Building an iPhone app with zero technical skills | Bryce Rattner Keithley

Bryce Rattner Keithley has spent her career in talent and recruiting, working with technical leaders but never writing a line of code herself. Yet she managed to build Daily Hundred—a fitness app featuring custom AI-generated videos of anthropomorphic animals demonstrating exercises—and ship it to the App Store before her software engineer friends. Using Replit, Claude, Gemini, and a relentless beginner’s mindset, Bryce proves that in the AI era, execution is no longer the constraint on good ideas. What you’ll learn: How to build and ship an iPhone app using Replit without any coding knowledgeThe step-by-step process for creating custom AI-generated workout videos by combining Gemini images with real exercise footageHow to use Claude as your technical architect and Claude Code as your software engineerHow to navigate App Store submission requirements (including fixing rejection feedback)Why being hyper-literal in your prompts unlocks better AI resultsWhy a beginner’s mind is actually an advantage when building with AI tools— Brought to you by: WorkOS https://workos.com/?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025—Make your app enterprise-ready today Metaview https://www.metaview.ai/home/how-i-ai—The agentic recruiting platform for winning teams — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Bryce and Daily Hundred (04:48) Building with Replit (06:16) The beginner’s mindset advantage (11:17) Creating anthropomorphic animals (22:55) Moving from static image to video (27:15) The floating genie and other anthropomorphic animal generations (30:46) Shifting from web app to App Store submission (36:24) User feedback (37:41) Lightning round and final thoughts — Tools referenced: • Replit: https://replit.com/ • Lovable: https://lovable.dev/ • Claude: https://claude.ai/ • Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code • Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ • Higgsfield: https://higgsfield.ai/ • Kling: https://kling.ai/ • Railway: https://railway.app/ • TestFlight: https://developer.apple.com/testflight/ — Other references: • How a 91-year-old vibe coded a complex event management system using Claude and Replit | John Blackman: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-a-91-year-old-vibe-coded-a-complex • What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: https://www.amazon.com/What-Got-Here-Wont-There/dp/1401301304 • How Women Rise: https://www.amazon.com/How-Women-Rise-Holding-Careers/dp/0316440124 • A Whole New Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/dp/1594481717 • How to Win Friends and Influence People: https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034 — Where to find Bryce Rattner Keithley: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brycerattner/ GitHub: https://github.com/brk-bot/ Daily Hundred on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daily100-fitness-challenge/id6762108062 — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I built an app called Daily Hundreds. I opened Lovable and Replit actually on the same day and left the simplest prompt. It was incredible to me that I could tell these AI tools, I want this. And it spit out a very basic, minimum viable product of it.

• 0:17Claire Vo?

  I asked you the other day, I was like, are you in test flight? And you're like, yeah, I was in test flight. And so now it's in the App Store, you got it approved, it's ready to go.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  We have anthropomorphic animal demos.

• 0:26Claire Vo?

  This is my favorite part, and we're going to see some pretty amazing ones. But can you walk us through how you generated this?

• 0:32Speaker 00

  I make the animal in Gemini. I film myself doing the exercise. And then I mash up the anthropomorphic animal with Bryce exercising to create the videos.

• 0:45Claire Vo?

  Were there any hard skills you felt like you developed as you went through this process?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  I got really good at copying and pasting, but I think I knew how to do that beforehand. I don't actually really know what Railway does, and yet it's there now.

• 0:58Claire Vo?

  The fact that you, a very non-technical person, are buying or acquiring Railway as your infrastructure without really knowing what it is, is kind of amazing from a go-to-market perspective for these AI tools. And I'm sure saying what you don't know and then trusting the beep boop robot gods also helps you discover and push further than you would if you knew the boundaries of things.

• 1:25Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clara Vow, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have my friend Bryce Ratner Keeble, who is decidedly not technical. She's actually spent her entire career in talent and people. But she has somehow beat me to the App Store with a vibe-coded fitness app, including customized animal videos for any workout you want to do. She's going to walk us through her step-by-step and show you how a beginner's mindset can mean you can build anything you want with AI. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically.

• 2:10Claire Vo?

  But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch? It's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features, so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features.

• 2:53Claire Vo?

  OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Bryce, to start our podcast, can you remind me, as one of your very good friends, are you technical?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Claire, not at all.

• 3:18Claire Vo?

