Stole an Idea, Built It in 12 Hours, Sold for $15K in 8 Days (Exact Playbook)

Join me as I chat with Josh Pigford, who took an idea from Idea Browser, built a tool called NameSnag for finding expired domains, and sold it for $15,000 within eight days. The conversation explores Josh's rapid development process, including how he leveraged AI tools like Claude for naming and coding, created branding, and used Twitter to build momentum and find customers. Josh emphasizes the importance of shipping quickly rather than aiming for perfection. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:26 - NameSnag Backstory 04:44 - Explanation of domain acquisition strategy 13:29 - Branding NameSnag 19:12 - Building Hype through Building in Public 29:28 - Biggest Takeaways from Josh's story 30:58 - What Josh would have done differently 33:17 - Q&A about selling side projects Key Points: • Josh saw a viral tweet about an AI tool for finding expired domains and decided to build it • He publicly committed to building the project on Twitter, which created accountability • He named the product "NameSnag" and secured both .com and .ai domains • Josh documented his entire build process on Twitter, generating interest and early customers • He sold the project for $15,000 just 8 days after starting it 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 Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND JOSH ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/Shpigford Personal Website: https://joshpigford.com

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

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Today, we've got Josh on the podcast. He's going to tell the story of how he vibe coded an idea he got from idea browser.com and then sold it in eight days for $15,000. It was a roller coaster journey. And the reason I wanted to have him on the pod is I want him to to teach you how you could do the same. And I just thought it was a really interesting story of how someone could take something from zero to one and this whole age of ideas with AI. Enjoy the episode.

• 0:40Greg Isenberg?

  Josh, welcome to the pod and I can't wait to hear what you have to say.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on, Greg. I'm pumped to talk shop.

• 0:50Greg Isenberg?

  All right. So maybe walk us through how this whole thing happened because it's a crazy story.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  It's it's absurd is what it is, Greg.

• 1:02Greg Isenberg?

  Like, I don't know if you're numb to it, but like, as in, I was telling this to, I went for coffee this morning. I was telling this to like a barista and he was like, that's insane. Like, guy, guy steals an idea from the internet and then like ends up like flipping it for $15,000. Like, what kind of world do you people live in?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. I've been, yes, what world do we live in? Like, there's, yes, we're in some sort of weird unicorn bubble. I feel like this entire story can be told in tweets.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  And so that's sort of what we're going, I'm going to attempt to do here. You posted on, what day was this? July 14th. This is 10 days ago. You tweet the about an AI agent that finds expired.com domains. So I, I did not see this tweet initially. However,

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Someone who follows me did, they just tagged me with some, you know, with an emoji. And then I replied that I had plans this week because I saw that tweet and I knew that like it was going to eat at me. And then I tweet, let's see, where is it? Oh, that I'm building this. Yeah. So this is what the next day.

• 2:13Greg Isenberg?

  Which by the way, you know, you know what you did here? I don't think a lot of people realize is you committed. You made yourself on the hook for doing it, right? You publicly said, I'm doing this thing.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, that's, that's my addiction to Twitter. So I, I just have to like, it's a, that's great content, right? Like if I, if I say I'm posting about it. So like, um, my previous startup was called Bear Metrics. It's like a business analytics platform. I sold it back in 2020. Uh, but like in 2013, 2013, I think I had a very similar tweet where Stripe had just started. Like they were still at really early days. Nobody had really built anything on their API other than just like integrating it for payments. But as far as like apps built on top of Stripe, nobody else had really done anything.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  So like I made a tweet that said something like SaaS or like Stripe Analytics, uh, company.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I'm building it tonight, like coffee brewed. This was like at like 7:00 PM or something. And, um, and that was the kind of thing that like I, you know, over the course of about two weeks or something. I built this tool that ended up like I sold for like millions of dollars back in 2020. Like, but that, that resulted in this, or it started, the impetus for it was this tweet that I made. And so like I find myself doing that a lot habitually where like, if I think of something, I'll tweet about it. And then like that just brings up, you know, first customers, a lot of times come from these kinds of tweets. Like it's self-serving, um, to some extent, and it does, it does provide a little bit of accountability.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  But yeah, so like the next morning at 8:50 I tweeted about it. However, I had been up since I typically get up around like 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. And I had been working on it already at that point, like a few hours. Um, and so that was, but that was 24 hours later. I tweeted from your tweet. I, I, I committed to it basically. And then I just kept tweeting about it in a thread. And, um, and then by, let's see, what time was this? 7:00 PM that same day, it was live. So, um,

• 4:41Speaker 01

  that was, that was sort of like the, from, from your idea to the time that like I actually launched it was like less than 36 hours, I think.

