Duolingo打卡千天无果后，他用Codex自制挪威语学习App并以AI Agents运营公司

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William, welcome to How I AI. Thanks for joining.

Um

and it was I think it was an All Things Web

hackathon. I tried building this app, but uh it just wasn't a great experience. Bombed the hackathon. I mean, I probably came in last.

I waited. Um, and the the main motivation behind this is I live in Norway and I want up to move from Dubai to Norway because I wanted an adventure. I didn't know what to expect. I just hoped everyone spoke English.

As soon as I got here, I learned that people actually speak Norwegian.

To make it by, I mean, a lot of people speak English, but you need Norwegian to get by.

But then the Norwegians are also very polite in the sense that if you try to speak Norwegian to them, but it's poor, they'll speak English back, unlike the French.

Mhm. So, they speak they speak English back to you. So, this might I couldn't learn Norwegian, right? And then I tried using Duolingo. I had a thousand-day streak

on Duolingo. I was always like chasing the streaks. And but I wanted to speak Norwegian to someone to something first that wouldn't judge me and something that would correct me. But also, I wanted to experience that felt like being thrown in a Norwegian village where you have no other option but to speak Norwegian.

That was just the experience I wanted.

Italian. And they're doing it this like very classic language learner way, which is a combination of Duolingo

and like listening to it like basically these like tapes, these audio lessons. And so, they're in the car and they're like

you know, hearing somebody speak Italian and then they repeat it. But the only way you can really learn a language is immersion. And I love what you call out because it's so counterintuitive, which is you said you can't learn this language because people are so polite, they will respond to you in English and so you can't actually get that reinforcement loop of like did I say it right? What am I supposed to hear? And so, you built this app to give you that experience. Tell us a little bit about like are you an iOS developer? Are you like a

fancy developer

I have a chemical engineering degree, but I taught myself to code to do some web development. So I did a lot of web development over the last um 5 6 years. I can write some front end. I can and then I can write some back end code save my life.

Building a web building a mobile app I can do it with something like React Native for instance, but I wanted today at least when I built Mural I wanted a native experience. I wanted like a premium feel to it cuz I felt like I could build anything, but

I wanted to optimize for the best user experience possible and I wanted to use like all the

the better iOS features.

So I decided to build in Swift.

Well, uh it wasn't going to be me building it. I needed Codex to build it. Uh

so

I just is building Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. And guess when we have AI agents building stuff

like the language doesn't matter. Like the language I know doesn't matter anymore. I just choose the best possible language for the tech that I'm building. Uh so that's why I went with Swift and Kotlin even though I haven't written a line of Swift in my life.

that code. So we're like, well, we know a bunch of people that can write Python and we know a bunch of people that can do this and so we're just going to build our app in that language to optimize for humans we knew

knew how to write that code. And now I love what you said, which is you can just pick the best language for the user experience, the thing that you want to build and it doesn't matter if you have somebody else staff that knows that language or not because you have our friend Codex on staff.

Speaking of Codex, do you mind pulling it up and just showing us how you like How do you get organized around a Swift I've actually never don't tell Sorry, we're going to do an admission right here. I have not built a native mobile app ever. Even in the age of AI, I have not built one. So, I am learning as we go. How do you How did you kick this off? How do you you know, how do you work it?

I understand how to architect apps. I understand like what's required if I need to make the front end and the back end. Um also the experience that I want. I think that was the most important piece here is

the experience I wanted for this app. I used to be a product manager as well. I was a product manager for 4 years. So, I've learned to work in epics and user stories,

right? Because those are closely tied to user problems. So, that's one way I found um

I've had like the best results when building AI apps. So,

how did you start?

I first started with a very long prompt that was very specific. And this prompt opened with literally I want a very aesthetically pleasing application.

Like it's This is my equivalent of make no mistakes, but is I want an aesthetically pleasing iOS application um that would that I can learn Norwegian with.

