How I built an app in 20 minutes - you can do it too

Hey, this is Passive Apps Pelton. I want to show you how to build an iPhone app in just 20 minutes. I want to walk you through the process that I use. If you have an idea, lots of people have app ideas and it's always been a dream, hey, let's get this app out there. I want to show you how I use AI to get iPhone apps created. So if you know me, you know that I love using AI. And I want to kind of show you how I use AI, I chat GPT and also Clod. And I'll show you why I use one for some things, one for another. I want to show you kind of the prompts that I use, the results I get back and just kind of how I go through this process. So when you're creating an app, you're actually creating a business. Okay, that's what an app is, is it's a business, it's a product. So before you start any business, you need to identify what problem does this business solve? That's the purpose of businesses, is you solve people's problems. And in exchange for solving their problem, they pay you. Okay, that's what business is. So a lot of times you can start with what's a problem that you have in your life? If there's a problem that you have, chances are there's other people with that same problem. So we're just gonna start, I'm just off the top of my head, I didn't even script this or anything. We're gonna start with what's a problem going on in my life right now? And there's a lot, okay? Probably comment down below if you have a lot of problems in your life. You need Jesus, okay? But let's say one problem I'm having, our cat Baymax has been missing for the last two weeks, okay? Kids, I hope you're not watching this, the cat is probably gone. Don't tell my kids, they're very heartbroken about this. But this is the problem that we're starting with. So I'm gonna actually just make a Google Doc, I'm gonna walk you through my whole process starting a new business. Problem, my cat is missing. Okay, so that's a problem. That's a problem a lot of people have, correct? Let me know in the comments, have you ever lost a pet before? So then we wanna identify the target audience, okay? So you have a problem that you're looking to solve. Who's the target audience? Well, it's gonna be pet owners, probably families, families with kids. Okay, so we have a problem. My cat is missing, I want to find him. This is a problem that pet owners, probably families and families with kids have. Now, the next thing you wanna look at is how could an app help solve this problem? Okay, because we're talking specifically about an app. So this is where I might go to chat GPT. I want to create an app that helps pet owners find their missing pets. So how can an app solve this problem? What features would be helpful in an app to solve this problem? Okay, and nothing's coming off, you know, there's, I could probably brainstorm for a while and come up with some features of, I don't even know, but I'm just gonna use chat GPT because I'm a little lazy. So I wanna create an app that helps pet owners find their missing pets. What features would this app have to help pet owners find missing pets? Let's see what chat GPT comes up with here. First off, I always love chat GPT, it's so kind. You know, it starts by making sure you're okay. Sorry Baymax is missing. Creating a pet profile is one feature. Location-based alerts. Marking where a pet was last seen. Allow users to mark locations of sightings and search areas. Lost and found matching. Search assistance tips, so some educational part, a community aspect. Integrating with local shelters and vets. You know, if somebody finds the cat, takes it to the vet, have some integration there. Integrating with social media because you can get the word out quickly, hey, we're missing this pet. Alerts for similar looking pets. Push notifications for sightings. Rewards for finding, but these are great ideas. See, and I could have brainstormed for a long time and I wouldn't have come up with this many ideas. These are things I didn't think of and chat GPT gave it to me in just a minute here. Missing pet timeline. Integration with pet devices. So we got a lot of good features here. So I'm gonna take all these as potential features. Potential features. Okay, and then what's been working really well for apps, this is how most apps monetize, is you have a free app, but then you have a paid version that has extra features. So you have a free version that helps people solve their problem. Then you have a paid version that helps people solve their problem even better. And the goal is you get free users, they're kind of your leads, and then your goal is to convert a percentage of them over to paid. So I'm gonna ask chat GPT, take that feature list and separate it into free features and premium features that people have to pay for. So it puts what it thinks should be in the free features. And again, you can change this. You don't have to obey AI. It's your servant. It's your tool. But it says put all this in the free and then have a premium version that has all this. So again, I'm gonna copy and paste that. Oh, and then it even is giving subscription model ideas. So a free