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Embark on a journey to success with the Startup Founder Roadmap, your go-to guide for navigating the challenging yet rewarding world of startups. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just launching your first venture, this podcast is your compass for building, growing, and leading a thriving startup company.
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00:00 - Chris (Host)
what's up, founders, welcome back to the show. Today I've got a very special guest yogi codes. Yogi codes am I saying that right, or is it jogi?
00:11
yeah, that was fine you're breaking up there I don't know if we're still on, but yeah, that was perfect okay, okay, uh, okay, perfect perfect, so I can see again it does this thing where it'll probably lag a bit every now and then, but you can just keep going. Again, it's something I always edit in post, yeah, so welcome everybody. We have Yogi Colts on the show. Yogi, one of my first questions I love to ask people is what got you into entrepreneurship? When was that moment where you knew I want to go this way and be an entrepreneur? Because I don't think entrepreneurs are normal.
00:45 - Jogi (Guest)
So what took you down this path? For me it was kind of accidental and I like to call myself the accidental entrepreneur in that way Because you know, like a couple of years ago something happened and the world went crazy. You remember that thing and I lost my job over that and I did some reflections and I was like I don't want to end up in this situation ever again, where I have to rely on something like an external hand feeding me right, and where I end up in a situation because having a job is quite risky because you only have that one thing right, and there's this guy who says risk means more things can happen than will happen. I forget who it was, but it's quite a smart quote, right, like anything can happen and you lose your job. I'm not going to say it, but it's not good for you, right, in that situation, particularly if you have a house and debt and stuff like that, it's tough for people and I decided I don't want to ever be in that situation again where I have to rely on somebody else.
01:49
I wanted to be independent and so I started working for myself, right, and I didn't know what to do at first, so it was hard, um, but yeah, slowly but surely it's getting better. And well, it's, it's awesome. I, I wouldn't like, I wouldn't go back ever. I think it's ride or die for me really.
02:11 - Chris (Host)
I think that's how most entrepreneurs are like. Once you get a taste of the freedom, it's kind of hard to backtrack and go the other way, where you don't have freedom and you have a boss, you got more responsibilities, like. It's much harder to go back to that once you've left it already yeah, I agree with that.
02:29 - Jogi (Guest)
Like wouldn't be for me anymore.
02:31 - Chris (Host)
Screw that so what are you currently building right now?
02:36 - Jogi (Guest)
yeah, so I started I, I go to the gym, right, I lift weights every now and then, or like every day actually, and I like to track my workouts and I use pen and paper for that, and it's not ideal to do that. So I've started to make an app for that, where the app does that for me, and it's kind of like a personal trainer also, because if you want to progress in that stuff, you need to do more and more all the time. You need to be better and better. You need to beat last week. First of all, you need to know what you did last week right, and so the next week you want to do a little bit better.
03:18
It's called progressive overload in sports science. So if you did I don't know for your bench press, you did 160 pounds this week, uh, for five reps then next week you want to at least match that or maybe improve a little, do an extra rep or add in two and a half pounds. You know stuff like that. Um, so if you add in two and a half pounds, you can do the same reps, but if you run the same weight, you want to go up in reps, and so I thought it would be good to have an app where all that stuff is built in right, where the sports science is kind of built into it, and it gives you uh feedback immediately, um, gives you call to actions and things like that, like it tells you when you um messed up and it also tells you when you beat it. So it's kind of like this dopamine thing, like gamifying.
04:06
It a little bit right to keep people on track, because that's the biggest issue that most people have is to to stay on track with this right. Like, if you look at the guys who look really good and really jacked, the big thing they have going for them is they work consistently, working out, yeah, for years on end without taking a longer break. And for me, it was always the issue that, like, life happened and I had a situation where I couldn't go to the gym. I mean, this is a dumb thing to say you couldn't go to the gym. I mean this is a dumb thing to say you always can go to the gym, right, but I just dropped it every now and then. And so now I've been training for a whole year uninterrupted and that's what I look like, right. So a guy who trained for a whole year uninterrupted, but I've trained. What is it like seven years or something, so I should be much bigger.
04:53
So you've been doing the lifting for a while, oh yeah, yeah, for a long time, but you wouldn't notice because I don't look like it right, because every every six months or so something happened. I lost every, I lost it all and you get it back quickly, but then you progress from the same state that you had before and that isn't. That isn't ideal. So I thought having the app for that to you know, keep me honest, where I always take the logs and stuff, and you know I need to keep it going and nurture it and stuff and that help that will help me and I'm scratching my own itch there, so it probably might help other people too, particularly because I think it's going to be a really good product in terms of the knowledge.
