Sorry. No, I was going to say so things are happening on screen. Yep. All the little modules in the dashboard are popping up little by little. It's using um shad scene for the components I think. I think it's funny like the color scheme is kind of similar to the one I tried earlier and we didn't even tell it anything about color scheme which you could do if you wanted to. Got a list of overdue

invoices from tech solutions and future designs. This also, it seems like it should be a solved problem, but like I think no matter the scale of your business, like invoices are a the most annoying and b arguably the most important. Uh so any kind of app here that improves that process, I'm all for it. Okay, so now so we've got the visual preview and basically I think it just writes some JavaScript and and serves that to you. And now it's going to go in the background and build out all the routes and kind of all

the plumbing of the app. A good practice that I like to do is go ahead and come over here and click on the database button and just manually create one because sometimes the agent will forget to create a database. And so if you just do it for the agent, it'll be like, "Oh, look. We have a database we can use." I'm looking for the progress tab. Where is progress? Is it preview now? What is the progress tab? So, usually the agent, it shows like a progress. It just says progress on the tab and it'll show

the agent. It'll literally just show like the lines of code appearing for each document kind of like down here. It may pop up on its own. I don't know. They're moving stuff around in here. Okay, we can see we have files now. Look at this. We have a file tree. So ostensively it just ran create react app and now it's going to go in and put in all the pages that we need. It's already imported a bunch of UI components. So that's great. Got our main app file. It's setting up the schema. That's good. That's

what we prompted it to do. That's to make sure your database is really locked down. And this this dashboard is pretty cool. I think that there's a lot you can do with the dashboard, especially in terms of marketing. thinking about when people take screenshots of their Stripe dashboard or their Beehive dashboard. Those are marketing tools in themselves. So, if you can have in here like a nice looking chart saying something about how much was collected this month that people can screenshot and and essentially flex like this. You've probably seen this pink chart all over Twitter

and immediately you're like, "What what is that?" And that's like a marketing tool for beehive. And I think you can do something similar with this in cash collected and and uh essentially flexing. People chase down, legs broken. Yeah. Yeah. All this money collected and no kneecaps broken. Yeah. Yeah. This is I so I think that's a really good I'm sure this is some marketing principle but thinking about like what's your one KPI that's most important to the user and how can you like demonstrate to them that they're making progress on that and then also like

make that sharable and for beehive that's this subscribers chart it's super super easy to screenshot it looks great they even have a download button if you want to download it as an image and share it so they definitely thought about this for my only edit to to that beehive uh chart is they should instead of having download it should literally say share like literally a share button share to x share to Instagram. Yeah, I agree. I I agree. I um I try to put that in my apps share buttons on any kind of data chart

or graph. Should we should we talk about some marketing ideas or or basically ways that we can get this in front of a lot of people? Yeah, maybe let's do that while we wait on the old agent to code. Yeah, I think did you guys see this tweet this week from I think it was Farsza TV Freewrite got 1.5 million views. Uh and and I think this plays into the whole idea, you know, when people say Stripe already does this or or QuickBooks already does this. I think Freewrite is a writing tool now. It's it's

beautifully done. The design is is really nice and it avoids distractions, right? So, like it's a a Mac app, but it's just proof that like look, that's the most crowded, saturated market possible. And he put that out. He got 1.5 million views and hundreds of downloads per hour. and his launch was essentially a a beautifully done video uh of of a Mac app that that looked awesome to use. So, one, I think that you could make, you know, uh like we were talking about with the screenshot for the dashboard. Um you can make videos of

you could tell stories and videos like um you know, behind the scenes of I had all of these invoices uh overdue. I sent my goons after them with with the invoice nudger and and it essentially saved my business. So, I think that's one marketing play that you you can take with this. What do you think about that? I think that's awesome, man. There's tons of you could just take like screenshots or like screen records of like mob movies and like be like this is invoice nudger chasing down my clients, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think