plan, a premium plan, that's five to $10 a month, and then also a family plan. Love it. Okay, so I'm gonna put all this down in here. Okay, now I'm gonna just pick a name. Again, I'm gonna use chat GPT. And if I find prompts that work really well, I actually have a big Google Doc just full of prompts to do different things. So this is one, give me four name ideas, why you chose them, why they would be good names. Choose names that give us the best chance for success, good keywords not used by other apps, et cetera. I found this prompt works really well for finding names for apps. So I, and I have that in a Google Doc. Just copy and paste it in here. Pet Finder Pro, Paw Alert. That's kind of cool. You know what? I'm just gonna go with Paw Alert, okay? Find my fur. There you go. I'm gonna put this up at the top. I'm gonna say Paw Alert app. Okay, so we have a name. We have a problem. We have a target audience. We have the features that this app is gonna need to help people solve this problem. We basically here have a business plan. And you know, you could ask, how would we market this app? And it'll give you marketing ideas. So I'm just gonna copy and paste this. Social media, community engagement, local partnerships, referral program. You could run ads. And ChatGPT can even walk you through how to do any of this. Yeah, App Store Optimization. Influencer. I mean, we don't like influencers, but you know, could be helpful. Building an email list. Definitely would wanna do that. And again, this, again, when you're doing marketing, again, you're targeting people who might have a missing pet or they might be afraid that they have a missing pet. So a lot of your, you know, if you're gonna start content marketing, you can write content. You know, what to do if your pet is missing. Maybe here's 10 things to do if your pet is missing. You could make a lead magnet of 10 things to do if your pet is missing and people give you their email address. They get this and then you can start marketing the app. And one thing I love about apps is especially if you have a free version, that becomes its own lead magnet. So people download the app for free and then they become, and now you have a list of people who want to solve this problem. And if you have a, you know, a $10 a month plan, you can start trying to convert those people to that $10 a month plan. So love that. So I'm just gonna copy and paste all this as marketing ideas down here. So we got features, marketing ideas. I could organize this better. I could put things in different files, whatever. All right, now I want to actually build the app. Okay, and you know, I'm a programmer, so I understand this. I'm gonna probably skip a lot of steps. You could say, walk me step-by-step. Don't leave anything out on how to build this iOS app. Okay, I'm pretty familiar with this process, so I wouldn't need to follow it quite a step-by-step. But again, if you're not sure what you're doing, you can do this. Define your app's core features. We already did that. Conduct market research. That's something we should do before we start building an app, is see what else is out there. Also, I love looking at apps in the App Store, checking the reviews, and you look at the one-star, two-star reviews. What is this app missing? And then that can kind of be where your app comes in. Wireframe your app, so you can use Figma to create wireframes. I'm not gonna do that here today. But anyways, Chad GPT will walk you through the process, but I'm just gonna show you what I would do. So I'm gonna create a new project, new iPhone app. It's gonna be an app. So again, you can make a game, augmented reality, a Safari extension, iMessage app, but I'm just gonna make a regular old iOS app. And we're gonna call this PAW Alert. And I'm gonna write it in Swift, okay? You can really do any language. If you did Storyboard, you could do Objective-C if you wanted to, but you can just leave it on the defaults. Create a folder on your computer. And this is Xcode, by the way. So every Mac comes, you can get this for free, okay? You just go to the App Store, look for Xcode. You can download it. Now, if you don't have a Mac, it's a little bit more of a difficult process. Go find a different YouTube video to figure out how to do that. So, but we have the code here, and we have a simulator here that shows what the app does so far. So right now it just says, hello world. This is PAW Alert, okay? This is the app. So you have a basic app built already, like right out of the box. Now, what I've found, I've found that ChatGPT does better for text things. Clod, which is just a different AI model, it does better in like designing things. So I'm gonna take all this. I'm just gonna copy and paste everything we have about this app. Clod here, we have this app. And then I'm going to my Google Doc where I have a prompt for creating a color scheme. So pretend you're the world's best graphic designer. Generate a color scheme for this app based on what it is. Make it amazing, make it great. And it's gonna create a colors.swift file that's gonna be the color scheme for this app. So I'm just gonna put that in. Okay, and you don't need to understand what this all does. Basically, it's just defining colors. A primary color, it's saying blue, warm orange. You can change these if you want. These are the hexadecimal values. So you could use ChatGPT to say, hey, I want the hexadecimal value for green. And you could mess around with the colors. But I'm just gonna copy all this, go back to my app, and I'm gonna just create, but I'm gonna go back to my app, and then I actually, it knows what's in the, Apple's so cool, but it knows what's in the clipboard. So it says create a new colors.swift. