The Startup Ideas Podcast - I Built an Entire App in Only 52 Min with Codex & Idea Browser

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Go to https://startup-ideas-pod.link/idea-browser to get validated startup ideas every single day and prompts to build your big idea Join me as I chat with Alex Finn about going from no idea to building a functional app using AI tools. We use Idea Browser to find trending business opportunities, develop a wellness habit tracking app concept with ChatGPT, and build it using Codex's AI agents. The episode showcases how one person can leverage AI to find and build an idea into a product. Get the blueprint to go from idea to an app in one afternoon: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/ai-builder Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction and overview 00:39 - Finding app ideas with Idea Browser 05:19 - Using ChatGPT to develop the app concept 17:36 - Overview of Codex and its capabilities 22:25 - Building the MVP while spinning up multiple AI agents 46:04 - Marketing strategy for launching the app Key Points: • Using Idea Browser to find validated business ideas by analyzing trends and market insights from social platforms • Leveraging ChatGPT to develop a business concept into a detailed Product Requirements Document (PRD) • Building an app with OpenAI's Codex using both local and cloud agents simultaneously • Implementing a marketing strategy through organic social media outreach The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND ALEX ON SOCIAL Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexFinnOfficial/videos X/Twitter: https://x.com/AlexFinnX Creator Buddy: https://www.creatorbuddy.io/

Alex, by the end of this episode, what are we going to learn? You are going to learn how you can go from no idea whatsoever to brilliant idea, to having the idea fully built out with AI agents. Okay. And could you give us a sneak peek of some of the tools that we're going to be using? We're going to be using two really awesome tools. We're going to be using Idea Browser to come up with a really amazing business idea. And then we're going to be using Open AIs Codex to build out that idea.

Okay, let's get started. I must confess that I built Idea Browser for myself. So I am a co-founder and Idea Browser, but I think that if it's valuable for me, it's going to be valuable for other people. So let's get to it. And I must confess I have absolutely no affiliation with Idea Browser whatsoever.

I just find it awesome to find ideas. So let's do it. All right. I am going to share my screen. First of all, props Greg, on Idea Browser. Awesome, awesome platform. from me. Well, the context there, by the way, is that, like, I run a holding company. So we're constantly incubating, investing, and acquiring businesses. So we need ideas. Ideas is the

lifeblood of our business. So the whole idea is, like, if you can scrape Facebook groups, subreddits, get data, and create validated ideas, then you have an unfair advantage. Yeah. And I, you know, based, I talked to a lot of vibe coders and new people to AI every single day and building has never been easier. The challenge is the ideas. People can't come up with good ideas. And so this is a fantastic way to find them. So you can find things to build out. I personally use this kind of as like a boxing gym in a way, idea browser where it's like, okay, I'm going to go into this. I'm going to find ideas. I'm going to build them out. Not always necessarily will they be million dollar businesses, but at least I'll get that practice of going from my idea to building.

And so what I'll do is kind of walk you through how I use it and we'll choose an idea and we'll start building it out. But where I like to start off is market insights. What's cool about market insights is it pulls from a lot of the big social media networks, right? Reddit, Facebook. And you can see what people are talking about, see their pain points, see where there might be solutions and maybe come up with ideas from these.

So I don't know too much about psychedelic assisted therapy, but I know a little bit about email deliverability. and so I'll come in here. I'll see what pain points people are having with email deliverability, sudden drops and deliverability. If you have a newsletter like I do, you know, this is something you run into all the time. Fear of Google outlook policy changes.

You can really find some cool, interesting pain points to solve from these marketing insights. They give you some solution gaps, places where there are no solutions at the moment, segments that are underserved. a lot of really cool ways you can pull ideas from here. But where I seem to personally find the most ideas to build out is I like to go to trends. This is just like purpose built, ready served on a platter, things you can build out.

Like I don't even have to think too hard, right? Like website design for small businesses, wellness app. This is a cool one. So this is one I've been thinking about. And it looks like it is having a lot of volume and growth at the moment. And so what I'll do is I'll look for a trend that I, my, self of interest in because the best products to build out are things you have interest in. I'll click in.

And what this is going to do is give me more information on this trend. So I can actually pull up the wellness app here. It'll tell me a little bit about how many monthly searches this app or this trend is getting. Tell me about what people are searching for with this trend. A wellness app refers to a digital platform designed to support individuals and achieving and maintaining their health and well-being goals. and gives me a little bit info on how many people are searching for this. And as you can see, a lot of people searching, not a ton of competition.

So this for me, when I'm coming into idea browser and I'm looking for ideas to build out and practice my building skills, this is kind of exactly what I'm looking for. Things that are having good growth, things with not a lot of competition, and things where I myself am interested. I'm interested in wellness. I work out. I try to eat relatively healthy. not including chocolate.

