Go From Idea → 10,000 Users With This Simple Strategy

Join me as I chat with Sherry Jiang to discuss her journey creating Peek, an AI-native personal finance app. She explains her development process from rapid prototyping to user testing, and how building in public on social media drove significant user acquisition. The conversation highlights how AI can be leveraged not just within products but also for marketing and content creation. Timestamps: • 00:00 - Intro • 03:58 - Behavioral science principles applied to app design • 06:13 - AI Chat/Peek for X • 12:05 - User Testing/Feedback • 14:00 - Building/Launching App • 23:04 - Building in Public • 24:42 - Format for posts • 35:14 - Content Buckets • 38:47 - Making Meme's with ChatGPT • 47:33 - Final Thoughts Key Points: • Sherry Jiang shares how she built Peek, an AI-powered personal finance app that uses behavioral science principles to improve user engagement • The app was developed through "vibe coding" a prototype in just three hours, followed by user testing with a "rule of six" methodology • Building in public on Twitter/X was crucial to Peek's growth, helping it gain thousands of users within a month • AI tools (Claude, Gemini) were used both for app development and marketing content creation The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringMarketing — Vibe Marketing for Sale: http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND SHERRY ON SOCIAL Peek Money: https://peek.money X/Twitter: https://x.com/SherryYanJiang

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  I think there's going to be thousands of mobile apps built with AI, but also have AI that are going to be a million dollar a year businesses. And I found a founder called Sherry Jiang, and she vibe coded this app, built it in public, got thousands of customers to it. And I think she's a first time founder, so I'm trying something new. I brought her on the podcast and I said, hey, what can you teach us about how you built in public? How you vibe coded this thing? And just your thought process for building this company? And I think a lot of people could copy her blueprint. That's why I wanted to bring her on and just learn a lot from it.

• 0:45Greg Isenberg?

  One of my favorite parts of the episode was where she showed us how she uses chat GPT image gen to actually create memes for her startup. So interesting episode. Grab a notebook because you might want to take some notes. Thanks for coming here. Thanks for being here and I can't wait to see what you build. Have a creative day, friends. I'm rooting for you.

• 1:14Greg Isenberg?

  We got Sherry on the pod. Sherry, I'm actually super excited to learn from you. If people stick around until the end of this episode, what are they going to take away?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Number one, sometimes you can just take a first step to getting started, whether it is three hours of vibe coding a prototype just to test something with users or writing your first like, hey, I'm building this app and this is day one. That's, that's all you really have to do sometimes. And that compounds more than you would imagine.

• 1:46Greg Isenberg?

  And Sherry's out there. I noticed her because she's getting thousands of downloads for her app. She's building in public. She's vibe coding. So she's a testament to it. Sherry, you brought a little presentation. I want you to go through it. I want you to teach people. I want people who are solo entrepreneurs, who want a side hustle, who have a business, but just want to AIify it. I want them to come away with feeling a little bit stronger, a little more excited, a little more fired up and have some tangible product design, consumer psychology, build in public know-how so that they could grow their.

• 2:24Greg Isenberg?

  App, consumer app, we're going to be mostly talking about mobile apps faster. So let's get into it, Cherry. Thanks for coming on.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Awesome. No, I'm super excited to be here and I've been a fan for a while. So I'm super excited for the conversation. So just to do a little intro, so right now I've been a founder for four years now. And currently the product I'm working on is called Peak. Been building in public on X for it the last, I guess, four months now. But basically the idea is we want to revolutionize the way that, you know, personal finance has really been from dashboards to like more dynamic UIs that actually make it feel much more enjoyable and bite sized when it comes to making some of those decisions. But I'm not going to go into like, you know, the nitty gritty of the, you know, product just yet. I actually want to talk a little bit about the process, actually,

• 3:16Speaker 01

  from like getting from zero to, you know, something that's launched on the App Store. And you really, you know, can just get started with a vibe coded prototype to start testing with users on day one. You do not have to have something that is perfect and beautiful. And I'll share some examples of what the very, very early versions of Peak look like.

• 3:37Greg Isenberg?

  What I like about Peak is it's a peak, no pun intended, to a whole new wave of consumer mobile apps. Like, there's like a thousand like Peaks, Peak for X ideas, startup ideas that could come out of this. So I want you to go continue and sort of show what the product is.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'll like, you know, talk a little bit about like, you know, some of these like principles that, you know, we were thinking about when designing the product. And then I'll walk through like two evolutions of, you know, what it looks like and how that translates. So, you know, when it comes to like how humans process information, right? And just like actually how LLMs also process information if there's too many tokens, you need to have information chunked in ways or else people get overwhelmed.

• 4:26Greg Isenberg?

  Right. So I'm just looking at the, you know, we call it sauce on this, on this podcast, the sauce on this slide here. So from a product perspective.

• 4:36Greg Isenberg?

