Start a Business With Just a Prompt (w/ Bolt CEO)⏐ Ep. #191

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 I sat down with Eric Simons, the CEO of Bolt, to talk about how non-technical entrepreneurs are using AI to build real software businesses from scratch. We broke down how Bolt went from zero to 20 million ARR in just 2 months, and how people are using it to launch full SaaS platforms, create AI-powered CRMs, build client dashboards, and even run entire web app agencies. Eric explained how Bolt helps you go from idea to product in minutes with built-in payment integration, full-stack backend, and mobile app deployment. We also talked about the viral tweet that launched it all and why non-coders might have the edge in this new wave of AI automation. 

 If you want to build something without touching code, try Bolt using my affiliate link. And follow Eric at x.com/ericsimons and Bolt at x.com/boltdotnew. 

Timestamps below. Enjoy!

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00:00 The New Era of Entrepreneurship
02:56 Building with Bolt: A Game Changer
05:45 The Impact of AI on Coding and Development
08:58 The Power of Community and Marketing
11:44 The Pivot to AI and Its Success
14:54 Understanding User Adoption and Use Cases
26:42 The Power of ROI in Software Development
29:29 Innovative Applications and Business Models
32:19 The Non-Technical Advantage in Software Creation
35:02 Monetization Strategies with Bolt
37:49 Building with Bolt: Real-World Examples
40:10 Prompting Best Practices for Effective Development
43:30 Overcoming Development Challenges
45:54 Designing with AI: Tips and Tricks
49:36 Building Complex Applications with Bolt

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
There's this guy CJ on axe, he posted a tweet and said and it
cost me 9 bucks on bolt to do this.
Then someone asked it how much did you build the client?
He was like $9000. Most people still don't know
that they can actually build software without being a
developer. You literally go from not even
having a website to accepting payments in like 5 or 10
minutes. Whatever software tool you use,

(00:21):
replicate that in Bolt. Worst case you save money for
yourself, best case you resell that to others.
People will pay so much money for a dashboard.
Go start a Dang dashboard agency.
What are some prompting best practices?
Show us how the average user with no technical knowledge can
go from nothing to something on Bolt.
This is the greatest time for entrepreneurs to be alive in the

(00:43):
history of the world. Why?
Because if you're marketing or business heavy, you probably
don't know how to code. But now you don't need to know
how to code. There are apps like Cursor,
Replit, Lovable, Windsurf for sale.
So many that are just vibe coding apps use natural
language, build a website, buildan app.
I'm having the best time of my life.
And so I'm on a mission to interview the founders of all of

(01:05):
these businesses because I want to know from all of them what
makes theirs different or unique.
And most importantly, how are their users using their app to
make money and to save time? What are the common use cases
building an agency on top of it,building apps on top of it for
others? And what are the fringe weird
use cases that people can learn from?
So today I had the founder of Bolt dot Nuon.

(01:27):
His name is Eric Simons, and he opened the curtain on how people
are using Bolt to build big businesses.
They went from 0 to $20 million in annual occurring revenue in
their first two months because people like me are building
really cool things on top of it.They didn't pay me to do this
interview. I just think it's a cool app and
it's one I use on a daily basis.Hopefully you can learn a lot

(01:47):
from it. Please share with a friend.
OK, well Eric, why don't you just start by telling us who you
are and what you do? Hey awesome, I'm Eric, I'm the
Co founder and CEO of bolt dot new.
Which is the fastest way to takean idea and turn it into a real
web or mobile application? OK.
And what makes Bolt dot new different from, you know, other
competitors out there? Totally.
Yeah, I think with Bolt, some things only focus on like web

(02:10):
apps. And so we kind of do web and
mobile and generally it's insanely fast to get up and
running with something that, youknow, looks, you know, not just
like basic, but really stunning as far as your website or your
mobile app. But you know, really
importantly, like we really focus on the end to end
experience of like actually likebuilding businesses online.
I mean, that's not just like, you know, a basic storefront,

(02:31):
but having like if you want to build a SAS application or like
a new AI application, having payments built in and be able to
actually use different APIs and that sort of thing.
You know all that is like integrated into this AI agent
we've made. Yeah, it feels like a lot of the
other Bolts of the world are like, they're really cool party
tricks and they're really cool for getting an MVP out there,
something that looks flashy. But there's not a lot under the

(02:54):
hood either when it comes to design or functionality or
accepting payments as you say. Yeah, exactly.
And you might be able to do it, but it takes a lot of like of
manual work to go and add those things in, right.
So you're kind of back at square1 then where it's like, well,
you're kind of spending maybe asmuch time then as you would if
you had started in an IDE on your computer.
Whereas like with bold, it's youcan literally go, we can, you

(03:16):
know, we can do, you know, a demo of this, but you can
literally go from not even having a website to accepting
payments on your app in like 5 or 10 minutes.
And you know, like if and actually building a real
application, like a course selling website or whatever have
you, you know, and that's crazy.That's never existed before in
history to be able to create custom software that you can

(03:37):
actually sell like that. What do you think that means for
the startup ecosystem like that?It's so easy, so frictionless,
so affordable. Like to zoom out a little bit,
What does that mean for all these new startups out there?
It's an amazing thing, right? Because the thing that's always
been really difficult about entrepreneurship is that, you
know, the best entrepreneurs tend to be the ones that have

(03:57):
spent a lot of years building companies.
And it's largely because, you know, you can't really go and
take classes on how to do business and you can, but like,
but you don't really learn a lotof practical skills on how to
actually go and build products and sell products and everything
that goes into starting a startup.
And by, you know, being able to like go and take ideas and
launch them into reality and getimmediate feedback, that

(04:20):
shortens the cycle, right, Of you actually be able to try and
build a business and really accelerates the learning process
for entrepreneurs. If you have to choose a single
metric, like what's going to determine if an entrepreneur is
going to be successful in starting a company, it's really
just a it's a numbers game. You know, if it's how many hits
at bat do you get on like building a product, getting

(04:40):
feedback, iterating on it, etcetera.
If in my view, like this is the tool that my Co founder and I
wish we'd had since he and I were 13, learning how to code
together through all the things we build over the past two
decades. Because it's that, you know, you
want to just be able to go and launch things, get feedback as
fast as possible and iterate andadapt.
So I think we're it's just an explosion of new things that
would have never existed before.But I think we're going to see

(05:03):
crops of entrepreneurs that that, you know, are able to be
successful far faster and and often in many cases where they
may not have been able to, you know, afford to just keep taking
swings on products. On a scale of 1 to 10, how
technical would you say you are?I'm reasonably technical, yeah.
I don't know, like 8 or 9 or something like that.
So you have like a software engineering background?