And so this is something I, for me, is a really good candidate for to build out. It's funny because like when you put it like that, find something that is in a growing industry with low competition that you personally understand and love. Like obviously the, you know, your chances of success is going to be highest there. Well, the chance of success, honestly, are 100%.

The reason being is like at the very least, least, even if no one buys the product at all, you've built a product for yourself, right? That will improve your own life. And like, for me, my business creator, buddy, I built it because I wanted to build an AI that analyzes my posts. At the very least, if no one bought it, I would have a product for myself to improve my own content. And so that's why it's always a win if you build things you're interested in. So here's my workflow. This is what I do. You know, I got into trends. I found a trend I really like. I have a prompt I built. call the idea browser prompt.

Purpose built for idea browser. I'll go. I'll take this trend. I'll copy it. I'll go in a chat GPT, which for me at the moment, GPT5 is the most powerful model there is. Sonnet 4.5, incredible for coding,

the best for coding, but straight up for chatting, ideating. I'm still a GPT5 guy. And so what I'll do is I will take my prompt, and we can put this in the description down below. But basically, the prompt is this. I'm giving you a link to a business idea from idea browser.

Your job is to act as a professional app builder and creative strategist. Read the page and then generate three high-quality, unique app ideas inspired by that idea. For each app idea, include the name, a concept summary, core features, why it works, and why it would succeed in today's market. Keep it practical and make it easy for a solo founder to build out. So I have that prompt. I'll take our trend we found. I'll put it in here.

So here's the idea. Paste it in. And what this is going to do is have chat GPT, go into that website, see what that trend is all about, and then give us a few ideas for what we can build out in our next stage, which will be going into codex and actually building out that idea. So we have a few different ideas here. we have mood mosaic, which is an expressive mood journaling and creative wellness app for people who want a more visual, playful way to track emotional health. Rather than writing pages of text, users paint their mood via simple sketches, colors, stickers, and stamps.

Maybe a little out there. Well Sync Buddy. Well Sync Buddy is a wellness accountability and habit pairing app that helps pairs, small groups, synchronize and support each other's wellness routines. and it's for people who thrive on social accountability. That's actually a multiplayer social network wellness app. It's not a bad idea. And then we have Biarrhythm Coach. Biarrhythm Coach is a personalized micro-wellness app built around users' individual daily biorethums.

It nudges users to schedule task breaks and wellness micro practices, like stretching, breathing, and light exposure in alignment with their energy peaks and troughs. That one's pretty cool. I think, I don't think any of these are bullseye for what I want to build, but what we can do from here is we can take certain ideas and combine them into one, right? Like some of these are a little abstract, like mood mosaic. I don't really want to build like a drawing app. Well sync, building a multiplayer social network is a little tough for one podcast. Biarrhythm.

I kind of like getting daily habits based on your goals. So let's do this. I think what we can do is we can say, I like idea number three, but it's a little abstract. Build me a plan for a habit tracker that also builds us wellness routines. So what I really liked in this one was the wellness, micro-wellness. I like that idea. Being able to track every little wellness thing you do and getting recommendations around how to be more well. So we can go back and forth with chat GPT here and get more ideas around that. Yeah, I like that idea. Like we have to do list for our professional lives, but we don't really have to do lists for our longevity lives.

We don't. We don't. And I think a lot of reason why is people just don't think of ways to be well. So putting a little bit of AI spin there where recommends those things. and you make a to-do list out of that. I think that could be cool. So let's see what we got here. Concept overview, habit flow is a dynamic wellness habit track that doesn't just track what you do. It designs and adapts your daily wellness routines

automatically based on your energy levels, goals, and feedback. The app blends traditional habit track with adaptive scheduling and AI coaching help users build sustainable, personalized wellness systems. This is something I'd use. Greg, would you use this? I totally would. I'm actually in a health kick right now.

I'm like actively trying to to be more healthy. And like I need it in my face a little bit more. So yes, I would. It even gives you the monetization. So free tier, how you can make money off of it. Upsell. We really at this point have not done any sort of creative thinking.

We've leaned on idea browser. And it just kind of fed us ideas. And the AI helped us come up with the winning idea. I mean, there's even a lazier way to do this. we'll do, you know, for another video, but like the lazier way to use Idea Browser, if you go back to it for a second, like you can, if you see the related idea

next to the trend on the right hand side, on the right bar, there are, and click, click that idea. So in Idea Browser, there's almost a thousand, I think, ideas and based on all these trends. So there are pre-cooked ideas based on, you know, and these are curated by human,

beings. So it's like we go through them and we're like, hey, this is good or bad. So you're right. You're right. You can use chat. You can use cloud. You can use some of these tools to go and ideate or you can just use the database. And there's one more tool that you can also use that I should just make mention is if you go to, yeah, tools, research your ideas. So we won't have time to do this now, but let's say you picked an idea you really liked. Like we could have picked, like that one, it sounds like we have that idea that we like from ChatGBT. You can actually put it into Idea Browser.

