This Week in Startups - Using AI to revolutionize video game development with Scenario CEO Emmanuel de Maistre | E1741

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Emmanuel de Maistre joins Jason to demo Scenario’s AI-powered game asset generator (3:54) before breaking down future applications of Scenario’s technology. Then, Presh gives a presentation on how to build no-code apps (26:41). (0:00) Emmanuel de Maistre joins Jason  (1:29) The cost of developing video games (3:54) Emmanuel demos Scenario  (11:29) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (12:45) Emmanuel demos Scenario continued, and the cost and use cases for this technology (22:49) House of Macadamias - Get 20% off and a free bottle of cold-pressed macadamia oil at https://houseofmacadamias.com/twist by using code TWIST20 (24:20) Addressing artist’s concerns  (26:41) Other applications for Scenario’s technology  (29:08) Emmanuel’s prior ventures  (31:23) Regulating AI  (36:50) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at http://crowdbotics.com/twist (37:59) How to build No-Code apps FOLLOW Emmanuel: https://twitter.com/emmanuel_2m FOLLOW Presh: https://twitter.com/preshdkumar FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1 FOUNDERS! Subscribe to the Founder University podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/founder-university/id1648407190

The feedback I'm getting from the users themselves is they find this technology is just augmenting them. It's augmenting their creativity. It's making them go faster, further away. So they love it. And if you are, you know, have you seen that research saying if you are, the smarter you are, the better result you get out of chat GPT? I think the same applies for images. The more creative you are, then you're going to get an even higher level of creativity. And yes, you can pretend being an artist even though you're not one.

you're not trained as a game artist. You can pretend being one with this, or you can approach being one with this, but if you're a good game artist, you're going to be an even better game artist with AI. This weekend startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business.

Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. House of Macadamias is the next big health trend. Get 20% off your first purchase and a free bottle of cold press macadamia oil at Houseofmacadamias.com slash twist by using code Twist 20 and crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world and crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist.

All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I've never been more excited about a technology, at least since the internet and the PC than I am with artificial intelligence and the pace at which it's evolving. And here at this weekend startups, we are all over this trend. You can join our substack. You can subscribe to the podcast. Go to the YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash this weekend.

And you're going to see a constant stream every week. You're going to see five or ten of these amazing demos of what is being done. built in the AI space. Scenario is the startup today. They're using generative AI to create and produce creative assets for the video game industry. And the CEO and co-founder is Emmanuel de Mastray. Welcome to the show, Emmanuel. Hey, Jason.

Thanks. Glad to be here. All right. So we know the video game industry. We know the assets take a long time and are very expensive to produce. tier one, or they call them tier one games or title one games. Those are the ones that cost.

What do they call them? Triple A. Triple A. So AAA games, those are hundreds of millions of dollars. That's call of duty. And then you have apps on your phone that might cost a million dollars to make or five million dollars to make. What are those Clash of Clan Angry Birds games tend to cost? Do you know what those costs?

Could be from like a few hundred K to dozens of millions, actually, if you look at even like Angry Birds and so on, your phone is pretty expensive. And it's not just the cost. It takes a while and it's risky. And those are double A games,

or what do they call those? Double A games are typically PC games, console games, but not like Call of Duty level. God. Then mobile is a category apart, and then you have all the new Web3 games wave. Ah, yeah. So at a minimum,

hundreds of thousands of dollars, on average millions of dollars and sometimes even tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars and a big part of that is creating these creative assets there are thousands of designers working on some of these games I understand or at least hundreds of them working on a single title

is that correct? Designers, game designers, product designers, art directors, technical directors, technical artists it's a whole crew, it's a, yeah, it's big. It's big, okay, and so you're going to use generative AI, which is to generate images through typically text prompts, I'm guessing, but you tell me, and let's just do a demo here. I know you have an incredible demo, so let's

see it. I definitely can switch to a demo. Let's show my screen right now. Yeah, always great show, don't tell. Okay, so here we go. I see you're in an editor of some kind. I'm on the web. It's a web browser. It's Chrome. And the website is app.com. Pretty easy. what you see here is my my homepage with some of the images I was making just before the before the show. Oh great.