  We show only one takeaway at a time on screen, something like cards. Think that's really smart. Like basically, what, all the things that you've described here, progressive disclosure, single person, the second thing is single purpose conversational UI. The third thing is the daily reports that can be read as a part of a check-in or narrative story that's easy for the user. And then the last thing is helping nudge users with relevant information at a time and provide practical first steps. These four behavioral science principles could be applied to any product.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely, right? And that's why I like, I like the point that you made earlier around how we're not here talking about how to build a finance app. We're actually talking about how consumer apps that are AI-enabled that help people in some parts of their life, whether it's to be healthy, be productive, be financially secure, right? They all, they all ultimately follow some of the same principles, right? But of course, the data that gets piped in and, you know, the subject area, that could all be different, but it's all the same at the end of the day. And even when you like, you know, create a podcast or, you know, you, you want to create content, it's the same thing, right?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Because you're, you're there to like, bring, like, here's the audience's brain and understanding how they process information and you're bringing it down in a way that they can understand. Same thing, right? That gets applied here. So I can maybe move on to actually showing you what we started to test, how these kind of, you know, like, start to manifest in, in a finance product. So this is a very, these are very, very early versions of something I did in XJS. I, I basically used Cursor and V0 to code this out. As you can see, it is very, very rudimentary, no pretty designs, but the main thing that I actually spent a lot of time testing with users is this.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Area, we called it AI templates. Horrible name, but later on, we call it check-ins. But this is the part where it's, it's, it becomes quite different. Um, and this relates a lot to firstly, this whole context switching fatigue principle. So when you click into these, you basically ask like a single question, right? So instead of having to like bring in, you know, information from all different places, like some, you know, Reddit posts someone made here or like, oh, this, you know, WhatsApp conversation I had with a friend who knows finance. It's all in one place. So you can kind of like step through the problem without really, really getting distracted.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Um, I can maybe try to show you what the, like the chat. Actually have it pulled up. It is a very scrappy. I can just maybe switch tabs. Um, so can you see this?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Like I have like the console log and everything on the, oh, okay. So the way that like this really simple one worked was start conversation. Uh, it's actually powered by Claude three, five on the back. And it was this really simple interaction that I use to test with users. Um, yes, food spending.

• 8:01Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, this is cool. Um, this is this, what's cool about this and the lens I'm using for, for everyone is this could be applied to a million niches. There is, and I'm curious, like, have you thought of other niches where this could work? Like peak for X?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, like nutrition is definitely like eating. Uh, uh, uh, uh,

• 8:29Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Eating, diet, health, kind of all, all sort of related, right? Um, now I'll tell you like a habit I wish I had that I do not have because it takes too much effort. Um, I want to be more specific about. Like the types of food that I am eating to like reach my goals, right? Whether it's like, oh, I want to like build muscle for this like competition I'm doing in the summer. Maybe for others, it's like, oh, I want to cut, right? Um, now getting like, uh, everything tracked and then being able to like personalize the goal. Then being able to like plan the meal and then figure out where to buy the meal. Because you know, you have to go out and get groceries, cook whatever.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And then like give continuous feedback around how the plan is going, right? Because iteration like you, you might not be perfect the first time. Like I would love that, right? I mean, if someone's building out today, like I, I would love to take a look. But it is the same kind of concept of like, you know, you, you have to like capture not just the tracking and the numbers part. It's like, there's so much more, so many more steps to ultimately getting to you taking an action and then seeing the results of the action. So I think this applies to so many different, so many different areas where, um, you know, where there's some level of like improvement that we're achieving for us, human beings, right?

• 9:56Greg Isenberg?

  Totally.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  What would it be for you, Greg? Like, is there something that?

• 10:00Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, like honestly, right now, I want to get really good at tennis.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:05Greg Isenberg?

  And, um, there's a lot of systems that I have to put in place in my life to get good at tennis. So I need peak for tennis.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, um, essentially like, you know, we have really busy lives, right? Like, I think a lot of our executive function, um, basically this prefrontal cortex, right? Is spent on like, you know, our day to day jobs, right? For me, it's like, you know, running a company, you know, for you, it's like, you know, running your stuff as well. For the stuff outside, like we, we, it's oftentimes we're just too tired to think, right? There's like a, a quota to how much we can like plan and think and do all of that. And so that's why that happens a lot, right? We just, we just don't have systems in place, even though we're fully capable of those systems, right? So in a like mental resource constrained environment, how do we help?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Take away that thinking, that planning portion from the human. So they get, you just get told, "Hey, if you want to get good at tennis, here's a 10-step part to your first stage of mastery." Right? And this is all you have to do every single day. And maybe one of the frictions of getting good at tennis is like, I need to find somebody to play with who's at my level. Like, I think tennis is really fun, but like, I don't want to play with someone who's like so good that like, I'm just boring them because like I suck, you know? So maybe like part of that is like a social matching platform where like, you have scores where like, you know, you kind of know someone's like at a similar level as you, right? And then you get to, you're in the same area, you can go and then get matched and you play somewhere. Like that reduces the friction of like, oh, how do,

• 11:39Speaker 01

  who do I know in my circle who's like at my level? So it's all about reducing that friction, having like AI so like, basically work for us so that we can become like, better versions of ourselves. Like you can be like, a great tennis player and I can like finally have the diet that like, I really want to have that I definitely am not following right now.

