A Social-media marketer built an App without knowing anything about coding, with help of AI and other tools.
The advancement of technology eased the process of doing stuffs greatly, that you don’t even have to follow the usual way of approaching tasks. You need not have to write entire mails by yourself, you can have summary of long paragraphs that goes for pages to pages, and in coding, you can avoid it simply, like this man did.
James Brooker, a social-media marketer turned to AI and few other apps to create revenue for himself by designing an app, but he doesn’t know any programming language.
Think Bridge App
Though been worked as a social media content creator and marketer for brands like KFC, Subway, and Taco Bell, James Brooker have been struggling since last year, as economy got into the verge of recession. Marketing usually be the one of the foremost cost cuts, if firms have wavering revenue.
To create another stream of income, Brooker thought of developing a software as a service (SaaS) product – an app, that could help brands market themselves using influencers at a low cost.
Called “Thingy Bridge”, the app helps brands to sign up for a monthly fee to be connected with influencers who are willing to do promotion for free, instead of directly paying to the influencers. A lot of brands can’t afford paid influencer collaborations anymore but are happy to run what’s called a gifted campaign – where the brand sends the influencer their product rather than payment.
Platforms used to create the App
Brooker used platforms like AirTable, a low-code database platform and Make, which helps in connecting services, for designing the app. He also sought AI’s aid whenever he got stuck, which was mostly Magai, a GPT-4 powered AI tool and Claude, for writing.
For example, when an influencer signs up, some of them put @ at the beginning of their username and some don’t. I went to Magai and asked, “I’ve got a column of data. Some data is going to have @s at the start and some don’t. I want a clean version of that column without the @s. Can you create a formula that I can use in AirTable to do this?” And, it did it! Sometimes it doesn’t work but you just explain the error to it and go back and forth.
While the backend of Thingy Bridge was made from AirTable and Make, the front end was designed using Glide Apps, which make front ends for database-type apps, says Brooker. Magai fills the places wherever he got stuck.
“For me, using AI really came into its own for the more complicated stuff on the database end, which sometimes concerned the front end. For example, if I wanted to show some of my data on the front end in a better way (i.e. standardizing text), I used ChatGPT to create a function that allowed me to do that,” he adds.
However, Brooker says that “AI isn’t just a magic bullet that’ll make you a multimillion-dollar business – you still need to put in effort and be creative”. Though AI apps and tools could assist the tasks for you, the way in which you feed in prompts and apply the answers or results deliberately in your model is what important when you are kickstarting a new project and is directly relatable to how creative you are. “What you’ve got to remember, though, is that AI isn’t creative.”
People who are ambitious to make a lucrative out of their tech-idea, but don’t have enough skills to initiate, this might be the best time to actually start, seeking help from AI, which is free to use.
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