Definitely like gaming related. I'm like trying to iterate around some concept around a treasure chest that I'm trying to produce and look how consistent these images are in shapes and proportions

and only the color is being changed. And we are not in Photoshop at all. I'm prompting the color. I'm prompting the shape and I'm prompting the proportions of the... So show us how that works.

Yeah. So you're showing like what I think they call in the industry a loot box or a treasure test. You might find this treasure chest in a game. How did you prompt it? What did you type in to get that unique looking treasure test? I was, I'm going to show you. But before we do so, please, please understand. These treasure chest came from what we call a generator,

which is a custom trained AI model with people's data. So instead of using a very horizontal model such as mid-jurney, stable fusion, we do let people make their own custom model with their data. And that's what they love. Because when, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, so if I'm Call of Duty and I'm on the fifth or sixth Call of Duty in the series where I'm Angry Birds making or Plants versus Zombies, I could upload all the artwork in every previous iteration of the game and be starting on third base.

You could upload all of it, or you could pick the certain portion of the games that you want to train a model on. which has characters, backgrounds, vehicles, and so on. So in that case, we have tests. You know what I can do before going into the chest one? I can show you another, even more relevant generator, which is something custom we've made for a demo, which is called Bubbleverse.

So the Bubbleverse is a potential game made with that art. So look at the rendering, the colors. We're looking at a bunch of beautiful 3D rendered, you know, looks almost like, I forgot the name of that, famous director, Wes Anderson. These are Wes Anderson, beautiful colors, slightly Japanese-inspired, perhaps, beautiful 3D models of bubbly type characters

and cars and vehicles and trees and homes and everything. So you only needed 25 images to upload into here to generate this. These might have been done by a human who made a collection of 25 bubbly images. Absolutely. And now let's start prompting. Let's start creating from the same style. And so Jason, give me an idea of a,

let's say a vehicle or let's say maybe a Batman or character. Oh, let's do hamburger. So let's do hamburger. Yeah, hamburger. Well, that's very easy. So you see I just typed hamburger on the left. And now it generates. We're going to wait probably between 10 to 20 seconds for the images to generate.

It's GPU-based, cloud-based. But why do we do so? What should the hamburger look? like it's pretty basic right? Do you have like any specific feature? Let's make the hamburger be on a bed of flowers and make it

the color green. Cool. So here is a green hamburger on a bed of flowers. I'm just prompting. Yep. Generates. It's crazy. But before, yeah,

Before we wait for your green hamburger to show up, let's look at your first session, your first patch. So that's the first one, second one, third one. Hey, people,

oh, by the way, this is like a character mixed with a hamburger, which happens sometimes. And for people who are listening, for people who are listening, what you're seeing is instantly something that I would say is game ready.

Just in my professional opinion, if I was playing a casual game, and it threw up a hamburger, any of these hamburgers would be acceptable to me as a legitimate item and it was created for free. For now. And look at the style of the hamburger is definitely, it's not photorealistic. It is not voxelized.

It is in the style of the person, the generator. And so I did not need to go into describing all the visual feature. Have you seen prompt engineering? Like people go to like 50 words and it's super complex. Yes. In that case. say, do this in a Wes Anderson style with a color palette that includes these colors that is, uh, you know, uh, got depth and shadows or whatever. And then we did green hamburger and here

are the green hamburgers. And they subtly made the bun green and they put some lettuce around it and all kinds of fun options that it just decided to make. Yeah. And so in your case, we do have your green hamburger. We do not have the bed of flowers though, which, which again, could be expected. So again, on the left side of the screen for those who are

on the audio, we have a bunch of settings and parameters to play with such as guidance. And if I increase the guidance a bit and run another

generation, it should emphasize, it should increase the weight of the prompt. And so it's all about giving artists, mostly artists, game artist,

giving artists the right tools, the right lovers so they can control the AI and stop randomly prompting forever and ever on Discord and some platforms. The game studio we work with,

they want to get their image in the least amount of time. They want it to be very efficient. Production has to be efficient. And so that's what scenario is about. Like stop exploring AI forever, train your own model that will drive consistency and then play with the settings until you nail your designs and so on.