(05:24):
I do yeah. I never went to college
actually, but back so my Co founder and I, he and I grew up
down the street from each other in suburb Chicago.
And when we were 13, we you learn how to build web apps
together and we've been building, you know, startups and
and whatever have you ever since.
And he and I have just been bestfriends for the past 20 years.
When we went to graduate from high school, you know, we were
looking at going to college and it was going to be like 100

(05:45):
grand in state for four years. And we're like, this doesn't
make any sense. Like we're already making.
We can build stuff. What are we doing?
Yeah, we were already making like 50 bucks an hour doing
website contracting work or whatever.
And when you're like 18, that's like meaningful. 6 figures.
Yeah, exactly. And so yeah, it just did the
math, didn't math. And this it was very unpopular
back in like 20-10. But I think it's like the

(06:06):
world's kind of come around to the idea that, OK, actually
maybe forcing everyone to go to college and being 6 figures of
that isn't the best idea for foreveryone at least, right?
So. I applaud you. 2010 is when I
was in college and I've always been entrepreneurial.
I didn't have to go to college, but I just had this nagging
insecurity and maybe a nagging like future dad.
I had my first kid in 2010 whereit's like this is like a form of

(06:27):
insurance. It's a good thing to do.
I got 2 college degrees. I've never used either one of
them. I feel like AI is taking away
all of my excuses, like my macroexcuses because when I was in
high school to, you know, early 2000s, I used to say, oh, why
wasn't I born 5-10 years earlier?
I could have been in the.com boom.
I would have moved out to San Francisco and then crypto comes
around and it's like I didn't buy Bitcoin till 2016, which

(06:49):
seems early today but seemed very late then.
It's like, oh, why wasn't I in the right message board?
I could have bought Bitcoin at $0.05, you know?
And now with AI, it's like, OK, Chris, where's your excuse?
You're on the cutting edge of this.
You're on Twitter, you see it like when a new model or new app
comes out, you're right there using it.
You have no excuse. And the other excuse I used to
tell myself is I'm not technical.

(07:10):
I can't code. If I could code, I would be, you
know, that's my Achilles heel. I, if I could do that and
market, you know, if I could be the marketer and the coder, I
could build whatever I want. And now it's like I can't for
the last like 6 months I've beenin these vibe coding amps all
day and it is so much more wonderful than I ever imagined.
I'm just loving it. I have an idea and I just build
it instead of like going to my brother-in-law who's really good

(07:32):
at coding. Like hey, can you?
Well I'm kind of busy. Like I can just do it myself.
It's amazing. Yeah, it's huge.
And like, and it's truly like it's the tool that my Co founder
and I wish we'd had because likeI learned how to code.
It was somewhat intrinsically interesting to like learn about
programming, but it to me it wasalways a means to an end.
Like I just wanted to build stuff.
I wanted to build products, I wanted to build businesses and

(07:52):
you know, if you're going to, ifyou're going to build digital
based products like you have to,you know, building software is
at least was a required part of that.
Or knowing how to, you know, so I look at today and you know,
some people have this opinion of, oh, well, you know, people
should still learn how to code. Like it's, you know, I mean, I'm
not, I'm not saying you shouldn't, by the way, but
people, there's kind of this, Oh, but we're losing something

(08:15):
like we also don't speak Latin anymore, right.
Things, things change, like the floor of complexity will kind of
go away and meaningfully drop the bar on what it takes to go
and build and do things. I think that's a good thing.
And anyone that says software engineers are going away period,
like that's just, it's just not true.
Like it's right. What's going to happen is you
just have developers and this happening already.

(08:36):
Developers are just focusing on higher value tasks than just
like going and changing basic syntax for styles or whatever.
And so they're just being way more effective at their job and
they're working on things that are very complicated that AI
malls are not well suited for. And so it's, you know, maybe a
good analogy is like modern industrial manufacturing.
It's like there are still maybe some people that say everything

(08:58):
should be handmade, every car should be handmade.
Like I guess Rolls Royce still exists.
They still do that. But it's like this niche market,
right? They're expensive.
They break down a lot, right? You know, in fact, it actually
turns out you having these great, you know, automated
manufacturing processes overseenby humans with higher leverage
tends to be better for. Everyone holistically, yeah.

(09:19):
I mean, there's still people pulling pulling around tourists
in horse drawn carriages in Central Park.
That doesn't mean that the rightdecision 100 years ago was to
triple down on horse drawn carriages.
You buy a Dang car. Exactly.
Like I think that big question of do I learn to code or not?
It all depends on where you are.Like if I'm 20 something or you

(09:39):
know, a teenager like and I'm onthe fence about like going hard
on business or going hard on coding.
Like I'm going hard on business and I'm learning all of these
vibe coding tools and that's my coding like my shortcut, right?
Whereas if I'm already a coder, like I'm going to learn how to
embrace this as much as I can and like you said, delegate and
elevate and just start doing more important.
Like you'd be dumb as a coder toabandon coding because all this

(10:02):
is going to take my job. So let's start looking for like
you are in the best position possible right now to further
embrace coding, right? Yep, exactly, exactly.
It just gives you so much like understanding how this how
software works, how to build software gives you just so much
more leverage on how to actuallycontrol and use AI tools and
agents to to go and do your bedding to, you know, change the
world or whatever, right. Yeah, it's like the difference

(10:24):
between a college like a business professor that like
spent 30 years running and starting businesses, like his
effectiveness in the classroom versus a business professor
that's always only been a business professor, right?
Which one do you take? Like I would rather have a coder
that knows these AI tools than someone like me, frankly.
But I can build these myself andthey don't myself.
And they don't have to be amazing, they just have to be

(10:45):
cool. So I love talking to founders
about like the 8020 of use casesof your tools.
So I'd love to hear like the 80%, like what are people using
it for? What's like the bread and
butter? And then what are like those one
off use cases that really just make you scratch your head but
are really interesting to the listener?
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, this was like kind of

(11:07):
crazy things. We launched Bolt like last
October and before this we were making a developer ID and so
only developers were using our product and the scale of revenue
just like we almost went out of business.
So like a month after Bolt launch was when we were going to
start spinning down the company because we have been around for
seven years. We got into the company 700,000
of ARR and so Bolt was the last experiment we ran like this in

(11:27):
browser development environment technology we made and Bolt, we
paired this Frontier AI agent with it that we've made and
overnight it just took off like in the first two months we went
from zero to 20 million of ARR. Oh my gosh.
It's crazy. That's product market fit,
right? Like if anyone's wondering, how
do I know? Like if you can't sleep because
of all the inbound you have, that's product.