It's going to, it takes time, it takes up to 24 hours, but it actually generates a report on exactly like pretty much step by step how you should be building this business. So it's like a deep research tool. It's deep research. It's deep research for ideas. Yeah. That's sick.

And it's cool saying how other. people use it, by the way. Like, we see people use, some people want, it's just like more of a preference thing. You know, some people like pasta, some people like pizza. Some people like relying on the trends and just like kind of going with it. And some people just say, I like human beings giving my ideas. And that's why I'm just going to go to the database. Yeah, I mean, I think the key is this is not to overthink.

And I think the main problem a lot of people have is they kind of, wait for the perfect idea and then the perfect idea never comes and they end up accomplishing zilch right what the key and how I kind of got to my winning business idea was I just kept building things I just kept choosing ideas and you learn from each idea you build out oh this is actually interesting I like building this app and you eventually get to where you want to go and now it was great about idea browse you have a trillion ideas in front of you just choose one start building it out. And if it's a losing idea, you still win because you figure out what the next idea you want to build out is and you get closer to where you want to be. So just build something out.

Totally. I mean, the idea for Twitter, for example, came from audio. Like the original concept, I don't know if you know this story. I don't. Yeah. So Jack Dorsey raised a few million dollars to build out audio, which is a micro podcasting app idea. And he built it and started just, you know, I guess it was too early to do that. And he was kind of like, let's just make a text and came out, you know, basically came out with the idea from for Twitter through that process. Same as true with Instagram. You know the story of Instagram, how it started off as Bourbon? No.

Bourbon was a location. It was kind of like four square, actually. Remember check-ins? Yes. Like checking in. Yes. You would check into places and you would post photos of the place you checked in on. what they learned was people just cared about the photos.

And so they're like, let's just build a photo sharing app. So your best idea usually isn't your first idea, but it kind of gets you there to your point. And I think it's the same thing with OpenAI. Isn't it the same exact story where it wasn't a chatbot at all? They just kind of demoed it as kind of like a proof of concept, hey, what would happen if this was a chat bot? and it turned out everyone using OpenAI

was just doing the chat bot. Like, okay, we'll turn this into a chat bot product. And they released GPT3.5. And like, that's all they've been doing since it's building on top of that chat bot. So that's how you come up with your trillion dollar idea. You just build something and you'll along the way find what the right thing to do is.

All right. Let's go back. So let's do this. We've kind of ironed out our idea. The last thing we need to do before we start building, which this will be the fun part, is we want to turn this into a PRD. So a product requirements document.

AI agents are really, really good when they have a detailed plan, when they have a product requirements doc to work off of. So we want to build this and then hand it off to our Codex agent who will start building the app for us. And so what we're going to do here is we are going to say, okay, I really like this idea. let's turn the MVP very simple version of this app. And for those who don't know at home,

minimally viable product. So I kind of like the first version of the app that is usable, that gives value to the user. Very simple version of the app into a PRD, we can hand off to an AI coding agent. And I'm going to hit enter on that. Now, chat GPT5 will build us the PRD for habit flow. Actually, pretty good name if you ask me.

And we were going to take this PRD. And in a second, I'll show you how we hand it to Codex to start building some cool stuff out. I got to be honest, I haven't played around with Codex all that much. Am I making a mistake? You are making a mistake. Now, do I think it's the end-all, be-all? You'll never have to use another AI coding tool again. know, I think it works really, really well in complement to like a cloud code, for instance.

Yeah. But there are some features and functionality, which I'll show you when we hop in, that you can't do anywhere else. Primarily their concept of handoff and cloud agents, which basically gives you the ability to spin up tasks wherever you are, whenever you are, cross-platform, and constantly be productive no matter what you're doing. So let's do this. let's take this PR date.

Actually, let's do one more thing here. Can you make this a markdown file, please? This is the way AI agents read is in markdown file, so boom, perfect. It's going to spin this up into a markdown file. And in the meantime, what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch over to codex. So for those who want to work with us at home alongside us, which I think is a very smart idea, What I have here is Visual Studio Code, completely free. You can download it, no monthly fees or anything.

And I installed the Codex plugin for Visual Studio Code, which is going to give you this nice Codex UI here over on the left hand side that we can work in. But the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a new file. I create a new project in Visual Studio Code. I'm going to create a project.m.m.d. a markdown file. I copy over our new PRD here. It's going to have everything about the project.

I'm going to hit save. And now what we can do is switch to codex. For those new to codex, this is a plug-in for Visual Studio code, so you can just install it connects to your chat GPT account. So as long as you're paying the $20 a month or whatever for the kind of the base tier, you'll have access to codex.