on the video piece, you know, if you think about launching software or or or products, initially, you know, the old way of doing it was getting on Techrunch, you know, getting on media and then blowing blowing you up. And then it was getting on Product Hunt, you know, getting people to upvote you, being number one on Product Hunt. And I think now the, you know, this community lives on X. So, um, an X prioritizes video. So, you're kind of crazy if you're launching a product without a video. And it's funny cuz we spend all this

time talking about AI coding, how to build software, and not much time talking about how do you actually storytell a really interesting video, and how long does it need to be? So, with Farsza, I think he just absolutely nailed it. Farsza. Um, I can even pull it up. Let me pull it up while while this is um loading. And I'm, you know, I think it's great to just use this as an example. So, people here's the here's the the video. Could you hear my sound, by the way? Okay, we're going to watch it. Like, are

you kidding me? That looks like a promo for a Netflix show. Yeah, right. Exactly. So, he goes, "Introducing Freewrite, a Mac app I made for myself. One simple, clean place to write without distractions. All in native swift, no subscription, all local, free. Enjoy. 1.7 million views." Okay. Then you go to the link and it's the video literally right there. It's the It's like the cleanest website of all time. And it's straight to the point and that's the brand, right? You know, the brand uh the brand is the moat, right? And I think um for invoice

nudger, if we're creating invoice nudger, how do we think of that brand around like going after people, the mob, like even if it's a joke, right? Um into the brand and how do we create a video that supports that story? Absolutely. Have you guys seen those those videos that go viral on X every once in a while? They're like the AI Trumps and Bidens and they look like gangsters like in a house somewhere. Uh it looks like a rap video. The feed is wild. Someone out there is going to know what I'm talking about. Um,

I think that you could make these AI videos the same thing like Conor McGregor with a bat in that movie that he was in, like coming after coming after your invoice or, you know, the mob showing up at local businesses. Uh, getting getting your invoice paid for you. I think there's a a um marketing campaign that you can essentially do around that whole thing if that's what you're going to make your brand around. I think that works. I think you could also ask chat GPT. You could like send stills from that video, right? The what's

his name? Farzad. You could send stills from that to chat GPT and say like, I want an iconic marketing video like this like for this app. Here's what it does. Uh like can you write me a script? Yeah, you can do that. You can also say you can also just be like completely real with Chat GPT and be like, "Hey, I'm launching this thing called Invoice Nuncher. I'm worried that it's not going to get a lot of users. I really like what Farsa TV did with the launch of Freewrite. Here's what I thought was really

interesting. You you know, imagine if Fza is the CMO of Invoice Nudger. What are the 10 things he's telling me to do? Yeah. Love that. Love that. Nick, you want to give one of those a shot and see what we get real quick? I'm kind of trying to babysit our dev here. We could do that. I got some other like marketing strategies I can rattle off if we want to do that. Maybe I give you like four marketing ideas and then you rank them from what you think would be the the you know the best

and the worst. Also like the most fun and the least fun and and what you think would be most effective. So um you know as your as your sales guy here the most traditional way would be cold email, right? So let's say we're going after agencies. You're going to go out, you're going to scrape a thousand to 10,000 uh owners of agencies or the operations person at an agency. You're going to go to a smart lead or an instantly. You're going to warm up, you know, 15 different email addresses. You're going to write some killer

copy. So maybe your subject line is invoice paid or something that that gets their attention. And I think with something like this, so I've done a ton of cold email and the call to actions that always can be effective, but they're they're not ideal when you receive them is like, hey, let's let's jump on a call or can I send you over a video, right? Because when someone says that, like you immediately feel like, okay, well, if you send me a video, then I owe you something after that. With this, I think the subject line

is like, hey, you don't have to talk to a single person. Here it is. Go try it out. You get your first two invoices done for free. That's the first one. We're going to do cold email. I really like that copy because I get lots of cold emails that are like asking to do me a favor, which used to be kind of the cold email meta and it still might be if you write really good copy and it's really adds value, but just to generalize, I don't need another meeting or another Loom to watch in