(11:49):
Market fit exactly and it's the first time I've seen anything
like it in my I've been doing startups with my Co founder for
20 years. I've never seen anything like
this. And because every other launch
we'd ever done, it's like you'llhave this.
If you do great marketing and you'd spend a lot of time on the
product, most things you'll havethis, you know, tick up on the
day of the launch, next day it drops and then it just flattens
out back to the grind of OK, we got to make this thing better

(12:11):
and that's. OK, that doesn't mean that
should quit. Absolutely not right.
Like and that is the normal thing.
What happened here is from day one, it just the revenue just
was cranking and so and our teamwas super excited on the first
day and I was like, guys, temperyour enthusiasm like this is how
it works. Yeah, I've seen this movie.
For 20, it's coming back down. Yeah.
And then the next day it didn't.And I was like, OK, so like

(12:32):
maybe the word of mouth, just kind of whatever.
And then it just kept going day after day after day.
And and then the other kind of crazy thing was that most of the
people that were emailing us as customers for support and stuff,
we're not developers. They were designers or PMS or
just people who are entrepreneurs and, you know,
people that were salespeople making website for their
daughter. It's just like we're like, what

(12:53):
is going on Like this is this isnot the market that we, you
know, kind of thought that was going to pick this tool.
Up, but it's a much bigger market, right?
Massive, right? Massive.
And so after the first month, itbecame very clear to us like,
OK, this is something, you know,Bull was really one of the first
products that that kind of hit that nerve where it's like, this
is not just developers can buildsoftware now.

(13:14):
And what does that mean? Right.
I mean, it's like, dude, there'slike a billion people on this
planet that now actually can be empowered to go and take their
ideas and put them into reality.That's going to change
everything. So I'm very enthralled by what
you're saying right now when youmade that pivot.
So from what I understand, you were like a browser extension
for developers when you made that pivot, was the reason for
the pivot because you were just kind of looking around, seeing

(13:36):
that these other guys thinking, Oh my gosh, like we could do
that. We're not far from that.
They're crushing it. Or was it like some something
deeper than that? I was actually pretty skeptical,
I would say of the AI stuff of, you know, from 2022 to, you
know, beginning of 2024. Not that like Chachi BT was
obviously for I think for everyone in the world was like a
mind blowing moment in my head after the first month after that

(13:59):
came out, I was like, what else is this beyond like Chachi BT?
What's kind of the killer use case here?
How is this, you know, one of the next things that this
thing's going to get incredibly good at doing that's really
valuable. And I mean, honestly, tangibly,
there weren't, you know, there weren't a ton of things that
that were really progressing. And so kind of by the beginning
of 2024, like our company, everyone else in the world was

(14:21):
like adding AI features into their app and they didn't make
any sense for a lot of these. They're just like AIAI, you
know, like a classic hype bubblething.
It was like adding blockchain toyour name five years ago.
Exactly. And so, so we were looking at
it, we're like, we think there might there might be another
because back in 21, we the exactsame saw the same thing happened
with the Web 3 stuff. And people were like, you should
have Web three involved. And it was like, this seems like

(14:42):
a bubble. People thought we were nuts.
People were like, you should raise money.
You should, you know, grow the company to 100.
And we're like, no, this seems like a bad idea.
It turns out would have been a bad idea, was a bad idea for a
lot of people. So I was kind of had the same
sort of lens where I was like, Ihaven't seen anything yet that
really strikes me as the breakthrough, like the next
breakthrough thing for AI applications that will drive

(15:04):
what they're saying is trillionsof dollars of potential revenue
per year, right? Beginning of 2024, you know, I
was using ChatGPT to just generate code snippets and I'd
take it and I'd put into our product, our product was an ID
for you to build web apps in thebrowser.
And I was like, oh, you know, like ChatGPT should basically
have like ARB stuff built into it's like when you tell it to
like build a web app or whatever, it just like does it

(15:25):
in the browser. Like that's the magic of we do
is like allowing you to run, youknow, full, you know, dev
environments in a browser. And our vision originally was
basically to make building full stack applications as easy as
using Canva or Figma. Just you go to a browser URL,
just boots, etcetera. Remove the friction.
Exactly. And so you know that it kind of
clicked. I was like, OK, we'll like the

(15:46):
code that Chatty BT is writing is like, I think kind of good.
So you know, let's make a demo of this.
We spent a week doing that in February of 24.
Found out opening eyes models just were really not great for
code generation like it just did.
The experience didn't work because you would tell to build
something, it would just break. It was ugly.
What would come out? Which leaves an opening for you.
Exactly what And so and we were like this is a cool idea maybe,

(16:06):
but it's not feasible right now with the current state of the
frontier models. Maybe they'll improve at some
point in the future. Then in May, a couple months
after that, we got an early preview of anthropics side of
3/5 model. It was immediately obvious.
I was like, holy hell, like thisis huge difference step function
difference in in how good this thing is at writing software in

(16:26):
the output quality of that. And so we green, you know,
brought the project back off theshelf, green lit it and launched
it. But so that's kind of the Long
story short of it though, is like the best things that I've
ever done in my career have always been things where it's
been like intrinsically I'm like, this would be kind of
cool. Like I am doing, I'm using
ChatGPT in this way right now. I wish that I didn't have to

(16:47):
like copy and paste to like an environment to run it.
Like I maybe we should just kindof build them together And like,
I just want that. And like, and our expectations
when we launched Bolt is that wewere like, this would be
incredible if we added 100K of ARR right?
By like within a year, we were at 700K at that point of AR
after seven years. And so we had no idea how
explosive the thing would be. Yeah, it really came from just,

(17:11):
you know, my own actual curiosity and and needs versus
how to look at the market going,oh, we want to be part of that.
Because if you look at like the 2022-2023 era of AI coding
stuff, there is tons of people just slapping AI and for that
exact reason, because they're all looking around like, oh,
they're doing this, they're doing that.
But like none of it added value.How did you get the word out

(17:32):
when you made this pivot? Good question.
We put together a tweet like that was.
I was hoping you'd say that. Yeah, you know, it's
unconventional, but you know, welike over the past like 7 years,
like it's always important. Like when you're building a like
a start up, you should always bebuilding community around it
because you never know which of your iterations is going to be

(17:54):
the one that clicks. And ideally you want some amount
of built in distribution for the, you know, to propagate what
great messages you're going to send out basically, right.
So we built up, you know, some like a small following out,
maybe 20,000 people were following our account or
whatever at the time. And, and, but we, we put out one
tweet. Like there wasn't even a blog
post, there wasn't a press release.
And, and it was a darn good tweet.
We spent some time on it and that just basically explained,

(18:17):
hey, this is what this thing is.And you know, why it why it
exists, why it's different and better than the other stuff
that's out there and it went viral.
That was important for seeding kind of the initial set of users
that came in and tried the thing.
But what what kept that that, you know, growth flywheel going
was that the experience was amazing, right, like people
would, and this is still true today.

(18:39):
When you go to bolt dot new, there's no like marketing
landing page. You have to sift through.
There's no like crap, you know, like I like most products.
There's like, oh, this is crap you have to go through to even
just try the thing out. I'm not going to lie, when I'm
vibe coding stuff I'm looking atbolt on new for my landing page
example. It's like remove the friction,
remove the distraction anyway. Totally.
Yeah, exactly. It's like just kind of get
people straight into the action because that if you have a great

(19:00):
product experience, it will speak for itself, right.
And so, you know, the prompt boxis there, you hit enter within,
you know, a minute, you have a web app or whatever that's built
that looks great and it's mind blowing.
And so people would deploy that URL.
They'd be like, wow, I have a website live on the Internet and
then they would share that whether, you know, in iMessage
or on X or whatever and be like,wow, look who I just made with

(19:21):
Bolt dot new. And so that was like, we saw
this crazy, you know, organic word of mouth thing happening.
And that's like still the primary driver of how people
find out about Bolt. Yeah, there's no paid
acquisition. Like there's zero $0.00, you
know, on the marketing for the launch of the thing.
I don't want to go too deep intothis but what was the what was
the anatomy of that tweet that made it so great in your
opinion? Good question.