• 4:50Greg Isenberg?

  People are going to want to know how you actually did that.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, um, the, the nitty gritty of like pulling that off, there's so many things here, right? Like you see in the, in the thread here, I'm talking about buying domains. Like I first got the dot AI that was available for name snag. Now, um, actually this will be great. So let's see if I can, okay. So in Claude, um, finding names for stuff is just maddening. Specifically when it comes to finding domains that are available. So what I've been doing is I have, um, who is MCP? Which we can talk about that if you want to, that's really getting into the weeds.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  That will check the availability of domains right here in Claude chat. But like, let me give you an example. So, um, what I did before I even figured out name snag was like, I have to figure out the name of something. Because if I can't, if I can't like name the folder, I'm going to put this stuff in. Or like when I'm generating code, I don't, I can't reference the product. Like if I don't have a name for it, it will drive me crazy. So like the very first thing I do is name the thing. Now, started doing this thing a couple of weeks ago where I'll be like, um, I need to name an app that helps people find expired domain names. Come up with words related to.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Find or snipe was I think one word.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Or acquire related to domains. So it comes up with 20 ideas here, just right out of the gate, fine. And then it should hit that who is, yeah. So now it starts going through using that MCP to see what's available. So I just did this for, I don't know, 30 minutes or an hour or something, where it does all this, it'll go through all 20 of them. And then at the end, it might be like, I couldn't find anything. Or there's, here are the three dot AIs, there were no dot coms. And I'll just say 20 more, 50 more, whatever. And I'll do this until I've got 200 random things. And because it's all within the conversation of Claude,

• 7:17Speaker 01

  it, every time it will basically summarize like, okay, after all this, here are all the dot coms that are available. Here are, here's the dot coms and the dot AIs that are available. Like it'll just summarize it, it keeps summarizing it for me. And it'll even give its opinion, you know, on like, what's,

• 7:35Speaker 01

  what's available, what's probably, you know, what's your best bet? Like, what's the best pick out of all these from a naming perspective? Which.

• 7:45Greg Isenberg?

  People often tell me like, they're bait, you know, they're always like, the dot com's not available, the dot AI isn't available. Like all the good domains are thousands of dollars. And it's just not, it's, it's not true. Like there is, there are available domains that are snappy and catchy that you could get for 10, tens of dollars. And my first reaction to when I saw your tweet, your quote tweet around, I'm building this, it's called name snag. I was like, this is going to crush.

• 8:22Greg Isenberg?

  Just because of the name, like the name is so good that sometimes like, when you have a good name to something,

• 8:32Greg Isenberg?

  it kind of sets a floor for how much it's worth just because of the name and the concept.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Sure. I, and a lot of the stuff, I also have a background, I went to school for design. So like, I have this. I look at everything through this lens of like, oh, will this work from like a branding perspective or some sort of design perspective? Like, oh, I hate, like, if something looks weird from a, like, the way that the word looks or something like, there's this like mental block for me where if like, man, I just hate how that will probably look if I try to, you know, do a logo for that or something like, um, you know, if, if, if one word ends in the letter P and the next word starts in a letter P and it's like, that'll be just impossible from a branding perspective or something like that. So like, a lot of times I'm, I'm rapidly also

• 9:20Speaker 01

  thinking through branding stuff as well, um, as these things are coming up, you know? But I mean, like here, yeah, we found, we found dot com and dot AIs that are available. So that was what I did with names nag, you know, and then, but that's the thing with the Claude stuff is like, because it's got this, all this context, I could literally just be like, three more and it'll repeat the whole thing. And it's so easy. It's just ridiculous how easy it is to try this stuff out and to brainstorm this stuff. Um, and get ideas. So like, this is my favorite thing as of late for ideas, uh, because like I want the, the, some TLD to be available, whether

• 10:05Speaker 01

  that's dot com, dot AI, dot app, dot co, I don't know, whatever. It doesn't matter. You can try any of that stuff. Um, so that was what, um, was the initial, um, let's see if any of those were available. Yeah. So.

