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Josh Mohrer: I’m in. I’m in about 7 million a rrr,
Andrew Warner: roughly like where’s profit right now?
Josh Mohrer: Can I keep three? Or something like that.
Andrew Warner: How many people on the team,
Josh Mohrer: you’re talking to the whole team,
Andrew Warner: what’s your process and how are you using Claude Code now?
Josh Mohrer: Hey, Claude Code, you see that feature in the code over there? Write the document about it and put it on intercom.
I love Claude code. I love it.
Andrew Warner: Hey everyone. Um, I’ve got a problem here. I’m doing a set of interviews with entrepreneurs about how to build AI companies, and truthfully, I don’t see that there are a lot of role models. Most people are just in the look at what I can build mode. Very few are in, look at what I can build, and a lot of people are buying it.
Now, let’s sit in for an hour and talk about how we got here so that the rest of the people who are listening can get there. Well, today I’ve got one of the few examples of what’s possible, and I wanna learn from him. Josh Moore created Wave ai. An audio note taking app, it basically records what you say in meetings or just directly on your phone to yourself.
Um, and when I say meetings, I mean in person or off or offline and, and even on phone calls. And I wanna understand how he built it to where it is. The next
Josh Mohrer: new thing presented by Zapier, the AI automation
Andrew Warner: company. Josh, where is it now? What’s the revenue today?
Josh Mohrer: That’s what you’re opening with. How about Yes.
You gotta butter me up a little bit.
Andrew Warner: I, I complimented you on your shirt style before we got started. That’s it.
Josh Mohrer: I know, I know that’s true. Well, so I’m in, I’m in about 7 million a r. Um, I’ve been, I’ve been flat there for a few months, but, uh, it adds a very healthy user base. Um, yeah, and I’d love to tell you more about it.
Andrew Warner: You’ve always said, or you’ve said for a long time that it’s profitable. How profitable and how many people on the team and what goes into putting this together?
Josh Mohrer: You’re talking to the whole team. Um, there have been some people that have come in and out over the course of the now three years to help with some higher end engineering work, some of the marketing stuff.
But by and large, I’ve done all the engineering. I do all the support. If you chat in app with support, it’s me. Um, yeah, it’s a bit of a, like what’s the natural limit of what I can do alone? And that’s in many ways always is sort of like how I am. That’s always been the way I am, but AI has just kind of supercharged that it’s allowed me to lean into my worst instincts about just sort of doing it all myself, um, which is kind of my natural way.
Andrew Warner: I’m surprised because you, you, you had worked at Uber and you’d worked so well with so many other people. You don’t seem like someone who works alone.
Josh Mohrer: I joined Uber at the end of 2011 as the New York. General manager, you know, when the company is small, you can have an outsized impact. And I was always attracted to that sort of thing.
Basically, I found myself at the end of 2022 without a job sort of in like mini retirement. Um, and Chachi BT rolled out and obviously everyone was there and tried it out and like had their mind blown. But for me the, my first instinct was like, this can help me. Sort of achieved a goal of mine, which was to become an engineer.
I really felt like even in those days before it, like at Uber and more so in the startups before that, I feel like the engineers kind of had all the power, and that’ll sound funny because they typically don’t within an organization, but if you’re selling something that is inter, you know, that’s on the internet, the people that do the engineering work are building the thing that the users use, that people see.
So I can just, you know, remember like having ideas, but being limited in what I could do with them because I, it would require engineers to kind of step in and do it at Levels, which was a health tech startup that I was part of for a couple years. Most, like basically the thing I did right before this. Um, also, you know, like an early stage thing and to get things done, I had to learn React Native and by Learn React native, I mean like become basically be able to like change text and react native, like very minor things.
But that was how I dipped my foot in like, oh, this is, this is kind of fun. You know, like I mentioned, I studied math. I’m in. I’m an, I’m like an analytical guy, so none of this stuff is super foreign, but I never made software that other people used. And so Chachi, BT kind of opened the door of like, oh, you know, I’m 70% of the way there.
I have the structure in my head. I kind of understand how computers work. So Chachi, BT kind of let me do that and, and not. You know, like integrated into any systems, just like the chat window. Like, Hey, I’m making this software, can you like help me? So it started helping me and you know, so that was September, that was November of 22.
I had a few ideas, I kind of riffed on them over that, over those few months.
Andrew Warner: Let me, lemme pause for a, a moment on there because I don’t think I’ve seen the ideas or understood the framework that you used to pick the ideas that you would pursue. I just heard that you had a bunch of little ideas and Wave AI was one of them.
What are they and how did you figure out what to, what the ideas would be?
Josh Mohrer: Sure. So, I mean, none of it was sort of like, I’m gonna start a business. It was all just kinda like, I’m unemployed and have free time and like this, this is really fun. Um, but kind of right away, chat, GPTs, you know, the sort of like most amazing thing that it could do in my view was summarize things.
So if you think about it up until then. Computers, and I’ve always loved them. The one thing they couldn’t really do is summarize texts, take a bunch of texts and make it a small amount of texts like that struck me as the killer app, and in a lot of ways it still kind of is like, it really is amazing.
We’re totally used to it now. It’s been three and a half years. It’s part of our like day to day, but that is still pretty amazing that an LLM can read a bunch of text and make it a small amount. So one of the ideas was sort of like a two hop, like record audio, transcribe that into text, which computers were already able to do at that point, and then take that text and summarize it.
And the idea was sort of like you’re at lunch with a friend and you talk about all these great things and like, but then you forget
Andrew Warner: that’s that’s the idea you ended up pursuing. What are some of the other ones that you didn’t, I’m trying to understand how you figured out what to do or what to play with.
Josh Mohrer: Yeah, I mean that was the one that ended up being the thing. I had another demo that I built that I’m actually have like revisited and I could tell you about why, but that would basically take New York State. Legislation, um, from their API and you know, the sort of idea, like no one reads the bill, like the bill comes out and it’s too many pages and it’s too confusing and there’s too many bills.