• 11:58Greg Isenberg?

  Amazing. Cool. Let's go back to the slides. And so you vibe coded this prototype in less than three hours. And then what next?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so I then started to just like, do user testing. So I, I, I had this thing I call a rule of six, which means, talk to six people that you think is in your ideal customer profile. Two less is like, you don't have enough sample size, too many. It's like, you just don't move fast enough because like, you know, people are doing this on their schedule. So I just started to talk to people. I picked people who are like in their twenties because I also think twenties is easier when it comes to habit formation around finances because you're just starting to earn a paycheck. You're just starting to make like, big financial first decisions. So I just talked to a lot of twenty-some year olds about money and then they started to use the app, right? I just like,

• 12:55Speaker 01

  didn't really guide them. I was just like, hey, just like start using it and like, let me just see where your eyes go to. And um it was quite interesting that I started to see a lot of parallels which um come back to a lot of the hypotheses that we had around the behavioral friction people have around managing money. So I put here like two like, you know, quotes from the users we spoke to. Um, one person said they, you know, have used dashboard apps right by their bank, you know, the Chase apps, whatever. Um, and most of these apps feel overwhelming, lots of numbers and info, but like, I don't know what to do with it. Um, then when they started to talk about the experience using the the chat and peak, they're like, oh,

• 13:38Speaker 01

  this feels like it's helping me actually get to my answers and it feels more dynamic than this like dashboard that I know is being shown to like thousands of other people, right? Where like again, because it's so standardized, you're making me do the thinking around how to interpret it versus like, you know, the conversational AI doing a lot of that work.

• 13:59Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, so the rule of six, you get feedback, you start getting insights. These insights, by the way, relevant for anyone building an AI app. What's next?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you start to build. Um, so uh, we basically took this um and spent about one and a half months actually building it out before we launched in the App Store. And um, for anyone who's launching a mobile app, uh, you sometimes get asked like, should you do test flights? Should you do like the pre-orders? Like, do you do a waitlist? Um, we just like sent it and we're like, you know what? Like, let's just get it out there, right? And um, you're never gonna feel ready and it's fine, just gonna be bugs, but that's okay. That you don't get real feedback until you have real users. So this is what the app looks like today. So obviously a lot more, uh, you know,

• 14:55Speaker 01

  design elements in here that are way more colorful than it was created, but you'll start to see like there's actually parallels, right? This this page essentially was this, right? But we like added more, um, you know, cards that felt like a lot more readable. We added these like stories basically, which are like, you know, nearly daily check-ins. Now, uh, this is a mock-up, so I realized, uh, you know, there's some dates that look kind of funny, but uh, basically, these are like, almost like Instagram stories, right? Um, so we, uh, so on the screen, um,

• 15:30Speaker 01

  We did something where we wanted to like take what was familiar with two people and other apps. So like these like little circular icons are familiar in Instagram, right? Because it feels like this, oh, like there's a little story, right? It's a narrative going back to Gestalt's principle of like, let me, give me something that feels narratively relevant to me, right? Organized information and storytelling. So we created these like daily stories, right? That looked like what you see on Instagram. Um, and then down here, these cards, we actually modeled off of like a lot of wellness apps, right? Like meditation apps or like journaling apps where like you click and then they'll have prompts of like, in the vibe checks question, there's a vibes checks card, there's a question

• 16:13Speaker 01

  like, hey, like, you know, um, what's my financial standing like right now, right? It's like a vibe check. So, um, we used a lot of the, you know, things that make people feel very calm, um, and applied it to money where people don't always feel calm, right? And some of our users actually told us that, um, they feel like they can open up peak a lot more because it doesn't feel as scary as like their banking app, like with red numbers being like, oh, like you spent so much more this month. Like here, like they're like, yeah, I feel more comfortable because of how friendly it feels and it doesn't feel judgmental. It feels like it's trying to help me. It's like, here's where you are and we're gonna get you to where you want to be.

• 16:54Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. So if you're building an AI app, think about, well, I think you got that insight from the role of sex and, and getting, you know, so step one, like in a world where anyone could vibe code an app and the hard part isn't really the software. It's really about the insights that you can generate from your target audience or community. And then thinking about, okay, what are their pain points? You know, one thing, by the way, you can also do is you can go and simulate what people's pain points are by just going to like chat GPT Manus and being like, hey, like, what are the most common pain points with an app like Mint.com? And that's called like synthetic user testing.

• 17:38Greg Isenberg?

  So you can do synthetic user testing and real user testing, which by the way, obviously real user testing is better, but it's sometimes it's just easier to prompt and get something. And then you reflected it in the product with UI that feels familiar in a calm design style.

• 17:58Greg Isenberg?