• 10:25Greg Isenberg?

  I don't think people are using, I call it Claude. I don't think people are using Claude like this, by the way. Um, I haven't seen.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I'd never, I'd really never used it until the MCP stuff.

• 10:39Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Like, that's, that's really kind of what, because I'm sort of nerd out over chat GPT and specifically like oh, three, that model and like the deep research stuff.

• 10:49Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  So, but when I could start connecting this to other stuff, that's sort of like made it click for me. And obviously I use their, their code stuff is what I, is my weapon of choice for like actually building stuff. But yeah, the domain name, the naming stuff.

• 11:07Greg Isenberg?

  Incredible.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Kills it for me.

• 11:08Greg Isenberg?

  Kills it. Okay. So you named it.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  So I named it. Um, so let me switch back to.

• 11:14Greg Isenberg?

  You got a really good name. Step one.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I got the dot com and the dot AI. AI was available. I did. The dot com was like 5,000. I think. And I did, uh, but they had a payment plan. So I was like, okay, whatever. I have nothing to lose here on just paying a few hundred bucks a month on this thing and we'll see.

• 11:39Greg Isenberg?

  Which by the way, a lot of people don't realize that if you find a domain that is really incredible and is $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, a lot of people will rent the domain to you.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:51Greg Isenberg?

  Right?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  And a lot of the there, it's in this particular case, it was, it was listed on, it's atom.com, A T O M dot com. And like they, it's already built in, like, I didn't have to go and like, contact the seller or anything like that. But it was essentially all automated.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Which was why I was able to buy it that morning and then like buy, I could use it that evening. You know, I wasn't having to negotiate a bunch of stuff or whatever.

• 12:21Greg Isenberg?

  But if you're vibe coding something and you're trying to do something similar to this, doing something like finding a great domain, maybe leasing it, and then maybe flipping it is a really interesting way to think about it.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it lowers sort of your, your risk, right? Especially if you can lease it and not even make payments towards owning it. Like, I mean, there, there are cases where you can, the person who owns it was just like, I'll just lease it to you. Whatever. And then whenever you're done with it, that's the end. That was still as a night nine o'clock that morning, I got both domains that I wanted.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  So then I just started building.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  And we can talk about that in a second here, but like you'll see, so what time is this at? That was at, that was at 1130 a.m. I was talking about how I'd already built the backend for it. And then like a minute later, I posted this first pass at a logo. So like what I'm doing is while I'm sort of vibe coding this thing and the, the AI is running in the background, building this stuff, I'm an illustrator, which you know, you could be an illustrator, Figma, Canva, whatever, designing this thing. So the first thing I did, and I don't, let's see. I had this idea of like the dot. What was sticking in my head was the idea of like, these are all, you care about the,

• 13:39Speaker 01

  the TLD that you're getting, the dot com, the dot AI, whatever. So let's focus on like a dot. So that was the, the initial impetus for

• 13:52Speaker 01

  this sort of like dot name snag thing.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  I'm a sucker for like slightly rounded typefaces. So that was that initial idea. I was kind of going with this green.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Then I started thinking, well, how does this look inside an avatar, like a, you know, a little square or a circle? So we need something smaller. And then that led to like, well, what if we do something like, you know, this where, or just slightly more interesting dot. Then I cleaned that up a little bit and ended up on that.

• 14:27Greg Isenberg?

  Which obviously slaps, just obviously.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  It just felt, felt good. And I'm, you know, and I can, blue is super cliche in the tech world, but like, whatever. I, I like the blue. Now that, I posted that on Twitter, like, here's my first pass. And there's a guy named Derek who has sort of like, whenever I post these side projects,

• 14:57Speaker 01

  he's like, hey, man, I made a logo for you. So, and then I'll be like, oh man, that's legit. Send me a Stripe invoice link and I'll send you some money. So this has happened maybe like five times now, where he does this and then I just give him money unprompted. So, you know, you could just do things. And so, so then he basically sends me this.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  You know, which is a little bit cleaner, gets rid of the rounded stuff, which is fine. I think it feels slightly more professional to me. And so, uh, so I bring the, the logo mark into Illustrator that's like in thing. And then that sort of where we landed was like this, this iteration is what made the site.