  Perfect. So just to get that out of the way, for everybody listening, I have my friend Bryce here. She is talented in many, many ways, but I still have her beat on the Software Engineer Index. And yet, she has been the first of us that has vibe-coded a iPhone app to production and to the App Store. So you beat me, you beat me there. So tell me how you turned from your background, which I'll let you talk about a little bit, to a iPhone app developer.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so most of my career has been in talent and recruiting, and I've had the privilege to work with really talented, incredible, technical leaders throughout my career. And on one hand, through working with these folks, you come to see how talented they are with what they build. And on the other hand, you come to see that they're living, breathing humans as well. And without being a computer scientist myself, there was this massive gap and full abstraction between who they are and what they could do. And with these new tools that came out, even going back to last fall, I kind of got an inkling of like, well, maybe I can try something too and see what the magic is all about

• 4:32Speaker 00

  and see what the high is you get from bebopping into a computer and having what you build show up on the screen.

• 4:39Claire Vo?

  So what did you build?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  I built an app called Daily Hundreds for consumer number one. The story dates back to the pandemic where I spent 20 hours per day, every day, in this literal room and wasn't moving and had two young kids at home. And I craved exercise. And there was this very short-lived 100 push-up-a-day challenge that I started doing, but felt like it was boring and monotonous doing push-ups every day. And I kind of thought, I wish someone could just tell me something different to do every day. I would happily do 100 of them. And it kind of came back to mind. I've been doing it intermittently throughout of just jumping jacks or squats here and there between meetings.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  And I was like, that seems like a lightweight thing that I can try. And so I opened Lovable and Replit, actually on the same day, and left the simplest prompt of, hey, build me a tool called Daily Hundred that pushes a different exercise to me to log 100 reps. And it ended up building something remarkably fast. It's not what you'll see today, but it was incredible to me that I could tell these AI tools, I want this, and it spit out a very basic, minimum viable product of it. I ended up sticking with Replit because I could phone a friend. I have a friend who's a director of engineering there, and I figured, on the worst case, he could unblock me. But that was really how it started.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  And I built this starting in October, and I got it into the App Store earlier this month.

• 6:16Claire Vo?

  So it took a couple of months, but walk me through a little bit of how you used Replit. I think this is a really great platform for folks who really want to go 0 to 100 into production. We had one of our early How I AI episodes with John Blackman, our 91-year-old vibe-coding grandpa who used Replit to build an app for his church. Replit is pretty amazing when you're building stuff that has a database on the backend that you really want to be functional. So how are you interacting with Replit on a kind of daily basis? And how are you moving forward the app? Just kind of tell me your process.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  I tend to think that a beginner's mindset can be used to your advantage here because I truly don't know what I don't know. A big unlock. Somewhat from your pod is that there's a plan mode. I would sometimes get myself in trouble by asking Replit, you know, how can we change the progress bar? The progress bar is like you're adding some reps and now it's in a circle. But it started as a line and initially I would say, let's change the progress bar to a circle. And it would just do something bananas. And I would have to quickly undo that. We don't like that. And coming to see they have a plan function was really helpful

• 7:35Speaker 00

  and profoundly changed how I would approach things. And tend to start really big picture of like, okay, robot, here's what your non-technical friend wants to do. How can we collaborate on our new idea? It has a preview panel that y'all can see right here, which makes it really easy to see if you're on the right track or the wrong track. Sometimes it magically happens on the right track right away. Other times it goes on the wrong track many, many times over. But it's really all in one and made things very simple to at least work at a small, at a small scale.

• 8:14Claire Vo?

  I have a question. So what concepts, development concepts or software engineering concepts, did you find yourself learning as you built this with Replit? Were there any things that you just kind of got like a little, you know, because you've done technical recruiting again, you're friends with me, you're friends with directors of engineering. You've been around technology for a long time. But were there any sort of like hard skills you felt like you developed as you went through this process?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh. Are there any hard skills that I felt like I developed? I got really good at copying and pasting, but I think I knew how to do that beforehand. I got way better at labeling things so I could find things on my computer. I still don't think I know candidly anymore about software than I did when I started to the extent that like, when I learned that, heaven forbid, I had to take my app from my precious Replit and move it to somewhere else before it can be an app. I moved it to Railway.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  I don't actually really know what Railway does, and yet it's there now.

• 9:24Claire Vo?

