Early Exit #46: My $60/month AI Tech Stack
The tools that help me build shockingly complex software with little knowledge of coding.
You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.
Sponsored by Wispr Flow — Use your voice to type 3x faster than your keyboard.
Thank you all so much for supporting the launch of AdAcadabra last week. Your emails, likes, and comments on my LinkedIn post absolutely made my day.
I am spending quite literally all of my free time working on this. Here’s my timeline:
Oct/Nov: Launch a beta version to my waitlist and collect feedback
Nov/Dec: Make improvements based on feedback
Jan 2025: Public launch
This is super ambitious and accelerated roadmap that can only happen because I made insane progress on my own thanks to the 4 AI tools I’m going to show you.
The AI Tech Stack
There are main tools I use:
I’ll explain how I use each one below.
Wispr Flow
Wispr is my favorite way to interact with AI and LLM tools because I can just use my voice.
It’s easier and faster to talk through your ideas instead of sitting down to write. Especially when you’re trying to verbalize complex ideas like, I don’t know, building your first startup.
Here’s how it works:
Download and install Wispr Flow
Set a hotkey to trigger it
Navigate to your favorite LLM (more on that in a sec)
Press a button, speak, and watch just how fast Wispr Flow accurately transcribes your voice into text
I only promote tools that I know and use myself so I was super excited when the Wispr team reached out. Seriously, give them a shot when you’re using the AI tools I’m about to cover.
v0.dev ($20/month)
v0 is like ChatGPT for front-end design.
You ask it to build something, it writes code, and then runs it right in the browser window.
This has been a huge help for me as I brainstorm and take my idea into something that I can actually play with.
I’m a terrible designer. I have no ability to take the idea I have in my head and shuffle the pixels around to turn it into reality.
But v0 fixes this for me in a way that just makes sense to my brain: I can design things with words.
The first screenshot is literally my first attempt at building AdAcadabra. You can see I gave it a pretty detailed prompt with specific metrics and instructions on what I wanted it to do.
Want to move something around? Switch a component out? Add a color scheme? Just type it out.
Even if you had no desire to use the code that v0 provides, the ability to design a user interface this way has skyrocketed my ability to iterate through ideas for my app.
I used v0 to design literally every part of AdAcadabra
My Login / Signup Pages
My main dashboard
My onboarding flow
My settings pages
You could then take these mockups and send them to an actual designer to polish if you wanted, or you can drop them into a code editor and start building.
Claude ($20/month)
Generative AI tools are great sounding boards for your ideas and can help you turn an idea into a structured problem that you can tackle step-by-step.
When I had the idea for my app I spent days in conversation with Claude to brainstorm what I could call it.
Claude also helped refine my idea and map out an action plan of what I could build.
Once you have a breakdown like this, you can start building your app idea one step at a time, and I’ve found this back and forth really helpful in refining my ideas.
The AI isn’t perfect which is actually a feature for me. It’ll inevitably do something I either didn’t expect or didn’t want which forces me think deeper about the design of my idea.
You can have Claude help you with coding and this is actually where I’d recommend most people start. Ask Claude to walk you through building a simple app idea using Replit.
Replit ($20/month)
Replit is a browser-based code editor that can also run your code at the same time. Replit saves you a lot of headaches with managing your own developer environment, which can be really tricky for people new to programming.
Start by asking Claude a question and asking it to show you how to build this in Replit.
One major caveat with LLMs is that their training data is outdated, which can make a surprisingly big difference if there’s been a new feature release recently that the LLM doesn’t know about.
If you’ve never touched a code editor before, this is the place to start!
Wrapping Up
These tools are the only way I’m able to take my idea and build something usable in less than 6 months with little prior experience coding.
I brainstormed the idea for my app and named it with an AI.
I sped through the design and UI process by chatting with an AI.
I took the code from step 2 and started building my app with an AI
Your initial ideas don’t have to be complicated. Build a simple tool that can save you time on a repetitive task you do right now. Start small!
See y’all soon for another update on my startup is coming.
Nick
p.s. My consulting business continues to do well but AdAcadabra is so much more exciting to me right now so that’s likely where my content will skew towards!