• 15:42Greg Isenberg?

  So you have, you have really good branding. You, you took a first stab at it and then someone, you know, did the last mile. So I think the, the lesson there is, you know, these people are out there and, you know, Even if you're not a trained illustrator, like you can use tools to, to, to take a first stab and, you know, and then, and then get, get someone for not an exorbitant amount of money to take, to, to, to, to take something to the.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I, I think people tend to overthink this and there were lots of people who are like, well, what, what tool are you using to design the logo, assuming that it was AI generated?

• 16:20Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Which is fair and also completely valid to do. So there's no reason you can't just like ask chat GPT to make you some logo, especially in the early stages.

• 16:33Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, but you need to have an idea. You need to have some.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  A concept.

• 16:37Greg Isenberg?

  Right?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yes. You should, you should, if you think, put yourself in the shoes of like an art director or something, right? Or like a creative director who's like trying to give some directions. It was the same way with like, you know, in the chat there about coming up with the domain ideas. Like I gave a few words that I wanted to kind of like focus in on, right? So then it can just act like a thesaurus based on the wording or the tone and go from there. So like, as with all things AI, the more context that you can provide it, the better it'll.

• 17:09Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. And you might, you might want to say like, you know, I, you know, pretend, you know, this could be the prompt, like pretend you're a creative director. I look up to people like Josh Pigford from NameSnag and maybe I look up to, you know, Greg Isenberg, Late Checkout, idea browser.com. You use those, you screenshot those logos, you give it the context and then see what it pumps out. Then you have to actually, I saw this really good tweet today from Jordan Singer. Um, and he said, here it is. The new bottleneck is no longer doing the work. It's reviewing the work. I think that's very true.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Ew, yes.

• 17:51Greg Isenberg?

  So you'll review the work. And then probably pass that off to someone who takes it to the end to the last mile.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I there's so you briefly mentioned maybe there. So like on at maybe there's four of us working on that product and one of them is I I would say another engineer because I'm doing a ton of coding, but he's the actual engineer. Like he's the the one who's actually really knows what he's doing on the engineering side. And so much of our process between he and I is like I'll vibe code something super fast, just to test out the idea or the UX behind it or whatever. And then I'll code, I'll code it, then I'll push it to get and then he'll go in and like essentially

• 18:43Speaker 01

  clean up my my mess. So like I'm passing off a lot of this to someone who's

• 18:52Speaker 01

  has a better idea of sort of like how this affects all the other parts of the code or whatever, you know, so there's a lot of this handing off that happens throughout the whole process, right? Even the logo here for names nag was handed off to someone who's can can probably

• 19:08Greg Isenberg?

  a pro.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  do a better job. Yeah, that's right.

• 19:11Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, cool. So we got that. And then what happened?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  So logo. So the I'm not going to just like cover all the tweets here, but I do think this plays a part in sort of the story here. So what you see me doing here is like I post a poll about like, how do we style the domain? Do we do this, you know, capitalize the S lowercase, whatever? Post a screenshot of like proof that I've actually got something working. And this entire time is me making this almost this community effort on some level.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  To me, what's super interesting about social is not just constantly broadcasting, right? Like it's a, it's a, the interactivity part. It's me posting something and someone has an idea. Me posting something, a logo, and someone responds with a different logo. You know, it's someone saying, I like that feature. What if you did this? And that's incredibly beneficial. Both to me, as I'm sort of doing this, sitting here in a box by myself, but it's also building up a bit of hype on the product itself.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  So I keep yapping about it.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  And then get to the point where it's like, hey, we've launched. Again, that was seven o'clock that night. Basically, I worked on it for the better part of 12 hours or so that day. And, but I think later that evening, like I stayed up another couple of hours and was at, I mean, we did a thousand dollars or something in revenue within a couple of hours of launching this thing. And subscription stuff, because I had just been talking about it all day, right? Like, because I was posting polls and screenshots and asking for feedback on things.