  So I think that, you know, you're even seeing that with Airbnb's like recent redesign when they added like their new icons. Like it feels calming, it feels like fun. It like people don't want apps that are black and white anymore. You know, soulless like brands anymore. They want fun brands, they want calm. And, and then intelligence, finally, intelligence, artificial intelligence is the foundation of the experience of the app. So every, like all these, you know, entry points, as they say in product design, are

• 18:43Greg Isenberg?

  designed to get people to interface with the intelligence, to get more smart, to help you out more, so that it's becomes a, a partner, you know, not a piece of software.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Exactly, right. Um, so something that we have as well is we have a vector database that actually stores memory from the user. So we have like actually thousands of signals that we save down, right? From like, you know, do you have a sibling, right? What are your values? Or, um, you know, how did you feel when you spent on, you know, fitness? Maybe if it's a, you know, higher spend category because you're going to Equinox, whatever, in San Francisco. But if you care a lot about it and that's a priority, we remember that and we're not going to be like, oh, you know, reduce spend here. We're more like, maybe there's other areas you can find efficiencies, right? So, um, it's, I, I think that like people's expectations of products, as you said, is going to change, right?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  With all of this available today where they expect things to be emotionally resonant and like taking into account not just function, but feeling, right? Like I want to use something that makes me feel a certain way because, you know, that affects how often, you know, I engage with it. And then to your second point, right? I think we want to start using things that feel. As human-like as possible, right? And, you know, we're getting to a stage where it's like you're talking to someone who is almost like a smarter best friend, or maybe a best friend that like has spent six to 12 more months in this area and is like able to like actually give you good advice and suggestions to like help you get better as well.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And, and none of this was possible, I guess, in like this kind of scale and speed years ago, right? Right now, it's like you can whip up, I mean, you can probably whip this up even faster than we did, right? I think you probably whipped this up in like maybe a few weeks, maybe a week, depending on like how complex your app is and like it's, it's truly amazing. It's just such an exciting time to be building mobile apps right now.

• 20:46Greg Isenberg?

  And, uh, before we get to your next slide, you, when you say, how did you build this?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:52Greg Isenberg?

  You, what, what tools did you use with Stack?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So for like the front end and the back end, it's been in TypeScript. And then for the mobile app, uh, because we wanted to be like more platform agnostic across, you know, iOS as well as Android, uh, use React Native and using Expo for that. Um, so yeah, pretty typical. I think we, uh, you know, don't do anything too like fancy outside of the, the React Stack. Um, as for the LLM side, we actually stringed together a combination of, uh, Gemini as well as Claude, uh, depending on like the, I guess, the function, but a lot of the initial insights,

• 21:36Speaker 01

  like these kind of, uh, I, I would say like more detailed insights, we use 3.7 on Claude because the reasoning is fricking fantastic. Um, and then elsewhere where it's like, uh, speed is required more, we rely more on, on Gemini. So a lot of the coordination on this chat, this is Gemini plus Gemini tool calling essentially. That's, that's going on.

• 22:01Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. All right, let's, let's continue.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  So yeah, that's the gist of like our journey on the product side. We've been out in the market for just a bit over a month now. And it's been super exciting. We built in public on Twitter, which I can, you know, go into detail in the next, next part. But I've been really like grateful and overwhelmed by the response. And we've had like thousands of people download the app. Our most active users are telling us to use it every single day. You know, they're checking their balances, they're doing like AI check ins to like understand their finances better. It's still early days, but it's like, so we're already seeing how people are using our app

• 22:51Speaker 01

  nearly seven times more frequently than like your desktop dashboard app. And they're talking more about like the, the habit formation that really is, you know, coming into play when you have this kind of experience.

• 23:04Greg Isenberg?

  How do you go from zero to thousands of customers using your product with basically no audience by building in public? Can you, in this section, can you teach us how?

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it always sounds kind of scary and impossible, right? There's, but really it's like

• 23:26Greg Isenberg?

  Not to this audience.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Maybe not.

• 23:28Greg Isenberg?

  Not to this audience.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:29Greg Isenberg?

  This audience has, is bought into the concept that building in public works, but how, how do you do it?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Amazing. Okay. I will, I'll go into how I do it. I'll actually just jump into like what I, what, what it kind of looks like timeline wise for me. Really just in the last few months, this little jump right here is I think I responded to some guy's tweet about college, not getting into certain colleges. I remembered this one, but by and large, you can see like there wasn't a lot here. And this is right here was actually when I made my first build in public post for Peak. And I know because it was actually on my birthday and For a long time, you might not really see much, right?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  And I think that's where like you, you kind of have to feel okay with um like posting and not getting a lot of engagement and impressions at the start because that is normal, right? Um, but you just have to find one opportunity where somebody catches wind of your post or your reply and it really just compounds from there. Like visually, like you can kind of see it um.

• 24:40Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  It started to happen around here.

• 24:42Greg Isenberg?