So nobody reads the bill. You know, I got, I got involved in government at Uber. You know, I don’t, I wouldn’t say that I was interested in it, but it, it was interested in me and so I had to get sort of into the weeds on that stuff, and AI feels like a good way to make sure that everybody reads the bill. Um, and that things can’t be, you know, released in the middle of the night and then voted on the next day.
Like, so I made this thing that would take every bill coming off the New York State Senate, uh, feed and summarize it and do some other things like, like ask it. Who’s gonna care about this? Who is likely to support it? Who’s likely to oppose it? Things like this. And so there’s an idea there that I worked on with a buddy from Uber that we actually have revisited.
And like I just said, I’ll circle back on that and, and kind of explain why. But, um, we’re gonna be releasing that as like a side quest in the next few weeks.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Josh Mohrer: Um, so that was one idea. I, I feel like. Customer service is sort of an obvious place for this technology to, to work. And I have a demo. I had a demo back then for like Shopify sellers.
Mm-hmm. To sort of, because that’s like a standardized system. It was way too early. And frankly, I, I still don’t think it’s a solved, I, I still don’t think that AI has kind of solved that. And I still do all my support by hand, although I am building out something to kinda help with that automatically. Um, but those were kind of the, the, the, the three things.
Um, you know, I had an idea, I have a bunch of friends that were on like a. Chat thread that goes back years. And I thought it would be cool to have an AI kind of sit on top of that and, uh, you know, what did, what did Dave say about that thing at some point in the last five years, like AI would be good at that.
So I played with that a little bit, but they were all just like demos for fun to kind of show off what I could do. Like I didn’t really think. What became Wave would be a standalone business. In fact, I got a lot of advice of like, well, you know, you should focus on a certain vertical. Like wave four doctors or wave four construction or whatever.
I
Andrew Warner: don’t think that would make sense too, Josh, because look, when you had launched it, Otter had already been out, fireflies was out. In fact, Otter, I remember using it as an in-person meeting recorder and it worked really well. And I would imagine that with all these different tools that were out grain, I think Fathom was out.
Reed, who’s founder I interviewed recently, anyway, they, they were out. And I keep thinking, why doesn’t one of them focus on a specific industry? Why didn’t you, and why did you decide to continue when there were so many already out there?
Josh Mohrer: Yeah. I mean. Otter does well, they all sort of started as meeting bots.
I’m not sure which of the ones you just mentioned. Do the generic recording. That’s like 90% of my volume.
Andrew Warner: Oh really?
Josh Mohrer: Yeah, so like I’ll do like 9,000 hours a day of just generic audio. And then meaning of
Andrew Warner: a person using the voice recorder and talking directly into it in a meeting.
Josh Mohrer: Well, they’re using the voice recorder.
They might just have it on their desk on a Zoom, like they might be on a Zoom on their. Computer and then have the phone on their desk, like selfie recording the Zoom, or it might be in a room, a live meeting. It could be at church, it could be at the doctor’s office. There have been, I’ve seen a bunch of crazy things, but that’s, but like most of it is the generic recording audio in physical space, I like to call it whether that audio is generated from a computer or not.
I, I don’t know. Then I also have like meeting bots and phone call recording over VoIP and things and like file imports and things like that. So I’m trying to capture all the different modes, but it is, it is mostly just that, that that first thing
Andrew Warner: I see. I see.
Josh Mohrer: And there are, there are many now, but actually there weren’t that many when I started.
There were not that many like. AI note taking apps in the app store when I launched, like maybe Otter was there. Well, they were certainly there. I’m not sure if they were meeting bots or regular. But you know, another issue is that I think. I don’t know if this is still the thing, but I heard a lot in the beginning that like wave’s summaries are better and I sort of intuited that Otter might have been not using the best models for their summaries.
Okay. And for the transcription, one of the, one of the things I’ve tried to focus on is just use the best version of the AI. So like whisper two, whisper three, you know, assembly ai, deep Graham. I’ve tried them all. Um, and I’ve just, you know, I’m not afraid to spend the, I, I was not initially afraid to spend the money to make sure that the quality of the output was the best it could be.
Andrew Warner: I
Josh Mohrer: see. ’cause I sort of figured it’s okay. I, I would rather spend more on that. I’m not spending any money on people, so I’d rather really spend it on the ai, make it. Make the product as good as possible. And I think really what has made it successful, uh, you know, a bunch of things have, but really the stubborn and relentless just polishing of the product.
You know, getting feedback, incorporating it, pushing out a new version. Like I have been working on this full-time for years, and so I’m just like, I want it to be perfect.
Andrew Warner: I do sense that like even the fact that you continue to get to do customer support on your own is amazing. Let me pause though for a second and I, I wanna shift in a moment into the development process, but if I’m understanding you right, you said, look, there’s a use case that no one else is doing.
Um, or if they are, they’re not doing it to the level that I think they should, and that is recording in person conversations. I wanna be there and I wanna summarize it. You got into that. How did you know that you were on the right track? Was it number of users? Was it, I know you got traction early. What was it that told you this is worth spending the next few years of my life obsessing on?
Josh Mohrer: I don’t remember the actual answer, but the answer I give when I asked that is, mm-hmm. A lesson I learned at Uber, which is if someone on the support line is like exhibiting extreme emotion. Whether it’s positive emotion or negative emotion, that is actually a good indicator that you’re onto something.
Like if you can make a customer so mad that you think they wanna murder you, you might be onto something there. I remember at Uber we got a lot of that in the early days, both ecstatic happiness and, and, and, you know, serious rage. You know, the driver took a left
Andrew Warner: mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: On Fifth Avenue and it, it wasted 20 minutes and I’m gonna kill you.
It’s like, all right, we are, if you’re that passionate, positive, or negative about something, then that product has really hit that’s really there. There’s value there. And so I think part of it was talking to users. You know, I still get a, like, this is amazing, you know, for many users, if you’re out of the bubble.
