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Hey there, freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. And today I’ve got Pat Walls, a guy who had made it really big on YouTube with his starter story. It’s a collection of YouTube videos featuring him flying out to entrepreneurs who built these incredible companies to find out how they did it in person.
Um, anyway. Sad thing happened. YouTube basically wanted to shut him down and I’d watched him get strike after strike and thought that he was gonna be gone, and so did he. And just when he was feeling like it was the end, he decided to have Claude Code, build him a new video platform. And the fricking thing just worked out.
I, I, I didn’t watch him, but I saw on Twitter as he was basically live tweeting his process. Anyway, I asked him how he used Claude code and he said, you wanna see it? And I said, hell yeah. So he did a screen share with me, which is what you’re about to listen to. And he showed me step by step how he did it.
Now, listening to a screen share is not that interesting, right? So why don’t you come over to my new YouTube channel where I’ve got a collection of these types of show and tell videos and see it. All you have to do is go to the next new thing.ai. Slash YouTube. That’s the next new thing.ai/youtube and you’ll see it.
And of course, if you’re someone who just prefers to stick with audio, I think we do a good job describing what’s on the screen. But I’ll let you decide. And if you ever want to come back to YouTube, remember my new YouTube channel, um, it’s the next new thing.ai/youtube and this interview. Like the others in this AI series are presented by Zapier, the AI automation company that I’ve used for so long that I’m literally their first customer.
Alright, let’s get to it.
Pat Walls: Last year we did over 2 million. Then YouTube comes in and says, what to you? They essentially labeled our content as quote unquote dangerous content and my, I realized that my channel could be deleted and I actually wouldn’t even be able to get my videos. And I basically rebuilt a small version of YouTube in an hour, a couple hours.
The early versions of it. We’ll do it from scratch, and you can watch this video or this tutorial here, and you could do it yourself. I’m gonna show you all the prompts. I’m gonna show you everything. Pat Walls is
Andrew Warner: the founder of Starter Story, a platform where founders share how they bootstrapped from zero to a hundred K per month.
Next new thing presented by Zapier, the AI automation company, and he’s got a killer YouTube channel that I’ve been following for a long time. And then he said on X that he was kind of booted off of YouTube and that he was vibe coding a replacement for YouTube. And it looked so beautiful that I wanted to find out how he did.
Don’t you think it looked beautiful? You laughing at me when I say that.
Pat Walls: Well, I appreciate that. I’m not a design expert by any means. I’m just sort of a scrappy programmer that uses, uh, tailwind, uh, design patterns. So nothing special.
Andrew Warner: It looked good and it was smart. It got me hooked into watching a video, and then it said, if you wanna watch more, then you need to enter your contact information.
Like all this stuff that a smart marketer would put into it. But here’s the beauty of it. I watch you do it on Twitter, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You publish and you came out with it. And I wanted to find out how you did it, and you said, Andrew, it’s actually not as hard as people think I can walk people through creating, using, uh, AI tools.
That’s what we’re gonna do here today. Before we get into it, you always ask your people how much revenue they make, how much money are you making? Let’s say with the YouTube channel. Then we talk about the business in general.
Pat Walls: You know, we’re a pretty big channel, uh, in our space, and we probably do 1.5 to 2 million views per month.
Uh, but as far as just the ad sense, that’s the revenue that Google pays you just by showing ads. I think we’re doing somewhere between 10 to $15,000 a month, but really that is just a small portion of our total revenue as a business. YouTube, I see is like one, it’s a, you know. A way that people can find out about Starter story.
Mm-hmm. And then we have our own products, like we have, uh, starter Story Build, which is our education platform, which teaches you how to build, uh, products and apps with ai. And then we also have our Starter Story subscription product, which has our ideas database and things like that. So as a total business, that revenue really only makes up five to 10% of the total revenue of the business.
I’d have to do the exact numbers on it, but, um, meaning
Andrew Warner: you’re 10 to 20 x. Of what you had said earlier.
Pat Walls: Yeah. Uh, may, maybe 10 XI think would be of that. Yeah. 150 K per month. Maybe a little bit. It, or, yeah, maybe a little bit more than that. Last year we did over 2 million. So around there? Yeah, five to 10%, but you know, it’s up and down, but yeah.
Andrew Warner: Okay. But the model is people discover you on. Yeah. TikTok, they discover you on YouTube. They come in and they watch this stuff and then they say, I need an idea. They come in, they subscribe to the product. That helps ’em learn and come up with ideas. Say, I need to know how to build. They come and subscribe to, uh, the service where you teach them how to do it.
That’s the model. And so then YouTube comes in and says, what to you?
Pat Walls: Well, they say that we have dangerous content. I believe they have some sort of automated moderation system, and I know that you, uh, Google as a whole is a very lean business. They like to automate everything. So I think they are going through a project right now over there where they’re trying to figure out how to moderate content in this crazy AI faceless, automated world.
And, um, they essentially labeled our content some of our past content in our library as. Quote unquote dangerous content. Um, and that is a policy that they have on their website of what entails dangerous content. And you know, if you get enough. Warnings or strikes on your channel, they can delete the whole thing.
And then, you know, this whole thing that you built over years and feel like you own can just be obliterated, overnight and vanished.
Andrew Warner: And my understanding is that they probably made a mistake. They’ve undone it. And what they did though was put a fear in you that this could happen. And also excitement in you that, you know what, maybe I could solve it.