And what's great about this is you're really augmenting an artist's work. So instead of an artist having to tediously make, let's call it, 500 objects for this game, this bubble game, and then every week updated with, let's say they come up with 10 new characters, devices, or 50. That would be 50 times 50 weeks, 2,500 more. So you'd have 3,000 objects in this game. you can have an artist just make 25 test images and then somebody else, a game designer,

can just, with their judgment, do everything from there. So you really just need somebody to start you out with a design style and then you're home free from there, correct? Correct, correct. And out of the 40,000 users that we have so far on the platform, the champions are artist, game artist.

And if you remember, the controversy around artists and AI, I found that very interesting that actually the biggest champion for that type of technology end up being the artists themselves. All right, founders, if you're a SaaS or services company

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that's a big one. You got to get your GDPR in order because they take it pretty seriously over there. So here's the best part. Vanta wants to give you a thousand. All right, that's 10 hundies. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com.com slash twist. That's vanda.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock too. Are any of your 40,000 users using this in production yet? And if they are using it in production, what is the distance between, what has to happen between you making this bubbly green hamburger on a bed of lettuce and it getting into the game?

How much more artistic work has to occur? So they definitely use it in production today. Not only they use it in production to make the game assets, but some games have this part of the game. where the creator of the object is not just the artist, it's the player. The player gets to in-game generates whatever reward, weapons, skins, buildings, I mean, depending on the, of course, the theme of the game. And that's you, it's AI-powered UGC.

Amazing. So if you were to clear out all these prompts we did and we just said, do a zombie teenager wearing a phone. football jersey. This could be, if I was playing a zombie game, I could say, okay, well, I'm a football player and I'm a teenager. I'd like to make my own character, and it would make a bubbly designed zombie teenager with a football jersey. I'm doing it right now.

So I first made a batch of your prompt, which was zombie teenager wearing a football jersey. And because I know a bit about it, I prompted 3D rendered full body, and then I'm going to do apocalyptic just to give some more you know, color and I'm going to have like maybe blood and then run another

yeah, we're not. So the language model knows what a zombie is, it knows what a teenager is, it has some conception of these things from the real world, it matches it with the style, but even beyond a designer

doing this, the game could, a game player could decide to add some characters or make a level themselves or I suppose you could have a random generator that just looks at

just looks at common objects in the world and just makes random objects and if people engage with them it could make more of them. So you could actually have a game where it just randomly types in zombie hamburger football jersey

and you get whatever out of it and this could create infinite universes with infinite characters. Yes. So here's the zombie coming for those who are listening what we see is blurry pictures at the beginning, very noisy pictures.

That's what diffusion is about. You add noise and you remove noise. That's where diffusion comes from in stable fusion, typically. So definitely very consistent zombies coming up with a jersey. With a number on it. So let's pick one of them, Jason,

which one would you like? 18. Number 18 looks right. Yeah, number 18 looks right. 18. we're going to do variance around 18 the only issue in that case maybe let's pick the next one

because we, yes, so let's do this one here because we love it. I just do refine and now I'm going to not only prompt the same phrase but I'm going to iterate around that image and I'm going to do image to image and variance will be created around the same shape or proportions

and I'm not going to go into like the tiny details but something super cool just came out which is composition control that lets you play again with the sort of input you want from that image. And we're going to have the results in a few minutes or in a few seconds, actually. How much CPU and cloud is this taking? We know these are resource intensive. So as you're doing this, you seem to be creating four images at a time. These are really good-looking images. So how much CPU is this using?

Could I be doing this on my local MacBook or is it using 10 MacBooks in the cloud? No, it's a AWS-based infrastructure. It's pretty, pretty GPU and server-intensive. I think we've spent more than 250K just in GPUs, just for the beta, just in a few months. Your company has bought $250,000 in these GPUs dedicated on servers. So you have that as a fixed cost, and there's a certain number of images that could create at a certain standard.

If you would divide those number of images into that cost, Does it wind up being a dollar per image, 10 cents per image, a penny per image, or a fraction of a penny per image? It's more of a penny to a fraction of a penny, though, depending on the settings, you might end up with images that are pretty expensive. If you go into more steps and more, you know, advanced parameters and higher resolution images, you can go into, you know, maybe up to like a fraction of a dollar per image.