If you’re touching ai, maybe not that often, Chachi BT once in a while, yeah. But you don’t really know how to use it for your work. You’re not in the bubble. And so this, for many of my users, I think is their ai. It’s what they use AI for. Do you use AI in your life? Yes, I use Wave. I see like, I like to ask folks in my secular life, in my life, not tech life, if they use AI yet, and you’d be surprised how many people say no.
Yeah, for fun on the side, but never for my work. My office doesn’t like it. We’re not allowed to use it yet, et cetera.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Josh Mohrer: Like that’s most people. So I think going vertical specific is like, is is totally crazy. I mean, all my competitors should go ahead and do that, but I think that it makes more sense to be kind of general for this.
Like Uber isn’t rides for a specific use case. It’s just rides,
Andrew Warner: but they’re not
Josh Mohrer: 50
Andrew Warner: different car sharing companies on the road. And so they don’t need to. If there were,
Josh Mohrer: there were though. Yeah, there were though.
Andrew Warner: I see
Josh Mohrer: there were, there were a lot of ride share apps. I mean, we’ve had, you know, I can name five that you’ve never heard of, that felt like existential threats to us in the beginning.
So it does start out that way. And look, it’s not exactly apples to oranges because it is just an app and there’s a lot of clones. I mean, there’s probably like 50 of them now, so it’s not quite the same, but
Andrew Warner: okay.
Josh Mohrer: If it works, it works.
Andrew Warner: All right, so let’s get into, I want to cover a couple of things here.
One is how you build, and especially how it evolved over time, and then also how you market. ’cause I think your promotion is really interesting. You’ve talked a little bit about meta, and obviously I’ve seen you talk publicly. That’s gotten people used. But let’s go into building. In the beginning it was you coding like an amateur developer, but where you, where where, and some people might Google things or go to Stack Overflow.
You would go to chat GPT, it was like your, your mentor. How did, tell me about that. Yeah, and Stack Overflow too. In Stack Overflow
Josh Mohrer: for sure. Doing it more the old fashioned way. Like I coded the first version I did, I wrote all the code. You know, ’cause I was, I was able, you know, and I, I used the AI to like, what would be like a good example, like background audio recording.
So like someone’s recording and then they close and then they like, minimize the app. Of course it should still work. Why isn’t it working? It’s like, oh, you need to do X, Y, Z. And so there were things like that where it wouldn’t necessarily be like, here’s the code, what’s the problem with it? It might just be like a conceptual question.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: You know, a lot of the early days was me making a version, trying it out, finding a problem with it, and then working to fix the problem. And then that times a thousand, you know, the whole idea of, of a, of a server. I sort of. I was able to sort of intuit, like, huh, I do the recording and then it sends out the file and it waits for the response.
But if I close the app in the interim, it’s all lost. Mm-hmm. Like, oh, that’s what a server is for. That’s what a server client, you know, that I should move all this to the server. Like the, the mobile app should be essentially a recorder, and as soon as the audio is done, it should be uploaded immediately to my server from which.
All the AI stuff will happen and then return the data back to the phone so that if they go and do something else, it does take a couple minutes to, you know, to process like a one hour thing. It’ll be there when they come back, send them a hush notification, send them an email, like all the stuff. So I sort of was able to intuit a lot of things that may be in a more formal situation.
Someone would learn on the job and learn how like the company does it. I sort of intuited and mm-hmm. Like got to these things sort of on my own through the experience, but it was very much like, have the IDE on one side of my screen have an LLM on the other, bring it over, Hey, what’s this? Okay, bring it back over.
Like a lot of, a lot of that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Um, battling with the context windows, which were extremely small at that time. So like, I really started doing this at V one. Of, you know, of like LLMs and all this and have been able to ride those improvements for three years, you know, every month my mind is blown by the newest thing, like Opus 4.5, and everyone, everyone of my friends who I.
Tell this about who’s not directly involved. It’s just like, you sound like a broken record. You always say that, but I always mean it like Opus 4.5 is a departure from the past. Like it is meaningfully better. It is. It is blowing my mind. Like it’s doing things that I can’t believe how much it can do on its own now.
And so
Andrew Warner: how are, how are you using it? Yeah, so Josh. Josh, it blows my mind too. Yeah. I’ve never been a developer. I always, in the back of my mind, like you thought it’d be fun to be able to, or at least to understand what other people are doing. I started playing with Claude Code and I go. Can you make this?
And it’s building it for me, and it’s asking me questions that help me guide it in the right direction. And by the
Josh Mohrer: end of I, I love Claude Code. I love it. So fun. And what’s so crazy is I only started using it two weeks ago. I was sort of like, Claude Code is like, it’s a little too hands off. I don’t totally get it.
I was aware of it and I was like, I don’t really get it. ’cause it’s writing and you
Andrew Warner: wanna write yourself is what I’m understanding about you.
Josh Mohrer: No, no. I, I don’t write When I, right before that I was coming from an IDE. Like windsurf, whatever, and it was still writing for me, but I was a little more hands, I was watching it, I was seeing the diffs, which you can actually still do, but I just didn’t get there.
Like I, I’m old, like things take a minute for me to wanna do. Okay. I’m not always about the latest and greatest. I like my way, but I got to it. And now it’s like all I do and claw coat. I bought a. Mac Mini over the weekend for my, for my bot, you know? Mm-hmm. And just all that stuff, like, I am deep in it, but I love, you know, the latest and greatest changes so fast that who knows what it’ll be by the time someone listens.
But yeah, I, I, that is what I use now almost exclusively.
Andrew Warner: How, like, how do you shift from one to the other? What’s your process and how are you using Claude Code now? What’s your setup in it?
Josh Mohrer: Well, the same underlying model, I’m still using Opus. Mm-hmm. But I think. Quad. You know, one of the things is you can buy the API by the month with that.
So I spend 200 bucks and I think I get something like $3,000 worth of API usage from it versus going direct and using the A PII was spending 50 to a hundred dollars a day, which I’m happy to do.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: Because I’m getting serious value out of it. But. I’d rather spend less money when I can, but also the age agentic loops that it’s put in the, like the way it does the model, the, you know?