And so I watched you say, I’m gonna build, what did you build? Um, what did you build it in? And then what are you gonna show us when you do a screen share?
Pat Walls: Yep. Well, I was, I, we had gotten the, the warnings or the strikes on the channel. It was like, it happened on like a Friday or something like that. And I was sitting and it just like, it just overtook me.
The stress just overtook me. Mm-hmm. I couldn’t think about anything else. I, I was at dinner with my wife and I got this email and then, you know, it just like, oh my God, like the whole business can vanish tomorrow. And it is like this immense, I don’t know, you almost feel like it’s like this, this physical feeling of like, wow.
Like everything I just built could be gone. So I was sitting there that weekend. Going through the, going through the emotions of like, what could happen, what do I need to do? And then I sort of got inspired. One, one piece of it, this rollercoaster ups and downs is I had this up of like, well, I could just rebuild it myself.
And, uh, you know, I have a software engineering background, however, I’m a really, really bad software engineer. So I’m gonna be showing you guys today how we could build, we can build it in just a few minutes. We can rebuild YouTube, but I said screw it. I’m sitting here, I got nothing better to do, and I’m worried that everything is gonna fall apart.
Let’s just. Distract myself by building something cool. And I basically rebuilt a small version of YouTube in an hour, a couple hours, the early versions of it. And I can show you how it looks on the actual website right now. And we’re gonna do a demo, hopefully too, of rebuilding it.
Andrew Warner: Let’s see the finished product first, and then let’s walk through how people are gonna be able to do this quickly by just following what you’re doing.
Pat Walls: Yep. I will show you first what we have. You can see something here that kind of looks like. YouTube, you know, it has a thumbnail, it has views, um, and it has, when it was uploaded, we can filter by how much revenue businesses are making and that sort of thing. I got a little description here and you can even click, uh, on a specific chapter and it’ll jump to that spot.
Yeah, you can go to the transcript and you can see I got this automated transcripts thing going on. This basically costs nothing. There’s a couple little streaming elements that I pay for five bucks a month or something like that, but. I was able to build this in essentially a couple hours. Let’s go into how to do this.
We’ll do it from scratch and you can watch this video or this tutorial here and you could do it yourself. Okay,
Andrew Warner: let’s do
Pat Walls: it. Anyone can just go to code.claude.com to get it, and what you’re want to do is open your terminal. Uh. A terminal is a command line interface that allows you to interface with your com with your computer.
Typically, you click around and be able to do cool stuff, terminal, you type things and it does things for you. Um, you should have terminal on your Mac. I use something called I term two. It’s basically the same thing with the different, uh, skin on it. So, uh, you can sit right here in the terminal. Let’s just make that clean.
I’m gonna, maybe we’ll even make it bigger just to show you what to do. Yep. And we’re gonna use a tool called Claude Code. Um, I believe there’s a free version of it, but I’m a big fan of, uh. I pay, I think a hundred dollars a month or $200 a month for Claude Code does sound like a lot of money, but when you realize what it can do, it can replace the work of developers, designers, and an entire team of people for a hundred bucks a month.
And you can build anything you want pretty much. I think that’s probably worth it, but I think there’s a free version you can try. I’m not gonna go through the process of installing it because it’s already installed on my computer, so I’m just gonna go through the process this
Andrew Warner: though. But before you do anything else, hit, I think it’s command and then the plus sign a couple of times.
Then we’ll see the font a lot bigger.
Pat Walls: Oh yeah, absolutely. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Genius. Great. Am I supposed to type Claude? I just can’t remember what to actually type. So let’s go to Google and let’s search that. Let’s say like, uh, I don’t know. Uh, let’s go to, yeah. How to use Claude. Code, um, install the CLI.
And this is, this is what programmers do. And like, uh, some people think like, oh, you, you’re such a genius ’cause you’re a programmer now you just Google stuff and now AI will even give you more of the answer. So I’m using the AI overview here and I’m trying to see like, okay, how do I actually start it? I think you just type Claude to start right.
Okay, there’s this one thing that I like to do that I would not recommend anyone watching this do, but I’m gonna go to the AI mode here and um, ask it about one feature that I know I like to use called, uh, dangerous Skip of Permissions. This is just gonna make things go faster for us. ’cause
Andrew Warner: Claude likes to keep asking you, can I do this?
And then can I do that? Can I do this? Can I do that? Yeah. Right, right.
Pat Walls: So I, anyone watching this, I’m not, uh, endorsing to use that unless you know what you’re doing. You don’t have to use it, but we’ll use it just to be faster so I can sort of talk as I go. Fair? I think that’s right. Cool. So I’m just gonna paste that right there.
And it should start. Okay, so now I have Claude Code open here. I can type things in here and basically it will create apps for me. It’ll create code for me. So we’re gonna create this YouTube thing. The first thing that I’m gonna do is I’m just going to create a folder that will enclose all of my, uh, well, I have my app in it, so, uh, I’m just gonna say, Hey.
In my code directory, this is a spot and I can show you here just so that everything makes perfect sense. Move this over.
Um, in my directory I have here I have starter story and a couple other random apps that I’ve built. I’m gonna say, Hey. Can you create a new folder called, what are we gonna call our app? Um, F YouTube. F YouTube, FU, YouTube. Uh, let’s just have a try that This is like the most basic thing. Let’s just, you could just ask it something just like chat GPT, or you could have it do something basic on your computer.