  Okay, so I actually really, really love this. Let's just, one, we're gonna say I got really good at copy and paste. We're gonna save that one for the trailer. But what I, you know, what I reflect on this is like, you really are vibing. You are really the true vibe coder. And it's so interesting to me, you know, something like Railway, just like a hosting kind of platform. My friend, my friend works there. We know the CEO. We're good friends with Railway. We love them. But the fact that you, a very non-technical person, are buying or acquiring Railway as your infrastructure, would that really know what it is? It's kind of amazing from a, from a go-to-market perspective for these AI tools, because I think, you know,

• 10:09Claire Vo?

  they used to be selling, I was in DevTools for a long time, they used to be selling DevTools to developers. And now, non-developers are discovering DevTools. And it's just a totally different market. It's a totally different go-to-market. And I, again, I think you said something at the beginning, what I want to reiterate for folks, which is, a beginner's mindset is, is how you stay. And you are unabashedly fine with saying what you don't know. Saying you don't know, and I'm sure saying what you don't know, and then trusting the beep boop robot gods, also helps you kind of like discover and push further than you would if you knew the boundaries of things.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  I think so. I mean, sometimes I'm sure it's a limitation, or at least causes me to spend more money. But like, as one example, it'll tell me, oh, look here for that thing. And I'm like, no idea where you're telling me to go. So I'll send a screenshot of, you know, perhaps all of the library. And which one? Where is that? Please give me more idiot proven. Eli5, everything. Or don't do it, and tell me where I plug in.

• 11:17Claire Vo?

  I love this so much. But one of the parts of Daily100 that I like, which is, this is a really cool app, get up to 100 reps, is there's actually a little secret video function in here. I guess it's not secret, but we don't have it popped open. So let's pop it open and show folks.

• 11:35Claire Vo?

  The best part of the app, which are these videos of animals doing the exercise.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  We have anthropomorphic animal demos. Yeah, so it turns out that micro workouts, like exercise snacks are really good for you. I won't rattle off all the benefits, but perhaps I'll share them with Claire for the show notes. And I did start sharing it with my network even when it was small and just on Replit. And I would get text messages of like, what's a Superman? How do I do a reverse lunge? What's a reverse push up? And I was like, I've got to like, not be the single point of failure here. But then I got kind of stuck in the, what person do I make? Is it all of me? I really didn't like that idea. And I thought we all have animals. And so I've created anthropomorphic

• 12:26Speaker 00

  animal videos for, I think there's two that don't have videos yet, but they are all obviously AI generated. And I've really kind of gone ham on these.

• 12:35Claire Vo?

  This is, this is my favorite part, and we're going to see some pretty, pretty amazing ones. But can you walk us through how you generated this? Because it isn't just make me a polar bear doing body weight lunges. It's much more complex than that. So I want you to walk us through step by step, how you eventually got to being able to productionize these high quality videos.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Thank you. Yes, it did require a lot of trial and error. And it's still not, it's still not fully seamless. But I started in Sora and fully prompting to describe the animal I wanted and the exercise I wanted to do, but found that oftentimes it would get good, but not great results. And the prompting was really limited in terms of tightening things up or fine tuning. And I found that just to be maddening. I ended up, and I can, I'll show you the process if you're interested, creating the animals in Gemini.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  I came to learn that the starting position for the animals was really key. Gemini wasn't doing the videos, but I was making the animals there. And my husband does a lot of work in AI and he introduced me to Higgs field. And so there's a ton of models in Higgs field. And one of their capabilities is to merge, mesh, intertwine a still image with a motion video to have what's in the image doing what's in the video. And I've played around with a couple of the different models, somewhat intentionally, somewhat unintentionally.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  I found that cling is the model that works best for these videos. Fun fact, Higgs field was down a couple of weekends ago and I was fiending for more video creation, so I went and downloaded cling separately and it didn't make videos that were as good as cling in Higgs field. So I'm a Higgs field loyalist. I make the animal in Gemini. I film myself doing the exercise. And then I mash up the anthropomorphic animal with Bryce exercising to create the videos.

• 15:02Claire Vo?

  Technically, you are in every video.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  As some say, you can imagine me in a mascot suit doing these because it's not that far off.

• 15:12Claire Vo?

  Okay, so let's walk through that because you talked a lot about Gemini. I'm presuming you're using Nano Banana here. I want to see it and I want to make a, I want to make a video.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Let's do it. First of all, do you have an animal you want to make?

• 15:27Claire Vo?

  Oh, I was not prepared for this. I can pick any animal?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  We're going to try and make crunches or bicycle crunches because those are on my hit list.

• 15:37Claire Vo?

  So, but think about what would work or I can, or we can workshop one together.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  I have, you already have a cat here, so I have a little leopard lamp over, over here, so we could do a leopard.

• 15:49Claire Vo?

  Let's do a leopard.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Okay, so I really don't reinvent the wheel. Like I said, copy and paste. I'll take what I had, create an anthropomorphic leopard.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  In a gym setting, wearing exercise gear, a leopard. And its hands should be behind its head. Elbows out to the side. Head resting down on the mat. The head should be to the left. And the feet should be to the right. The knees be positioned above hips. And the feet Forward. In a tabletop.