Mm-hmm. The model is the same, but the way it interprets and asks questions and does follow up and touches your files and your file system and bash and all this stuff is like really crazy. You know, just every day I’m having these experiences that blow my mind and I’m running out of folks to tell about it.
But it’s like I was talking about, I, I like initiated a discussion about my rates, like how much do I charge? Should I charge less? Like Uber was very big about like time to cut prices like we were every six months we were lowering the price because that’s a moat, you know, it makes people, you don’t want to get undercut and I have no costs and my.
The margins are really good. And so I’d rather get some of that back. So I started a like a, a discussion like, let’s talk about this. Maybe I divide the features up and put one of them under a lower tier and a high and all this. It’s like, let me just go look at your analytics for a bit. I need the API key.
I’m like, here’s my, here’s the API key. And it just like, okay, cool. And it went away for a few minutes. It came back with just like. A report that an analyst would spend a week on and I’ve like heard people talk about this. Mm-hmm. But until you experience it, it’s crazy. So like it’s nuts. It’s nuts.
Andrew Warner: I
Josh Mohrer: talked,
Andrew Warner: I talked with Ryan Carson.
He’s got Aron job that just tells it that goes out every day, does the research on his different analytics and makes recommendations based on what he’s done and what’s going on in the site. Do you have anything like that that you’re doing now or is it too early for you?
Josh Mohrer: Ryan Carson, his Twitter,
Andrew Warner: his Twitter’s, Ryan Carson.
It was hacked recently, but
Josh Mohrer: it on money, it was hacked. That’s what I was about to say. Yes, it was hacked. I got a good DM from him that made no sense. I’m like, oh, that’s why you’re not real. Okay. I knew that name. Um, yeah, I mean, sorry, what was the question?
Andrew Warner: I just liked how he had a report every day with.
Uh, recommendations based on his analytics of what he should be doing to change marketing.
Josh Mohrer: Yeah,
Andrew Warner: and
Josh Mohrer: I’m not as tapped. I have not built my world around that yet. I’m a messy guy in real life and I’m a messy guy on the computer, you know, and digitally, and I think having a sort of base level of organization is important.
So my, like, I have like 50 windows open with different things going on. But yes, with some organization, you know, a, a buddy, like an AI skeptic buddy was like, you bought a Mac mini for all this stuff. Like, this is so stupid. Like, I’m trying to go see this show, have it monitor. The price on StubHub and SeatGeek and all the different places, and then send me an email every hour with like, with like all the pricing updates.
I’m like, perfect, I can do that. Took me five minutes. I set it up and sent him an email every hour. Like, you need to have good ideas like that to sort of do, and I’m just not gonna, I keep it all up here. Mm-hmm. But I am. But I hope to do more things like that. Like really use them like employees, you know, something, you know, like reading server logs, like searching and reading server logs is like such a great thing.
Like, Hey, I have this fire based function called whatever, and if spits out thousands of lines a day, but you know, lately I’ve been having these failures, will you please go and inspect the logs on the terminal? Search the log, search for the word fatal and write a report and bring it back. And like it gave me something in five minutes that was like extraordinarily useful that I could not have done on my own.
It just, I would have to like dump a million rows and, you know, it just would’ve been a, a huge pain. So I, I hope to do more things like that. I keep my new feature. Schedule pretty aggressive. So I like tend to just be looking forward and not spending much time on that stuff, but I, but I should. Things get missed when you’re single.
When you’re like solo founder, things get missed for sure.
Andrew Warner: Would you tell me some of the tools that you’re using to put it together? Like what are some of the, what are some of the software that you rely on to build wave?
Josh Mohrer: Cursor is sort of home base for, for like all the code. I have the app repo, but also the web app repo.
And then I have sort of, uh, like a bunch of other repos that each are sort of web apps themself that do specific things.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: So like I have a couple of. Side things like wave Pod, I’m putting the URLs in the chat wave tube. These are sort of like SEO ideas to try to get some No,
Andrew Warner: I’m those, I, those I’ll get to actually around marketing.
’cause I was wondering how much, how, how many new users were coming in. But I saw a really good case study about you on Adapt E and so I, I recognize that you’re using that for example, how are you using Adapt? How are you using Twilio? What are some of the other tools that you’re using?
Josh Mohrer: Sure. Um. Adapt is like my source, is my sort of central system for all things subscription.
So when you buy in the app or on Stripe, it’s, it kind of runs through them.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Josh Mohrer: Paywalls. If I want to run like a test on, you know, like an AB and all this, that all runs through Adapt. Yeah. I’m a favorite of like, let me write about you as an advertisement. You’re
Andrew Warner: so good at that.
Josh Mohrer: I get, I get zero new users from that stuff, but anyway, but it’s all good.
LIO is, um, is for like phone, so that’s what, uh. Voiceover ip so you can actually like make a phone call in the app that runs for Twilio. I know you’ve
Andrew Warner: got your own dialer. You check to make sure my phone number is the right one and by validating it. Yeah. So once you know it is I can dial using your dialer.
Josh Mohrer: Make, yeah.
Andrew Warner: And you call out, they see my number on caller id and then we’ve got a recording of the whole thing. That’s Twilio that’s doing it. What else do you have that’s working? Do you use anything for landing pages, for forms? Are you building it all yourself?
Josh Mohrer: Next Js like web framework just for everything.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: Um, my like macro thesis
Andrew Warner: mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: For this stuff, this is a little out there probably, I’m probably gonna say it badly, but like the notion of abstraction layers, I think are at risk from ai. So what do I mean by that? Whereas I previously like use a SaaS tool that does a certain thing to achieve a goal.
Now I just asked the AI to build it from scratch.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: And it’s like, I’m not gonna replace Slack with it or like Riverside, how we’re setting this up right now, how we’re like recording it. Certain things like that I would always use. But there’s sort of a, a category of things that no longer make sense.
Um,
Andrew Warner: what about Intercom? You’re not using that for customer support?