And I described the experience I want, which was basically I want this application to run on GPT live one cuz GPT live one was just released I think a week after. So, GPT live one was the technology that I tested that enabled me build this. I don't think I'll be able to build this without GPT live one today. So, I specified we need to use GPT live one.

And then um we needed to use GPT six uh Luna for any other AI um any other AI tasks on it. I described also the experience I wanted. So, I wanted an orb that was, you know, a pulsating an orb that I could talk to that felt like a phone call, like a familiar interface that we would use.

And then I went on to describe the the style. So, what is something one? I literally wrote, "I want something that feels like fall, like autumn.

Um use fall uh fall colors. Um and again, it should be really beautiful. Follow um

design best practices like you are a senior designer at Apple's. So,

I'm just giving

I'm just giving it references of like I cuz I needed to get the taste that I wanted. Uh because I live in Norway now, I I love to adopt like a very minimalist style. So, I was like, "Make it like it should be really minimalist.

No element on the screen should exist unless it absolutely has to.

And if something isn't necessary, remove it or put a toggle for it." Um so, this was the like the base experience and then I requested that it reviews it the design after it's done. Now,

the first design it produced was

It was in dark mode.

It was in dark mode. I'm like, "No, this isn't going to work."

look, you don't need to know Swift. Like you just don't. It's none of your business. You don't need to know You need to know that maybe that you should use Swift, although AI could figure that out. But what you do have that I feel like a lot of people haven't invested in their own skilling is design and product language. Like truly the ability to describe what you want with specificity. And when people talk about taste, they talk about taste all the like what is taste? We need taste.

And really what you need is design language and references in the world that you can point to. You need to know what liquid glass is, you need to know what minimalism is, you need to know what a gradient is. And

and I think the more rich your reference set is when it comes to design, the better. And then on the product side, the more you know how to articulate a user journey

in a way that anybody can execute on an engineer, human engineer,

a AI engineer, the better that like workflow will be. And so, you know, when people ask me like, how do you develop taste or how do you get good at work? I'm like,

describe websites. Like use your words to describe what makes brand A versus brand B special or what makes website A or app A better. And the more you practice that, I think the better you can be at prompting

agents to do a great job.

people liking the experience, but I also saw a lot of people that had similar applications.

And then I looked at the difference between what I built and theirs and I noticed a lot of it just had to do with the experience, like how it felt when you looked at it, right? A lot of it were was also in dark mode. Like I rejected first, it had a lot of a lot of features, right? Um for for me, I just wanted a speak and a caption. A caption would be the only way you would understand what's being said if you're just hearing the language for the first time. That was my opinion and that was the only thing I wanted.

Yeah, uh please please just speak English.

Uh yeah. Yeah, we can speak Norwegian. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah,

I'm with my friend and me.

Uh yeah, it's not going to be my friend and me.

um I'm doing all right. And it's it um Miro asked me, so what am I doing? I said I'm in a meeting

with a friend. And um Miro said something but I ignored that and I said, please can you speak English?

And Miro said, no, I cannot I cannot speak English back. I have to speak Norwegian. So I think I can pull up the the past conversation.

Uh so it was like uh hi, like what do you want to talk about today?

I was like, oh yeah. It was like, are you ready to start or do you want to think a little bit?

I was like, hm. And I said, can you hear me?

Um and Miro said, yes, I hear you. What do you want to talk about? I said, I'm in a meeting.

Uh

and I said a meeting wrong. I said yarap or en mote.

But that's the wrong tense. So he says, uh it's called et mote.

Not en mote.

So it corrected me as I said that and then asked, what's happening in the meeting?

Then I said, can you speak English? Uh and Miro said, I'm only going to speak Norwegian. What are you doing in the meeting? I said, oh please, just speak English.

And then Miro said, I understand but I'm going to speak Norwegian. But what are you talking about in the meeting?

And then I gave up.

I'm stuck at I'm a man or this is a phone.