(19:43):
By the way, have you ever heard of the Amazon PRFAQ approach?
No. So it's this is a really, this
is a good. One, this is good.
Yeah, so, so the Amazon PRFAQ iswhen Amazon wants to go and
release a product before they would start making designs or
writing code or anything, they write a press release and an FAQ
for the product. What are you saying the day that

(20:04):
it is launched? Because you effectively have to
answer the questions of why is this unique?
Where are we innovating on this?What problems is this actually
solving right? Proactively removing friction to
people ever using your thing. Bingo.
And you're starting at the end, right?
You're starting at like on launch day and then working
backwards from there, right. So and what that provides is
then when everyone's built, whenyou say OK, well, we're going to

(20:24):
do this project there. The North Star is so clear on
where you actually need to get to right And so for us with the
approach we've taken is we have like our approach is a tweet
thread FAQ. So what we do is because it's
even more distilled format of like A blog post or a press
release, because you have to, every tweet has to have a
purpose if it wants to be good. At least you don't have like a

(20:45):
run on thread or whatever. And the first tweet, it was
really the video demo that we had to showcase like just going
to bolt on you typing a prompt and what you could actually
build out of it. But one of the guys on our team
did a great job with that. As I recall, the text of that
tweet kind of started with the classic like, you know, wouldn't
it be great if you know ChatGPT?Could actually I'm think I'm

(21:07):
looking at the tweet right now. It took like maybe a dozen or
two of revisions just for the first tweet to get it to where
we were, like within 200 characters and etcetera.
Was this the one? That is exactly it all.
Right. Why don't you go ahead and read
it for those that are only listening?
OK, so this tweet says what if AI dev products, Claude V-0,
etcetera let you install packages, run backends and edit
code introducing bolt dot U by stack blitz prompt, edit, run

(21:31):
and deploy full stack apps, fulldev environment MPMV Next JS
with Frontier AI free exclamation point.
That's it. That's the tweet.
And then in the comments, then you get to the nitty gritty,
right? You don't want to put that up
front. Exactly the most.
Interested people will start scrolling, but if you put that
up front then you just turn people off.
And This is why I love that doing tweet threads is kind of

(21:51):
like the focal point of how you make marketing messaging,
because the first tweet is the thing that needs to grab
people's attention and be like, Hey, this is a thing that sounds
dope and is relevant and it's something you would want, right?
Like we all agree on that because that's really what you
want to get on that. Because once you have them
there, they will then read through all of the cool things
that this thing can do. It's way easier to make all the

(22:12):
the subsequent, you know, kind of tweets by the way, because
you're really just speaking to the specific features that
really stand out and, you know, etcetera.
Not that we didn't spend time iterating on those, but that
tweet specifically we, what we really want to anchor to is
like, you know, the way we find this out is we would just go
talk to like our friends and prospective customers or
whatever and we'd say, hey, thisis what we've built.
Here's kind of, you know, the general pitch.

(22:33):
What do you think they would askthat question?
Well, how is this different fromClaude or V-0, right?
Why do I need this? Like, what are the actual things
that has these? And that's if you look at that
tweet, that's exactly, it's like, hey, wouldn't it be great
if these things that you know and love could do this?
That's what Bolt is you. Leave with a question.
Exactly, exactly. So and you kind of have to like

(22:54):
you have to talk to people to kind of get a sense of like,
what is that? What's the first thing people
are going to ask you? Like yeah, but like, what about
blah, blah, blah? You know, it's kind of like the
first question on this pocket. What about kind of the other app
builders, right? It's like whatever, It's like,
well, how do you if we deserve to exist, what exactly is that
reason? Right And like, how are we?
That's super important to have. And anyway, so something that
we've learned over the years when we've launched up is just

(23:16):
really having a very well thought out hook and explanation
of what this thing is, why it deserves to exist, why it's
going to solve your problems. Way easier said than done to do
that well. I think one of the magical
things about that tweet was you put the URL right there.
Not below the fold, not in a comment, but right up front.
And I've looked at the Twitter code and there's a misconception

(23:38):
out there says if you put a URL in your tweet, Twitter is going
to deboost it because they don'twant to take people off the
platform, which makes logical sense.
So most people, myself included for a while, thought, okay, I'm
never going to put links in tweets.
I'll put them in the comment tweets, which I would still say
80% of the time is best practices, but Elon himself
recently came out and tweeted and said, hey, we don't like

(23:58):
automatically de prioritize or de boost tweets from the
algorithm if they have a link. What we do do is we do whatever
we can to keep people in the platform.
And so it doesn't have to be a link.
It might be, but if your tweet is not interesting enough, maybe
because they're clicking on yourlink and leaving Twitter, maybe
it's because it's just not compelling.
There's not a good hook, there'snot good payoff.

(24:19):
We're not going to boost it. But if your tweet is compelling
enough and it has a link and people stay on Twitter, like
maybe they click the link and they just keep reading all of
your comments. They're watching all of your
videos. So Twitter's like, wow, I don't
give a crap that he put a link in here because they're staying
on Twitter even longer than theywould have otherwise.
Let's boost the heck out of this.
Like, sometimes you can really find magic because you lose a

(24:39):
ton of people if you put the link in even the first comment,
like you lose 80% of people. But if you can find magic and go
viral with the URL in the top tweet, oh man, zero to 20
million arr in two months. Totally in this.
Case totally. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And that was the thing too with our the dot new domain because
we originally did launch with developers.

(25:00):
And so one of the stipulations of having a dot new domain is
that when you go to that URL, ithas to immediately start some
type of action. So if you go to like docs dot
new that takes you to a new Google document or Google like
a. Yeah, that's what I used to open
all my docs. I never even connected it to.
Yeah, exactly. And so so and that's why we
chosethe.newdomainandpartiallybecausethe.comwas taken.

(25:21):
But we were like we really want people.
The magic of this experience is 0 friction between your idea
into reality. And so the dot new domain
actually requires you to, you know, remove the marketing crap
basically, right? I love it.
OK, so my ADHD is on full display.
Let's get back to the original question that I brought us away
from 8020 of how to use Bolt, How people are using it.

(25:44):
Most of the people that are coming to Bolt by and large are
folks that are entrepreneurs actually like they're building
businesses. And then there's the large
portion of folks that are, you know, assisting in building
businesses like PMS, designers, engineers, even like sales and
marketing teams, etcetera. We have two kind of splits of
where our revenue comes from, which is 1 is prosumer, which is
that's the entrepreneur startingbusinesses.