Now, there's a couple of things different here if you're more used to ClaudeCodecode or cursor. With Codex, you have two options. You can work locally or you can work in the cloud. So working locally is kind of probably what you're used to with Claude Code, probably what you're used to with cursor, where it just sees the code in your ID and edits it, writes code, changes code, whatever.

The difference here is you can run this in the cloud. And basically what that means is you can spend, up AI agents that work in the cloud, on the internet, and does things for you asynchronously, writes code for you asynchronously. And the advantage to this is you can now spin up these agents from your ID plugin here, like you see with Codex, from your chat GPT app on your iPhone. You can spin up agents from Codex on the web. So if you go to chatgbd.com slash codex, You can spin up agents from your web browser. You can spin up agents to do tasks for you wherever you are, mobile browser, ID,

and they all work together, hand off tasks to each other, which allows you to basically unlock productivity while you sleep while you're on the go, while you're at the gym, wherever you are. You can have AI agents work for you building out code and doing whatever you want. That's a big deal. It's a really big deal. It's a whole new paradigm of building. that we really haven't had before where it doesn't matter where you are,

it doesn't matter what you're doing, you can have code being built. My personal favorite way of using it is before I go to bed every night, I challenge myself, I need to spin up three tasks for AI agents. So before I go to bed, before I turn off my computer, I have to give Codex three tasks. So whether it's implementing features, whether it's doing other tasks, which I'll show you in a second, whether it's marketing, product, whatever, just having three tasks. spun up before I go to bed so that when I wake up, my app has advanced. It's a really, really cool new way to be able to use AI agents. With that being said, I'll show you all the other cool stuff.

You can do with cloud agents in a second, but let's get the kind of base app set up here. So I'm going to say work locally, and I'm going to say, I created a PRD in project.md.m.D. Please build out the MVP using NextJS and SuperBase. So that's going to be our tech stack, NextJS for the front end, SuperBase for the database. You can choose your model. You have many different options here, high, medium, or low. I've been using Codex high for everything,

but I just watched the Codex Product Manager build out an app live at the OpenAI Dev Day. and he used low for everything. I was kind of shocked. So I'm going to use low for this. And I'm going to hit Send. And it's going to start building out our MVP. You're like, if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me. Yeah, I was just like by default, I want the smartest model.

And so I've been using high, which takes forever, it takes a long time. But the head guy who did like a live demo building out a complex app for the entire convention, used just low for everything. I'm like, okay, I guess low is good enough. It takes longer. and doesn't it take more tokens? Takes more tokens, takes longer, but my mindset's always been like,

I just want the smartest employee possible doing everything for me. Right, you're putting in like the most premium gasoline. Exactly. I want the most premium everything. If I'm drinking water, I want to drink Mountain Valley water. I can't drink out of a tap.

Are you kidding me? A'd boy. There we go. You know, this is the GPT high of water, but apparently you can, do the GPT low tap water and it still works well. So that's building that out. Now, while that's building that out, I'm going to show you the power codex. And for the record, open AI is not paying me, but also for the record, I will happily take an open AI check. I'm going to switch as this is

working to the cloud. So run in the cloud. Actually, let's do a new chat here. I'm going to say run in the cloud, and I'm going to say take a look at project.m.D. Let me make sure we're on the right. Yep, we're on the right repo here. So you're going to connect this to your GitHub as well. We're on the wellness repo. And build us an entire marketing plan for this app. And so now what we're doing with Codex is we have the local agent building us out the app, the MVP, and now I'm going to spin up a cloud agent to build us a marketing plan on the cloud for the app. And I hit send on that. And that is the power of codex and like these cloud agents that you really didn't have before in cursor or cloud code that you can now take advantage

of where I'm now spinning up AI employees in the cloud to do other tasks while the local agent is building out our app for us. It's kind of crazy because if I had downloaded VS code, downloaded Codex, I wouldn't have known that, like just by looking at Local versus Cloud. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a new paradigm of building. Also, too, I think these companies could do a little bit better of a job of explaining to people how everything works. But yeah, it's a whole new way of thinking about AI coding.

It's instead of thinking about it, like I'm like pair programming with an intern like you would with Claude Code or Cursor, it's now I'm kind of the CEO of a company and I'm hiring employees to do things for me as I work. Right. I have my software engineering intern building now. I in my chat have in the cloud my marketing head of marketing going and building this out and building out a marketing plan. And you can just spin up agents as you go in the cloud to do a lot of things at once. And I can actually show you here as this is going. Oh, you can actually see it right here. So you can see the work it's doing in the cloud.

Here's an entire marketing plan for habit flow. Objectives and KPIs we can track, target audience or who we're going to be targeting, resilient achievers, 25 to 40-year-old professionals like us. That's exactly what we were thinking with this. Positioning, messaging pillars, competitive landscape. It did, look, it did research on competitors for us. did everything we wanted as our other agent was working on us on actually building out the MVP. And it looks like that is still working here as well.