  Amazing. And can you maybe go into like some of the posts?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So um, this is the very first post uh I made uh. And as I, as I was evaluating it, I was like, I think I got better at like figuring out how to post about things as well like. But you know, it was one of those things where I was like, let me just get the first one out there. So this was done in March. Um, as you can see, it's a, it was actually four or five hundred initially in the, the views. But I think since my account has grown, I think a few people have come back and looked at my first post maybe. Um, but yeah, I, nothing crazy. I basically said, uh, day one, building the next big personal finance app. I was like, okay, maybe I'll make it like a journal thing. So like it keeps me accountable that like, okay, I do take day two, day three, day four.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Um, and then I say like, yeah, one of the biggest reasons why I built Peek was because running my own company made it harder for me to manage my money as disciplined as before. Couple with, you know, ADHD all over the place. So, and I actually uh have this like URL, spend dot peak dot money. That was actually a, a landing page that I created for this like, you know, very, very early uh version of the app uh which we, we uh, you know, re redirected and took down. But uh, yeah, basically it was very, very simple, right? This, this chat.

• 26:04Greg Isenberg?

  Can I break this down?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:06Greg Isenberg?

  So uh, you know, I'm on X a lot. I get hundreds of millions of impressions every single year.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:12Greg Isenberg?

  And this is an incredible tweet. Um, and I want to break down what, why it works and some tweaks I would make.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 26:22Greg Isenberg?

  So.

• 26:24Greg Isenberg?

  If you're building in public, the best thing you can do is get people to follow along in your journey. So the smartest thing about this is you're like, day one, building the next big personal finance app. So it's like, okay, I might follow Sherry because like, I want to see where this goes. People don't like not knowing the ending of the story.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:49Greg Isenberg?

  It's just, human beings need to know the ending of the story. So it's like, okay, I guess I'll follow Sherry, you know? The other thing is, building the next big personal finance app, we all know that none of us are happy, ecstatic, or I shouldn't say none of us, I would say-

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Most of us, yeah.

• 27:08Greg Isenberg?

  Lots of us are unhappy with, at least 50% of people are unhappy with the financial tools they use. A lot of them are using like antiquated bank, old school, 200-year-old bank, banking apps that look like they're designed from the 90s. So building the next big personal finance app is aspirational. So you have a journey meets aspirational. And then you're just, you say honestly, which makes me feel like you're a real human being, you know? Like we're texting. Writing like you're texting is super impactful on building in public and X. The only thing that I would, oh, and you say that like, you know,

• 27:52Greg Isenberg?

  you know, because running my own company made it harder to manage my money. Like you're, you're a bit vulnerable. Being vulnerable also really works in, in building in public. The only thing that you're missing here, and this is like a personal thing, but if you would have said, like, I suffer from ADHD, and like, that would be, for the people who have ADHD, extremely relatable.

• 28:20Greg Isenberg?

  Also, having a link in here suppresses the-

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:24Greg Isenberg?

  The algorithm. But other than that, this is like a nine on 10 tweet. It's really good. Can we move on to the next slide?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I know this gets like talked about so much of like, you just gotta show up, you just gotta post. And I know like, everyone's like, but everyone says it. I've been doing it for a while. Like, I'm not going anywhere. It feels like I'm stuck. It's nonlinear and I like could not believe when this day happened and and actually I only found out about this because my uh I mean our app was melting essentially like I was getting all these pings from intercom like this this and this user like has filed a ticket or whatever and I like messaged my co-founder right and I was like um are there bots like what's going on here it's like this like moment where you're like is this a bug are these bots like it could

• 29:16Speaker 01

  cross your mind right and then I was like no I I think these are real users because we were like looking at like what people were doing like no they're actually trying to connect their bank accounts like you wouldn't do that if you're a bot right so then I started to trace back and that's when I realized I think I was one of the first people that were happened to respond to this one tweet that this guy Preston um posted um he posted uh I want to finance up with three numbers what I spent today what I spent this week and what I spent this month and I don't think he knew it was gonna go to like 6.5 million views and certainly I didn't think like I I reply a lot on Twitter a lot actually that's another piece of advice which is like when you're you

• 29:59Speaker 01

  know early on like reply a lot and then at some point your post will carry you more but anyways I was replying to like you know a lot of threads that I felt like were relevant right so it it just so happened that my one response here got picked up um and I added an app store link um and I I said something like you get a cute mascot that roasts you um and then yeah it it just kind of took off uh and you never know when it comes it this one came like a month into building public so like I started what March 6th uh so this was like a month and three days and uh yeah this is the first time like I hit some kind of inflection point building in public

• 30:43Greg Isenberg?

  yeah you also what's good about this is you were like download my app it's you know I think People don't like pure promotion. I feel like you humanized it when you said you also get a cute mascot that can roast you in an AI chat interface if that's your style too. So again, going back into, going back to write like you text and write like you're speaking to another human being. I know that sounds obvious, but people, they, they get all corporate when they're trying to do this sort of stuff and that just doesn't work.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I completely agree. Um, I feel like the, so even the way that like, um, I write stylistically is, um, I, I make it very conversational, like a text message, right? It's like, um, you know, I don't use capitalization. Uh, I, uh, you know, add little things like, if that's your style too, which I don't know if I would have used back at Google. Um, yeah, like a little cheekiness, you know, you're like, it's kind of how you would talk with a friend, right? A little unfiltered. Um, but yeah, that's, that's like actually my norm, like how I talk here, um, this tweet is just how I talk in like real life. There's not a big difference.