This is cool because it will do anything you essentially want. This is kind of just one of the crazy ideas of ai. It could take over your computer and do stuff. So now we got F YouTube in there. So let’s actually. What’s that? Fun? YouTube, right? Fun YouTube. Yeah. We’re gonna call it fun. YouTube. Um, let’s, um, actually start the app.
And this is actually one thing that maybe is a little inside baseball on. One thing I recommend if you’re new to AI coding is to use a proven framework that real coders use that is, uh. It has a lot of documentation online so that when you ask it to do things, it’s gonna do it in its little opinionated way, uh, which will just make your life easier.
So when you ask it, can you add this feature, or can you add, can you fix this bug? It’s gonna be looking at all the millions of documentation and code online and fix it in an efficient way. So there’s a, uh, something called uh, NEXT js, which is just a framework. I don’t even use it for myself, but I wanted to prove that anybody can do this.
So we’ll use that one. It’s very popular and we’ll, we’ll use that. Say, I’m gonna say I want to build a simple app with next js. Can you put it in that directory for me? And create a basic app and then start it up. So I have no idea if this is gonna work. Um, but if it does, it just shows how primal your prompts can really be.
Like I, I did have that little inside baseball in the next JS thing, but other than that, I just really told it to just create an app.
Andrew Warner: Essentially what it does is it gives you the framework for the front end design and then also for how all the data is gonna be stored. Yeah, yeah. So you don’t have to, you don’t have to make those decisions
Pat Walls: for it.
Yeah. Okay. Exactly. Think of it like thousands and thousands of programmers have like argued and Right, uh, updated code and like made it perfect so that it’s really easy to create apps. You’re basically like channeling all that. Work and effort that they put into these open source platforms. And you’re like standing on the shoulders of giants, as I like to say.
: Yeah.
Pat Walls: So it’ll make your life easier. You don’t even need to know why. Just trust me bro. Uh, okay, so it started the server here. Your next JS app is ready and it started the server. So let’s go and actually, uh, try it here. It’s gonna do local host 3001. Here we go. This is our app. It just says Next Js Uh, you know, I could deploy it.
Probably, we probably won’t do that in this one ’cause I don’t have, uh, Versal, but, um mm-hmm. You could, that, that part’s easy. Let’s now. Sometimes thinking like you could just ask it like, oh, let’s just go recreate YouTube. I think that’s probably the wrong way. I think maybe in like a year it’ll be able to do that, but right now you still gotta kind of approach it like a programmer.
And my sort of unique maybe skill that I can share is that I’ve been a programmer, a bad programmer, so I kind of know how to think a little bit, but also. I build, you know, businesses. So I sort of have that sort of, some of those trade offs there of how to do that. So let’s, one thing, one cool, uh, thing you can do is what I would do here is I’m just thinking of what do I want like to be the first part of my app.
And when I think about that, I go, well, I actually want the YouTube show page, like just the video page. I want to, that’s gonna be the core thing, and most people are gonna be watching a video. So that’s where I want to start. One feature. One page, not the whole app, not all the features, one feature, one page.
That’s it. So what you can do is, what I would do is I would go to YouTube, I would go to, you want to go to Mixergy or you wanna do something? Starter story. Uh, let’s go to yours. Okay? Let’s go to starter story. Let, and let’s go to our most recent video. Why not? And what I’m gonna do here is maybe I’ll zoom out a little bit on the page.
No, that didn’t even work. I’m just going to take a screenshot and I’m gonna use command control shift four. That’s a little inside baseball too. And I’m gonna copy the UI and that’s it. And if I do a command, if I’m on a Mac and I do a command control shift four, I think that’s what it is. I can paste it here.
Mm-hmm. And so I have to do Control V and you can see image number one is there, and I’m gonna say like, here is the YouTube interface. I want you to recreate this on the page. Uh, but instead of Pixel Perfect, do it with placeholder components. So I can see the design and then one by one add the features I want, like video embed and you know, recommended videos or whatever.
This is, I’m trying to like approach it, like I’m almost like drawing it on a piece of paper, like I had a piece of paper in front of me and I’m drawing the boxes.
Andrew Warner: I like the logic of it. I like watching how you think this through. Essentially what you’re saying is gimme all the elements and just kind of name them and let me fill ’em in with what I want.
Yep,
Pat Walls: exactly. Because I don’t want it to recreate YouTube. Exactly. I might wanna change one thing, right? I may want to put something cool on the right side sidebar instead of recommended videos, and I like to take things step by step. I don’t want it to do it all for me. I like to sort of like. Build and iterate as I go.
Right? And I think that’s, that’s how someone who’s building like a real product will, will do things. Um, but there’s no right or wrong way to do it. I think this way is like a fun way to be a little intentional about how you build it.
So it’s gonna take a little time here.
Andrew Warner: So what you’re probably doing is just gonna keep going back and forth between the browser to see what it made and the, the terminal to see what you’re asking for.
Pat Walls: I usually do like two screens, so I use like the, the Mac spaces, so I’ll go back and forth. So, yeah. Ah, yeah, I’ve noticed you do that.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Pat Walls: That’s what some people do. Uh, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of ways that people do it, but that it’s already done here. So what I’m doing here, as you can see, is I’m just going back and forth between terminal and here, so you can even see it behind. Mm-hmm. So let’s go back to our app and let’s reload and see what happened.