general. Um, so I like that. Could you uh can you can you Okay, if you're if you're if you wanted to do that, like which tools do you need to do cold email? Sure. So, uh, starting off with your your lead list, first thing you're going to do is you're going to go to an Apollo or just Google like, you know, B2B email, uh, data or better yet, go to an Upwork or go to a Fiverr and find someone that already has a list of 10,000 agency emails. So, you can go directly to Upwork and

say, uh, I have $200 for the first person that has a list of 10,000 agency owners. I don't want you to go out and scrape these. I want someone that already has these and I'll pay you 200 bucks for them. So there's your first list. You have your first 10,000 contacts to reach out to. Then you're going to go over. Wait, that exists? Yeah. Have you ever done that? No. Okay. So you can you can absolutely do that. Um Yeah. Well, I I haven't had so much luck going that route like cuz I think I'm

bad at hiring people on Upwork or Fiverr. So, if you don't want to hire, I would say I like Apollo and something called Outscraper. Outscraper is probably one of the cheapest ways to scrape leads from Google or Yellow Pages. It's really nice. It's like an API that has just like a little old school front end. And then the other way that's kind of fun is Scrapebox, which is like old software from like the 2000s. and it'll actually run the scraper on your computer. I don't even know if it works anymore with Google, but I think

you can scrape the yellow pages with it, which is useful if you're going after local businesses, maybe not so much for SAS. Um, those are kind of like the DIY versions, I think. Yeah. Yeah. My only warning with out scraper is that it's gonna it's mainly for like local businesses and a lot of times those emails that are on the websites are not really the emails that you want. It's like contact at whatever rather than, you know, Rob at domain. Um, but yeah, something similar. Find email, find with find dy mail. I think it's like

$50 a month to start and you can scrape like 2,000 leads from from LinkedIn. So, that's something you get started with. Then you're going to go to Instantly or Smart Leads. These are both $50 $100 a month. And I think now you can actually purchase uh email addresses directly through them. So, you're going to buy, let's call it, two or three email addresses per domain, and then you're going to warm those up for, I think it's like two weeks. You just set it to warming. It warms it up. Essentially, all that's doing is sending emails

to other inboxes in this warming pool. And then those emails are sending uh emails back. So, it looks like this is like real human interaction rather than just like drumming up these email addresses and then sending out a 100 different cold emails. Those are going to get flagged and all sent to spam. So then you have your warmed email addresses and then you're going to set up your campaign. So you're essentially just going to drop in uh those 10,000 leads and then you're obviously going to want to test your copy as well, right? So I

put that into buckets of let's say 100 leads here, 100 leads here. Uh you can AB test your subject line. So maybe one is like invoice paid, the other one is like uh you need this right now, I don't know. you can workshop that and then test. Also, you can use syntax so that at the bottom you're using different call to actions. So, you're saying like um hey, you don't need to talk to anybody. Check this out right now. Get your first two invoices paid on us. Or the next one could be like um you

know, I made this video for you and it sends them to a landing page like the the Farza TV uh free. So, yeah, that's how I'd set that up. Nice. That's that's a really good way to do it. So that's number one. Idea idea number one. Idea number two. Number two, I think we could do the Instagram and Tik Tok playbook. So I know this is more B TOC right now, but I think there's a huge opportunity to do this in B2B. So running the same playbook that like a Calai or there's a bunch of

other ones out there by the way. I saw one a taller app. It's like an app that is supposed to help you get taller. It has like 500,000 downloads. So that's just a a side note. this uh this playbook is is running those apps up. And I think there's a lot of room to do this um in the B2B niche. And so the the playbook there is actually somewhat similar. You go open four accounts on Tik Tok, four accounts on Instagram, and you warm these up. So for 3 to four days, you act like a