• 21:13Greg Isenberg?

  I think it's more than that, in my opinion. I think it's, when I zoom out, you, because I know a lot of people are gonna be like, well, Josh has 50,000 followers. Of course, you got a thousand dollars MRR in like, in a few hours. But what, if you look at, I'm building, yeah, this, I'm building this, click on that, click on that. I just want to see how many impressions you got from that. 145,000. Like, if you go to, you know, go to your Twitter, your Twitter account, like, you don't normally get 145,000.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 21:48Greg Isenberg?

  You know what I mean?

• 21:50Greg Isenberg?

  Like this is a, this is like a, a big one and you're getting 11,000. Go like to,

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Let's see, buy cookies for breakfast.

• 21:58Greg Isenberg?

  You know, you're getting, you're getting in the single digit thousands of views and you got 145 times more impressions. Now let's break that down. Why did you do that? What, what happened? You jumped off a trend. Basically you found a tweet that was going viral.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:15Greg Isenberg?

  In this case, it was about a startup idea.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:18Greg Isenberg?

  And you quote retweeted it and.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Which I did not realize this, like mine, my quote retweet uh got, you know, not as much as your, as your original tweet.

• 22:31Greg Isenberg?

  Almost.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Almost, right?

• 22:33Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Almost.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  So it's like, yes, it very much though was like jumping on to uh that your, your, your tweet that started going quasi-viral.

• 22:46Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. So that's what people don't understand about these social platforms, specifically X2 is like find something you can, there's tweets going viral every day and there's a startup idea related to um to that. Like I saw, go to Brett from Design Joy's Twitter. So I, I've had this guy on the pod once and here he said, uh, click the latest, his latest tweet.

• 23:16Greg Isenberg?

  So there's this app that's going viral right now. I think it's making like two, $300,000 a day of revenue, which is crazy, you know? Um, and he designed it. It's called T Dating Advice. And it's like an anonymous app to like basically score men that they go on dates with. And so it's an obviously viral idea. And he says, I'm the designer behind the mega viral T dating app. If anyone wants to build the equivalent for men, my DMs are open. I have plenty of ideas. So there's, yes, this guy Brett from DJ can go build this, but you can also quote retweet this and be like, I'm building this.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:52Greg Isenberg?

  All of a sudden, how many views this guy? He just, you know, it's gotten.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  55,000.

• 23:57Greg Isenberg?

  Like all of a sudden you're like siphoning views and then people are following along your story and then they become your first customers.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  As I was posting this stuff, there were, you know, I think there are a number of comments that talks about how like. You know, if anybody else is building this like it's game over Joshua like beat you to it. Knowing that I how fast I'll build stuff. And I think that the problem is most people overthink this stuff, right? Like, I don't have some, I have a skill set to building fast, only if only because I've put in the reps to know how to build stuff really fast. So here's a list of what is it 78 projects over the past like 20 years of things that I've built. And, and this doesn't even, this doesn't include everything that like I built and then just shut down because I didn't completely finish it because I realized, oh,

• 24:50Speaker 01

  this isn't going to work. Like, there was a Twitter bookmark AI processing thing that like I was building, got real close to finishing it, but then I realized, oh, I'm going to have to spend $50,000 a month for Twitter's API to like actually make this work. So that those things don't show up on this list here. So that there's, there's 78 things here on the list, but it's probably, it's, it's hundreds of things where I've started something, right? So I'm very good at like the zero to one for most things, like just starting something and seeing what happens. And so I've put in the reps and there's no reason someone can't take like, go to like idea browser every day and just freaking build the thing. Even if

• 25:33Speaker 01

  you, I told this people who like new, new, say freelance designers who are like, well, how do I, how do I get clients? I don't have a portfolio. Well, just like make up stuff, man. See an idea for a company and just make a logo for it or design a website or design the app or, you know, do like Brett's doing where you have some idea and he's so he's designed it. He didn't like build the app, but he designed it. Like you can do that. You can just do that. Right? And there's no reason you can't take something, the, an idea of every day on idea browser and say, okay, here today, this week, I'm going to time box myself for the week to build this thing out. And I'm going to tweet about it

• 26:15Speaker 01

  constantly, annoyingly even. And eventually you'll build up a following just around that even.