Josh Mohrer: I do use Intercom because their library for the chat bit in the app works really well. Mm-hmm. And that’s non-trivial to make that work. But I don’t use their AI thing and I answer many of the things that come in. I answer on a website that I built for myself that hits their API and just gets all the tickets, and I just answer it there because then I can kinda like layer on all my own stuff.
Andrew Warner: I see.
Josh Mohrer: I didn’t give any good examples for my pieces, but I’ll think of them while we talk and I’ll jump in it appropriately and say, oh yeah, I just thought of it.
Andrew Warner: Essentially what you’re saying is where possible I, Josh like to build things myself instead of use these tools? Yeah. And if I have to, I’m picking the tools that I need to, but I’m not using them all the way.
I’d rather make my own and it’s not that hard to make my own.
Josh Mohrer: That’s right. Not as like a fetish, but as a like, because it’s actually better.
Andrew Warner: What makes it better in your mind? Like, it seems like you have a customized way, for example, for chat. You don’t want them to start to figure out how to answer in your place.
You haven’t, you have a thesis on how to answer properly.
Josh Mohrer: Yeah. I’m trying to think of what a good example of this would be. Yeah. Like, you know, a very basic example is like if I’m gonna send a, a big email, I don’t need a like wissy wig editor to set up the email. Like the AI will just build out the code.
Like, Hey, I wanna do an email about Wave Assistant, which was an email that went out this morning about chat across all of your, do you know, uh, across all of your sessions, smarter Search in the app. That all just kind of rolled out and it ended up, uh, you know, that email was written by an ai, it’s an HTML email, but I didn’t use any like service for it.
Um, to actually actually make the email content. ’cause it’s just easier to just do it in code. Anything that’s sort of putting you, that’s sitting between you and the code is potentially gonna just get in the way.
Andrew Warner: You know, that’s the thing that I’m noticing, like really up and down the, the size of companies that I’ve talked to, they’re trying now to just create it themselves.
And it’s not about cutting out costs. It’s not, it’s not that intercom costs too much, it’s that they want more control over the experience. And that even goes down to a consulting company I talked with that’s creating their own Calendly because they need little bits of customization to them. Totally.
Alright. Totally. That brings me to my sponsor, Zapier. I mentioned that they’re a sponsor. You said I’m, I’m integrating them somehow into customer service. What are you doing with Zapier then?
Josh Mohrer: I’m integrating them into, so I get the, you know, you recorded wave and then you. Either read it in the app or it, it’ll send an email or you can share it to Google Docs or Notion.
And I built out a bunch of the share features myself on the tools. You know, OneNote, doc X, like Acrobat, like all the formats that someone would want. But I get inbound all the time like, Hey, I really would love for wave recordings to land in my. Companies like CRM, it’s this like esoteric thing that I’d never heard of.
Do you have Zapier? And so I actually have a Beta Zap or Zapier thing where once you set it up, every recording you do will trigger a a Zap and it’ll land that wherever you want. And it’s part of a bunch of things I’m releasing in the next few weeks that include API access. MCP access. So if you want to ask one of the other ais about your sessions, you can do that now.
So it, it’ll be A-P-I-M-C-P and Zapier are gonna kinda roll on the same day as part of a, like, take your data wherever you want to go.
Andrew Warner: I see.
Josh Mohrer: Um, I think there is value in being the, the app that facilitates making the data.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: So you’re doing the recording, it’s creating data. Everyone seems to like it for that.
But it’s like, then what happens? Like the next stage is what, you know, something has to be actioned. We’re meeting, there’s gonna be some sort of output from that. Either, uh, a to-do list or like action items or whatever. Or it needs to land somewhere. I. We need, or I say I need users to be able to get their data wherever they want, as easily as possible.
And so Zapier does a great job with that. They have the integrations with everything. Yeah. So if you wanna take your wave sessions to some esoteric thing that I’ve never heard of, you can use Zapier for that. You know, I think the API access might be even more useful, but for the non-engineer, um, Zapier’s really the best.
Andrew Warner: I’m even finding that frankly, if I use Claude Code, it doesn’t have enough connections out. And so what it’ll say is just use Zapier and then get the connection you want.
Josh Mohrer: Just use the direct API. Here’s the key. I mean, it’s really like, just one more story. I also use Intercom for my dot, for my like knowledge base, like the articles about all the features.
And my, you know, I used to write them and really slave over them and make them better and use AI to help make them better. But now it’s like, Hey Claude Code, you see that feature in the code over there? Write, write the document about it and put it on intercom. And so now it’s just like, and AI is reading the code, understanding how the feature works as it’s reading the code.
Oh, wow. And then write, writing the, writing the article in the style of the other articles that it can also read. And then it just like. I don’t know, man. It’s crazy.
Andrew Warner: I know it’s, it is incredible. And then it makes me wonder if everyone is going to be able to create, or more people are gonna be able to create.
What does it mean? Does it mean that people are gonna start creating their own version of Wave? Does it mean that companies are going to start to do it? Or is is it just that we’ll always have boat, we’ll have what we have now at SaaS and in the same time people create their own software in addition.
What do you think?
Josh Mohrer: I think there will be more software. I mean, wave doesn’t have to be a team of 50 people. Venture capital in an office. It’s me in the downstairs apartment in my building. I think there’ll be more, there’ll be more software. I mean, I had this slot in the shower. I recently it, I’m in. In New York where we recently had a, a ton of snow and I have young kids who I knew were gonna wanna sled.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: And I didn’t currently have snow boots, uh, or pants for the snow. I left it upstate at my other house and uh, I bought on Amazon like very cheap boots. And they were great. They were like 40 bucks and they were great boots. Um, the pants were similarly great, so I felt like a hundred bucks on very, very useful things.
And I wonder if software. It’s like making apparel is like a solved problem, like we know how to do that. We do it overseas. The supply chain is there. They make the boots really cheap in every size. They ship them, they go to Amazon. I picked the boots based on where I could get it the next day and my size, and I got them for really cheap.