Oh, wow, you could be spending 10 cents or 25 cents an image. This is an extraordinary thing because we've lived in such a, a deflationary Moore's law. We didn't know what we would do with all these CPUs. We thought CPUs and GPUs and storage was getting so plentiful that we had no use for it because, hey, people can't even, you know, tell 4K from 1080P from 480P,

like if I showed the average user, they probably wouldn't know the difference. Whereas here, because we're doing generative AI and it has to do so much GPU work, this is actually using a lot of the GPUs in the world and it's going to be constrained for some time? Or is this something you think software is going to become more refined

and we're going to just have these costs plummet 90% a year? So cost will plummet, maybe not 90% a year right now. Definitely they will plummet. We have seen some demos of stabilization running on a phone. Maybe not the type of advanced calculations we do, but someday, yes, diffusion models will run on phones, whether it's for text, like GPT,

you know, like models or whether it's for images. And one day, because it's not quite there yet, full like 3D models, it's coming. Especially when you make 3D models right from the image you just generated. In that case, we have the initial zombie with the jersey, and then I made a few variants without even touching the prompt.

And from these variants, it's reasonable to think 3D models will be made just in a click. And that's extremely deflationary, as you just said. And you could take random prompts where you could ask, you could train chat GPT4 or just a language model. You could say, go look at, I don't know, Reddit or Twitter, find different characters or find inspiration from these locations. It could be a newspaper, it could be YouTube videos, let's assume you have permission. You could say, look at the top trending characters or people or scenarios.

on this website. It could be an open source one. It could be like 500 pixels, right? You say go on 500 pixels and just start making me images or characters and just start building up crazy amounts of libraries. It's extraordinary where we're at right now

in terms of building stuff. And develop localized versions of games, develop seasons per, you know, holidays, Halloween, Christmas, news, memes, you know, like this could be highly personalized. Anything that goes into the prompt box could be, you know, plugged into other pipelines. So this will drop the cost of making,

this drops the cost of making a season of, let's say they're doing the Christmas season, the holiday season of plants versus zombies. What did you guess a game like that would spend on that refresh in terms of time and money that, and then how much would you reduce it by? I got the first numbers from the first customers we have. feedback is

processes are 10x faster on average so they work 10x faster and for a you know small studio of 20 people which is rather small

it's not Riot or Blizzard but for a small studio they would typically save at least 200k a year using scenario just on concept arts not even in-game assets just concepting

will save them 200k a year then you then go in-game assets and then come marketing assets, which is a big part of the game industry as well. How to automate the marketing. Got it. So they like to make YouTube ads, TikTok ads, Twitter ads, whatever.

All of those ads falls on the creatives. Now they could be making them without having creatives, having to anoint every single one. So this is going to knock 20%, 30% off the cost of running one of these studios this year, you think? It's probably right, yes. Mason. Probably right, yes.

Yeah, yeah. Which means they could either save that money or they could do 30% more work and delight their customers 30% more, which is probably what they'll do. This is extraordinary. Where will you be in one year? We go to other media beyond 2D.

We are expanding into 3D, making these not just 2D images, but 3D models. We integrate, as we are doing it right now, into the game engines, which is a good, good go-to market for us. because that's where most of the game developers are. They're on Unity, they're on Unreal.

They might want to do just this on Unity and Unreal. Obviously, we improve everything around asset management, collaboration, bring the whole studio together. And there's a lot to do on the roadmap. Better trainings, by the way, better AI models. Train faster, more efficiently. So the fidelity will go way up. You'll be able to do 3D models,

which means like a Fortnite character, could be made in here, maybe, and then actually just dropped into the game. And so that's going to save an massive amount of money in time. If you love snacking like I do, you got to find the perfect snack. It's not easy. You want one that's going to remove cravings that fit your dietary goals, regulates your blood glucose levels, and it got to be something you look forward to eating. And you know what?