So, there it is. There it is. That’s pretty good. Yeah. I thought it was going to do something a little bit more. Um, you never know what you’re gonna get with ai. I thought it was gonna do something a little bit more, uh, like templates. Placeholders. Yes. Placeholders. But it didn’t do that. But it doesn’t look bad, right?
Like, um. No, nothing works. Obviously I can play this. Nothing actually works. I click this and, but it created like what I like about this, even though it didn’t do exactly what I wanted, the search is there, but nothing actually works when you search it. So we’re gonna go through, we’re gonna build these features as long as much time as we have today, and actually build, build out maybe one or two things or however long you want to go for.
Andrew Warner: Let’s pick a couple of things to do and, and get rid of the rest. But before you even do, do that. Yep. Take me into Finder and just see what it actually put in there. Yeah. Because essentially what it’s doing is it’s listening to your requests and in that folder that you did earlier, it’s putting in all the um, yep, yep.
All the files that do that.
Pat Walls: What I said earlier, uh, is that I didn’t wanna look at any code like I think you have to, I, I, I basically said like, we’re not even gonna look at code. Like obviously it’s showing code here, but I’m not actually looking at and editing code. So yes, it is putting everything typically.
It is not the way that I would recommend doing things. Right. But I just wanna show you that you don’t need to look at code to do this. But yes. If you go here and you look at all these packages and all this code, it’s editing all these code files. Mm-hmm. And if you’re building something truly, you want to be able to look at the files and edit them for this demo.
Mm-hmm. Um, I, I wanna prove that you don’t need to do it. You don’t need to be able to read code. But yes. If you were to go in here and you were to go too. See, I don’t even know that much about how, um, next JS works. You could see that. Oh, I didn’t
Andrew Warner: mean for you to have to open that up, but yes. I see.
Pat Walls: Yeah, you, yeah.
It’s created all those files and it’s editing all those files. Every time I tell it to do something, it’s making edits. Mm-hmm. And making changes. And then the images are being put into the folders for you. Uh, the images, I’m not sure how the images work specifically for this app. Um, it probably did find
Andrew Warner: her for a second and just take
Pat Walls: a look at where the images are.
Yeah. Yep. Um, but I could prompt it and say, Hey, use, uh, you know, use an image here and you can give it to it and you can tell it. Okay. All right. Yeah. I say Use, go find Andrew from Mixer G’S face online. It’ll search for that. And it can put your, your face right in there if you wanted to, you know, it could do anything, which is cool.
Andrew Warner: Have, um, do you have a sense of what you wanna do next, or do you want me to suggest something for what this page could look like? Sure.
Pat Walls: I mean, if you want, we can actually put the video in there to show that, you know, like, let’s, the most important thing about YouTube is having an actual video that is playing, right?
Because right now there’s no video, it’s just a placeholder, which is cool. So if you think about this as like a canvas, this is our canvas. Let’s go and work on this part of the canvas right here, which is the video. And once that works, um, then we can do another. Then maybe you can tell me another feature to add.
Okay. Let’s do it. Okay, so here’s another inside baseball tip, is that, yeah, we could tell it to go and rebuild streaming and quality and compression and encoding and all these things, but no, when you look at any successful app that use something called a wrapper, and whether it’s an AI app that’s using.
Uh, chat, GPT as a wrapper, like Claude code is technically a wrapper for an LLM. We wanna use a wrapper for streaming. So there’s an app that we use called uh bunny.net, and think of it as like AWS for YouTube. Kind of. Okay. Uh, it’s a place that’s gonna host our videos, it’s gonna manage streaming, it’s gonna manage compression, and we’re gonna interface with it through an API and that’s where everything will host.
So we don’t have to handle that nasty stuff that
: mm-hmm.
Pat Walls: We’re, we’re trying to operate a business. That’s what we’re gonna do. So, um, you could ask it to go and rebuild YouTube, you know, at the, at the bare metal, but you don’t wanna do that. So let’s, let’s prompt it. Let’s say, okay. Okay. I want to get the video.
Working and I am using bunny.net for streaming. Can you go online and, uh, see how, maybe I wanna say like, just go online and check out the documentation
: mm-hmm.
Pat Walls: For this, and then implement, uh, a video. Uh. And then I would say like, get the video player working with these credentials. And just to save us time for this demo, I have my bunny credentials right here.
Um, this is like how it, you know, the keys for the API and stuff like that.
Andrew Warner: Do you need me to black that out before we publish?
Pat Walls: No, it should be fine. I’ll let you know. Um, okay. I can, I should be able to just delete it and then it’s totally fine. But I will let you know that. Then, uh, one quick thing I’m gonna also have it do is just take the, um, an example video that I have here, um, please.
Please use this video for the, uh, demo. Let’s see if this works. That’s pretty, kinda not overly specific on how to do it. I just said figure it out and let’s see if it figures out. This one might take a little bit of time.
Andrew Warner: Are you typing usually or do you do audio
Pat Walls: dictation? You know, I. Just heard about this awesome tool called, I typically type when I’m programming.
: Mm-hmm.
Pat Walls: Um, but I just heard about this awesome tool called, I think it was called Whisper Notes or something like that. I’m not sure the exact name because I don’t like the, there’s so many dictation on Mac. I don’t think it’s very good. It sucks.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. You know what I’ve been using, uh, I had to look it up.
Voice Inc. Yeah. Because it’s still all run on my desktop. It’s super fast. And because it’s on my desktop, they just charge me once and never again. It’s not a subscription.