• 32:02Greg Isenberg?

  Love it.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:03Greg Isenberg?

  All right. What else?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, um, yeah. So this like kind of set things off. And then, um, I was going to show you like one specific tweet. I'm actually just going to jump to like my Twitter because I don't think I put the, uh, I'll share this tab. So this tweet was basically the first day that I actually on my own post got more than like a thousand. And I mean, the algorithm does have an impact, right? In a way, it's like, if you have like a moment like that and you kind of catch it and you post anything afterwards, it kind of like grows from there. So I followed up, right? I was just basically like, hey, you know,

• 32:50Speaker 01

  There was a bunch of downloads I was not expecting posted by this person. Uh, and then we actually made some changes to the UI because it's not three numbers. It's four because it would have looked weird with three. I had a debate with my team on that. Um, but yeah, we, we kind of shipped it overnight. We were like, you know what? There's probably something to this whole like simplicity thing where like, people are obviously reacting to the, the bloat, right? The Frankenstein dashboards where you're like, sure, like I can look at my cash flow in this fancy, sankey chart with 12 colors, but like, how do, how much did I spend today? You know, like, that's all I need to know. So, yeah, we just like shipped this right away. So, um, that's like, I mean, the pros and cons of building public. I think it's a pro, like you get to move really fast.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  You like see feedback and then you build it, you get, like you get reactions. Um, obviously the, the downside is like, if you're, you're, you're kind of accountable to things, right? Like you're like, oh, I, I see this, I want to work on it. Then people expect you to put something out, but I like it because it kind of keeps me, you know, on track and making sure that like I'm creating the best app for our users.

• 33:56Greg Isenberg?

  So there's a few, there's a few ways to build an app that gets a lot of traction. One is trend jack. So you look at what trends are, are going to be. And then you like build for those trends. And I think that's like, I think it's, that's a huge way to do it. The other way, which, you know, is something I, I think about is tweet jacking. And obviously you think about that. So you, what, what you really did is you saw a tweet that got a lot of traction, millions of views. And then you essentially vibe coded a, and you know, that tweet into your app.

• 34:37Greg Isenberg?

  And then you latched on to all those people who wanted this product. And then all of a sudden they're like, wow, this, you know, peak is for me. This is a product for me. And you can only do that today, like, you, you know, in a world where there's AI and you can ship things overnight, you can only do that today. So I think this is brilliant. And then I love that you, you included like the journey day, whatever you put up there.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:09Greg Isenberg?

  Day 22.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  22.

• 35:11Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. This is cool. I like this.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, this is more tech stuff, but I thought this could be maybe useful for people who are like, oh, my gosh, I have to post every single day, like, how do I come up with ideas, like, all that stuff, right? Um, so I kind of came up with like, things that I enjoy talking about almost every single day, and oftentimes, these are things I'm already talking to friends about, right? So it's not like I'm creating new behaviors, just like it's another medium. So, um, you know, we already talked about the daily updates, right? Uh, but one thing I'll add here is, um, I did start out with like, hey, you know, building the, day one of building the next biggest personal finance app. I realized like, hey, that gets used, if I use it over and over again, it's like, okay, like, what's new, right?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  So I actually started to, um, make thematic challenges during certain time periods. So, uh, I started like, uh, another one I called like the three X retention in thirty days, because our week three retention was not great at one point. Um, it was like thirteen percent, which you don't want as a consumer app, not great. So then I was like, you know what, I don't mind, I'm just gonna tell people, our retention needs to improve, right? This is the number, here's where I wanna be, here's like, how long I wanna take to work on this, and here are all my steps, I'm doing it. Um, and I, funny enough, we did two things that actually shot our week three retention

• 36:38Speaker 01

  up from that, uh, from like thirteen percent to essentially like twenty-eight percent in like a short period. Um, we, uh, improved onboarding completion, literally just asking people, hey, spend three days, just connect your bank account and finish, and fifty percent of the people we just sent a reminder did it. And then the second thing is, we started to send, uh, these context-specific notifications, so it's like, uh, Like, uh, well, we'll basically look at their behaviors, right? After a time period and we'll be like, oh, it's a, it's, it's, it's a weekend now. Um, you know, you might wanna, you know, take a look at like, you know, your, you know, spend buckets, right? In, in these particular areas like entertainment, et cetera.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Uh, so it's like related to the time period. And, um, that also brought a lot of people back into the app. So, um, we actually completed the challenge in four days, which was kind of funny, actually, four or five days. Uh, so I was like, okay, I mean, I'm not done like working on retention by any means. It wasn't like, okay, we're done. But it was kind of hilarious that sometimes like it's little, the little small things that actually can make a difference.

• 37:46Greg Isenberg?