• 16:41Claire Vo?

  I have to pause here as my friend Bryce writes this very precise prompt about accurate positioning on your crunches. I have to call out that she has a a secret power here, which is she used to teach bar. And so being able to prompt somebody. Knees over hips. Shoulder width apart. Hands behind your head. Who knew that all those skills would come into prompting an AI image gen model to make a leopard doing crunches?

• 17:16Speaker 00

  It's really true. As I often tell people, like, you never know what lateral moves in your career are going to end up being tools that pay off in dividends later. And I am quite good at physical exercise cuing. And now I use it a lot. Okay, let's see what this gives us. And I know a lot of your guests like to speak. For me, some of the precision, I'm visual, so I like writing it out. But I have found that we want to leave no room for interpretation. And I'll often ask myself, can I be any more literal in what I'm describing?

• 17:59Claire Vo?

  Okay, and we're using Nano Banana here in Gemini.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  In Gemini.

• 18:06Claire Vo?

  And it's creating your image. I have to call back to one of the earlier things you said, which is you originally, your MVP one was using Sora. And Sora is being sunset. So I'm glad you have a different flow here because you would have been deprecated out of.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  RIP.

• 18:23Claire Vo?

  I know.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:25Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting. You know, one of the challenges of building stuff in these day and age with all these new products is sometimes they end up being experiments that go away. And then you're like, wait, I was building my very important animal videos off of this. That's a really disappointing. So I'm glad you got to this, this new, new flow. And then Gemini is going to take a couple of minutes to load and we will just wait for it to show up. And then we'll go to the next step. This episode is brought to you by MetaView because who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder, hiring manager, recruiter I speak with feels the same pressure. Hire the right people as fast as possible. But recruiting is brutally time consuming.

• 19:10Claire Vo?

  Alignment is hard and the competition for great talent keeps getting tougher. That's why teams like Riot Games, Brex, GitLab and Replit, plus 5,000 other organizations use MetaView. The agentic recruiting platform giving high performance teams an unfair advantage in hiring. It works by giving you a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers. Finding candidates based on your exact criteria, taking interview notes, reviewing every inbound application, gathering insights across your hiring process and helping you identify the best candidates in your pipeline. Don't let your competitors out hire you. MetaView customers close roles 30% faster.

• 19:52Claire Vo?

  Get started with MetaView today and get your first 100 candidates sourced for free at metaview.ai/HowIAI. Okay, so it loaded. Let's pop it open and see how, how good it did.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  So it's kind of flawed. It didn't do a great job. It didn't listen to the hands behind its head. It didn't listen to the head down. It got one leg in the proper position, but it got one leg not in the proper position. We're gonna try it again. We are creating an anthropomorphic leopard in a gym setting. The leopard should be wearing exercise clothes. And sometimes, and this is probably me not knowing anything, and summoning the AI gods. Copying and pasting works when we're on a win, and starting over sometimes work when you have an L. So I'm just restarting the karma and writing it all over again. This is to match the video, because it doesn't do a good job interpreting anything.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Both knees should be above hips. Knees should be bent. Feet forward in tabletop position. Both feet off the ground. They should know their characters in the image. Sometimes AI gets excited and adds friends for the character, and we just don't need that.

• 21:03Claire Vo?

  We don't want that. Okay. So just, we prompted it once. You copied and pasted your kind of original prompt, made a couple edits, did not give you what you wanted. You say, "Don't copy and paste. That's just welcoming more of the same." Instead, start it over, rephrase. We added a couple more literal things together in terms of like saying, "Both feet off the ground," or "Both hands behind your head," or "Left and right," and just being very precise. And then you're using Gemini to create this image. We'll see if it does a little bit better.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  We'll see if Gemini does a little bit better. It's really fascinating. Sometimes we'll get things on the first try. Sometimes it'll take a while. Yesterday, we made a cougar. And what it got quickly was the cougar. What it didn't get, and I wanted it to do burpees. I wanted the cougar to be all the way forward on the mat, and I wrote that a couple of different times. Cougar should be standing all the way to the front edge, left side of the yoga mat. It gave it weights the next time. I didn't want weights, but it kept it in the middle. And so what I then did was I took an image of myself and showed it a different version, because we just kind of got stuck.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  But we eventually got the cougar a little bit further forward. Okay, let's see. Okay.

• 22:25Claire Vo?