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Use the code twist 20. Get 20% off. And for a limited time, they're giving a free bottle of premium cold pressed extra virgin macadamia oil with any purchase. Go to House of Macadamacadamias.com slash twist and use the code Twist 20. House ofacadamacadamias.com slash twist and use that code Twist 20 so they know JCal sent you. There was one artist on Reddit. We read it on All In previously and on this weekend startups. This artist was lamenting how, you know, like this is taking a little bit of the art out of the game. And he was kind of depressed that somebody who was an average artist could now do his work.

And now you have the ability for a prompt to do the work and eliminate their need to do the next 500 images. So they just have to do the 25. What's your response to those people who maybe are bummed out about this technology? The feedback I'm getting from the users themselves is they find this technology is just augmenting them. It's augmenting their creativity. it's making them go faster further away. So they love it. And if you are, you know,

have you seen that research saying if you are, the smarter you are, the better result you get out of chat GPT? I think the same applies for images. The more creative you are, then you're going to get an even higher level of creativity. And yes, you can pretend being an artist,

even though you're not trained as a game artist. You can pretend being one with this or you can approach being one with this. But if you're a good game artist, you're going to be an even better game. game artist with AI. And it's not just push a button, you know, it's like fronting,

but like selecting the right models, the right training parameters, the right, everything takes a while. It's a new art. It's just a new Photoshop. And it will take years until people go to the end of this technology.

We had architects who were very upset about CAD drawings and people using computers instead of using pencils and rulers and drafting desks. And, you know, the fact is, we're able to design, you know, more beautiful homes, more unique homes, more unique spaces with CAD and share them around the world. How many people in your company to get to this point?

How many developers did it take to get here and how much time? We have 25, but we started as a team of six back in October, went pretty fast to put the beta out in December. and that's when we started growing after we got some the first seed money in December growing from 6 to 25 in just three months basically mostly engineers so far got it any other applications for this we hear a lot about hey video games

and Disney Plus and the Mandalorian and the real engine and things are kind of converging do you see this at some point taking over and doing South Park episodes or you know you know, Clone Wars episodes, bad batch episodes, you could start to create characters

and then place them into what would eventually become TV shows because you're doing backgrounds, you're doing art. It doesn't take much to have people move around the backgrounds. It doesn't take much to add dialogue. And if you can make the characters, well, certainly you can make voices

and there's other people who can do voices. So I'm curious, where do you, is there a new place to go with this? Right now you're helping game studios, but this feels like a new art form could emerge from your tool itself. We have some edge cases being used right now

by a few other users. Definitely movie, even though some other companies are much better are doing movies with DNA such as Runway, such as Wonder Studio. It's a slightly different

sort of feature sets to develop. But like marketing, you know, all kinds of like any industry that needs some images will be based on Gen. is going

to be based on Gen. I significantly. How do you charge for all this? We charge a subscription

per accounts which goes from 1K to 40K a year depending on the size of the studio members

quotas, images. And we go into some enterprise custom pricing as well. In addition

to the SaaS model, we have an API-based model where people just pay per API call,

you know, depending on how much they use the API. Yeah. We just, we just started this week to monetize actually.

Oh, really? So do you have a sales team doing it? Or you just took these 40,000 people who were using the free product and just said, hey, you hit the upper limit, consumption-based, you need to sign in and pay, put a credit card in? We do, we have a small sales team for the tier one, tier two customers, like game studio of a certain size, plus myself, one in Europe, one in the US. And we do have a customer success team as well. It's not just about, you know, signing. It's making sure they're doing a good job.

and they're adopting it at scale. But it's, yeah, it's going well. I'm super, super bullish. I've made a first company before, which I sold was good, but this one is going to be, you know, a hundred legs bigger. What was the,

previously you were in LIDAR, if I understand from my notes here. It was aerial capture with drones, LIDAR and photogrametry. Oh, so you were sending drones up with Lider on it to do what? All kinds of inspections, you know, mapping of buildings

and infrastructure construction sites and so on. We were not flying the drones. We were doing the software to process 2D and 3D imagery at scale with AI in the cloud. So it's kind of a natural evolution, but instead of like scanning,

we prompt. And that was a niche market, right? Like sending those drones up to do construction sites? It wasn't supposed to be niche when we started according to, you know, BCG and McKinsey and so on, but the drone market didn't end up being that big.