  Totally. I mean, I think what, what you're saying is if you're building in public, you might wanna have one really big goal. For example, I wanna make a million dollars ARR in 12 months and I'm building the next big tennis app.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:05Greg Isenberg?

  And that's a really big goal. And you can remind people of that goal, but you need to have subgoals.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, exactly.

• 38:13Greg Isenberg?

  So if you wanna bring people along for the journey, you need to have a set of subgoals, probably every 30 days.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:21Greg Isenberg?

  Where people are bringing you, you're bringing people along and it's like, okay, today's chat, uh, you know, this month's challenge is going to be retention. And then, okay, day 31 happens, you're like, okay, new challenge happened. I'm trying to hire a designer and I, you know, and I'm gonna go, so e- every startup has a set of challenges and, and focusing in around every two weeks or 30 days, I think, is really smart. Making memes around personal finance, talk more about that and talk more about your process for creating them.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, so I would say like, you know, don't make memes for the sake of making memes, although it's, it's super fun, but, um, you know, one thing that, um, you know, we all know is like just talking about finance itself without like thinking about the emotions and the context around it can be very boring, right? So making memes is kind of my way to figure out like, what is it that like? Really like people feel like some kind of way about, right? Emotionally, when it comes to money. And so I started to create memes, actually, to like, you know, get, uh, get that kind of, I guess, feedback from folks. And maybe I'll show some examples again. I'm just gonna go to my ex, because I think it's it's easier to

• 39:38Speaker 01

  to share. Uh, all right, I'm on my timeline. Okay, uh, so I started to post, um,

• 39:49Speaker 01

  like, I do stupid stuff here. I mean, this is pretty like just silly. This is a, you know, this is from the latest Avengers movie. So it's a bit of a trend jacking, whatever. Like, I was like, maybe people, you know, get the reference. So this is a superhero or, you know, villain uh, in the movie called The Void, right? So basically, uh, you know, you go into this feeling of nothingness, right? Um, so I just like, you know, took a couple of minutes was like, maybe there's some joke that I can make about this. And I was like, you know, like, I feel like I'm really bad at managing subscriptions because it's one of those things you just like pay for and forget. And it just like goes into nothingness, even though it's not really nothing because I'm paying for it.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Um, and so I use like that kind of, uh, you know, like as a tagline, right? And then added this image, which, uh, I just, I think I prompted on, this is GPT-4O. By the way, I prompted like New York skyline and I took a screenshot of like some, you know, picture of this supervillain and I said, put the peak face right here. Um, and I use this to basically like, kind of get more and more like, uh,

• 41:03Greg Isenberg?

  It's like a brand awareness, isn't it?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a way. And I, I've been doing a few, like, few of them, like I did, let me see. This one was also, yeah, like, wall of shame. I mean, I actually looked.

• 41:16Greg Isenberg?

  This is really smart. This is so smart. Like, what you're doing is basically.

• 41:24Greg Isenberg?

  You you know, some of the pain points of the audience you're going after, but you're packaging it in trends and memes so that the algorithms love you. And you're using like not enough people are using like image gen and some of these tools to have an unfair advantage. Like if you're building in public, a meme a week, a meme a week is going to be helpful. Like you will get thousands of impressions.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Greg Isenberg?

  If they're good, if they're good.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And they're they're not necessarily too hard to do. I even actually have this post here because someone was like, how do you do it? I'm like, I think it's pretty simple. I actually recorded.

• 42:11Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Can you make that full screen?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:13Greg Isenberg?

  Start from the beginning?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:15Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Okay, so let's see what your prompt is. Can you create? Can you create? Can you create a peak cartoon meme around the latest Thunderbolt Avengers movie? Movie, the dark void scene, subscription creep, insert clip of lightning lit abyss that place your 1399 free trial keeps teleporting to. Okay?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. By the way, um, this line I actually got from O3. I was actually using O3 to brainstorm like trends. And then I was and then thunder. I saw the Thunderbolt movie and I was like, oh, that was one of the ones. So I I actually copied this from O3 into 40. And I just added this part at the top, right? Can you create the peak cartoon meme? And I added the logo. Um, this is the logo asset.

• 43:03Greg Isenberg?

  So what you're saying is you can even use these L L Ms to give you idea around what memes create. You don't even need.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 43:10Greg Isenberg?

  You don't even need the ideas themselves. So use use a.

• 43:16Greg Isenberg?

  Use ChatGPT as a meme co-founder.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:22Greg Isenberg?

  And start from there.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, the the one thing you still have to have is you have to have taste. I mean, they'll give you a bunch of ideas, like nine out of 10 are shit. You have to decide like which one like, you know, catches people's attention, is visually suitable and can relate to some message around your brand, right?

• 43:41Greg Isenberg?

  I've actually never tried this. I've actually never tried to use.

• 43:47Greg Isenberg?