real human on there. You follow a bunch of people, you bookmark things, you like things. What you're really trying to do is you're trying to get in that niche, right? So, for this one, you're trying to get into the freelancer niche and find all the hooks that are working for freelancers and uh the videos and and the formats that are working. So, one format that's working in in the test that I'm running right now is slideshows. So, it's like here's your for this you could say something like here's the top five tools that saved my

agency and then it's just a slideshow of of different tools and I think you could have invoice nudger in there. Um, so yeah, that's that's two. Number three. Number three, I think LinkedIn short form and just LinkedIn in general, right? A lot of your audience is going to be living on LinkedIn and X. Uh, I did an experiment with LinkedIn. Basically posted a short form video every day for 14 days. Uh, 2 million impressions in in those 14 days. So, you just have to This is like a a quantity game. You're going to post a

new short form video every day about Invoice Nudger, stories of how uh Invoice Nudger is is helping clients, how uh saved your business, and using hooks like check this tool out or this AI agent is like the employee I always wanted or this AI agent collects my money without breaking kneecaps. I think there's like a ton of creative things you could do there. And uh and also posting like the screenshots from the from the sick dashboard that we're about to make. And then four is just handtohand combat is what I like to call it. So,

you're going to you're going to make your list of 50 to 100 people you want using your tool. You're going to go to X and you're going to find creative ways to DM them and basically like enter their orbit. So, you're going to comment on all their posts. You're going to you're not going to you're not going to immediately pitch slap them like the first day that you want to get in contact with them. This is like a month-long play that I know it works because I've done it, but it takes a while and it

and it's more um it takes work. You need to you need to like be in their orbit. Uh make sure that they know you exist. And then you're not going to immediately pop into their DMs and say like, "Hey, I think this tool would be super good for you." It'd be, you know, uh that post that you made was like really good. I like what you're doing with your agency by the way. Uh would you be willing to to test this tool? So, that's number four. Where do you rank these? I I'll give you my

top two. Yeah. Um and then I'll give you my bottom one. Yeah. I guess I'll give you my all four, I guess. So, my favorite one is the LinkedIn um short form. Video on LinkedIn right now is literally like fishing with dynamite. They they want video so badly. If you can create halfdeent video and put it on LinkedIn, you're you're going to crush it. Also, unlike X, you can put a link within LinkedIn and get people to actually sign up to the thing, right? So right now links are so suppressed on X that you know

the move on LinkedIn is basically post something let it go viral for or get some likes and comments over the next four or five hours then edit the post and then put the link at the bottom. Uh so that's what you can do. Second, um just the as you call it, gorilla warfare, just like going out there, reaching out to people, being in their face, um adding value, I think is just really it increases your surface area for luck. So, I really like that one. Um your second idea, which one, which one was that again?

Yeah, Tik Tok and Instagram playbook. Yeah, that like interesting but like more risk in my opinion. Um, and my least favorite one, and this is just because I'm not a cold email guy, um, is just cold email. Like to me it's like there's faster ways to warm up an audience than cold uh, email. So that's why I always prefer organic and social. But it was interesting to hear the tools you use. Um, so thanks for for like, yeah, that was interesting. I will say totally. And I think the cold email because it's passive and it's

kind of you set it up once that can be layered on with any of these, right? So you can set that up and have it target people in the background all day while you go after, you know, the LinkedIn short form and and handtohand combat. The Art of War by Nicholas. Wait, so are you guys I I've always wondered this. Um I know that LinkedIn is like right per video. Do you literally just go on and attach a video to a regular post or do you need like is there like a reals tab? So you

just upload it like a normal TikTok in the whatever the dimensions are and it gets into their their short form feed. Um so I think there's a video tab now. I made a whole video on this behind the scenes of like it took I think it was day seven my first one blew up and hit like 300,000. Um but yeah, you you essentially just post it like a normal video just in the dimensions of a of a short form video. Okay. Okay, that makes there's a video tab now on LinkedIn. It's like relatively new. And

so you you know some people just I don't know who these people are but some people are like chilling and just doing LinkedIn short form. Um, and then some people are like if you go to the LinkedIn home feed, at least 50% of the posts are video now. Yeah, LinkedIn LinkedIn is pushing it um pretty heavy right now. You just got to stay consistent with it and like they they will push you and you will get a viral video if you just like commit to putting up one a day or or one every two days.