It's 1,200 lines. So we had 1,200 lines of code built out for us while our marketing agent was working the cloud to build out that plan. While we were talking smack about OpenAI, 1,200 lines that they're just beautiful lines that they're creating for us. And what's really cool is if I actually, it's a pretty. probably not going to be too visible on the camera, but if I go into Codex on my phone and I refresh here on my chat GPT app, I have that entire marketing plan on my phone as well. That's cool. Right. And so it's completely cross-platform. Everything I do in the ID is in my mobile app. Everything

I do in my mobile app is on the browser and vice versa. so across the board, which is, you know, an ecosystem, I don't think any other AI company can really pull off right now at the moment, which is really awesome. So we have it still building out our app. We're going to have the MVP done when it does that. But like, I think typically when people are building out apps like this, during this time when the agent's building, they'll go, they'll go on X, they'll doom scroll, they'll do whatever. All of a sudden, two hours gone, they got nothing done. If you kind of shift your mindset now to having cloud employees,

AI employees, which is unlocked with codex, you can get a lot more done in these kind of in-between moments, right? Like while this is working, I can maybe spin up a new chat, make sure we're working in the cloud, and we can say, you're a product manager,

come up with a roadmap for the app based on project. and I hit send. Now I have my product manager employee working for me all while I wait for the MVP to be built out, which looks like that is actually good to go and set here. Boom. Okay, perfect. Yep. So now we can run this and we can test it out. So let's see, we didn't set up the database just yet. So this might not work right away. But if this doesn't work right away. We can run through setting up the database as well. But I'm going to, let's see here, I'm going to run this. NPM run dev. Let's see. Oh, we got to run NPM install. Okay. NPM install. So this is going to install all the dependencies, all the tech, all that. So it's good

to go. And then we'll be able to run the app after this. All right. So we'll do a little bit of debugging here. we're getting errors trying to install the dependencies. I'm going to go in. I'm going to go to Codex. I'm getting errors when running NPM install. Here they are. Let's make sure we run this locally. Yep, running it locally.

I'm going to hit send. And it'll go through and he'll figure out the errors and fix whatever needs to be fixed here. I'm happy that there's errors, to be honest, because it happens, right? It's a part of the process. It looks like, Yeah, it looks like it had the wrong version of SuperBase in the dependency.

So it was trying to install a version of SuperBase that doesn't exist, which is an issue. So let's try that again. Still having errors with SuperBase, let's do this. Let's just say for the sake of this seems to still have issues with SuperBase. For this MVP, let's just save. Data locally. I'm going to hit send. So we can get a working version first,

and then we'll implement SuperBase right after, so we can get that working off the rip. So that's going to kind of remove that dependency that's giving us fits here. So we can see kind of the MVP version here that we can test. But again, unlike other apps, what we can do with codecs is we can have many different strands of work going on at the same time.

So we still have our roadmap going here. So we have the roadmap. Let's check in on that. So here's our roadmap. Vision, deliver a delightful adaptive habit tracker that keeps people consistent in wellness routines. So guiding initiatives, product alignment. Phase one, the core MVP experience, which we're working on.

Improved habit here is via smart nudges. Let's see, phase three, expansion and monetization experiments. So it really builds us out step by step what we're going to be building out with our product manager agent here. which really cool. You can always make sure you're being productive. We can go back to our local agent who is fixing our dependencies here.

What are you using at the moment to kind of vibe code? Are you using Claude or what have you been playing with? Yeah, I mean, I've been in a Claude code phase for maybe, what has it been, three months? Mm-hmm. But have been seeing, it's kind of one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on, Like have been seeing some of the Codex stuff, and I'm starting to get tempted to, you know, to go deeper into it.

It's worth playing around with to see how it fits into your workflow, right? Because it works a little different. I find in some ways Codex isn't as proactive, right? It seems like Claude always does a little bit extra of what you ask, which some people annoy them, some people they love. Codex is almost the opposite where you have to nudge it along sometimes to do things. So it's worth playing around with to see if it's compatible, right? Like the same way you to interview employees to see if they work well in your company.

It's like interviewing the AI agent. Yeah, you also get to know who they are and how they work. And you can kind of, what might be good for you might not be good for someone else. Exactly, exactly. You know, there's people who live and die by cursor. right and they all work in different ways and have different features and functionality. For me, I'm having a lot of productivity, almost like 6040 codex to ClaudeCode where, you know, I have the workflow I'm showing you here.