05:28
It has right, all the all the science is built into it. It's I originally was a scientist that like way back and so, um, that's kind of like, yeah, my pet peeve to well, not pet peeve, that's not. That's not the right way of saying that, but I can yeah I can combine the two things right.
05:46
Yeah, yeah to you know, like do it right and like if, if you most gym mats don't have that built in, they're like just trackers and you don't know. You pick your own workout and different people have different needs for working out. Right, if you're a beginner, you grow from looking at weights. Pretty much the first year you don't have to do as much. You can do a little bit and that's it. But then later down the road, in years one, two, three, you, three, you're becoming intermediate, something like that. So you have to train a little bit harder. And then, once you've trained four years uninterrupted, you need to do a much, much better job at it, right, and you need to do more work. And so I'm building all this stuff in where it figures out what your training age is and if you're progressing, and if you're no longer progressing you'll have to do more stuff, stuff like that, you know.
06:34 - Chris (Host)
Oh, so you're using AI in your platform, because I think AI is going to be a part of pretty much every software tool. But I think part of the problem right now is everybody wants to use it so that they can say they're using it, but after we get more experience with it, it then it'll become more useful, versus just saying, hey, my app has ai. We're going to get to a point where it has ai features and it's actually a good feature and it's helpful to the user.
07:01 - Jogi (Guest)
I think that's where we're going yeah, I thought about implementing something like that initially. I haven't got it. Right now I don't have it. It's more like my knowledge that I have about training built into it, right, and that is based on the state of the scientific literature. But I think I will make sort of a chat bot that I'm training on the science, the literature and like all the stuff that's out there, where people can then ask questions and the app will answer yeah, but that's for down the line. Yeah, I'm. Yeah, I'm thinking about how to best do that, because, you're right, like it's a everybody does ai and it's like a marketing thing, right, um, so I guess it helps with sales.
07:47 - Chris (Host)
Uh, it has to make sense though, right, it's just one, one thing yeah, I think that's kind of the problem right now is everybody's trying to use it like people in no code. Um, pretty much anything I see being built has ai mentioned somewhere in the process, and I don't think it's bad. I just think it's going to take a little bit more time for everybody to figure out their path of using that ai. Or it's just saying, yeah, we have ai for this platform. It's like it has to be useful, man, whatever the model is, it has to be useful for the actual user. You just saying you have it isn't really important 100% and you see that in successful products too.
08:23 - Jogi (Guest)
I think right Like they always, they're very good at a niche thing.
08:29 - Chris (Host)
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and I think the niching down of products like yours, where it's, you know, a fitness tracker, a fitness app, I think with niche products like I have a project management tool that's for agency owners.
08:44
I have a personal branding program for founders. It's like I think when you're in more niche like that, you actually have an advantage because you can tailor it specifically to who you're talking to. Um, so I think you just have kind of more freedom. Honestly, when you're a bootstrapper and you're working towards a specific market, that's just that's huge man. So what are man? So what's your bigger goal with your platform that you're building? What's the long-term ideal? Do you want to sell or do you want X amount of users? What's the big thing you're shooting for?
09:18 - Jogi (Guest)
Oh well, I want users first of all. I mean, right now it's in development and it's not quite ready for it's getting there, but it's not quite ready yet for test users. So what I want out of it is that people find value in it and that it's a good app, right, um, and yeah, then I'm gonna see how I'll be able to grow it in terms of marketing it, because that's the big thing, right, to be able to market it. Writing the product is actually not that hard, but I personally find selling stuff much, much more difficult and doing the marketing really of it um yeah, yeah, yeah that's just.
10:00 - Chris (Host)
It's so funny. I see the conversation on platforms like twitter and even linked LinkedIn to a certain extent, about building and about how you have to learn how to market. And it's always funny because I'm on the other side of that, where I'm more of a marketer and a salesman that I am a builder, like I didn't go to college to code, I never learned any of that. I'm like a marketing guy. So I always see it from the other point of view, where people are like struggling to market their products and don't know how to talk about them or get customers and stuff.
10:29 - Jogi (Guest)
It's so funny seeing it from the opposite side, man right, yeah, so with this one, I've done it differently this time around. I've done the building public approach from the beginning, um, and I'm gonna expand that much more. And, uh, I can see there is some like the home page doesn't have anything on it, but there was traffic there already, like people checked it out already and a guy, uh, put down his email to become a test user already. Right, so I never had that before where I did that and, um, I think that's helping.
11:01
I also am starting with prior projects. I'm starting to understand how google works with the SEO aspect of the of the thing and I have some ideas about how I can, yeah, like use leverage Google for that app, because there's, there's some stuff you can do with the exercises. You can make a dictionary around it or, like you know, one of those dictionary websites for the, for the marketing thing, where people can like look for exercises and muscle groups and like how to train. You can make that a little interactive and tool-based and I think I'm going to go that route because it seems to be a thing that works on google.