  Oh yay.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  There's your leopard. Its head's not down, but I think we can work with this.

• 22:32Claire Vo?

  Okay, can we pop it up and just show what we, the improvement we got? Alright, so both legs up, tail still looks awkward, but you know, it's a, it's a, it's a tail.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  It has a tail, its hands are behind its head like we want for crunches. It's in exercise gear, there's no other friends.

• 22:49Claire Vo?

  We love it. Okay, so what is your, your next step?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Uh, here's another actual hiccup about Higgs field. Sometimes the downloads work well and download what you want, and sometimes it downloads something totally random. Like it might give us a different animal than the one that we created, which is fascinating. So we'll see if it gave us the right one. It did. I saved the animals by name. I saved in a starting positions folder, so I can pull them for recall. I give the animal and I give the position that they're in, so it's a little bit easier. And then do you want to try and turn this into a video, Claire?

• 23:26Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Okay. So, then we go to Higgs field. And Higgs field has, it's like an embarrassment of riches in terms of how many options you have and what you can do. It can be a little bit overwhelming. But in this case, I use motion control, I use cling 3. It's under the video option right here, so cling 3 motion control. I add the motion. So in this case, we're going to pull my video. And this is gonna be crunches. We're gonna do crunches cut, cause it's shorter. Fortunately, all of these exercises are not in my living room, and that's what you would see if we didn't have this magic tool.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  And then we start, find the position that we want, and this was our leopard in the supine position. It lets you choose the scene control. So in this case, we're choosing the image. Still loading our video. Or still loading our image, excuse me.

• 24:25Claire Vo?

  So just to call out for folks, a couple of things that I noticed, if you're not watching on YouTube. So Bryce took a video of herself doing these crunches with her legs in the tabletop position. Very good form, excellent work, my friend. And a couple of things I noticed is you're, I see now why you prompted for the head to be at the left, because you don't want the video to be mirror image of the image. And so you put these two image and video side by side. They're roughly the same shape of character. You're using this cling 3.0 motion control model. And then you're saying the image is what's going to control the scene versus the video is going to control the scene. Because you don't want the videos in your living room. You want the videos in 24 Hour Fitness Animal Edition.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 25:10Claire Vo?

  Okay, great.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 25:12Claire Vo?

  And then you click generate.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  And we click generate. And it does require patience. They tend to take quite some time. You can tend to do, I can maybe do three or four before it gets overwhelmed. So I might queue some up if I have my videos and my images ready. But it is, you know, go for a walk, do some of your daily hundreds, get a set in.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  And it'll eventually get you your video.

• 25:38Claire Vo?

  Amazing. So we'll let this process and we'll come back and see what we got.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Do you want to see some of the past ones while it's working?

• 25:43Claire Vo?

  Yeah, let's do it while it's loading.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Okay. So there have been a lot of friends that we've made. We have animals and we have mythological creatures. For making sure we're getting good coverage. There's a goblin, there's a cat, there's a fox, flamingo. Some of them I'm able to get on the first try. Some of them take a while. And some of them are just like real. Real tricky. I'll show you one that I think demonstrates like how AI can can do you wrong. So I wanted to demonstrate swimmers, which is a great postural exercise for us people with desk jobs. Oh, excuse me, supermans. So it's laying down, it's lifting all of its limbs up off of the ground.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  It's using your posture muscles, using your glutes, basically your whole back chain. This is what I wanted. This is our genie doing some supermans. But do your hands have to be like that? We need to... No, you got a lot of choice. This was just his style. But as you can see, we got real close the first time. I was pretty happy with this, except the feet stayed up. And we don't want people to think that they've got to do this unreasonable exercise the whole time. And sometimes I'll have to get in there and give it some more encouragement, some more literal guidance.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  So bad. The genie's legs should start on the floor and lift up at the same time as the arms, instead of saying elevated the whole time. What?

• 27:16Speaker 00

  I I don't even know if I can describe what I'm seeing on screen right now. You just really go to the, we'll, we'll make sure this is bookmarked in the YouTube so you can see this. I mean, the genie is floating. There is some body part, maybe a foot, maybe something else, just on the ground. And he's doing nose dives into the yoga mat. And so, you know, oh, he's only got one leg. It must be his foot. You can see it kind of floating behind him. Foot, yeah. Very odd. Very odd. Not approachable for us actual humans. No, not at all. Was there one that you did that surprised you how effective it worked?

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Like an animal you thought it wouldn't really work out and it ended up being pretty high quality? Oh, a million percent. This was my kids' recommendation. They wanted me to make a turtle. And I was like, a turtle feels like not the animal at the gym, first of all. But like, the the shell would be a bit prohibitive. But like, look at our friend doing these cross-body stepping presses.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  He's so friendly.