And then if it gets stuck, I'll have ClaudeCode code kind of be the surgical going and fix that micro issue. That's been working well for me. So I'm going to try installing this again. we change this around. Boom. Okay. So we added the packages. Looks like it installed. Let me see if I can do NPM run dev and get this working. Looks like it's working. Okay. Let's test this out. All right. I am going to switch over. Habit flow. Build sustainable routines with energy aware planning. Adaptive wellness routines without the rigidity. Habit flow calibrates your day every morning. Set up your focus. Pick your start habits and let the app shape a plan that responds to how you feel. completions watch streaks grow and help the momentum with gentle data-driven nudges. Okay, let's see what, see if we got, oh, wow. So we have an entire onboarding flow.

And again, like, first of all, this is awesome, right? Like we have like, obviously this isn't the full app, but this is a pretty cool MVP where we have like the intro, the onboarding experience, a whole lot of other cool things in here. And this really, you get these types of awesome results. when you do things like build out a PRD ahead of time, right? When you develop your idea. And it takes a little bit of extra time to do, right, to go into idea browser, find a really good idea, develop it with AI.

But you're going to save time in the long run because you're going to be a lot more focused and get better results from your agents because you have that in-depth PRD built out. So let's play around with this a little bit and see what we want to add, what we want to tinker with. and I can kind of show you how I use codex to tinker with different things and add on new features and things like that. So it's personalized habit flow. Alex check-in preference morning check-in. For me, focus is the issue.

You get so many different AI tools out there. I can never focus on one thing at a time. I'm sure you got that same issue. Starter habits, 10-minute mobility flow, two-minute breath, I could use that. I'm pretty good at that. Let's get rid of that. Let's do, I could do more deep work sprints.

habits. I want to meditate more. Everyone talks about meditation. I want to meditate more. Let's do that. Let's add that to the list. Ooh, okay. So it saves the habits we want to do. And then we can save and continue. Please add your name. I got to add my name in here. Alex. Save. You can hop in today to generate your first adaptive plan. Okay. So let's go to today. Let's see how that works. Today's pacing. Tune your energy, then work through the tailored plan. How's your energy? I had a lot. of coffee today. So we're going to do five. All right, we got an error. We'll do some debugging in a second. Plan mode. So it gives us, okay, it gives us some, some, uh, to-dos for wellness techniques we can do. And then routine logic primary, rank habits. Okay. So this is pretty cool. We give it our goals.

And it gives us a bunch of to-do items, uh, to stay well. I like that a lot. Let's do a little debugging. Let's see what this error is. Set log is not defined. So, well, of people, they have really complex workflows when it comes to debugging and errors. They have MCPs that has Codex or Cloud Code watch your log and like screenshot

your browser and this and that. They have all these. At the end of the day they're probably usually trying to sell you something to get you to do these really complex workflows for no reason. Here's my really complex workflow for debugging. I highlight the error.

I do command C and then I go into my ID and I hit command V. And then I hit enter. I don't find any need to set up MCPs for this. I don't need to do any sort of advanced workflows. Please solve this error. And then I hit enter. This seems to work best for me.

I don't need to have codex connected to my browser or anything like that. I just copy and paste errors. and it seems to fix it pretty well. And it looks like it's fixing the error. And at the same time, while it fixes the error, again, you probably want to get into that codex mindset of, okay, how can I be productive while my agents work? I'll spin up a new chat.

I'll make sure I'm in the cloud. And I can say set up an AI chat interface where I can chat with a wellness. expert AI and get advice. So I thought of another feature to build out while this works. I'm going to give it to our cloud agent. And what I'll show you towards the end of this is how we can start pulling down these changes and implementing it into our app as we go. And so the key here, especially when you're using a really awesome tool like Codex, is productivity, focus. And because we have these cloud agents, we can always make sure we have things cooking, things baking in the back end,

and have new features pumping out as we go. So let's see here. Let's go into, let's see, did we have this here? Let's go. The only downside is sometimes you get tripped up and you forget which agents are working on what. Here we go.

Looks like it fixed the error. Let's go back in, make sure we're not getting an error on the screen anymore. Is this like kind of percolating ideas for you, Greg, around Codex and things you can do with it? Yeah, totally. I also think, first of all, I agree with the whole MCP complicated workflow to the errors. So I've tried using some of those tools and it's, oh man, it's like, it just feels like

I'm overengineering things. So I'm happy you said that. So that was actually what I was thinking about. The second thing is I was thinking about this app. And, you know, one of the beauties about building an app, instead of just like sketching it, you know, on a notepad, is it got me thinking that this in a mobile setting would actually probably rip. You know, not that we're going to build an iOS app today,

but, you know, maybe if people want in the future, we can. Follow up iOS focus on where we show you how to build an iOS app. I like that. Yeah. No, but I think that's how I would think about it. And then what I do is I would probably write. out that idea and be like, hey, here's what I've built out. You know, this is, here's, you know, here's my vision for an iOS app.

And I would use idea browsers AI agent to basically scan, you know, scan social sentiment, give data around, you know, is this a good idea and how would it implement it? So that's something that always exists. That is a pro feature. But, you know, that is, that's something. I, it's like you have to build it to get those ideas. You know what I mean? So this is the, this is the, the researcher ideas agent, right?