I sort of wonder if software might be similar in that it’s cheap to make. There’s a ton of it. None of it is, is huge. The boot brand is unknown. My kids and wife made fun of the way the boots looked, but boy did they do the job. And so I wonder if software will have a similar kind of thing where there’s just a lot of it people.
There’s a lot of options. Which one you use doesn’t really matter. Like the boots are the boots, the AI recorders, the AI recorder. And you might have one that you like better, but at the end of the day it’s like. They just do it. The like barriers are so low that there could be many options for everything you wanna do.
And so to me, what I’m doing looks more like running a corner store that I work in full time and I sweep that at the end of the day myself, and I’m the shopkeeper and I lower the gate at the end of the day. Like that’s more. The mode that I’m in than like a high tech software company. ’cause I’m working alone.
I do it to make money. This isn’t an equity play, this is to make money. Now, as a business, I’m the business owner. I’m the small business owner. So I’m always on, I’m always thinking about it. That’s okay. That’s what I wanna do. That’s what I like. And it’s sort of more like that. I just work on the, I have a shop in cyberspace, if you will.
Mm-hmm. And I sell things to a small number of people, relatively speaking. But it makes plenty for me and for my. Okay. Family. Like it covers everything. And so that’s, that’s more, that’s the mode. It’s not a big company. So like what does ai, you know, allow anyone with agency can go and do something that’s still a very small percentage of the population.
It’s still not most people, it’s not everyone. It’s not even most people. It’s like a subset similar to who could do it before. I feel, you know, but don’t have to be an engineer anymore.
Andrew Warner: I feel like it’s gonna be a little bit like YouTube, where before really good videos would only come on television and movies and then eventually you end up with all these creators and some of them are Mr.
Beast and some of them are doing it just for themselves because they like having family videos and they’re more creators. Okay. Um, do you think this could be a billion dollar business? Do you think this is the Sam Altman one person billion dollar business direction?
Josh Mohrer: Well, I, I can also answer this the way that I always do, which is, so I think that it’s usually framed as one person.
Unicorn, and unicorn refers to a company worth. You know, the billion dollar mark. Not, not, no one will ever value this because I’m not gonna raise money. So there’s no way for this to be a unicorn in that sense. Um, which is a lot of vanity and kind of like what investors are willing to pay. It’s a great signal for sure, but it’s part of a scheme that I’m not part of right now.
Um, you know, I think what you’re asking is like, what is the natural limit? Of something run by one person and I think it’s probably quite a bit more than what I’m doing.
Andrew Warner: I guess what I, no, I think the way I would put it like this before, um, you’re a runner. I love how on your website you show your latest run.
So beautifully done. I’m too Oh, thank
Josh Mohrer: you.
Andrew Warner: Before I and I, and you make me Miss New York, I see that your last run was through Central Park. Man, that’s so good. I remember before I ran my first marathon, I met a marathoner and I said, how do you even do it? And he said, the way you do it is you have to imagine that you’re gonna go more than a marathon, do an ultra.
So then the marathon doesn’t seem so big, it turns out that’s not the way that I think.
Josh Mohrer: No,
Andrew Warner: but it gave me a sense of the head. What I eventually had to think was, I’m going to run a marathon as a way of getting me to even run to 10 K. I’m wondering, do you have any number in your head that says, this is what I’m aiming for, even if it means that I’m not gonna run my version of a marathon and have a unicorn, I’m gonna figure out what the 10 K is that comes from that.
What do you have in mind?
Josh Mohrer: Yeah, I mean, I think running, particularly as someone who got into it late in life, I had no like high school. Running records. So like I am, I, I, in the last five years have run as well as I’ve ever run, you know, half marathon, marathon as well as I’ve ever done. Not good in the sense of all runners, but good for Josh Moore.
So I, you know, it’s related. And then I sort of relish doing better than I’ve ever done in the past. And so I would like the, I would like the numbers for this year, both on my running. And on the business to be best ever. Uh, last year was best ever business, not best ever running. Those things are related, unfortunately.
Um, and when it’s 20 degrees outside, I can’t do much running anyway, but I, uh, I would just like it to grow. I think I have. Yeah, there’s no grand vision. I mean, it’s, it did seven last year. I’d love it to do 10 this year. That would be great. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that, but let’s see what happens.
I’m just kind of enjoying the process. I’m unlike venture-backed startups, which have been exclusively where I’ve worked for the last couple decades.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: And those situations to me feel very focused on an outcome like Uber especially. And I didn’t join Uber, even knowing what employee equity was. Or like I knew what it was, but it wasn’t the focus.
If it had been, I probably would’ve negotiated a better deal, but it was just sort of like cool, and I get stopped. But like, this is cool because I get free Uber rides and I’m the boss of a small part of the store. Those are the two things that I liked a lot. When you’re focused on the equity bit, it’s sort of like, someday we’ll do X and you do your math of like, well, I own this much and we’ll sell for this much, and how much will I make?
And that, that’s very nice. But that is a future focused situation that I’m really not in right now. Right now it’s just sort of like I’m running a business. I wanna run it as well as possible. I’d like it to be bigger than it is now, but it’s so that I can make more money now, not so that my stock or I, I’ll sell it someday.
None of that is really in focus because I don’t think it’s a sellable business. Uh, and I think, you know, if you had asked me right after Uber what I want, a lot of us would say like, we wanna like own a small SaaS business. It’s like, well, great. I do that now. I looked at buying one, I almost bought one for like gym equipment.
I was gonna buy this e-commerce business that made gym equipment and sell it on on, on their own website and on Amazon and all this. And it’s like, I’m really glad I didn’t do that. This is way more my mode.
Andrew Warner: It is so beautiful to watch it get built in public. Let’s close it out with the last segment of this conversation, which is how are you getting customers?
And I wonder if you could take me through like the first customers, which sounds like it was your friends who were willing to give you feedback, but then the next, and the next, and then what works for you.
Josh Mohrer: So right now it’s, it’s Apple search ads and Google ads for, for iOS and Android respectively. And I haven’t been able to get meta ads to work in more than a year.