Pat Walls: Right,
Andrew Warner: right. But I, yeah, much
Pat Walls: fast. And I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been hearing about a couple that are good. Um, I’m gonna get into that soon. I use dictation all the time, just not necessarily for programming, but mm-hmm.
I should. Okay. It says it’s already done, so that was pretty fast. Let’s take a look. Let’s see. And it works. There it is. Yeah, it works. Right? Um, so that was way easier than I thought. Obviously, I, I had already done some of the work, like getting the keys ready and everything, but, um, that’s the power of using, uh, a wrapper or, you know, like a third party, API, you, you’ll use it for lots of things.
Like just to even have login working for your app. A lot of people use, uh, something called Firebase. Uh, so. That’s a little kind of inside baseball for anytime you’re building stuff, don’t reinvent the wheel.
Andrew Warner: How do you find all these? How do you know that? Obviously we see everyone using Firebase, but if you are looking for video provider, I never heard of bunny.net.
If you’re looking for something else, how do you find all these tools? Right.
Pat Walls: Well, uh, I think LLMs are pretty good. I was like going, I asked Twitter because I didn’t really know a whole lot about this space, and then I had a few options and I ran those through LLMs and I, I said like, what do you think I should use based on like my preferences?
I said like, I don’t really want to have to deal with Yeah. And coding and, and it was like, you should use Bunny. And I, although I didn’t really like the, how their website looked, it kind of turned me off a little bit. I trusted the LLM there, and I’m like very happy with that decision now because obviously it worked so good.
So I, I try to trust AI more than my own vibe sometimes.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. It’s weird when I never, when I don’t hear of a site and still on the bottom of their site, their copyright is out of date. They haven’t changed it yet. It makes me wonder, are they really paying attention to the site, but it’s working for you.
Okay, I get it. Why don’t we do this? Do you wanna just eliminate everything from the page except maybe a box on the right? I don’t know if it’ll do a transcription service, but how about chapters or is there something else that we wanna do? Yeah, yeah, we could try
Pat Walls: chapters. That could be fun. Let’s do it.
All right. Where do you wanna put the chapters?
Andrew Warner: How about where on the right side, like you did it in place of, uh, the,
Pat Walls: the recommended videos. The, the recommended videos. Okay. So yeah, this would be kind of a cool way to show it. I’m gonna take another screenshot again and just remind the app, Hey, this is what it looks like, because sometimes these apps, they, they’re only seeing code, they’re not seeing visuals, so, mm-hmm.
I’m gonna take a screenshot here and I’m gonna say, Hey. Here’s what it looks like right now. Great job. Sometimes say nice things to help. You’re very
Andrew Warner: kind to it. You’ve said, please, multiple times you’re showing appreciation. You’re nicer than I
Pat Walls: am to people in my life. I think that Sam Altman one time said that even if you add a nice little thing at the end, it costs them all this.
They’re spending billions just because people are being nice. Random, but uh, okay. Um. Let’s talk about the right sidebar. I don’t want recommended videos. I want, uh, chapter timestamps. And now here, here’s the thing you also have to think about too, is like, well, I don’t actually have the timestamps and I probably don’t want it to like go and like transcribe the video and find them.
’cause that would just take too long. I’m just gonna, mm-hmm. Because I just wanna get it working first. I’m gonna say just to make them up. Yeah, just make them up. Say, uh, I don’t have the actual, uh, chapters on me right now, so just make them up for this, uh, you know, for this exercise. And so we can. Make them look nice before, uh, what’s it called?
We figure out state, state meaning database. Okay. And maybe another thing we can do too is like, let’s, let’s actually, what, what do we want our chapters to look like? We don’t really know. So let’s go and just go to google.com and search. Um, inspiration. For timestamp chapters. This is kind of a cool thing you can do.
If you want to get inspiration, you’re not good at design, let’s go to images. Um, sometimes they’ll have like something like Dribble or something like that. I’m not finding like super good ones here. Timestamp chapters, YouTube, dribble. Um, if you see
Andrew Warner: anything sticks out to you, the one second from the left is interesting because it’s so visual.
Why not? We can try something.
Pat Walls: Let’s get a little creative with it and let’s say, okay, can you make it look cool like this? Yeah, why not? Let’s try it. Um, I want,
Andrew Warner: how about put it, how about put it underneath the video and then expand the video all the way to the right, so now people can see, okay, the times timestamps in a new way.
Okay, we’re just playing around here. I like this.
Pat Walls: Okay, so let’s go and start over here and let’s say. Let’s talk about the right sidebar. Remove it. Sorry, I’m, it’s very slow here.
So I would probably break that into two things, just to be simple, uh, and make the video full screen. And what’s cool is that’s gonna go. But what’s cool about Claude Code is that while that’s going, I’m pretty confident it’s gonna be able to do that. It’s very sort of simple. Mm-hmm. Um, now I can start kind of prompting it.
What I want it to do next, even though it’s already working for me, and this is when you start getting fast with ai. Now I, and sometimes people have multiple CLO codes open and they’re doing like five things at the same time, but we’ll keep it simple. Now I want to add a cool edit timeline thing. Uh, below the video where the description
is that flows, that shows you dynamically where the video is, the. I want you to do this with chapters, make up the chapters, uh, for, um, for our exercise before I hit submit on that, that, that something could go wrong there, but that’s okay. I, I want something to go wrong. Uh, so we can debug it as we go. So now it’s full screen that already happened.