I mean, I think that's really good because, again, this is the mindset you need to be building when you start becoming an AI builder is, you know, how do I get maximum efficiency? How do I get maximum productivity? Well, this is another employee we can spin up, right? So while our Codex agents are building out roadmaps, marketing plans, debugging, fixing our next feature, let's get an agent going in idea browser that's going to now take our PRD. We can go in here. Below is a PRD for my wellness app. Please research how this would do on mobile or how we can improve this idea. And I paste that in. And I can hit send here.

And now, right, this is the kind of AI agent employee mindset. I have my three to four employees working for me in Codex. I now have my employee working for me an idea browser to research this idea and expand upon it. You know, maybe now I go back into chat GPT and I spin up, you know, I give another task, hey, can you build out the landing page for the app, right? I can go in here. hey please mock up for me a landing page in all the copy for it for this app. I hit send on that.

And now, you know, this is how you build a one person billion dollar business. It's one person, but it's eight employees working for you at the exact same time. Our Chad GPT agent, our idea browser agent, developing our ideas for us. and then our codex agents, writing PRDs, writing code, and building out our roadmap for our app. This is like the mindset you need to have to build a successful one-person business. So this is really cool.

You can edit your research brief, generate the research report. This is really cool. Okay, so it gets the challenges, the motes, the observations. This is cool. So if you click generate report, so it's generating now.

But if you'll see, if you scroll down, you'll see an example of a report. It basically is the idea browser format, but for your idea, which is really cool. And if you scroll up and you see at the top right, there's a build this idea. This is a new feature that basically gives you optimized prompts

for your idea and for the database of ideas, you know, for marketing, email sequences, ads, all that sort of stuff. And then you can just copy the prompts and put it in V0, cursor, cloud, whatever. You know, it would be really cool. What? Using the V0 API. And like when they generate this report, it automatically builds like just the V1, like kind of the shell of the page to kind of give that visual inspiration.

Like right in the, right in the report, boom, you have your V1 copy this code of V0. Totally. That'd be sick. That'd be really sick. It's an idea. This is sick. Ready to build, choose your copy your prompt paste into any of these builders. And oh, and this is the prompt.

Yeah, that's the prompt. That's sick. And if you see on the left hand side like marketing product, you can see what you can actually build. Wow, that is amazing. Sales funnel. Lead mat. What would the email sequence look like that we build here? This is where I stink.

I have 40,000 people on my email newsletter, but like I just, I don't understand the email funnel thing. Like I'm like a dog chasing a car. I want to know what to do with it. You know, it's like this would, this would be helpful. This is cool. Nice. All right, cool.

And what happens? What happens when I click the tool? Oh, it just takes me to the, all right. Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah, this is awesome. Yep.

All right. So we can now see, we have our seven different employees working for us. Let's switch back. And like, I love Claude Code. Don't get me wrong. I love curse. but like this isn't possible with any other tool at the moment. This is like a really big advantage.

I'm going to switch back to Codex. Let's do this. Let's see what we got here. Okay, so it fixed the error and then let's see what else we got. Set up the AI chat. How's our agent doing here? Okay, it's still working. Oh, let's apply.

Apply results. Skip, close. Okay, did this put in our, let's see if this actually put in the chatbot and see if that's ready to go. So I'm going to switch back to our app. Let's see what we got here. Habitflow. I'm going to refresh progress.

We probably have to ask it to build it into our menu here, the AI chatbot. But we can do that. Let's go back in. We can do anything. Anything we want. Anything we want. Unlimited ideas.

As long as you got AI agents working for you to come up with the ideas, you got unlimited ideas. And like this is, what you can see here is like we went from so far, we're like 40 minutes in, we went from literally zero idea to a fully working product in what would probably take people weeks to do, right? You know, studying ideas, validating ideas. Then you get an engineer to build out the kind of V1. They have to put it live.

Then you develop other ideas and you have other people come up with roadmaps and marketing. We got all that done in like half an hour, which is pretty incredible. let's make sure we add the chat section to the top menu bar. And it's on that. And our cloud agent will go do that. And then we can do things like just to show the power of what we got today with agents. I'm going to go into Codex on my browser. So say we're on the go.

Maybe we're working from a coffee shop or something or we're on a library computer. People are still going to libraries. And we can log in to chat gbt.com slash codex because we don't have the ID on a computer. We can just go into the browser, go into codex. We can make sure we are in our wellness app. And we can say, build out the email marketing sequence for this app. And now I'm spinning up agents from the browser while I was spinning up agents from the IDE and also doing it from my mobile phone.