Every few months I dip back in, I spend a bunch and it fails, and there’s a bunch of reasons for that. Competition. My ads are stale. And I think most of those, those are both symptoms of a larger issue, which is that I’m just not that interested in doing it. Um, and I, every so often, a few times a year, I’ll bring on a new agency will get up and running.
They’re like, we’ll, for sure be able to make this work because my metrics are pretty good. Like, if someone installs, there’s like a one in 10 that they’re gonna gimme money. That’s like I’m told, is pretty high for this sort of thing. And so like, so I need more installs, you know, and so I’ll do between 800 and and, and a thousand installs a day.
And I think a lot of that is coming from, from app store search, you know, on, on the app store, I have a 4.9 star, like 11,000 reviews. Mm-hmm. So it just comes across as trustworthy and on Android it’s getting up there, but not quite as good. So I, there’s gotta be a word of mouth element that I’m not really measuring.
There’s gotta be some natural search. The ads in the, in those two places, uh, are probably helping. But it’s mostly, uh, yeah, and then really good retention. I mean, well actually not really good, but some kind of retention so that most of the money that comes in every day is renewal money, you know,
Andrew Warner: is great.
Was imagining that most people are, I know you’ve changed your flow. I’ve done some research on how you change your pricing. You’ve said in the past that it was too complicated or maybe it was like Claude, as I was analyzing it said that you shifted from complicated to simple. I imagine that most people are doing annual subscriptions with you, right?
Like that’s where the, the majority of the revenue is anyway.
Josh Mohrer: It’s where the most of the revenue is in terms of, like, I just looked at this, it’s actually split a third, a third, a third, weekly, monthly, and annual in terms of people. But in terms of dollars, it’s obviously way more on annual.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: Um. But like, yeah, and I mean, I, it, what, what’s so weird?
There are some things about the App Store that are just like the way things are and had, and since I had never really done any work there before, I’d, I had been working for. For app companies, but not app subscription companies. And the whole idea of an annual subscription still makes no sense to me. I would never buy it in annual stewardship or anything.
Like I don’t know what I’m gonna like in a year. Right? I feel like monthly isn’t the right thing, uh, but it turns out people love their annuals. So I started focusing on that and their trials. I didn’t like trials either. Everyone loves their trials, like, all right. I’ll do tried. Sometimes
you
Andrew Warner: don’t because I think on annual is where you give right now a three day trial.
No trial on, I don’t know if you do weekly or monthly. Um, you’ve been experimenting with it. I, yeah, I think that makes sense. People say, I’m gonna try it. Get the free three days.
Josh Mohrer: Yeah. I mean, the three days was such a stupid decision. It should be seven days. Like the whole, the whole app is very, like all the business, all the activities during the week, you know, we’ll do big recording days every weekday.
If it’s a snow day, a little less, and it’s like federal holiday, a little less. Weekends are dead. And like, so seven days is a more natural, like experience it for a full lap around the week in your job. I’m gonna make the change soon. I’ve just done very little. Optimization of that stuff because I find it so unpleasant to work on.
Nothing wrong with it, it’s my own. It’s where I started. I did the marketing and ops. That was my job. Every job I’ve ever had has been in that sort of thing. But I just like, there’s so much more dopamine in making new things. So I just try to keep making new things that in
Andrew Warner: you. And you know what? I don’t think at levels you did that.
From what I’m seeing, levels, you’re more of an operations person. When I see you, I’ve, I’ve heard you, I’ve read you now so much. I’ve been intensely in your world. When I see you light up. You light up from customer service where most people want to throw up from it. You, you get excited about the building of it, but yeah.
Now that I’m actually talking to you about marketing, I thought you’d be jazzed about it. You are not. No,
Josh Mohrer: I’m not jazzed about the support either, but the support is the. The first line of defense, it’s where I learn about bugs. It’s where you know, you’re hearing what people want. If you’re not talking with users, and look, I know I’m supposed to like invite a bunch of users onto a Zoom for a half hour and like watch them use the app.
I’m not doing that. I just, I can’t, I can’t do that. But the customer service is like, you know, that’s where shit gets real. Everyone who’s had a problem, and that’s a useful group to talk to. And on good days, that channel is very quiet and on bad days, it’s not very quiet. Um, you know what I mean?
Andrew Warner: What’s that Microsoft tool that lets you see how people are using your app?
You’re not using something like that.
Josh Mohrer: Yeah, I am, I have, I have Century that like reports every problem that anyone has, whether they know it or not. But like, you know, and, and then I have a sort of a circle of people that I know from the real world who I gave free access to for forever. And one of them sent me a text last night.
I was in bed. She used to work for me at Uber. And what time was this? I’m just looking at the text. Mm-hmm. It was 9:15 PM I guess I hadn’t seen the text until I was in bed. I get a lot of sleep, by the way. I was in bed and I saw a text. She’s like, did you change something on the, like on the line spacing of the summary, because it’s making me go.
I was like, oh, you’re right. I did. Sorry, and then I fixed it. Um, but there’s just like little that would never come up in like a, a bug report. Yeah. I, I changed how markdown is rendered in the app for a reason. That’s not that interesting. But yeah, the line spacing and I even noticed and it just like when you work alone, I like noticing and don’t Oh, and, but it doesn’t always register ’cause there’s no other voice, you know?
So it’s very, very useful to just have people in the orbit. Saying things, and in, in the absence of people I know, I rely on support channels.
Andrew Warner: So then, all right. I, I just wanna linger on this for just a little bit longer to understand how you’re getting users. Is it then the, the tools that you mentioned earlier where you’ve got pod.wave.co, where I can have you gimme summaries of my favorite podcast so I don’t have to listen to them, or you have one for YouTube.
Did those work? What’s working for you? Why? Basically, I’m trying to say why are you getting so many users as a vibe code or when other people aren’t?