11:37 - Chris (Host)
Um, so yeah, yeah, yeah for me for me.
11:43 - Jogi (Guest)
Inherently, it's much easier to write the product like much, much easier.
11:47 - Chris (Host)
So how did you build the skills of building and like coding and stuff, like, were you in college for it or did you just sit down and just learn it one day?
11:56 - Jogi (Guest)
No, at my previous job I needed to write something and I like needed to write some code. I started like 10 years ago with Python to automate boring tasks and I think I found a YouTube talk Automate the boring stuff or something like that, and the guy was talking about this, like how you can use Python to automate things. And I made a robot that would put my times into the time sheet every day, for instance at work, because, like I don't like chores, right, like there's so much overhead that you have to do so I I started automating the overhead slowly away so I can free up more time and do actual work. And then that carried over in my next job where we had a peptide synthesizer which was crap in terms of making the instructions for it. It was really, really slow. It was Windows software and you put all your stuff in. It took five minutes for it to spit the thing out in the end and it was just a text file that was instructing the machine what to do. Like move robot from here to here, pick up liquid. Now. Move from here to here, drop liquid, right. Like that's all it did and it had, like, certain lines in the text file. I'm like this can't be too hard to make this text file, why does this take five minutes?
13:18
And so I made a script, and that was a Python script, where you put in the sequences and it sped out the instructions for the robot, and that was um much, much quicker. It was done in like a blink of an eye, right, it's still like you you press the button to run it and you counted one in your head and it was done right. So that was much better in terms of productivity for us. And that's where it's like. The first time I really had a big code project to do it, it was during lockdown, when they didn't know what to do with me in my previous job. So I wrote it then and there and I learned coding there and I just kept going with it afterwards and initially it was Python and with Python, websites like Flask based stuff like Flask is a web framework for Python and then now I'm doing JavaScript frameworks and things like that. So it was just by doing to answer your question. I was rambling a little, but, yeah, over time, little by little just doing that I've had.
14:14 - Chris (Host)
I actually hear that literally 50 of the time I ask people that question, they say I didn't go to school for it, I just learned it. And I love that. I love it. I feel like if I sat down and tried I really could. But I also want to focus on my strengths of being able to market and sell. I think that's where my strength is, so I don't want to kind of deviate from that. So how do you feel about the no code movement, right like where people are using just automations essentially to build different platforms?
14:41 - Jogi (Guest)
I have no idea about it. To be honest, I can't tell you the thing about it. I heard about it, but I I think you would love it.
14:50 - Chris (Host)
I don't have an opinion even. I think you would love it. It's just a way for people like me that aren't coders to kind of put products and put stuff together through automations and workflows and stuff. Man, I love it personally because, again, I just like that now everything is becoming so accessible to so many people. I love that aspect of entrepreneurship now.
15:16 - Jogi (Guest)
How do you build an app without coding, though? Sorry to so many people, I love that aspect of entrepreneurship. Now it's so different.
15:20 - Chris (Host)
Sorry. How do you build an app without coding? Essentially, you can have a bubble. I think it's probably the most popular platform in terms of no code. You just have automations that set up and they work together. Some of them even have templates. Where you can honestly get some of these templates? You buy them for a couple hundred bucks and set up your app and put some security on there and then you can start marketing and selling. Some of the templates are already ready-made for you to just go and make money like that.
15:51 - Jogi (Guest)
It's kind of crazy how it is. You're buying an app and then you're selling it onward. You're like a reseller. Is that how that works?
15:58 - Chris (Host)
um, with the templates in a way yes, honestly with the templates, because some people go on there and they'll make a template for project management or crm or a door dash app food ordering, food delivery or whatever and you can go and buy that and put your own brand on it, get a domain and stuff and set up some security and accounts and then start selling like it's that easy now. Um, so I just I like the freedom of it. I love that aspect yeah, makes sense.
16:30 - Jogi (Guest)
And how do you do complicated logic in there, like if you have to actually do stuff that isn't written yet?
16:36 - Chris (Host)
Yeah, see, that's where you have to create, like, different workflows, and it takes some time to set those up. Datasets can be really, really crazy. You can use APIs in there. Apis help me a lot personally With one of my platforms. I hire developers me personally I hire no-code developers. Come in and help you with that kind of stuff where it just gets super complicated. So that saved me a lot of time, made me a lot of money because I didn't have to do that little stuff when I could just focus on marketing. So again, I just think where entrepreneurship is now, what being a founder is now. I love it because it's expanding a lot more. You know, it's not just one thing like you have to have a bunch of venture capital funding behind you. Like those days are gone, man. You can start a company tomorrow and have something really good. I love that right?