What do you, why do you think the drone market didn't become that big, didn't provide enough value to users? Oh, value was enormous. It's more like regulation, and it's not that easy to fly a drone anywhere, any time, you know, with the right material resolution and so on. So the pilot limitation and the regulations killed it. Yeah, you can only wait, you can only carry so much in a drone.

You're never going to see, you know, 500 pounds drones flying tomorrow to capture you your next construction site. And let alone, let alone the transportation drones. You know, it's, it's an amazing technology, but physics is physics, regulations or regulations, and things in the air, when they fall from the air, can do damage. And I think that is, I think one of the lessons people learned was the utility of drones is based on weight, and the utility is based on being in cities or populated areas in some cases like delivery and that's challenging because people do have the regulator seem to be very

cautious in the in the drone space and here you don't have to deal with regulators you just have to deal with software and how much you can delay customers for now for now for now what do you think regulation AI can me I think if you I think it's there you're good well I was going to say um if you if there was a place to start thinking about regulation. Where would you, as somebody who's an insider, start to think about regulation? At what point in the stack,

at one point in the code, the hardware, the application, the geography, where would you even start with regulation? I think it starts with the training data. How did you get it? Where did you get it from? How did you select,

you curate the training data? That is the debate today around around chat GPT and what data has been used and how, you know, how do they control what comes out and what gets, you know, eliminated or just like what gets out and what gets blocked.

The same will go for images. Stable Fusion was trained on a very wide array of 5 billion images scrapped on the internet. People loved it, but a lot of legal teams find challenges around like, do we have the right to generate commercial images. The answer is

clearly no. You cannot take Gettys images and make derivative works from it, especially if that infringes upon their ability to do the same business. At least here in the United States, that's how the law works. It's clear as day. There'll be tons of settlements.

Which is why people use their own models and which is why Adobe released Firefly, which is ethically trained on images they have the rights to use. And I believe in a few months, every single you know, Genii Image generator will be trained on data that people will have the right to use at some, in some, you know, at some point.

There's plenty of open source data out there. And if you wanted to train on Gettys, you should just ask them and pay them a fee. And they might charge you a million dollars or they might charge you, you know, there might be a photographer out there or a group of photographers who own these who just say, yeah, you can train your image generator for $1 per photo.

And if you need a million images, great, that's a million dollars per year. There's some reasonable amount of money to be charged. So it could be a great income stream in the way streaming is for musicians. And income stream could be renting or leasing your generator. Instead of selling the final image such as the final picture, the final photograph, just rent the use of your model as an artist.

And it's like a much more like a much passive income that could be interesting for them. It has to be developed and proven, but yeah, it's coming. Well, you could do it if you had somebody who put a collection in here, like this bubble collection, you could have an artist who builds that on spec, who's in college, and they say, here's my bubble collection. Anybody who wants to generate on top of it, it's going to be, you know, $1 per exported image. And then they would know who paid that $1 per exporting image. And they create those 25 images. And if 10,000 images are exported per year, that's $10,000. You as the platform take 30%, They take 70%.

You made three. They made $7,000. That's a pretty fantastic business for a kid in art school who made 25 images that took, I don't know, 10 hours each. And that's money they would make forever. So there's a reasonable trade of services here. Yep. And then you know what this happened in stock photography. Stock photographers were villainized at some point because they were like, hey, you should send a photographer out to take a picture of the golden,

Gate Bridge for $1,000 let them develop the film and they should charge $1,000 or $2,000 for that image. You shouldn't let people buy a Golden Gate photo for $5 or $10. Yep. So the world advances more people have access to this incredible

content. That's better for society. Sorry if people are, you know, sorry that it's deflationary, but when things are deflationary, people can do more creative things, right? Yeah, and every time to do more.

And you want me to drop another buzzword, it could be also, blockchain could be involved to track these flows of images across different owners, which has not been done yet, but it's a good,

I think it's a good use case of blockchain that combine, you know, Gen.E. Explain how that might work. Yeah. You know, well, a generator

might be tied to some sort of smart contract. So any image that is being made from that generator could be tied to the generator and then to the artist via some revenue share stream written, coded into the contract. Or, I mean, look at Genii, it's the abundance, right?