It it will hit. What do you guys say when someone will be like, "Oh, LinkedIn's cringe. I don't want to I don't want to post on there." Like, people take themselves too seriously. What do you What do you say to them? I don't know. Like, get over it. Like, do you want to win? Like, I don't know. Then don't post there. Save it for me. That's what I say. Like, that's fine. I think it's definitely a great place to find us. It's a tool. Yeah, I think it's a tool. Like, all these things are tools

to have in your toolkit and building a startup is so hard. There's such an uphill battle in terms of earning attention, creating trust, getting people to actually click things, doing things, getting their, you know, getting them to dance to put out their wallet. All those things are so hard. So, you would think that anyone who's building something would want to increase their probably success. And, you know, LinkedIn has a billion users, I think. Wow. Something like that. Um, so you know, hundreds of millions of active users, those are people, those are people who are potentially

willing to um to engage with you. So I think that um yeah, is there a lot of bots and and and lameness to LinkedIn? Yeah. But um you know there's also a huge pool of people and ignoring hundreds of millions of active people seems like a foolish thing to do or silly thing to do if you're trying to increase your probability of success. I am furiously prompting if you guys want to check back in. Yeah. With our prototype here. Let's check it in. So, the one that we just did looks pretty sweet. And it's kind

of making us create an invoice and attach it to a client, which is kind of not what we wanted, but that part works. And then we can go here into invoices and click on it. And then we can either mark as paid. Oh, okay. Automatic nudging is enabled or you can manually send one. But then it says this feature is not yet implemented. Uh when I try to click send reminder. So we're fixing that. Uh and know it has a tab here. This is pretty cool for your templates. Um for like your first reminder for

the invoice, second reminder, third reminder. I think this is nice. Um Oh, I have an idea. for like a future idea. What you can eventually do is for an extra fee, you can have a lawyer's letter like send sent from a a lawyer. So, it's like a reminder from a lawyer. So, it's like, "Hey, my name is Jimmy. You know, I'm counsel at um Billy LLC. Um just a reminder, you know, you signed the contract and stuff like that." So, I think that that's why I posted this idea. That's why I thought it was interesting

is because I think there's a bunch of upsells that you can do as well. I like that. I like that a lot. Okay. Replet says, "I've implemented the send reminder feature. You can now test this feature. Email will be sent to the client's email address." So, I'm going to go in and ask Actually, I'm gonna ask the agent real quick. Um, show me the code and explain how resend is implemented. What email address will the reminders be sent from? Um, don't write any code. And we may be able to you can just commandshift F and

replet to search the code. So I'll go ahead and search resend. Okay, it looks like it's importing the resend. It's got its API key which I added to the secrets in Replet. There's a secrets tool. So anytime you put an API key in, do it that way. Okay. Okay. So it's got cron jobs set up for the set up for the automatic nudging. So, I don't I don't think we could test the cron jobs because they're set on like a daily schedule, but there is a automatic send button. The from address is configured in the

user settings. That doesn't make sense, right guys? Uh, sanity check me here. It doesn't make sense for us to be able to set whatever email address we want and send from it or the entire SMTP system would be insecure, right? Like, I think it has to come from resend. has to come from resend. So, we're going to go into the resend docs. So, I think Okay, I think it seems like you don't even have to specify what email it comes from. Let's just see what happens real quick. We're in this one. I think it should