17:26 - Jogi (Guest)
yeah, that's true. If I can do it, anybody can yeah, I'm with you on that particularly with the, with the ai tools.
17:37
Right, the tooling is incredible, like if you have a question, like you need to fix something and you don't know how, right away you prompt it and nine times out of ten it spits out an answer that at least, if you follow through with it, will end you where you want to go. So it's good stuff, the GPT-4 particularly, but also the yeah, now the CoPilot, I don't know, I canceled that the other day. But GPT-4 is quite good, particularly for debugging. If you have a bug and you put that in there, sometimes it can actually make the function just from the. You put the bug in, just a bug message, and it spits you back the function properly and you're like okay, you didn't even know this part, you inferred it, you're smart man.
18:23 - Chris (Host)
I love that part too, because I think now we've reached a point where the AI is going to help a lot of people build even better platforms. It's insane. I know a guy who's working on some stuff for like hospitals and like helping people get bionic arms and stuff. It's crazy how fast this stuff is happening. We got about five minutes left here. Okay, what kind of people do you have interest in working with? I find that a lot of founders in our stages are, like always looking for somebody to connect with. So, are you looking to find somebody in marketing or sales? Do you want some kind of team member that can help you build Like, who are you looking for to connect with now?
19:06 - Jogi (Guest)
So at this point in time, I'm not really looking for anything like that. Looking for anything like that because I think it is important that you at least try yourself at every aspect of the business and if you then fail, fine, you might want to partner up with a marketer if you've tried marketing and you couldn't, right. But otherwise, if you don't do it yourself first, you don't know where it goes wrong. If you need it later on, right. And so I think, like I have the tunnel vision I would use both hands, but I'm holding a microphone here the tunnel vision in the hacker approach to it. For now, right. And then I think, I think, eventually, the first thing I'm gonna want help with to answer your question, uh, when the time comes for it is marketing, particularly around seo and around hats. I think, um, yeah, so a good, a good market that would help, I think, to have, because I think that is the crucial part, the one that I'm lacking the most.
20:21 - Chris (Host)
Okay, I find it funny that we're reaching that stage, too, where a lot of founders are like, nah, I don't want to really build a team right now, because I remember when I first started learning about startups and all of this stuff, like five, ten years ago, it was so big about like you got to have a team member, you need a co-founder, you need all of these things in place, and now it's like you can do so much on your own and make a lot of progress. I think having the wrong person too early could actually slow you down, to be honest.
20:49 - Jogi (Guest)
Yeah, particularly with the tooling that's there, and I think if I would want a partner in this that would be equity-based, and then I wouldn't want to hire people, I would want somebody who is as driven around it as I am. I think otherwise with personnel. I'd rather build tooling for it that I can automate. Like with the open ai api, you can do a lot of stuff that usually you needed humans for a couple years ago. Right, like a lot of stuff you can do already. Um, I've built some systems internally, in-house, so to speak, um, where I uh, I'm automating a lot of stuff already, um, for for content production and things like that, and this is only gonna get better, right oh, wow, okay.
21:45 - Chris (Host)
Yeah, man, it's dope to talk to you and see what you have going on. I'm working on this show. I want to have, I want to build a community of founders like you and me that are out here building things, solving our own problems, trying to help people. Like I just think the more we can connect with each other, the easier we can all grow, because I'm pretty sure somebody is going to need this app you're working on to help them track their workouts and stuff. Like I think more entrepreneurs need to take their health a lot more seriously. To be honest, that's a bigger conversation, um, but yeah, man, thanks for being on the show. I appreciate having you. Absolutely thanks for having me.
22:22 - Jogi (Guest)
Uh, before we go, let the people know where they can find you and your platform so I'm yogi codes on twitter, so that's j-o-j, no j J-O-G-I-C-O-D-S, and then the app is called Get Jacked. So if you just go to getjackedapp, that's a great name.
22:42 - Chris (Host)
I love that name, that's where you get jacked.
22:46 - Jogi (Guest)
If you stay consistent, not like me, learn from my mistakes consistently, live for years on end, and you will get jacked and use the app. Yeah, and I have right now. I don't know when you released this, but right now I have a email box on the landing page where people can type their email and I'll invite them as test users and I won't charge during the testing and then later on. I don't think it'll be expensive either, like I would. I think I want to make it over the volume, um, but yeah, we'll see.
23:17 - Chris (Host)
We'll see about that all right, man, this was great. Thanks for being on. Yeah, thank you.