It's like millions and millions of images being made and shared and content overall. You know, how to be able to track it via some sort of like a trusted ledger could be interesting. I'm not saying we should all do it on like right now and we are not even doing it, but with the Web3 people, the Web3 games that use scenario,

They're all about it. Incredible, yeah. You know, yeah. Well, this has been amazing. Continued success. Where's the company based? San Francisco. You know, this is like your,

maybe the fourth AI company to come on who is basing in San Francisco. And it does seem like there's a little, you know, revitalization in San Francisco of people putting their AI companies in the city itself, not in the surrounding area.

So, hey, listen, continued success. And we'll see you all next time on this week at Sargams. Probably the most common challenge I hear from founders is related to building. Either they are in technical and are searching for a technical co-founder or they can code, but they're just spread to then. This is one of the first major obstacles you're going to face, and I know how discouraging it can be. But there is a solution.

Do you have a great idea, but you don't have a technical co-founder? Well, crowdbotics can be your CTO as a service. Boom, just like that. This means you can focus on building an awesome product and delighting your customers. rather than wasting your time on infrastructure planning, architecture compliance, and all that boring stuff. CrowdBotics also offers professional scoping to help you flesh out your project at the MVP stage and beyond. So cut out the hassle and get back to building that perfect product for your delighted customers. When you think CrowdBotics, I want you to think getting your time

back to focus on product. Product drives everything in a startup. So let the folks at CrowdBotics show you how it works. Schedule a free scoping. session and get your detailed build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's crowd, B-O-T-I-C-S dot com slash twist. Hey, everyone, I'm Presh, and today we're going to walk through how to build no-code apps. So first, we're going to talk about why build no-code apps in the first place. We'll cover things like who's it for, and then we'll jump into some of the pros and cons. Next, we'll talk about some of the best tools to use when building in no-code, and these are going to vary

depending on what you want to build. So hopefully after watching this presentation, you'll have a better understanding of what no code is capable of, and then you can get started on third base picking your platform. And lastly, we'll wrap on some of my favorite resources in the no-code community to help you further your education. So let's get into it. So why build no-code apps in the first place?

It's going to come down to two things. So one, you're non-technical or non-technical yet, and two, you want to move quickly. So for example, you have an idea and you want to put that idea in the marketplace as quickly as possible. Test and see if it's worth pursuing. Over the next couple of slides, I'm going to show you how before even building your product, you can utilize some cool tools to get to the third base of building your product. So using no code tools to start this process of building your product might look like this.

Step one, you get your idea. Step two. You might want to share that idea or validate it a bit. And this can be done by tweeting it, writing a blog post, or sharing it in the subreddit. Step three, you might want to start making a mock-up of your product with tools like Figma or Canva or Sketch. And I include design tools in no code because they've really designed them so anyone can learn them quickly, and they're just delightful and fun to use. Step four.

Okay, now your product mock-up is done. So it's time to build a simple landing page. And remember, the goal of this is to put something out there and see if there's interest of the product, so it's not mandatory to have an overly designed website. So I use tools like WebFlow or maybe even Notion, Squarespace, card. Step 5. Okay, so now the website is up and we want to start capturing people who visit the site

that might be interested in the product. So we can do this with a simple email capture tool, and I like to use Mailchip in this case. Step 6. And lastly, with the emails, we can now start funneling customers or potential customers into a community with products like Slack or Discord or even Twitter. Keep the conversation going and keep your potential customers engaged.

Now we're going to talk about the pros of no-code development. And I've narrowed it down to three things. Agile development, low-to-no maintenance, and cost-efficiency. So in terms of being agile, you can put out an MVP as soon as you have the idea, and you just need to do it with one person, which is yourself. You don't need a whole team. Next, there's no maintenance. Since you're building on top of platforms,

and ideally big ones with big teams, we're piggybacking our product on them, and so they manage the maintenance for you and updating everything. And lastly, it's cost-effective to a point. because you don't need to hire developers, which are expensive. The other thing is, you're dependent on the platform you build on. So if one day they wake up and decide to remove a feature that you use every day, you might be at a disadvantage there.