• 28:30Claire Vo?

  I mean, turtles are historically known as ninjas, so I'm not surprised that it...

• 28:34Speaker 00

  That's... that's true. That's true.

• 28:37Claire Vo?

  Or this is maybe its origination, even doing curtsy lunges. Look at this little friend doing curtsy lunges.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  He's got a nice little demeanor. He looks approachable and friendly.

• 28:47Claire Vo?

  Oh, Bryce, you know that I do ballet. Can you make me turtle ballet?

• 28:54Speaker 00

  That's for our next installment.

• 28:56Claire Vo?

  Okay, perfect. So let's see if this video is back up and loaded. And again, I can see here, it's taking you one, two, three tries. You're trying to re-prompt. Sometimes AI goes real sideways. And were all of these kind of this combination of image and video?

• 29:11Speaker 00

  They were all the combination of image and video, yeah. And to your point before, there were times where I tried to get it to... Perhaps I had an animal in a straight arm plank position, and I wanted it to do donkey kicks or something that started in quadruped. And it couldn't even adjust the starting position from mostly the same to the knees down or bare plank hovers where your toes are tucked and you're lifting your knees slightly off of the floor. It even had a hard time interpreting those small changes. And so I tend to get really precise on the starting images as much as possible. And that's been a big unlock in terms of generating the right video that I want.

• 29:56Claire Vo?

  Amazing.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Okay, you ready to see your leopard?

• 29:59Claire Vo?

  I am ready to see my leopard. Show it to me.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Let's see how he did.

• 30:02Claire Vo?

  Hey!

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Hey!

• 30:05Claire Vo?

  You're doing crunches!

• 30:06Speaker 00

  I'm doing crunches. It was kind of this weird elf before that everyone thought was a human and kept asking me who the human was. And so now we've got a leopard. This is fantastic.

• 30:15Claire Vo?

  I love this so much. And it looks great. I mean, things that you can call out, even think it shows the reflection of the leopard in the mirror back there. So it's pretty... Pretty smart. You would never be able to do this before. This is one of those things that I tell people. Like, imagine being able to, in the past, like, you would have to, I don't know, hire an animator? I don't even know what you would do. It would just be videos, low-res videos of you in your living room.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Really. In the corner.

• 30:45Claire Vo?

  Yeah. Yeah, in the corner. And so now you have this, like, high-production value, fun leopard, doing crunches in appropriate form, even looks like it's struggling a little bit, little wobble to the crunch. It looks very natural. 10 out of 10.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  You can do crunches now, too. You've got your inspo.

• 31:05Claire Vo?

  I love it.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  You've got your form.

• 31:08Claire Vo?

  Okay, so just to catch people up where we are so far, we have built a full end-to-end app in Replit without knowing what we're talking about. Decided to add in custom videos of these exercises by combining a banana banana image of, reference image of, an anthropomorphized animal and my friend doing an exercise. So it's just like a video from your iPhone doing an exercise. You're combining those in HiggsField using the cling model and waiting about five minutes, and then you get your video. So you have these two things together. This looks like a web app, but people don't want to pull up web apps when they're doing their exercise. So your next step was getting this to the App Store.

• 31:53Claire Vo?

  And I will tell you, Bryce was asking me for advice on how to do this. And I was like, girl, I am not a mobile developer. Never have been, never will be. Not my thing. Don't do consumer enterprise till I die. And so I was like, I can't help you. I can't help you. Otherwise, I would. And I think you've heard that a lot from friends, right? A couple of months ago, when you first started this, like, you were asking around how to get this into the App Store, and what was their response?

• 32:16Speaker 00

  I started building this in October, and once I realized that I wanted to keep using it every day, and to your point, not only do people not want this as a web app, you certainly don't want it to be daily100.replit.app, because nobody's going to go there. It was like, okay, well, the holy grail is getting this to being a published app in the App Store. And the, like, broad consensus back in the fall was, at some point, like, yes, you can do a lot of this in Replit, you can do a lot of this on your own, at some point, you're going to have to have someone technical unblock you and level up to get this in the App Store. And a friend's husband, who's technical, I- Engaged him to basically write me a fairly intensive doc that I could shop around if I wanted to hire a contractor.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  But as I went through the holidays, as the new models came out in February, and I started, I started getting ready to advance the project, it was wild to me because the same technical folks that I was asking, Claire included, it was sort of like, actually, with the current models, like, you can probably do this yourself. And so I did. Beginner's mindset went into Claude and was basically, how do I prepare a Replit app for App Store submission? And kept it really broad and gave it the context that I am not technical, I can use