Boom. So we’re good on that. Looks good. And then I gotta make sure that I actually. Put in my photo that I have from, um, where was that again?
Andrew Warner: The YouTube inspiration. Might have been in a different browser window. Did you have it? Oh yeah, maybe
Pat Walls: it was here. Oh yeah, yeah. There you go. So I’m going to, I just, the way I do things is this little screenshot thing.
Just gotten good at that. So I’ll put that in there and I do my thing there. Let’s see
Andrew Warner: what happens. And when you are working, you are not looking at the code at all. As a developer, even you’re someone who just says, I’ve got it. It’s good.
Pat Walls: For the purposes of this, uh, demo I wanted to show you without having to look at code.
What I usually do is before when I finish a feature, I do a small thing at a time. Mm-hmm. I’ll just do a quick look at the, the code changes. Mm-hmm. As like, almost like a reviewer, like I’m the senior engineer who’s just making sure I didn’t do something really dumb that breaks, you know, checkout or something like that.
And, um, or is gonna take my app down, but. I don’t look V with a lot of scrutiny at it. And here in this example, I’m not looking at with any scrutiny. Yeah. I’m just trusting that it works. So I imagine in a year I may not even look at anything at all, but as of now, I just still have that little 1%. I just gotta check.
So, yeah.
Andrew Warner: Man, I’m picturing you that weekend just going from insane low, my business going down to this is so fun. Yeah. It’s so creative. This is like being a painter, getting to paint whatever you want with. Exactly.
Pat Walls: That’s what’s cool. I’ve, I’ve heard about that analogy before is like now with ai, like I don’t have to deal with writing.
All this JavaScript that I just did, like look at all this JavaScript here. I hate this stuff right now. I’m like a painter and it just like, I can kind of just say what I want, right? And I know it’s gonna do. So look, it’s doing all this stuff right here. We’re not gonna go over what that does because it doesn’t matter.
But it’s running all these like click events and all this stuff. So let’s see what it created. Um, I hate doing that stuff ’cause I’m not like an engineer’s engineer. I’m more of like a product builder. So this stuff I, I just. It’s amazing when it can do it for you. So let’s go back to, uh, our app and reload.
Whoa, whoa. Yeah. That looks pretty cool, right? Yeah. Let’s see if it actually works by pressing play.
Wow, that’s cool. It doesn’t actually work with like, I want to make, it doesn’t skip to it. Okay, but, so let’s fix that. I say, okay. Wow, that worked pretty good. I gotta tell, I gotta tell it. Only issue I have
Andrew Warner: that always.
Pat Walls: Is the timeline doesn’t, uh, change when I update the scrubber of the YouTube, or sorry, the, um, the bunny video and vice versa.
So Cool. So I know like, you know, you get 95% of the way there and there’s usually small bugs to fix to get that final 5%. That’s just how. Product development works. Um. But that looks pretty cool. I mean, the fact that it came up with that with like a very, yeah,
Andrew Warner: it’s not bad, right? What I didn’t like about it is it looked a lot like a timeline on a video editor with multiple tracks.
And I said that’s confusing, but I do like the visual of what’s where. Um, and it took the best of it and it ignored the part that didn’t really relate here, right? It didn’t have
Pat Walls: different tracks. It made some decisions and it said, Hey, I don’t wanna show. Right. You know, an editor, you see multiple things.
It put it all on one line and it kinda, it kind of is cool ’cause it’s like the, the, you know, the, the timeline of a, of building a business. And that is something that YouTube would never do because it’s, you know, it’s not that specific to entrepreneurship. But, um, that’s pretty cool. Hopefully it’ll fix the bug, but yeah.
Andrew Warner: All right, I’m getting it now. I’m getting the way that you are feeling. How you, how it took you just a few days to get this going, how it gave you this sense of ownership. I also have to keep enforcing that. It wasn’t just dumb creation. What I loved about it was the thought. The marketing thought that you knew that there would be a period where people want taste, that you knew that there would be a next step and a next step after that.
It’s so easy to get carried away with. This is so cool. I wanna show it to people that you forget. It’s also a business that I need people to interact with properly and I need to get to the next step. And I love that you did that and you kept thinking that through. I wish that there was a way to inject more of that into, into people, frankly, even into me.
I like
Pat Walls: seeing that. Well, I mean, you can build anything you want now, you know, I’m sure I saw on, I think on X, that you had just built like a note taking app. Is that right?
Andrew Warner: I’m such love with this note taking app because I just didn’t think to create it. There’s so many note taking apps and suddenly I said I’m just gonna do it and within 15 minutes I had my ideal note.
Yeah. Notepad, it’s such a dream.
Pat Walls: Yep. Yep. I don’t know what’s gonna happen with software, uh, because of this, because anybody can sort of code up something that’s super customized to them and Okay. Let’s take a look at where we are. Okay. Let’s check. Whoa, we got a bug? Nope, it works. Okay. Let’s see. Could play.
Didn’t work. Oh man. I wonder why. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be able to show another inside baseball, um, thing that I think is really cool that you might like. Okay. So for this one, I’m gonna do something called, um, playwright. So name doesn’t matter. But basically there’s another cool thing about AI is that you can use AI to do the testing for you.
So when there’s something going on like this that’s like. Kind of hard, it’s like a really like kind of deep bug. Mm-hmm. You can actually ask it and say, Hey, that didn’t work. Um, I want you to actually spin up MCP playwright, just if you’re watching this, you can do something similar using those, uh, thing.