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna put it all in there already. So now we have a color scheme. So then what I wanna do, create a really cool, you can use adjectives as you'd like, create a really cool welcome screen for this app. This will be the first screen people see when they open the app. At the top, it should have a logo, the name, and an icon. In the middle, it should say what the app does, why people would want it. And at the bottom, put a link to get started, sign up page, or already have an account, login page. Do whatever you want to do to make this welcome screen look amazing and be really helpful for people using the app. See, and now here's where being a programmer is helpful because it's doing all this in React, which is a different language. So I'm actually gonna stop it, and I'm gonna say, please do it in Swift, because that's the language we chose. So it's doing it in React, but we actually want it in Swift. There we go. So this is Swift code. So it's giving me a welcome screen. Okay, so it gave me all this welcome screen. I'm gonna copy, go back to my app. Again, it knows welcome screen, not Swift. And then, voila, we should have a welcome screen. And it used the color scheme that we already put together. And you know what? That looks pretty good. You could go back and forth with Cloud a little bit and say, oh, you know what? Actually, I don't like those colors that much. But this just popped out a welcome screen. You notice I haven't done any coding, right? Like this has all been clawed. I could do the same thing, create a signup page for people to create a new account. And sometimes I just remind it, again, make it look amazing. Give the user a great user experience. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. You didn't know I was musical, did you? Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Hard at work. All right, so there, we've got a signup page now. I'm gonna go here, new signup screen, not Swift. Let's see what it came up with. Okay, here's what we got. First name, last name, email, password, phone. It put icons for continue with Apple, continue with Google. So when we go in this paw alert app, we're gonna say the first screen it opens is welcome screen. Then Xcode comes with a simulator. So I'm just gonna hit this play button and it's gonna compile the whole thing. It's going to build all the code and it's gonna put it into this simulator. Okay, so here's what the app looks like. So we have the welcome screen. This is what it'll look like on your phone. Okay, now I wanna show you, you can actually get this app on your phone. So I plugged my phone into my computer and it says, do you trust this computer? It's my computer. I have trust issues, but I think it'll be okay. So I trust this. Then on here, when I go to targets, so this is where you're wanting to run it. So this is the simulator that we ran it in, but I can actually click here and I can select my iPhone 14. Yes, I still have an iPhone 14. I'm gonna click run. And then now instead of building it and putting it in the simulator, it's actually gonna build it and put it right on my phone. So you can see maybe the paw alert downloaded on my phone and I open it up. Can you see that? There we go. And this app that I just built is now on my phone. I can test it out. I can kind of see how it works, make sure it's looking good. This is obviously, this would be a longer process. You'd wanna go back to Claude and say, okay, now I need a login page. Then you need to show me how to hook up, sign up and log in. And there's a lot to it, but little by little, step by step, you can build out this app using AI without really knowing what you're doing, without really knowing Swift, without really knowing how to code. And I'm just really excited to see where AI goes going forward. I would love to build, if I get some free time, which I probably won't, but I would love to build some kind of a program where people can just type in what they're wanting to build and it will use AI in the backend and just create the app for people. I think that'll be amazing. And I think we're not far off from that. I think that's where we're going in the future. So if you're thinking about getting into programming, make sure you are learning AI as you're going, because I think in a few years, maybe two years, AI is moving very quickly. I think instead of a programming team of 10 people, we're gonna have one person who's an AI operator running 10 AI programmers. That's what I think we're going. So if you saw all this and you're like, I still don't