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Claude code, where it was starting, some of what was involved, and what do we do next? And it gave me, I think it was like, five pretty meaty items that we were gonna have to go through, including moving, letting go of my Replit comfort blanket, and moving off of it, and ultimately got it ready for App Store publishing. And so what I would do is I would use Claude, original Claude, as like, my friend in, I don't know, in the cockpit of like, what are we doing? How are we gonna approach this? And it would tell me when to go into Claude code. Claude code would write me code, I would bring that back into Claude and say, this is what

• 34:24Speaker 00

  you told me to have it do, here's what it did. It would confirm or give me thoughts on it, and then it would tell me to put it into the terminal directly, which was a fascinating and, at first, terrifying experience. But that was ultimately what I would do. I had bought between Claude, Claude code, Claude, and terminal, and really continue. And in fact, I, I hit my limit.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Like 51 minutes before it reset one day and then I got 90% another day. But I was able to stay within my limits generally and did start to outwork it because on a couple of occasions, it would say, you've done a lot today. You can come back tomorrow. I'm like, absolutely not. We're going on to the next one. And so I was able to go, I took about 25 or 30 hours in one weekend and just cranked through it, but ultimately got it into the App Store on the second try.

• 35:19Claire Vo?

  Yeah. So just for folks, and I love this workflow again, because it's like beginner's mindset, right? You were just like, Plan O Claude, OG Claude, is very accessible to me and not scary. So I'm going to ask OG Claude to give me a plan. And again, like, let's go back to plan mode. I need a plan. Give me a step by step. And I love the honesty of like, I'm not technical. So like, let's not pretend I am. Give me the step by step. I'm going to work with Claude code. And then you would give those steps to Claude code. So you almost had like a product manager or a technical architect in Claude. Then you had like your software engineer in Claude code. And then they both said, you know, we don't have the ultimate permissions here. So you need to step in and do these specific

• 36:04Claire Vo?

  things in the terminal. And then you went to, I asked you the other day, I was like, are you in test flight? And you're like, yeah, I was in test flight. And so now it's in the App Store. You got it approved. It's ready to go.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  It's ready to go. Yep. I had some pretty low hanging fruit from my first submission. That was mostly user error. Yeah, we're, we're live and in the App Store.

• 36:25Claire Vo?

  What was the user feedback or the, the feedback? Do you remember?

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Yes. So there were three things. One, and, and of course, I just took it all. I copied it and pasted it from Apple's feedback into Claude and was like, we did not achieve full publishing. Here's what it said. The first one was like, oh, it looks like you checked the wrong box on parental. You're like childproofing something. And so I was like, this is the box to check. I probably went back to it and was like, you need to clarify further where that is and what to do. The second one was definitely user error because it does use your phone number to login. And because it needs to be compatible with iPad, I needed to add sign in with Apple,

• 37:09Speaker 00

  which I had done, but I never tested it. And so that was my bad. It didn't work. And so I needed to troubleshoot that and make sure that sign in with Apple worked. And then you need to have a way to delete it. So I needed a button where you could delete your app. And so I added a button to be able to delete your account.

• 37:27Claire Vo?

  And she's not lying, folks. It's right here on, on the App Store. She truly beat me. This makes me very mad. I am a little bit of competitive. I'm competitive as I go through. This is super impressive. So again, for folks who never thought they could do this, and you know, we've had people on the show who are like pseudo-technical, like product backgrounds. And it's just, what I love about this moment is really people are unconstrained by execution. And they can take a good idea that adds value to them and build it and make it real. And not just make it real, make it production ready, which I think is super impressive.

• 38:10Claire Vo?

  So Bryce, before we get you out of here, I'm going to ask you a couple lightning round questions and then we'll get you going. So in your day job, you think a lot about talent, teams and leadership. And I'm just curious, your thoughts reflecting on this exercise, which has brought you much closer to the builder side of things. What are things that are top of mind for you about how to hire and how to be hirable in this moment?