• 26:22Greg Isenberg?

  I was talking to someone who he's, you know, sixteen, seventeen years old and he wants to go to business school. And I was like, what does that even mean in twenty twenty five to go to business school? Like, what does that even mean? Like, you should go to shipping school.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:39Greg Isenberg?

  You know what I mean?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:41Greg Isenberg?

  And you should, you know, use idea browser, use or or just come up with ideas on your own, like use chat GPT. Like, whatever it is, just get the reps in to know how to, you know, take an idea from zero to one, all the stuff that we're talking about, you know, the, like to us and to you, Josh, like it's, it's, it's intuition, but you've built it over time, right? So people need to build that intuition.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there's, everybody wants, and it feels, AI has made it feel like there's a shortcut. And to some extent, on some parts of it, there are. But the reason, you know, some of the questions people were asking or wanted to know from this podcast were like, what, you know, do you, are you using some sort of like boilerplate template for a code or whatever, which I'm not? And like, a lot of that stuff is just, I just know how these things are going to work. Because I've done it so many times. And I haven't done it because I got paid to do it, right? Like, I'm not doing this, working at some company or whatever. I'm doing it because I enjoy building stuff. And so I end up getting the reps in because I I'm obsessive about it.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And you, you just do that and you talk about it. And then, you know, yes, uh, my fifty thousand followers or whatever is helpful. That's, that's a level of distribution, but like that came from me being on Twitter for, since two thousand and seven, right? Like almost twenty years and just tweeting constantly about stuff. Not saying that you need to like twenty years to build up a following, but like. You'd build up a community around the stuff that you're doing by just putting in the work.

• 28:28Greg Isenberg?

  And yes, but I will say it was harder for us back in the day because we had to build followers. And then then we had followers to distribute and that took a lot of hard work. Today, with the for you.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Sure, for you didn't didn't exist.

• 28:45Greg Isenberg?

  Didn't exist, right? So yeah, there's people who have like the the tweet that went, you know, I think it was like one of the most viral tweets of all time. It's like share it, share a piece of lore. Did you see that tweet?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 28:57Greg Isenberg?

  Like, go to that tweet.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Absurd.

• 29:00Greg Isenberg?

  Absurd. I think it got like 1.3 billion views. There it is. So.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  1.2 billion.

• 29:07Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, give me a break. Like, first of all, that person is getting what, like, like a check for half a million dollars? When I saw this account, I think it had 2,000 followers.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Followers, it was 30,000 now.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was that was not possible, even 10 years ago.

• 29:27Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. So if I could summarize, like, my takeaway from your story is find good ideas or come up with good ideas. Figure, you know, have a positioning and brand in the market that's that sticks out. Bring people along for the journey.

• 29:50Greg Isenberg?

  And just keep trying to make it better.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  I I think there's people are so afraid of of putting out stuff that.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  You know, there's like that Reid Hoffman quote about like, if you've launched something that's like perfect or whatever, you've waited too late or something like that. Like, like waiting to ship perfect software, like you've already waited too long. You're like, you just have to ship stuff and.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  A lot of it's going to look bad. It should, it should almost by, by definition should like be kind of gnarly. Because otherwise you're starting to make assumptions about what people will use, what features they want when we're talking about software. Like you just have to kind of do things and then see, get feedback on it. And like with names that there was all sorts of feedback around people saying like, well, this doesn't work. Or like, this is a bad idea, which is fine. Like people are allowed to critique stuff. But if anything, that means like, that's a good thing that you're getting that kind of feedback, because it means people are paying attention.

• 30:58Greg Isenberg?