And lastly, it can get expensive. Again, depending on if you're using multiple tools, you want to be thoughtful with the kinds of tools that you're using. Now we're going to talk about the tools you might want to use when building no-code apps and what's actually possible. Let's get into it. So to start, the first decision we need to make is what type of product do we want to build? Do we want to build a simple website with a gated community slash paywalled content?

Or do we want to build a marketplace type of business similar to Airbnb, where it's two-sided, you've got a supply side, a demand side, and you want transactions to occur? Or do we want to build a mobile application for maybe the App Store or the Play Store? So there are tools for all of these examples, and we'll dive in deeper right now. Let's start with a simple subscription website or subscription business. These are three tools that will get you started, and you can build an entire business. off the back end of this. The first is Webflow, which is the visual no-code website designer that I mentioned earlier. And this is popular now because you can customize fully and they've got

beautiful templates. The next is a tool called member stack. And what this allows you to do is allow your website to have a sign-up portal or dashboard and allow you to charge customers either one-time payment or a subscription model. So really turning your website more into like an app or community. And lastly, is Zapier, which is an automation slash API tool that allow you to connect and talk to different applications. So you can have your Webflow website, talk to MemberStack, and you can do that through Zapier. So here I'm just on WebFlow's template website,

and you can see they've got beautiful designs here. I'm in one example called London, and I can buy this if I want to use it, but you can see, looks like a very professional website here. It's got nice animations, nice colors, and this looks like it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to build, but you can replicate this with just a click of a button. Okay, now here we are on MemberStack.

Again, member stack allows you to create like a sign up portal and create a login for your users on your webflow site. And so here you'll see this login portal. That's kind of an example of what it would look like. And then you've also got a pricing page. So that's, you know, if you want to charge or put up a paywall for some of your content, you can do that as well. Here's an example with one of our portfolio company, SoulSavvy. And they were initially started with just completely no-code tools. So you'll see their website.

You know, you can go in, you can sign up for the waitlist or you can skip the waitlist and put your and sign up, all of this can be done within Webflow and member stack. Lastly, on the subscription website stack, we have Zapier, which is the king of automation and connecting different apps to talk to each other. So you'll see in the screenshot they've got thousands of integrations into all the main apps like Google Sheets, MailChimp, Calendar, Slack, Typeform, Stripe, and so on. So the main purpose for Zapier is for apps to interact with each other. Moving on to a marketplace type product, these tools will get you started right out the box.

So the first one is softer.io, and the second one this bubble.io. And both of these will get you on third base because you can use some of their marketplace templates. And the best examples I'll show you here are Airbnb clones on both platforms. All right, so here I am on softened I.O. And they've also got a great template library. I'm going to go to one of their examples here, co.dott live. And this is a marketplace example built right on the platform. And so you can see you've got some houses here that you can click into. You've got a search feature. You've got to explore spaces. And you can even go as far as booking a spot on the platform and that'll take you to like a landing page or stripe,

a stripe powered page to complete the transaction. This is another example using the bubble platform. So again, another marketplace type product. You can see you've got different locations here. You can even create your own listing. And so, again, designed beautifully, works perfectly. You're building this from scratch, but you can also use a template and get you again on that third base.

Lastly, moving on to mobile app development in the no-code ecosystem. There are two main tools that I've used, and the first one is Bravo Studio. That's bravostio.app.apps.com. The first one, which is Bravo Studio, is more of a visual designer, so you can use Figma or AdobeXD to design your app. And so what Bravo Studio is connects those elements together to make into actions. So you're basically leveling up your prototype be a functional product. The other app I've used is called glide,

and glide allows you to create web-based but mobile-friendly apps to do powerful things like create management tracking tools or a conference app or a workout app. And I've even seen a template for an Instagram clone. Now, let's wrap up with some resources you can use to learn more about building NoCode products. So the main resources that I like to use are Makerpad.co and noco.tech. And both of these sites have extensive libraries of content that you can get started from beginner all the way to advanced. You can see on this screenshot, you can start as basic as just creating websites, or you can

go to building mobile apps. And again, this is all no code. So they've got you covered. And that's going to wrap today's episode of how to build no code apps. Thanks for listening.