(26:06):
And then we have B2B, which is existing businesses like Fortune
5 hundreds or scale ups. And that's where we see a lot of
designers, PMS, engineers adopting us to accelerate their
prototyping and workflows and that sort of thing, right?
The prosumer side and just buy sheer number of heads on the
platform. Entrepreneurs is like the number
one thing and they're coming here and starting, you know,

(26:28):
businesses of like all types, which is insanely cool to see.
Do you have some examples like what like selling info products
or agency web like they're selling websites or what are
they doing? Yeah, totally.
So certainly a lot of agencies useful to go and build stuff for
their clients, right. That's a pretty large one.
And the ROI on that is insane. Like there's this guy's CJ on

(26:52):
Axe. He, he has the most legendary
ROI story we've seen where he posted a tweet and said, Hey,
this is, this is the web, the application I made for my client
and it cost me 9 bucks on Bolt to do this.
And and then, you know, people got a good amount of pick up and
then someone asked the question I was going to ask had they not,
which is how much did you build the client?
He was like $9000. That's like buying Bitcoin in

(27:15):
2010. It's crazy, right?
If you like search like bold arbitrage, there's kind of a
growing number of people that like are kind of connecting the
dots on this. There's a lot of agencies that
use this for just accelerating the development workflows.
And this is becoming a much more, you know, a very common
thing at this point that folks are doing.
But then you have folks that arestarting like SAS businesses,
right? There's a lot of different types
of these that we see. So you have people that are that

(27:36):
will make course building websites for themselves, for
example. So instead of going to, you
know, one of these other platforms, you can actually own
all of your revenue and have your own site to do it etcetera.
Instead of giving a 10 or 30 or 50% cut or whatever it is to go
and you know, use some other hosted platform and that sort of
thing. So that's like just kind of one
example of something we've seen other ones too is like people

(27:57):
are making AI applications. One example is this guy named
Paul who's been part of he was like one of the first couple of
weeks of folks that were on our platform, but built an entire
CRM with Bolt that has AI integrated into it.
And so you can literally industry specific and he was
just kind of going after a general this general industry
like anyone who's like. A CRM to fit his needs, hoping

(28:19):
that maybe other people would like it as well.
Yeah, absolutely. And you can go sign up for it,
you know, etcetera. We've seen a lot of different,
you know, cool types of businesses and folks, you know,
making like real money now goingand actually selling monthly
subscriptions and you know, etcetera for this stuff, right.
What kind of app did CJ build the $9000 one?
What was that for? That was for one of his clients.

(28:40):
It was a dashboard as I recall for some type of reporting in
their product, etcetera. And he was, you know, being
acting as like an agency, consulting with them and, you
know, building out web apps and whatever you're having.
That just reminds me of just a framework that I have.
First principle, Like people love dashboards.
I don't care if you own an auto repair shop, you're CEO of a
Fortune 500 company. And I think the first principle

(29:03):
behind it is like, it just makesus feel good that we have
everything under control. Like my whole business is on one
screen. I know what's going on.
Really you don't. But my point is, people will pay
so much money for a dashboard that is simply just aggregating
together data via APIs through an interface that you build with
something like Bolt. So go start a Ding dashboard

(29:24):
agency. That's the thing, you won't be
the first person to do it like AI.
Total totally and so we're actually running this hackathon
right now for the entire month of June where out of you saw
this but like so we're I. Did yeah 1,000,000 bucks.
The world's largest hackathons, we have over 100,000 people that
are participating this at this point, we crossed the world
record, which was like 66,000. Guinness is like officially

(29:46):
going to market. You know, like I've never done
it before. I've never been in the world
record, but we're all going to be there.
It's been so, so cool to see allthese folks going and like, and
building ideas that they would not.
And the reason we did this, by the way, was that most people
still don't know on planet Earththat they can actually build
software without being a developer.
And so that's like, that was whywe kind of created this

(30:06):
lightning rod of attention for this hack thumb of like, hey,
over $1,000,000 of prizes. You do not need to be technical.
In fact, it's better if you're not technical and you come to do
this and, you know, come on and,you know, try Bolt for free and
like build something and, you know, see what you can build.
And there's been amazing stuff for like, folks, there's an app
that someone's building in SouthAfrica for giving access to like

(30:29):
emergency services down there because apparently there's not
really great infrastructure for if you needed to go to the
hospital, like where do you actually go?
Like it, Which kind of blows my mind because you would expect
that this would be kind of a solid problem in 2025.
I think it was like a month or two ago, one of his friends had
an accident in South Africa and they didn't have Internet access
and had no idea where to go. And that's like a common thing.

(30:51):
So there's stuff like that wherepeople are building applications
that are actually meaningful, kind of even even beyond just a
business sense, like actually, you know, obviously important
for for humans. I think it's very key that you
said like it's actually better if you're not a developer.
Like I, I think of this study where they took a bunch of
executives and a bunch of kids and they gave all of them a
bunch of marshmallows with toothpicks.

(31:13):
And they said, all right, build the biggest tower you can.
And they put them in groups of like 3.
And all the executive, they got together and they had like 2
hours to do it. They spent the first hour, hour
and a half planning, game planning, engineering.
Let's get the load bearing righton this.
Let's have a big enough foundation.
And the kids just started freaking sticking marshmallows
with toothpicks and they startedbuilding and falling over
building involved. And the kids won, right?

(31:35):
Because they weren't biased and they just started trying and
failing, trying and failing. And when I think of a developer
going into something like Bolt, they probably have all these
preconceived biases, biases and confirmation biases.
And they go into like, well, I don't want to build this because
it's probably going to. And they might be wrong in a lot
of cases because they have theseassumptions that just aren't
true. Whereas someone that's totally
ignorant like myself can go like, yeah, build me an iPhone

(31:58):
app. And then it's like, OK, and
you're going to hit problems, you're going to hit friction.
It's like, OK, let me take this over to ChatGPT.
Let me export my repository to GitHub, OK?
And like you just start working through these problems, which
that's all entrepreneurship is, is problem solving.
And entrepreneurs know how to dothat very well.
And I can actually see a scenario where the the
non-technical vibe coders if youwill, are are crushing it.

(32:21):
For sure, right. I mean, like, that's 100%
because like the big problem with like, you know, the
building like apps and software being gated to date on having
development experience is that once you're a really proficient
developer, you lose touch, you know, naturally with what the
experience of using software is as a non developer, right?