Josh Mohrer: Dude, I wish I knew. So Wave Pod gets a ton of traffic. This was all like, I thought of this. I did. I was like, this will get, and then I’ll like, every time a summary is made, it’ll store that forever.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Josh Mohrer: And then it’ll register for SEO. I was like, that’s a really smart idea. And I do get a couple thousand visits a day from that now, and I have 550 folks who like. Who like signed up, it’s all free, but they signed up and added series that they want. And anytime that series has a new podcast, it transcribes and summarizes it and then emails it to them.
Um, but it gets a lot of visits to their website, but none of them are actually wave user, like they don’t convert.
Andrew Warner: I see.
Josh Mohrer: So, I don’t know, I don’t know exactly what I, I don’t know the answer.
Andrew Warner: What about virality, other note taking apps? You do that?
Josh Mohrer: Well, I just, so in the early days, the only answer I could come up with and, and there was a time where we did, it was a couple years ago, where meta ads worked super well and I grew from like a millionaire r to like six in like four months.
Like it was crazy ’cause it was a first of its kind thing and it just brushed it on meta. Now there’s 40 million of them, so the ads don’t really work anymore, but. What I used to think, and I think this is still somewhat true, is that if you’re good, things might work out.
Andrew Warner: Hmm.
Josh Mohrer: And I know it’s sort of trite and maybe even not true, but I do kind of think that the internet’s, the, the internet is good at servicing quality.
Like it’s good at servicing quality. You know, the app works. And people seem to like it. They’re bad. I get bad reviews. I get like, this app is buggy as, and like I might say like, you’re using an iPhone 13 or using like a X me Android phone or something. And it’s like, oh, sorry. But
Andrew Warner: I do tend to agree with you and the the one piece of evidence I would put up is clearly their videos are so good on TikTok, they’re so good at getting attention.
And their stuff is so in the way and un in my opinion, uncaring about the user experience.
Josh Mohrer: I don’t know if you brought them up on purpose, but they recently came into my, into my hate bucket. Um, why? Well, they have a mobile app that looks just like mine. It just does the thing that my app does, and they priced it exactly the same.
You know, 1 39 0.99 annually was very much alike. That sounds right. And that’s, that’s how much they charge. And there’s a lot about their, their new, I think their. They’re a stunt looking for a product. Um, I thought their original idea, which was like screen recording with excess information.
Andrew Warner: Yes.
Josh Mohrer: So like you’re interviewing me right now and it’s transcribing, it’s saying, Hey Andrew, you should ask ’em about this.
Yes. That’s cool. It doesn’t seem like they actually ever did that. It seems like they’re really good at stunts. Yes. Like, maybe I should, maybe I should buy them or something. But like, they’re good at getting attention, which by the way. Is more important than making a good product. So, you know, good for them that
Andrew Warner: they work that out.
I, we’re gonna find out where, where it ends up, but I think that this is the two polar opposites on your aspect. Everything is, it is the two polar opposites. Everything’s well cared for, you care about customer experience and so on, on theirs. They have a good concept and it’s another good marketing and another good marketing technique and I wish that they would just focus on the one thing like you said.
Just show me the transcript on my screen. Do the thing. Yeah, do the thing. And then on the left do the other thing, which is like recommending stuff. And I guess that’s what you’re saying. You wanna be in the world of, I wanna understand what my customer needs are and cust and just keep building to that.
And the way that you know what new features to AD is, you keep checking in with customer service, seeing what people are asking for, and that’s how you go from in person to phone to meetings or whatever the truth
Josh Mohrer: is. Yeah. I mean, on a bad day, I say to my wife, like. Nothing I’ve built in the last year has mattered.
Like I nailed it with the first thing and everything I’ve done since then has been a waste. And there’s like, we’re taking a dark turn for the end of the interview. I think that there is some truth to that. They’re like, oh, let’s do phone and let’s do meeting bots and let’s do, let’s do widgets so that people can just tap to record.
Mm. And let’s do. Let’s do like export to Evernote. ’cause some people still use that. And let’s do export to Notion and let’s do public URLs that you can just share on a website and let’s do you know, all this stuff. And it just like almost hasn’t mattered because like the core thing, no, no, no, no. I just want to tap a button and have it record and then it does that magic summary thing.
I don’t know how you do that, but it’s amazing. I’m like, oh. That’s all you want. So like sometimes yeah, just nailing the product is kind of it, but I am trying to diversify, I think. I think the whole thing is at risk. Um. Unless I do other stuff. So I’m trying to do other stuff
Andrew Warner: because Apple’s going to eventually add it in.
Alright, you won, that’s what you meant, right?
Josh Mohrer: No, just because there’s, well, apple, I mean there’s a chat GBT version of Wave that just like records background audio on your computer and I was like, well this is done and, and the iPhone can record, can record phone calls. Now that’s a thing now, but it hasn’t mattered.
People just use the thing that they want to use. I don’t know.
Andrew Warner: I, I
Josh Mohrer: don’t
Andrew Warner: know. All right, let’s close it out with profit. I’ve asked you, you’re profitable. And I did the thing where I asked the question badly, and so we were able to skip past it roughly. Like where’s profit right now?
Josh Mohrer: Uh, you know, gross was like seven and then Apple and Google take a bunch of that.
So let’s say like, you know, like five lands and maybe I, I keep three or something like that.
Andrew Warner: That’s boss. That’s killer man.
Josh Mohrer: Yeah, it’s working out.
Andrew Warner: Yeah,
Josh Mohrer: it’s working out. But everyone’s like, oh no, it’s all that Uber money. It’s like, no, no, no. It’s new.
Andrew Warner: No. This thing I, I’ll tell
Josh Mohrer: you, the most esoteric problems in the world, it’s like, no, I want you to know that I got rich twice, not just once.
It’s, and I, I need you to know that I’m very insecure. I need my, I’m just kidding.
Andrew Warner: The people who know this. Space are watching and have you, I constantly see you on lists. People are so excited that I was gonna have you on because you are doing the thing that everyone else is aspiring to do. You’re building the company individually using AI and showing other people how it’s done.
And I, I really appreciate you coming on here and chatting with me, and I hope, uh, my pleasure go around with you at some point.