  I've never tried to use ChatGPT as a way to come up with meme ideas. So I'm gonna try this after. I think this is cool.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you you totally should. I I I can see what my prompt was when I asked it for memes. I I think I said a few things in there, so like pop culture, like, because we're reaching an American audience, I was like, sports, you know, sports stuff kind of works, celebrity gossip. So I gave a few categories as well. So it wasn't just like, make me memes. It was like, I I I added some details in it, but I I guess I'm a long if you want to give a meme Jenna, meme idea Jenna a try on GPT. So uh,

• 44:27Speaker 01

  I'll keep playing this, but you can see how the first one looked like not great. I mean, it was like the Sentry guy wasn't there, like it's a dark. I mean, I looked at this copy as okay, like clearly it just copied word for word from the 4O language and like, yeah, I mean, it, nobody would get what this meant. So then I just like, prompted it again. I was like, okay, use this picture of Sentry. Sorry, Sentry slash void. Sentry, I don't know if you, did you see the movie, the latest Marvel one?

• 44:58Greg Isenberg?

  No, but I've seen like the trailer.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's actually pretty good. Um, I.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Felt pretty disappointed with Marvel for a long time, but I actually think this was, this was a solid movie. I'll do like a very quick 10 second explanation of Sentry. Basically, when Sentry is really sad and in a depressed place, it turns into the void. So it's devoid of stuff. So that's the same thing. So I gave it, I basically ripped that photo, sorry, oof, I ripped that photo from Google Images, I think. And then I came up with this, which like, obviously looks kind of, this looks like some Statue of Liberty, like Superman. Doesn't really look like the void and then like, I don't know what's going on here, like.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Peak with the whole, I was like, trying to like, tell it to use a New York skyline and it like, just took this text. I mean, it just does stupid things, but like, I don't give up. I just like, try to like, see if I can be more specific. And I was like, actually use this image, right? And then change the text.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I think it like, crapped out there.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And then I said, actually, like, add the Peak logo onto the face. And then the text should be this. So it's very specific. And then you get that. So it's multiple iterations. Like, I think if you give up after the first try, it'd be like, yeah, it sucks for like, image jet or making memes. I'm like, no, you just gotta like, you know, finesse it and you, you get something out of it.

• 46:36Greg Isenberg?

  Awesome. What else you got?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, let's go back here. I think we did actually talk about this, but yeah, you can use like, GPT and LLM to brainstorm. And in fact, beyond just like meme ideas, you can actually use, I use O3 for this mostly, but you can actually feed it, your Twitter handle, your socials, and ask it, can you like, analyze, like,

• 47:08Speaker 01

  What you think would be three strong angles for me to talk about uniquely? And like, give me those categories. You could do that. Um, and you'd you'd be surprised like what it comes up with. Yeah.

• 47:24Greg Isenberg?

  You can do it, and you probably should.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 47:27Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Um, just have a few more things. I know, like, uh, yeah, there's a, I put this in here because a lot of people like, say that building public has a bad rap because people are just talking like it's like they're just yapping or where's the product, right? And I think that's why the build part is really, really important. Like you gotta show like you're interacting with people, you're taking feedback and all of that. So I actually added this tweet in here because it's very recent. Um, it's just from like a day ago, I think. Uh, but I, yeah, so this person Seb, um, had been using Peak for a month. Um, I think discovered it from the tweet, probably from Preston.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Um, and, uh, left feedback, right? It's like, hey, here's some things that like I want, you know, working better, the refresh, uh, the, you know, Gen Z lingo is something that some people like. It's some people don't, it's polarizing depending on who you ask. And then, um, this part is really where I kind of took out and said, okay, we're doing the one thing that we wanted uniquely do well, which is Story Gen. And then, I mean, I always think when someone says borrow UX, like I appreciate that, like it's a, yeah, it's a something that I don't mind hearing. Um, so I, yeah, I interact a lot with people on replies,

• 48:50Speaker 01

  DMs, probably have like at least 50 people, like in some kind of direct line of communication that just, you know, sends me the stuff, um, while we're building Peak at public.

• 49:01Greg Isenberg?

  And that's it.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  That's pretty much it. Yeah.

• 49:03Greg Isenberg?

  All right.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:04Greg Isenberg?

  Um, Sherry, thank you so much for your time and sharing your process and how you built this, both from a product perspective, from an insights perspective, and from a marketing perspective. Um, I'm going to include the, the links, uh, to where people could follow along your journey and Peak's journey, uh, in the show notes if people want to go and, and, and, and get more of that. Um, do you have anything you want to leave, you know, the audience with before you head out?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  I think this is the golden age of building AI native mobile apps. So um I'm really excited to see what everybody starts building. Um, this is like a paradigm shift, not just for personal finance, but it's for the whole suite of any kind of applications that we're gonna use to like, you know,

• 49:57Speaker 01

  improve ourselves in some area, right, to like, live a higher quality of life. So I think this is like such a cool time to be building. Um, so yeah, just go out there and do some cool stuff.

• 50:09Greg Isenberg?

  Amen. Thanks, Sherry. I appreciate it.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 50:12Greg Isenberg?

  Bye.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Bye bye.