(32:42):
And, and this is something for us as a company, like we were
building tools for developers before, now we are building
tools for non developers. And so for us, we are having to
completely transform how we approach building, building the
experience of our product because a lot of our engineers
own instincts no longer actuallymatch with the end users using
the product to that. And so who are we hiring to
bring in is like folks that are like great PMS and designers

(33:04):
that have really good perspective of OK, what really
representing the end users experiences.
And then for our engineers, there's lots of ways to kind of
get that context on the engineers.
Like some companies, every engineer has a, you know, knows
a customer personally that they talk to every week, right?
So like they have that built in like empathy and you know, you
know, thread with them, right? But it's a huge advantage for

(33:26):
folks that are are building appsis if they don't, if they're not
kind of actually bogged down andthe bajillion details that go
into building software product. And that's like the stuff that's
come out with this hackathon is some of the coolest ideas.
And you know, that I have seen from hackathon, largely because
it's not just engineers making stuff for engineers.

(33:46):
It's stuff that's like, wow, this is like if we brought a
girl on our live stream that is a new mom and built an AI app
for new moms that helps you like, you know, you can ask it
questions about, you know, what do you do?
Like how much, you know, generally should you be feeding
the baby? You're like, how do you get them
on the right sleep schedule, blah, blah, blah.
Which, you know, I had, you know, my first kiddo a year and
a half ago and I was like, yeah,that's a real problem.

(34:08):
Like that's like, you know, a real thing.
And, you know, but as an engineer, my first thought
wasn't, hey, I should go build an app for this.
And, you know, like it just didn't click.
That's what's really cool about this, is that it connects people
that are directly exposed and feeling the problem to with the
tools to actually solve it, you know?
Yeah. What are some weird, unexpected
ways that people have used both to make a ton of money?

(34:29):
Maybe they built an agency on top of it.
Maybe it was a random website. Anything.
That's a good question. I think the agency's one has
been so interesting, but it makes a ton of sense why that's
the case. The other really interesting
ones that I've seen have really revolved around folks that are
going and building, you know, platforms where they are owning

(34:51):
the content that they're making and selling it directly.
And it affects the kind of cutting out the middle band of
some of these other tools, right?
So whether they're selling courses, whether they're
selling, you know, materials or access to community or, you
know, etcetera. Like that's that to me is like
some of the most interesting stuff because some of these
tools will take a substantial cut out of your earnings, right?

(35:12):
And like, yeah, before you couldhave gone and signed up for
Stripe and done yourself. But like, you know, the previous
company I ran before this was, you know, we were selling
courses online kind of like parasite and for my Co founder,
I was just him and I, as you know, like a basically a
lifestyle business. And it took him and I like a
month or two to get just the infrastructure set up with
payments and login and da da da before we could even start

(35:33):
selling courses. And in retrospect, it probably
wasn't worth our time, but we just didn't, you know, we're
like, we're boots dropping. We a 30 or 40% cut is brutal.
Like we got to pay rent. That to me is, you know, some of
the most interesting things fromlike a monetization standpoint
that I've seen for Bolt, but. That could be a good framework
of just like whatever software tool you use that is more

(35:56):
expensive than you think it needs to be, or takes a bigger
percentage cut than you think itneeds.
Try to replicate that in Bolt. Absolutely.
At worst case you save money foryourself, best case you resell
that to others. Absolutely.
One of my friends, actually a tangible example of this and
this, they're not making money on this, but they have there's
like a teleprompter iPad app, right?
So they're using it to like, youknow, they're, they're recording

(36:16):
videos and it's like 30 bucks. I don't know of any good
teleprompter apps so I would love to hear about this.
Yeah, so this blew my mind because he sent me a message.
He was like, yeah, like you've been using this app.
It's like 30 bucks a month and it sucks on the iPad.
And so I went to Bolt and just one shot said make me a
teleprompter app. And it did.
And it's better. And it, you know, cost
basically, you know, two cents or something to me.

(36:37):
Yeah. And then they own it forever,
right? So there's a lot of things like
that where, you know, tools thatyou're paying for, you actually
may not need to pay for them. And in fact, you can customize
them for your own use cases for your business, which is like a
very common use case actually across the spectrum of people we
see, whether it's entrepreneurs or it's actually a Fortune 5
hundreds or whatever. Like, they're also using Bolt to

(36:57):
just build internal tools for themselves that are kind of
bespoke, you know, do. You have any examples of big
businesses that have already been built with Bolt, like from
an ARR perspective or a number of customers perspective?
Yeah, good question. I think I'd have to pull up.
I know that there's startups that have launched using US for
parts or you know, or full partsof their web apps, whatever have
you, because YC startup called Denormalize that used us to

(37:19):
build their application and they're doing stuff around AI,
data pipelines, etcetera. And they've raised a couple
$1,000,000 at this point. There's a lot of these though,
right? So the one thing is because, you
know, folks own their entire Stripe accounts.
We don't have observability per SE into how big some of these
folks are getting. But we hear this a lot though
were they like, hey, we use thisto build out this entire thing.
And we certainly see the companies that that are growing

(37:41):
by headcount and adding seats onus.
You know, we see that as well. Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of cases where you certainly startups are
going to raising, raising money and are making substantial
amounts of ARR, but also existing scale UPS and Fortune
500. They're like, you know,
launching new products out of this thing that are, you know,
doing responsible for 10s of millions of dollars in revenue

(38:01):
per year sort of thing. Yeah, I could see someone saying
like, well, yeah, I want to get in Y Combinator, but I can't
just build something with Bolt to get in.
And it's like you can, you can, you can.
Yeah, you absolutely can. I'd love for you to show us,
like show us how the average user with no technical knowledge
can go from nothing to somethingon Bolt.
Cool. Yeah, absolutely.

(38:22):
Let me go share my screen here. OK.
And for those listening on audio, I'll be describing what's
going on here. All right, so we get the Bolt
homepage here. Simplest thing in the world,
What do you want to build? And there's just a text box.
We can tell what we want to build.
Maybe let's just have like, you know, create a course selling
website, perhaps something like that.
So I'm Eric Simons, I want to build a course selling website

(38:47):
for my new course on how to use bolt dot new to make production
web applications. Anything else you want to add
here? No, I'd love to ask you
questions as we wait for this toprompt.
What are some prompting best practices like the first prompt?
Start with like something, you know, relatively simple, like

(39:09):
you just start with like the home page and start with maybe
some of the, you know, just static parts of the application
and like figure out like how the, the colors, the UIUX you
want. And that's what this thing's
going to go do right now. You want to like, because if you
look at from a typical product development process, that's
usually where you want to start.It's just with, OK, let's make
sure the general flows, the layout, the look and feel,
etcetera. Let's make sure all of that

(39:30):
stuff works properly. And then we start like layering
on functionality. And so in the next steps here,
depending on what comes back, we'll either make some changes
to the colors or whatever have you, or to the layout.
We're like, OK, cool, this looksgreat.
And let's start adding in some functionality.
And at that point, you, you kindof want to break these things
out, you know, into specific tasks.

(39:51):
Like you prompt my prompt just so that it's easy for you to, if
you have to roll back, you're like, OK, this that that didn't
really work. You're you.
There's like only one thing thatI was working on there.
I can easily roll that back. But generally you don't want to
like completely jam a ton of stuff you know, into the chat
just because you might end up with results that are hard to
rollback and kind of have fine grained control, right?