  Before we head out, what, what would you have done differently in this project?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Um, I, I don't know that I would have done anything different because I, I really, there's another tweet in here, which it would take me 10 minutes to find, but like, so I posted this, what, what day of the week was this on? Whoops. July 15th was, what was that, like a Wednesday or something? That was a Tuesday. So that was on a Tuesday. That Thursday, I occasionally like go up, take the dog and go up to the mountain, the cabin in the mountains and just spend a few days kind of doing whatever.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  So like that Thursday, I went and I like spent the first couple of days just building out, I scrapped the entire first thing that I built, all of the code and literally built it from scratch again on like that Thursday. So like two days later, I built version two of this thing. And I think the keeping up, like if I had not sold it, I probably would have kept that same. Mentality of like, let's scrap it and like, let's build the next iteration of this. And then to me, that's what AI enables is this, this sort of rapid iteration on things. Where you have an idea and then you realize, oh, here's some things that didn't work.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, you can just build it again. Like it's not, we didn't spend six months building some complex piece of software, spent a few hours and not, and I'm not tied to it. I now have learned, I've got new information. So let me just build it again. And to me like, that's one of the big takeaways is, is just, you know, I shipped two versions of this thing in like a 48 hour period. And you can apply that to almost any side of business, including marketing, you know, growth stuff, code, whatever. You just, you just keep building stuff really fast and, and don't get like tied to it. Right. It's, everything's not your baby.

• 33:16Greg Isenberg?

  Amen, brother. So people have asked you questions. We're going to go through three or four of those questions and answer them.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Cool. Let's see. So somebody asked her about selling. So this is actually a decent topic for us to talk about here. So they asked when I knew I should sell it or do I build to sell things? So first off, I don't, I don't typically build anything to sell it. I build it because I'm trying to learn something. Like that's my motivation is I want, I'm teaching myself some piece of code. Or some, some concept, I guess. So I don't build stuff to sell, but I do tend to assume I will not hold on to things for a long time. So this is the same reason that I can build V2 48 hours later because I'm not, uh,

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I'm not so married to V1 that I built and think that I've done something amazing. Like if I've learned what I needed to learn from it, then like, let's move on. And that was the case for this, you know, your idea was like, you could build a 1.2 million ARR business, which is entirely possible. I wasn't necessarily, I didn't build it because I thought that I could make 1.2 million dollars. Right. So I sold it for like $15,000 eight days later. And it's a hundred percent could have sold it for more, but like, I'm not, I wasn't building it to sell it. I wasn't building it to make 1.2 million dollars. Like, I was building it because I wanted to learn stuff about like, who is records?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  And then the ability for AI to like, process all this data and, you know, semantic search stuff, like super nerdy things that just happened to fit this project. And that struck a chord for me, so I decided to build it.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  But that's sort of, my motivation is almost exclusively for learning things.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  More than anything. There's a couple of questions about like, selling it, or like, this person hears that, leave money on the table and not list it on like, acquired.com.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I think there, there, one idea that I have had here is like, it would be kind of interesting if I wasn't actually building a full-scale sort of VC-backed startup also, along with all these side projects, is,

• 35:38Speaker 01

  it would be kind of fun to every week, pick some idea, build it out, and then you just sort of sell a startup in a box.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  I think there's this thing, so in the past, since 2023, in the past like, two years,

• 35:56Speaker 01

  I've built all these different apps, like, sold for 8,000, sold for 25,000, sold for 5,000, sold for 12,000, sold for 24,000. Like, I think I've probably done, I don't know, close to $100,000 over the past couple of years, just selling off random side projects that I built over the course of like, a week. So I think that there's, if, if your obsession is just building stuff, you could almost make that your job, you know? Like, there's income to be had of just like, taking an idea, building it, and then selling it.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  I think AI allows for a lot of that stuff, and there's people who don't want to get in the weeds on the AI, but do want a functioning tool, and you could sell it. To me, that would actually be kind of fun.

• 36:43Greg Isenberg?

  Cool.

• 36:45Greg Isenberg?

  That's the podcast, bro. We did it. I appreciate it. Josh, how many ideas did you say you've done? Seventy?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  There's 78 on this list here on my website.

• 36:57Greg Isenberg?

  So this is the Startup Ideas Podcast. You're obviously the, you're an idea person. You're one of us. I appreciate you coming on. If people want to follow Josh's journey, I will include links to all the places you can get to know him better in the show notes. Check him out. I told him before we hit record, I told Josh that he's my, my ex-crush of the week because I recently found him and I've been, I've been, I've been consuming his tweets, loving it. So, you know, keep it up.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for having me, Greg. It was a ton of fun.

• 37:31Greg Isenberg?

  Later.