just automatically like pick the resend email address and send from there. Oh, I don't remember. Test user test user one. Also just like really cool what I'm looking at right now. I It looks really good, right? Yeah. Okay. So, I'm putting in dummy information for client and invoice date is say it's due in two days. Pay me please. Automatic nudging. Okay. Add the client. Create. So theoretically, this should just automatically nudge a day after the due date if I set that the nudge interval is up. But let's see if we can go test a manual

send to just make sure that the emailing is working. Did it say I needed to do that in resend? Yes. Okay. To add the domain on resend. Okay, there. There. Okay. Oh, okay. Okay. It would have to be from the invoice nudger.com. Okay. This makes so much more sense. I for some reason thought we were not doing custom domains uh for like the test version. I misunderstood the docs. Um and so we need a domain name. I guess I think someone bought it. That's a bummer. Yeah. whenever. Yeah, I give away these ideas and people

just they take and I love it. Any other ideas? Um um invoice mafia. Yeah, you do invoice enforcer. Tony Sopranoinvoices.com. [Laughter] That's perfect. If you're not having fun building startups, then you're doing it wrong. Okay. So, I'm going to try not to expose any of my login or credit card information and I'm going to buy this domain name. You a pork bun guy? Yes. Yeah. I think it's the easiest. Yep. Pork bun is a good DNS. I've used Namecheep before. Uh I think I think just like Pork Bun is no frills and it has really

nice like preconfigured DNS. So like if you buy one for like your Shopify, you can click a button and it'll just kind of automatically set it up for you. So it's really nice. I didn't know that. Yeah, they have a a bunch of little preconfigures in there and because a lot of these just kind of use the same formula every time, so it it knows it. Okay. So, in let's see, do we have the domain pork buns loading? Here it is. This is the Are you doxing your your domain list? Oh, yeah. A little bit.

Tell me you're an entrepreneur without tell me telling me you're an entrepreneur. There's like a domain. I kind of panicked for a second thinking I was doxing important stuff, but like I have so many worthless domain names that I've purchased. I don't use any of these. Okay. So, in resend, we're going to add in domain name. Let's just Should we use the root or I think we'll just use the root. Tony Sopranoinvoices.com. North Virginia. That's funny. It's Northern Virginia. Okay. So, we're going to have to set up these records. You can do this in any

DNS host. So, what are you doing right now? So, I'm setting up the mail records in the DNS. And we're going to get rid of the default pork bun ones. So basically you have to whenever you use an email sender oh it's already verified you have to verify like hey I actually I actually actually own this domain I'm allowed to send from it and this is how you do it. Um the host this is the host and then this is the actual value of the record. TTL is time to live. So that's how quickly is

this record going to be um like put out like registered basically. And I got that same error. And then Nick, why is demark important? I used to be able to tell you this, but it's uh something to do with your email security. It's basically like a This is supposed to be 10. It's basically like a I think it's a third party that does something to verify that your email isn't being abused. So now resend is verifying that email address. Okay. So good news is we got the email verified in resend. We got to find out

like how do we name the email? Okay. From Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're going to send it. Let's see if we can do this. Set up the app to use enforcer at soprano. Tony sopranoinvoices.com using resend. Let's see what it does because right we don't want it to use one that the user enters right now. We want it to choose Yeah. In the future in the future what would you want? Like one from your own website or one from like tony sopranoinvoices.com. I think yeah like eventually you'd want to be able to set it up

with your your own company domain, right? So you could have it sent from the CEO or, you know, the VP of finance or whoever whoever would be like the most likely to uh get someone's attention. Okay. So I may not have even had to have done this because we have that settings page in here where we set our email, right? So what happens if I pause? I can't revert unless I make it. So, we're gonna let the agent go, but might revert it and try it how it was set up. Automate the crown jobs. Use

the same email address. Okay. And do I need to set up? Do any of you have any idea um that enforcer email in resend or does it just kind of have cart blanch? I'm not sure. Well, I'm not sure. I just ask AI. Okay. Um, do I need to set up a specific sender email address and resend.com dashboard or once the DNS is properly configured, can I set the sender address in my apps code. Do you guys ever use the deep research feature increasingly more and more usually on on Perplexity is where I use it.