(40:13):
So me, I'm like super impatient and when I'm building something
I'm like do this and then it starts.
I'm like also do this and then do this and then do this and
then do this. Would you not recommend?
That it depends. So especially if you're doing
like if you're changing kind of parts of the UI and that sort of
thing, totally fine. Yes.
If you're when you're kind of getting into more complex
functionality, it's good to likekind of break it down and take

(40:33):
it more step by step. I'll show you one feature we
have actually that allows you tokind of consolidate changes like
that that are maybe large and etcetera.
It's called discussion mode. And so this is down here in our
chat box is this little like discussion icon.
If you click on that, then you can actually just have a
conversation where the agent isn't actually building
anything. It's just helping effectively

(40:54):
answer questions and build a plan on what to go and build
with you, right? OK.
So this is the app we got back. So it's called Bolt Master.
Looks good, gave us some branding.
Yeah, like pretty good. For wow, that looks really good.
Geez. I'm not like a design master,
but I think that this looks legitimately good.
Let's say for instance it's not good enough for me.

(41:14):
I wanna look something, I wanna see something much more sleek.
Maybe I have some examples, I can go screenshot it.
What prompting tips do you have for asking it to change the user
interface to look a certain way?For sure, yeah.
I mean, if there's like certain colors or like, hey, I want more
animations, you can just tell itto do that.
You can just say, hey, I want itto be like a purple theme or I
wanted to like. And if you have specific

(41:35):
examples, you can actually just take screenshots, drop them into
the chat and it'll use that as reference then and go, OK, I
will make something that looks more like this, right?
How well does it work with screenshots?
Let's say I went and took Airbnb's homepage which is known
for design. I just screenshot it and said no
this isn't vacation rentals but make it look like this.
Sure. How well would it do with that?
Let's give it a shot. I'll go ahead and drag in the

(41:57):
screenshot of Airbnb. Make the theme look more like
Airbnb like. Because design is something that
is very easy to ignore, but I feel moves the needle much more
than people would have said. Absolutely, absolutely right.
And so that to me is what's coolis I'm building something from
scratch and bolt, what I'm oftendoing is I will go and find, you

(42:18):
know, great design inspiration to pull from and, you know, tell
bolt to to go and look at that and then, you know, spin up
design based on that. Right.
And hopefully, hopefully the demo gods play well with me
here. But it's it's really looking at
the screenshots like. No, no, no.
There we go. Cool.
What happens? Because this has happened to me

(42:38):
in other apps where I just hit brick wall.
For instance, I'm trying to build this website right now and
it will not let me log out. I click log out, it just
refreshes. And I put the code in GitHub and
ChatGPT and they all say that, oh, I see what's happening.
It's just, it's actually loggingyou out, but it's not refreshing
on the UI over and over and over.
And I cannot fix it. Yeah, and it's a very simple

(42:59):
thing. What are your tips for getting
around that brick wall? Absolutely, because it's going
to happen. Yeah, yeah.
And this stuff does happen, right?
So that's like one of the reasons we rolled out discussion
mode is it's very useful for solving these types of issues
because it, it's you know, instead of it, you know,
typically when you go to other like even with the, the normal
build mode mode agent in Bolt, and this is how you know, chat P

(43:19):
and a lot of the other things bydefault will work.
Is though, instead of being like, hey, let's like maybe talk
this through and like have you do a couple of things to test
stuff, it'll just be like, oh, Idefinitely know what's going
wrong. It's like it has no idea, right?
Whereas discussion will say, OK,let's try this.
OK, can you give me this information?
No, OK. And it'll actually start
instrumenting the code base. If things are still going wrong,

(43:40):
it'll start adding logs and etcetera to then pull in and go,
OK, well, what is it? What's happening now, right?
That typically goes a very long ways, right?
I mean, the cool thing about discussion mode is that every
message of discussion mode takeslike 110th of the price of a
normal agent message, right? And so you can send way more

(44:00):
discussion mode messages, which is important for debugging and
not just burning through your entire, you know, monthly
allotment, right? So this thing, you know,
shamelessly, shamelessly. That's pretty close.
I mean, there's no shame on thispodcast.
So we're all about copy paste. Yeah.
Yeah, obviously when pulled the exact color scheme and this is
like, you know, took exact inspiration from, you know.

(44:21):
From those listening, it looks like Airbnb.
Yeah, like it took about 90 seconds.
And it looks like Airbnb. Airbnb for courses.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
I mean, how much time and effortand care and money does Airbnb
poured into design? I mean, so like, in all
seriousness, why try to become agood designer when you can just
do stuff like this? I think for, for a lot of

(44:43):
applications, right, I think that you, you don't need to for
Bolt. Like we, we spent time on the
UIUX, but as I mentioned earlier, like we started Bolt's
development in July and we launched it in October.
So there's 90 days, right. And we poured log into the UIUXA
bit to the degree you could, butwe didn't even have a mobile
responsive view for Bolt and we didn't have it until the
beginning of this year. Like we went to zero to 20

(45:03):
million AR without a mobile responsive view, right And I'm
not. Saying there's a lesson in
there, there is just freaking launch.
Absolutely right. If the value you're providing is
actually insanely great, which it should be like that's the,
that's what you have to do, right?
There's all these other things that you should do that people
were yelling. It's like, how do you not have a
mobile response to view, you know?
Well, we made, we had to cut corners somewhere to get it out

(45:25):
online. Yeah.
And for a lot of applications folks build, it's like the
design of this, what comes out of these models is excellent.
And it's why would you go and spend cycles on something that
is usually kind of, you know, somewhat ancillary to the core
value you actually have to go and provide.
Not that you should ignore design at all or something, but
there's a certain bar you have to hit.

(45:46):
And unless you're doing something that is designed
specific and that's one of the key reasons that your app is
going to win and is competitive or something, right?
And those are few like there's not a lot of those.
You should be just be focusing on solving the end users
problems. Do you have any other like
prompting hacks like shortcuts like talk to it this way or say
this or this phrase or? I'm very curious about that.

(46:08):
I encourage people to just like,you know, throw vibes at it,
especially for design. And like you'd say, Hey, like,
go and, you know, make it beautiful.
Like make this thing pop. Like, you know, add a page that,
you know, really focuses on XYZ.Like sometimes it's just better
to let the AI take a crack at whatever you have to do versus
you trying to like really spec out exactly how it should be.