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting. I've personally always gravitated towards an appreciated environment where the best idea wins. Right? It's not only certain people have the best ideas or certain functions can have the best ideas. But I think in this day and age, the attitude that

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Different skills and different ideas are going to come from everywhere. And it's table stakes to cross pollinate and have both like the humility and the curiosity to work with others in ways that you haven't before. I think people that get, dare I say territorial or constrained by what they used to do or what other people used to do are going to struggle with relevance and playing nicely in the sandbox and instead trying to zoom out and consider people can contribute in ways that they haven't before and being both ready for that from other people and keen

• 39:44Speaker 00

  to do that and bring that attitude to other places as well, I think is necessary. It requires, there's a lot of adaptation. In fact, I feel like there's an opportunity for me to adapt because for a lot of the things where my job or my function is changing, it's still a nice to have. I think there's other functions where it's table stakes. And I have friends who especially do technical recruiting who have seen that when there's resistance to seeing technical problems in a new way is where folks really struggle.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  So for an engineer to come in to a technical interview and focus only on finding a working solution fastest, it misses the point because the robots can find a working solution faster than they can. And if they're not recognizing, hey, in this equation, the human role has shifted. I need to step back and consider my role as well as the full suite of tools and understand that my role as a technical expert is broader and different than it was six months, a year ago. That gap, I think, is only going to be greater and more challenging.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  And so that willingness to almost be open to outcome and unattached to what was and recognize that what got me here won't necessarily get me there, but also that

• 41:24Speaker 00

  At least for now, there's still a lot of opportunity, I think, to preserve humanity and maximize impact when you're willing to see things differently than you did before.

• 41:32Claire Vo?

  I love that, and I think that's a real challenge that needs to be put out to everybody in this moment, is your roles are fundamentally changing and the skills you need are changing, and that's OK. I think there's still value to bring into an organization, to a team. But the sooner you face that things are different now, the better. Bryce, my second question is, I know you read or listen a lot to books. In this moment in AI, has there been a book that you've read recently or one that you just have in your pocket from, you know, the before times that you think is really relevant for folks right now as we're navigating this different sort of moment in our careers?

• 42:09Speaker 00

  If you haven't read What Got You Here Won't Get You There or How Women Rise, which is kind of the sister book to that, it's a good reminder. Not everything is in the title, but it's really the premise that like, yes, you should trade on your strengths and the things that have been positively reinforced to date. And also, definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. And so your willingness to believe in yourself and scale to the next altitude is really your opportunity. I did listen to A Whole New Mind. It's the book by Dan Pink, which actually came out in 2014, and I think is really ahead of its time, but talks about the benefits of

• 42:54Speaker 00

  an "and" thinking of both left brain and right brain thinking. And again, this is, it's old now, and the way he's talking about automation and acceleration and abundance is interesting and right, and I think it's only more true. But I really think, especially as...

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Computers can do more left-brain thinking. There's an opportunity and a lot of inspiration for seizing and maximizing humanity with right-brain thinking that they talk about that's pretty powerful.

• 43:28Claire Vo?

  I love that. We'll link to those books in the show notes, but a lot of good recommendations here. And then my last question I ask everybody on the show, which is, when AI is not listening, when you are getting that weird genie foot floating below your Superman genie, what is your kind of like prompting technique? Do you yell? Do you bribe?

• 43:51Speaker 00

  I am a true Dale Carnegie enthusiast, and I feel like I've built a lot of my career on how to win friends and influence people. And I would be lying if I didn't acknowledge that it is sometimes cathartic to put down my Dale Carnegie and not win friends and influence people with the robots and just be angry. So sometimes I do raise my typing. However, and I will say, I have been inspired and somewhat compelled by some of your guests that have talked about karma with the robots, that I have strengthened some of my perspective and opinions on my role and how to humanize or not.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  And so I do try and be more measured and decent and prepare myself for continued robot evolution. So I try to be decent and firm when needed and also keep my position of power.

• 44:51Claire Vo?

  I love that. And then, you know, two other things that we saw is you just try to be hyper literal, and the screenshot is your friend.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  The screenshot, yes. Try new things, right? It's like, add more details. If it didn't get it right, how can I be, literally, how can I be any more precise about what I want? That might work. Reset. I'm an 80s baby, so refresh or rewrite if I need to. And then try something new. Like, maybe I'll draw the progress circle and take a physical picture or capture a screenshot of my starting position and like, just see if that prompts the robots any differently.

• 45:26Claire Vo?

  I love it. Well, Bryce, this has been really, really, just a fun episode, I think, very accessible for folks. Now, where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Certainly, yes. I run a firm called Great Team Partners. We take a team-building approach to startup scaling. We work with mostly seed through Series B companies on how to grow strategically and with talent density. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on GitHub at BRK Bot. And you can, of course, find me on the Leaders Board of Daily Hundreds in the App Store.

• 45:59Claire Vo?

  Thanks for, thanks for coming. This was super fun.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Thanks so much, Claire.

• 46:05Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.