Um sort of seem to I don't know better. I also only have the $20 a month on on chat GBT. So I think I have like 18 a month or something. Okay, so it looks like we're good. How good are we right now, Billy? There we are. We're very good. I had to remember the test password. Okay, so now we're looking at invoices. And I just want to make sure there's something here. So it says from Billy from enforcer at tony soprano invoices.com. Going to save that. This will be for the automatic nudging. We're gonna

go into Okay, let's see if we can send a reminder. Reminder has been sent. We just take a second to like realize how insane that is that within the last hour you have a functioning app that even if the the email sending capabilities is not perfect. You can log into it and you have seven different, you know, pages. Guys, I didn't think we were going to be able to pull this off. This is like a heist. This is a heist, guys. I can't believe we did this. Wow. Insane. We It's like we spun up a

collections agency with Replet and Resend. Literally, literally two tools. And I I don't even I didn't put a credit card in on resend. I don't even know how their pricing works. Like, it was that easy. I learned about it 15 minutes before we got on this call and I was able to paste the docs into Replet and have it figure it out for me. It's just like this is incredible. This is crazy. Uh so really like all that's missing is that field to put in. I mean I know there's a lot missing that we want

to do, but like get to MVP MVP, we need it to let you put in a link to your invoice, right? And they'll send uh they'll send that link in there so people can actually pay your invoice. Um I want to my clients are not current I could test this on. Do you guys have anyone like any friend clients like that? This wouldn't be crazy to send the next step. I think the next step is we need to find a test case. Um we might have to do another another pod. You know, I'm I'm just

happy we were able to do this. Like to me, this is this is really helpful. I mean, it was a tutorial on how to use rapid replet agent, how to use resend, how to think about marketing ideas and growing your SAS app. So, Billy Nick, thank you. Um, wow, I actually did this like I was like, thanks, you know, Gaba, you know. Yeah. Thank you, Greg. Thank you for uh for having me on. This is uh this is a lot of fun. I'm gonna have to spin up an email list form at tonopranoinvoices.com. I think

you I think you do. I think you need a landing page now, dude. That should be your That should be your personal website. Just for the bit. It just doesn't make any sense. That's good. Wait, I actually this is a tool question that I don't have a good solution for that you guys might. When you're starting a new like app like this and you bought the domain name and you just need something to collect emails, what do you use for that? Is there a tool that does that easily? Do you mean for like a weight

list? Yeah, like a weight list. Um, you could use like Jot Form or something like that. But if you use like a card for a landing page, I think they have something you can connect like air table on the back end. Um, yeah. I don't know if you use something different, Greg. Uh, I mean, framer card, uh, tally.so, type form. Interesting. Interesting, huh? There's another app idea there. Boys, this has been really fun. Uh, I'll include your social links and personal websites uh in the show notes that people can go to. Uh, is there anything

else you want to leave people with? Uh, I would say go make like 50 apps. Just like keep iterating. Don't get stuck on one. Like that's my advice is to if you have an idea, try to make it three different ways and then move on to the next idea and you'll get really good at using all these tools for making apps. That's like my training regimen. Yeah, I think this world is crazy right now. The fact that not only can you spin up an app like we just did in an hour or at least an

MVP, but you can also then go out to all these marketing channels that are completely free and you could test all of these marketing channels and get a weight list before you even touched Replet. So, uh it's an exciting world we're in and uh yeah, thanks for having me on, Greg. You both are legends and I appreciate your time and generosity and uh I'm sure the listeners appreciate it too. So, thanks for coming on the Startup Ideas podcast and until next time, see you later.