Mm-hmm. And pull up a browser and debug the issue.
Until it’s fixed. And when I was preparing for this demo, this didn’t come up, so let’s hope it works. But basically what it should do is it should pull up another browser with AI and start looking at things around and clicking on buttons and diagnosing the bug until it fixes it. So not only. Can AI write your code for you?
It can also do your testing for you, which is again, if AI is, the future of AI is in marketing, it’s in building, it’s also in user testing, right? I use this kind of thing all the time. I use a different, uh, way to build my app. So I’m hoping this is gonna work right now, but it’s one of those things that if you’re not like a big coder, like this can be a huge, um, hack, not hack, but this could be a huge, uh.
Help for debugging crappy issues like this. So it’s doing its thing right now, it’s trying to figure out how to run this sort of advanced playwright software, which basically spins up a browser and starts clicking around. Mm-hmm. So it might take a second there, but if I already had it installed, it’d probably be faster.
Andrew Warner: While that’s working, what else are you doing on a personal
Pat Walls: level with this? It’s not necessarily personal, but one thing that I was. Like able to do with AI that I thought was amazing was build a, a command center for our business. Mm-hmm. So I have one dashboard that all me and my team can look at that integrates notion where we have a bunch of stuff that we, uh, save it integrates, Stripe, integrates analytics, and it puts it all in one place.
Andrew Warner: Okay. Um, it’s continuing to do this. Well, that’s the cool thing about Claude Code is that it could go forever. Um, do you wanna see if it’s got anywhere? It’s been, it’s been refreshing. It.
Pat Walls: Yeah, let’s see if it worked. Maybe it’s just still doing its testing thing. It works. It works. Look at that.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. Yeah, there you go.
How about we do this, um, let’s just clean up this page a little bit and remove some of the extra features that we have on the page and then publish it for the world.
Pat Walls: Cool. So what I would do is I would just remind Claude code, what is there, ’cause while it can look at the code, sometimes it’s nice to give it a little, uh, a little visual of what’s there.
So I’m gonna, I’m gonna take a screenshot right here. And I’m going to paste it in there just like we showed a couple times already, and let’s just ask it. Uh, I’m gonna say I need you to remove a couple things that don’t work. Uh, so let’s say we’re, we’re gonna remove search, right?
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Pat Walls: What else do we wanna remove?
Andrew Warner: Uh, hamburger menu. And let’s even get all the. The comments from below outta there. Remove comments and the create button and the stuff to the right of that. I guess that’s the account create button.
Pat Walls: Um. Account stuff on top right. Again, you can just kind of say like, pretty, you could really put some vibes in there.
Like, you don’t have to be too specific. It’ll probably get it. Okay. Um, we got the comments outta there. Should we get all this outta there?
Andrew Warner: Sure. Um, is there a description in there? Sure. Let’s get, let’s get rid of it all. Let’s just have something that’s super simple.
Pat Walls: And title and buttons and description below video.
Okay, let’s just try it, see what happens.
So, um, that should be pretty fast. I think that’ll be pretty fast and we can always add it back later ’cause you don’t wanna have some fake stuff.
Andrew Warner: I see it doing
Pat Walls: it. So it says it’s done here. Let’s reload. And it
Andrew Warner: looking good?
Pat Walls: Yeah. Do you like
Andrew Warner: that? Yeah, I do. I love it. Let’s publish. Cool.
Pat Walls: Okay, let’s ask it again.
Again, I don’t know anything about Versel. Um, I’m a Rails guy, so it’s totally different and I’m doing this from scratch. Basically. I have a Versel account signed up, but that’s it. So I’m just gonna say I have no idea what I’m doing. Uh, but I want to deploy to cel. Uh, what do you need to do that? And can you help me?
Let’s try it. Because right now I know they’re probably gonna need some sort of information like what’s my account? And something like that. So I want to just keep it open and make sure that I don’t put the cart before the horse in terms of the deploy. Mm-hmm. I can help you deploy to Versel. Let me check a few things.
Now it’s running some stuff. Let’s see, build work. So it’s doing a build, which is cool. That’s what typically has to happen to get it up into production, but you wouldn’t need to know that anyways. But that’s a good sign. This is where a lot of things can go wrong,
Andrew Warner: Uhhuh,
Pat Walls: uh, before the days of ai, you know, you get these weird errors, like, here we go, there’s an error right there.
But what’s amazing about clog code is it can see the error and then fix the error, and you never have to Google it at all. So now it’s asking me to log in, so let’s try that. It should hopefully pop up. Some sort of, it needs to authorize to my Versa accounts. Let’s see.
I’m just gonna turn off this cloud code. You were doing good.
Andrew Warner: And you do a lot of this, you just say, I don’t know. I’m not sure. You teach me, you tell me what to do.
Pat Walls: Even before, uh, ai, we were, I was a software engineer and we were just Googling stuff. You know, you would go on Stack Overflow and you’d say, you just ask kind of like a dumb person, like, how does this work?
And that’s, that’s kind of the ethos of the program or, or the builder really is just mm-hmm. Help me. I don’t, I don’t even know what I’m doing. It’s almost like a humbleness of like. But not, I think some of the best programmers are very, like, they’re not, you know, they’re not smart asses. They’re, they’re humble, uh, folks.
So
Andrew Warner: I’m surprised that it’s taking this long for something that seems so basic, you know?