And like, this is like the really cool way to. think about AI development now. So kind of as you've seen so far, we have a bunch of different AI agents working for us. We have an MVP good to go that people can start testing out now. Now the number one question I get other than how do I come up with ideas is how do I get people to start using the app? Well, the best way to do this is the freeway, which is just organic marketing. So if I go into Twitter, which for me is like, I think the quickest way to just get people on to the app, you know, you get engagement in literally seconds. I'm going to pull open Twitter or X if Elon's watching.

Please don't shadow ban me. And I'm going to go post and I'm going to say, been super obsessed with wellness lately, but can't think of any habits to implement. anyone else have this challenge thinking of building an app around this, right? I'd send this out. This is literally how I launched Creator Buddy, my social media app. I was like, I wish I had an AI that knew all my tweets. And so I went into a tweet. I said, wish I had an AI that knew all my tweets. But anyone used like an AI

assistant that's aware of all your tweets and can coach you, I hit send. It went like super viral. 200,000 impressions. And like, that's how I kicked off my beta. So I would post this. I would then DM anyone who replies, yeah, I'm interested. And I'd say, hey, do you want to beta test this? And I would send them the link to the app we just built.

And like, this is how you start getting users and build kind of like your base for your app is. You use organic marketing with Twitter. You leverage your community. You reach out to them. You do the kind of unscalable, which is DMing a whole bunch of people. saying here's the app, do you want to test it out? And like, that's how you get your beta testers. And that's how you start building the scale, which will eventually be a popular app. Like, this is how you start getting those users, is just start talking about your app on social

media. Alex, what do you say to people who are like, well, easy for you to say, you've got thousands of followers. I've got 500 followers. Well, my question is this. How do you think I got thousands of followers? by tweeting, right? Like I wasn't born and then God handed me 300,000 followers. I've been on Twitter for like two years now. I started tweeting. People liked what I tweeted. People were interested in the projects I was building. Then I got to that level. So how do you think I got 300,000 followers doing exactly what I'm showing you here, which is coming up with interesting ideas and then tweeting them out. So even if you have 100 followers, tweet out your ideas,

you'll still get a couple hits. You'll still get a couple people to use. your app and like this is how you'll get to that level where you have 300,000 followers. Like yes, is it easier for me to launch apps because I have a huge audience? Yes. But also how do you think you got a huge audience by doing this what I'm showing you here? So like you have to start from somewhere. You might as well do it instead of complaining. So you put it out. You get a couple bites like you're like fishing in the water. You send them the link to the beta. Now you got people using it. Right. And so we went from in the span of this has been recording for 52 minutes now, right? We went from ideas in idea browser. We had no idea what we wanted

to do. We went in an idea browser. We looked at some market insights. We looked at some trends. We looked at like, okay, what am I interested in here? Websites, save energy solar, vomiting dog treatment. I'm going to get a dog soon. This will probably be something I'm interested in once I do that, right? You found an idea that's interesting to you. You went to Chad GPT. You developed that idea. You went back and forth, bounced ideas off Chad GBT, came up with a well-developed PRD. We went from there. We went into our building agent, right? We went into Codex, which I'm loving right now.

We spun up a bunch of AI employees to develop the idea for us to build the code, to start building out a marketing plan, a product plan, a roadmap. We have all those people working for us at once. And while our employees work for us and the app gets built out, I'm now going on. on to X and I'm finding my first beta testers. And that's how you as a one person business can have the same power, the same leverage as a massive company and start getting your first users and first paying customers. So it's pretty powerful. You just got to learn where you can find that leverage like with Idea Browser and Codex and chat GPT. Alex, thank you for your sauce and your

generosity for coming on. Highly recommend people go and follow him. I'll include links for his ex, his newsletter, and creator buddy, all in the show notes. So people can go check that out. Anything you want to leave folks with, Alex? Check out the YouTube as well. All I do is post tutorials, how to build cool things as I go. And, you know, this is what I would leave people with. 99% of people woke up today, pick up their phone, doom scrolled for 15 hours, and then they're going to go to bed, right? If you just spend it. even five minutes today, experimenting, searching for ideas, developing ideas here and there. You do that over the span of a week, a month, two months. You're going to be so far ahead of

the competition. It's going to be unbelievable. So just find a little bit of time every day to do one of the two things we went through on this video. And over time as that compounds, you're going to have incredible products. You're going to have paying customers. You're going to have something you're going to have a lot more than what you have now so just find a few minutes to do what we did today i promise cool things will happen and send this to a friend because it's more fun to build with friends you know you'll be more you'll be held more accountable um so i don't know about you alec but like when i when i do you know if i'm doing something like this like i want to do it with like the homies and i want to like build something together so i think it's a lot more fun with friends

personally. I absolutely hold each other accountable. You don't want to be the one that shows up in the group chat and they're like, what did you do today? And you're like, oh, I just do them scroll all day. So a lot of benefits to that as well. Thanks a lot, man. I'll catch you later. Of course, my man. See you soon.