You know?

Uh so I would I wouldn't be able to hold a conversation

and then I took the Norwegian I took the Norwegian language exams.

Um and I took a course for like a week like a short course for a week just so I understood like grammar.

Um I took the exams. I passed. As soon as I came out of like the exam hall, I deleted Duolingo because I was like nah, this is just completely useless.

And I tried it and that was my like my motivation to build something like Mimir started after that. So Mimir has just helped me get better at practicing my Norwegian in different like settings. And you know, this is

I could talk about like the weekend. I can also see like the words that I've learned.

Um

And how well I've you know, I've gone with like with each one. I recently introduced flashcards for instance in case I want to practice like the the words.

And I also have themes because at the end of the day you want to be able to speak these languages

within a particular setting. And I can also pick like a random theme about like maybe AI or something in the world today. It would search the internet and come up with the conversation

about about that. But at the end of the day it all lives on the talk screen. I just go to here. I start a conversation with Mimir and I just talk about stuff whatever. And it just keep nudging me further and correcting me as I go and it wouldn't stop correcting me until I say it properly.

One, let's put aside that you've viper to this whole thing, which is awesome. Two, let me just say the meta skill that you have, which is like a growth mindset, which is I can learn Norwegian. Like I can learn something, and I feel like this is the skill that really helps people go very far in the age of AI, which is like if you just have this confidence that this thing is a solvable problem, learning a language is a solvable problem, building an app is a solvable problem. Like these are solvable problems that you have the tools, and if you can just ask the right questions and get the right feedback, you can get there. I think that is just like that is the skill of the And also, I would say

being really low ego, which is like I'm okay getting it wrong. As long as I can be corrected, and I think AI is such a great teacher because I tell this to people about learning to code,

I say it is an infinitely patient private tutor. Like it's not going to make fun of you. It's not going to say you're stupid. It's not going to be embarrassing. So, like the ability to use AI as a tutor for any topic and let it be patient with you and let it let you make mistakes. I just I think it's the skill that is a real signal that somebody's going to be very high impact in this in this next phase of of the world. And so, that is what I'm observing of you at a higher level. Uh no, thank you. This is This is so I like it's like giving me so many ideas. The other thing I just want to pause before we go into a couple other workflows is

GPT live. So, for people that don't know what GPT live is, um it's Open AI's like kind of real-time voice model and it does really good with real-time experiences and like interruptions, which make it great for this kind of language testing.

The other thing GPT live is really good at is voice control of apps because it's so fast. So, um I think we did an episode. I'll have to dig it out of voice control

through GPT live in your app. Um so I I I I I think GPT live is a totally slept on model that people don't appreciate how much you can do with it. The only thing I have to ask you a question. Is this expensive to run?

So, the honest answer,

um

yeah, but I just chuck it into like my token budget.

All right? Um I made it open source, so anyone can run it. And uh it currently costs around

um

it'll cost about

$5

to

to chat with Mural for

I think for

30 minutes.

Yeah. So, for about 30 minutes, it's going to cost $5 in

Now, it's going to cost between $3 and $5 for 30 minutes. Um but then, I'm building this for fun, so

I'm just I I put $1,000 on my Open AI mesh

and just let folks burn it to the ground.

I think it's really like $100 now.

I'll also say is that it's less expensive than a 101 tutor. Um and and you can't call your tutor to your house in the middle of the night and say I'm ready to practice some Norwegian. So,

I it's it's so cool. Okay, we're going to do a couple more workflows. We'll get you out of here. So, aside from building cool apps and learning Norwegian, you run a business

and like me, like to keep that business lean with agents. So, tell me a little bit about how you run your business with agents.

I put together a mandate internally and I called it 100X. And this was a way for us to go 100X our kind like revenue goals and we we set up as a company without drastically increasing head count. And this meant that we needed to use AI as much as possible without using AI to generate content or seeding any of our creative work to AI tools.