(46:29):
Because I, I think that some people will just get really,
really, really detailed. And then what comes out is is,
you know, will will like work, but it's, you know, they're
spending all this time on thingswhere, you know, in these models
that that they're trained on, you know, the best, you know,
apps in the world. And so you get to kind of
leverage a lot of the best practices just by saying, hey,
we need a pricing page. Can you just kind of go whip

(46:50):
something up with these three prices?
And it's like what comes back like yeah.
Oh, OK. Yeah, that's great.
Yeah. Like I went to thought it out
that way, you know, so. In a previous podcast I
suggested people do this and I'mcurious what your thoughts are
on this. Let's say you have an idea for a
website and you pull up Bolt alongside four other direct Bolt
competitors and you just are prompting all 5 at the same

(47:10):
time. Do this.
Make this website same prompt inall 5 browser windows.
What result are you going to getfrom Bolt?
Either good, better, you know, different, worse, whatever.
It doesn't matter. How is Bolt going to be unique
when you're prompting 5 different, you know, vibe coding
apps the same way? Totally.
Yeah, I think we've got pretty the best like design output at

(47:32):
this point of all the things outthere.
We've spent a lot of time on that because like again, it's
like we're trying to get you from idea to business, you know,
as as fast as possible, right, and in less than 5 minutes.
And so if you're having to spenda ton of time on just making the
website like look like somethingthat could actually sell a
product, that's a problem. And so that's the first prompt.
That is what you're going to seewith Bold on the 2nd.

(47:54):
Prompt. You'll save time absolutely just
on the design. Port, yeah.
And what comes out is stunning, right?
And on the second prompt, you'reactually, you have a real back
end and payments, etc, integrated with the thing,
right? That's what you're going to
really notice. And, and the speed of it too.
Like that's like we really have,and this, a lot of it comes from
the seven years we spent building this technology.

(48:15):
Like, so this is like the how we're running this in browser
here. By the way, this is the seven
years of technology we spent before bolt on our previous
product. And this is no one else has the
a pure in browser based dev environment.
All the other providers have to use cloud VMS for every time you
open up one of their things. So you will notice there's it
takes a long time to boot those things often.

(48:36):
Sometimes they won't boot at allbecause you know, the server is
borked or whatever, blah, blah, blah.
With Bolt, every single time, like when I refresh this chat
window, this is booting a fresh operating system on my device
inside of my browser, booting itup, installing it, getting it
running, etcetera, you know, within seconds.
And that's, and you know, on theother guys, this can take
minutes to do that. So that's like, I think those

(48:57):
are the things that you'll tangibly notice when you kind of
go compare these things against each other.
How viable is it to build like aproduction ready iPhone app with
Bolt? You can do it, absolutely.
Yeah. We have an integration with
Expo, which is like a React Native thing.
And so on the home screen, you just say like, you know, build
me a mobile app, mobile app thatlooks like Spotify or whatever.

(49:19):
This will actually, you know, get a real native application
spun up that using just a, you can take a picture of a QR code,
you know, that will pop up here,but you can actually run that
app on your device and as you are prompting, it'll up like hot
reload it, you know, in your hand in real time, right?
And so that's like we're one of the few providers that can

(49:39):
actually do this. Again, it's because we're
running all this stuff locally on device that we can let you
build mobile apps and not just kind of like specific types of
web apps or something. Yeah.
What type of functionalities arestill difficult for Bolt?
Like let's say I wanted to builda WhatsApp clone and I wanted
people to have encrypted chat between, you know, anywhere they

(50:00):
are on the earth. Is there any like sort of
feature or product or database or something that like Bolt is
still kind of young at that thatimproving?
That's a really good question. I think for all of these things,
there's kind of a complexity curve of when you start adding
in functionality that's reasonably complicated and not
super common, you may start. Like an Uber clone.

(50:20):
Like an Uber. Clone we're using like GPS data
and stuff. Yeah.
And especially with Uber, because it's like a lot of what
makes Uber work is the dispatching algorithms and
software behind. And obviously there's tons of
humans that have to support thatoperation, right.
And and that's where things get a lot more complicated because
now you're not just talking about, you know, really a like
what you know, it's software is like a CRUD based application,

(50:40):
create, read, update, destroy where you're just you're
putting, you're uploading thingsto a database, you're
downloading things. Now you're dealing with real
time systems where you have to have, you know, servers that are
doing sophisticated algorithms that you have to invent to, you
know, be matchmaking drivers to to passengers, etcetera,
etcetera. It's like things of that nature
would be very difficult to do with Bolt or any tool for that

(51:01):
matter, without having knowledgeof it.
But it also depends on the use case too.
If you're building an app to that, where you only ever have
20 drivers to be assigned to different like orders.
OK, I mean, you know, that actually would work like you
don't need some crazy sophisticated, you know, mapping
algorithm or something for that,right?
And you can just be doing a moredirect matchmaking thing.

(51:22):
And again, this is like where you're spending a like as people
build their projects up, they'respending a lot more time in
discussion mode in bold because they're going, OK, I need to go
add this functionality, blah, blah.
And then and discussion mode will come back and go, OK, we're
gonna have to go do this. That here's kind of the
trade-offs. Like what are you actually
trying to do here? And you know, really honing in
on the plan, which is exactly, you know, when you when

(51:42):
engineers write software that, you know, they don't just kind
of go, oh, we're building ubergrain and then just start
coding. It's like there's you have to do
a lot of planning to kind of really think through, OK, how is
this going to work? What's the actual, you know,
intended, you know, experience we're delivering here, etcetera,
right. And so the same thing is true
with this and coming back to earlier in the conversation
where it's like knowledge of building software being

(52:03):
important. This is why, right?
So if you want to build more complicated things, but it's not
even like even knowing how to code, it's also just
understanding at a high level, OK, what are like the tools and
services that that you can use to solve different types of
problems? How do you glue these things
together, those sorts of things,right?
And what we see a lot is people will come here, they will,

(52:25):
they'll build their first website, which is something
that's maybe a maybe a personal website or it's like a course
selling website, something like that.
And then they're like, oh, I want to go build something more
complicated. And, and then they have to go
learn some stuff along the way, which again, discussion mode in
our Discord community is helpfulwith etcetera.
You know, folks like, there's something really powerful about
being intrinsically motivated togo and learn about this stuff

(52:47):
because you're like, oh, I know I can build this.
Yeah. And therefore I'm going to go
dig in and like, you know, understand how I would do it
versus if you don't even know how to code, like it's really
hard to kind of get past that point, right?
And so here's a mobile app. So this is like previewing it.
You saw this QR code. So if you scan this on your
device, you can actually, like, run it.
Oh, wow. But yeah, So this is Spotify,
our Spotify clone and, you know,etcetera.

(53:10):
But that's. That's zero.
Shot, you know. Yeah, I've never even attempted
a mobile app with any of these vibe coding apps, but I want to.
Yeah, it's cool. It's fun.
I mean, it's, yeah, it's so different to be holding this
thing in your hand and then seeing it update live as a
native app. It's really it's something else.
This was amazing. I know people are going to love
it. Where can they find you?
We know where to find bolt bolt dot new.
What about Eric? Yeah, you can find me on X, I'm

(53:33):
Eric Simons over on X. And then our X account for Bolt
is Bolt dot new like spelled outDOTBOLDOTNEW.
Yeah, that's where you can find us.
OK, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it.
Share with a friend and if you want to use Bolt, I'd love it if
you use my affiliate link in theshow notes.