Pat Walls: Yeah. Oh, sorry. It says press enter. I wasn’t even reading. Uh, it’s actually telling me something here saying press enter to open the browser. So, okay. So it was waiting for me, but it didn’t really gimme a nice notification.
Sorry about that. So it should have worked. I may try to interrupt cloud code here and say like, Hey, you’re kind of screwing up here.
: Mm-hmm.
Pat Walls: I think I need to log in and off to Vercel, but you are just hanging. Doing nothing. Let’s see what happens if I say that
because what you, what it’s doing here is, while Claude is Tech, Claude Code is technically running, uh, and trying to figure things out, you can send like an additional message like this to give it a little, maybe a little bit of a boost or a little extra context. If you know, just like someone who seems like they’re spinning their wheels, maybe give ’em a little nudge
: in,
Pat Walls: in the right direction and sometimes it can help.
So let’s see. Sometimes it can be a little slow here.
Okay. I think it’s making some sort of progress. I hope, uh, it made some moves here. There we go. You need to authenticate in your browser. Go to this URL. Boom. I think we’re gonna get it. So I’m gonna go plug this in here and it, it’s asking me for a code. This is okay to show. Authorization successful. Yeah.
It’s just like a, you know, an SMS code? Yep. Just temporary. Okay. I think we’re making progress here.
Andrew Warner: I think so too. It’s
Pat Walls: percolating. Yeah. It always says these like random, uh mm-hmm. Adverbs, I dunno if that’s the right word, but you’re logged in now. Let me deploy your app. So they’re deploying now and I think deploys are pretty fast on something like Versal and Next Js.
So. Let’s see if it’s fast. And I wanna tell you that cursor or really Claude code, when it first came out, it was nothing like this. I mean, it was, it was very promising when it first came out. I’ve watched it, it’s almost been a year, I think, since Claude Code came out and it just gets better and better and better.
The models get better and then the reasoning gets better too, and I just don’t even know where it’s gonna be. There’s probably be some sort of new tool in a year from now, but. It’s pretty amazing to see how fast it’s gone.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. It is like a junior developer who’s really learning quickly. Yeah, and you don’t have to give it as much context.
You don’t have to be more, you don’t have to be as specific with it.
Pat Walls: Yep. Okay. It says it’s done and it’s even nicely told us where to find the app, so let’s not, we can put our own domain on it. That would be, yep. That’s easy within the platform. But this is it right here. This
Andrew Warner: is it. It’s up and running.
Pat Walls: Yep. There you go.
Andrew Warner: Holy smokes it. That is super fast.
Pat Walls: Yep. Yep. And there you go. Anybody that’s watching this can go visit this website and, uh, check out that. What is it? It’s F YouTube
Andrew Warner: dash flax. Versal app. Yep. Yep. Hell yeah. And, um, wow. We, yep. Pat, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for taking us through step by step how to get an app created, published to the internet and used by people.
Congratulations on what you’ve done with yours. Thank you. Well, I hope that you can, uh, do something even cooler. What I would like to do is just create a lot of little playful things that I need. You’re gonna continue to do this even though you’re back on YouTube, right? Yeah. Yep. Because,
Pat Walls: so I think about it differently now.
I, when I was. I thought about before, before I got the strikes, I thought about YouTube as our platform, our, our place where the original content is hosted. And I just never even thought that it could be taken down. And now there’s this concept called the hub and spoke, which is you have your hub and then there’s spokes, there’s, you know, LinkedIn is a spoke and um, maybe your newsletter is a spoke and your YouTube is a spoke and whatever.
I used to think of YouTube as the hub. And then everything else was a spoke. Even my website was bespoke because YouTube was so powerful and that’s where, yeah, most of the people were. After this happened and my, I realized that my channel could be deleted and I actually wouldn’t even be able to get my videos.
Once it happened, once we got the first warnings, I told someone on my team, download every single video and just make sure that doesn’t happen. And then now how I think about it is that this is the hub and YouTube is a spoke. Yeah, that would be a really bad spoke to lose, but it will not kill the business.
At the end of the day. We’re creating content that a lot of people like, they will come, not everyone will come over. But a lot of people will come over and still want to consume this content. So that, that’s, that’s the mindset shift that I had.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm. Um, do you think that you will then link people from an ex post, a LinkedIn post, et cetera, into here to your site?
Yeah.
Pat Walls: Already doing that. Will you, can, you can go check out my, um, my, my Twitter and I, we will, uh, reply. I didn’t even notice. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve, we just started doing it. We don’t send people to the YouTube anymore. We send people to here. Which I like more because I’d rather have them on my site, you know, that could potentially be useful for retargeting.
: Yeah,
Pat Walls: it could be. Obviously we have like a little, um, login wall, so you can watch like two minutes, but then if you wanna mm-hmm. You log in so I can do more customized stuff like that. And as you said, yeah. That, that’s now the hub, right. So. Yeah.
Andrew Warner: All right. And you, you know what? At this point, you’ve built enough of a reputation on YouTube.
YouTube is sending you enough people. You’ve got the design and the aesthetic, right, that you don’t need every last viewer on there. You now need to get them into your network. I’m assuming you’re building your email list now a lot faster. Yep. Yep. Yep. Alright. The website is the place that we’re gonna send people to is starters story.com.
Yep. All right, brother. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone. And if you’re listening to this and you have any ideas, if you of who I should be talking to, interviews I should be doing, hit me up, let me know. Bye everyone.