think that I can do it. So what I've done, I've built this passive apps program. And basically what it is, you submit an app idea, I'll build the app for you. Look at that good looking guy on this page. Passive-apps.com, leave a link below. First off, you can just submit your app idea. So I'm happy to go through the beginnings of this process. You put in your name, email, what problem does your app solve? Who's the target audience? Brief description of the app. I'll put it together into a document similar to what we put here for pilot and just say, here's what I would be looking to build. And then if it looks good, if it looks like, oh yeah, I would love for you to build that, I've always wanted to build something like that, then you can buy the program. And 397 a month to build these apps, this is much cheaper. If you go get a quote from like a professional development team, it's gonna be, I've had people in my program who say I got a quote for the app I'm looking to build and it was $15,000. Okay, and the reason I'm able to do it so cheap is because of leveraging AI. I use AI to speed this up so that we don't have to spend $15,000 to get an app idea out there. Most apps, we're able to get kind of a MVP, a minimum viable product out in three months is what we aim for. So instead of $15,000, you're paying $1,200 to get this app out and into the app store. So, but if you sign up for the program, we've got 41 people in the program right now. I'm kind of aiming at 100 people. I think I'm kind of aiming 100 people and I don't know, we'll kind of go from there. This is a new business for me. It's a work in progress, but we'll do a kickoff call where we'll just talk through your app idea, go back and forth on some things. Then I'll take care of everything. I actually have a team of people too to kind of help me. I can't do 41 on my own, but we'll put together this vision. We'll put together a list of all the screens we need, all the functionality that this app needs, the roadmap of week by week, how much we're looking to get built. Then of course, I'll take care of the marketing. That's what I'm actually good at. We can leverage the YouTube channel. We can leverage my email list, things like that, my connections. I'm building a trading app for someone. And so obviously Mike from the Midas Trading Group, he's like, hey, my group will be the beta testers for this app when you get it out. And then once we get the app out into the App Store, this 397 a month goes away because the development's done, and now it's just a 50-50 profit share. So I'll do my best to blow this app up as much as I can. Again, that's where the money I made that I lost in crypto, I made from mobile text alerts, which was an app that I built. I grew it to 30,000 customers and was able to sell it for $6 million. But I just wanna help people achieve their financial freedom, achieve their financial goals. At one point in my life, I thought crypto was the way to do that. And I'm still, crypto's always gonna be in my heart. But I just think business is solving people's problems is the way to make life-changing money, okay? And I think building an iOS app is one of the easiest ways. You have an audience already. There's 1.8 billion people searching around in the Apple App Store. And so I think this'll be really great. If you are interested, what I would love you to do, you don't have to pay right away. What I would love for you to do is just go and submit your app idea. PassiveApps.com, I'll leave a link below. And just go here, wonder if your app idea could make money, submit it for free feedback. So this is free. You just put in what app idea you have, and I'll put together a plan for it and send it over to you and say, hey, would you like to build this? And there's no obligation. Again, I only wanna help people if it's gonna be helpful. I've turned down a lot of apps. Games, for example. Games make a lot of money, but they're very difficult to build. So I've been turning away. I've had a few people come. I have this game idea, and I say, hey, that's not really, games take too long to build. I'm not looking to spend a year building something. But like this Pollard, I bet we could get this out in three months. So I would love for you to submit an app idea, but we're building a lot of stuff. 41 apps we're building right now. But for example, Wondersmart, it's an all-in-one travel app. So when you're in a new place, it'll help you with navigation, weather, currency converter, language translating, all in one spot. Trade Metrics, I mentioned, is an app we're building to help with traders. So again, this is an app we're gonna build, put into the Midas Trading Group. FitRxLife, I'm building with Sam from our community. But it's to track medication, monitor health for people who take weight loss medication. But you can track your weight, log your medication, log your side effects. So building a lot of cool stuff. I'm loving this. I'm loving hearing people's ideas and then making their ideas a reality. So I would love for you to be a part of that. Thank you for watching my channel. Appreciate you guys. God bless. Have a great rest of the day.