Um

Uh so, first of all, I had to figure out everything I, you know, I currently do. I put together a list on Notion. That was my first step. I listed everything. So, as the founder and I'm a solo founder, so I do a bit of customer success. I handle most of the inbound sales. Currently working, I think, about 11 to 15 deals in parallel at the moment.

Um I handle the product team as well because I used to be a product manager. Um and I do a bit of like accounting, HR, interviews, like hiring, to just talking to folks. And we have a team of around 25 people

internally. Uh so, I wanted a way to be able to manage a lot of things. First, I wanted to hire near of staff.

Um I tried hiring someone. They didn't start. They quit on like just before they started for some reason. I think that was like a hail Mary for me.

Um, so I decided to adopt AI tools. Um, and I tried different tools, right? I tried Claude first. I got used to use to Claude co-work. And then for some reason my account got banned.

Um, I don't know why. I skipped it. I went back to ChatGPT and installed work. Um, and I decided to use projects as I currently have on here.

I set up projects for everything, basically. Cuz I just wanted a solid way to manage

um, to manage individual things I do. My company's called HackPanda. So, for every critical piece that I work on directly, I create a project for it. I have a project for HackPanda operations. This is where I manage things like, you know, invoicing,

um, campaigns. Not just And if anyone sends me a message on Discord, this is where that would likely fall into. And that task will be run um, from here.

Um, I have stuff for growth. So, this is like I also get like an operator brief every Sunday night of the week. So, what's something we should start doing, what's something we should stop doing, and what stuff we should keep doing. I also ask you for like the three highest impact activities I will conduct this week. So, that's a routine. So, I use routines a lot as well.

Um, we're building an internal tool for growth. Um, this is what we use to uh, we we use with our customers. We go from content ideation all the way to distribution in Booksy. Uh, I also support with the growth of Booksy and content creation.

Uh, so I created a project for it. For sales, I did the same thing for our website. This is my podcast, everything outside code. Um, I manage like interview briefs and all that um, in there. And just every other thing. So, I use projects a lot with with Codex. Uh, now for Codex, I kind of reserve reserve like the complex work. So, for instance, Miro having written Swift, so I kind of like wanted Astra to work to work on Miro. So, I wanted frontier model on that stuff.

Um, that that's what I do on Codex.

But, on the flip side,

I found Grok Bot and instantly, I think it was amazing. Like it was a game-changer for me because it gave me colleagues.

Whereas with ChatGPT, I got and like Codex, I got folders.

Um,

and on Grok Bot, I got my fellowship as I like to call them.

I was first asked to create a chief of staff. I just called him Gandalf. Straight up.

Straight up. And then I asked Gandalf to create everyone else. I needed, um, other bots for engineering, marketing, project, uh, product management, accounts, sales, and customer success. And kind of the personas are, you know, very close match, you know, like Legolas, you know, pretty Legolas is, uh, the

the marketing dude. Elrond, the elf, runs engineering.

Um, I have Gimli, um, the dwarf with the coins, um, in accounts. Uh, Aragorn recruits everyone and, you know, sells the fellowship. He runs sales. Um, and Sam always plays support. So, he's his customer success, uh, for this one. And yeah, uh, Frodo is in charge of getting the ring. Uh, he's basically the product owner

in this case. So, uh, Frodo runs PM. And yeah, so this I set up the fellowship. And with with my AI workflow, what I do first of all after set up the fellowship, and not just on Grok Bot, but also on Codex, also giving it access to everything.

Now, I know it's counterintuitive in some

parts and some conversations that you want to be skeptical about what AI has access to

and what it does and what, you know, it has read or write access to. Uh for me, I just let all that fly out the window. The only thing it doesn't have write access to is the bank.

So, unlike anything else can go wrong. I mean, I don't have access to customer data, right? So, that's safe as well. But, uh the bank and customer data, aside from that, everything is up for grabs. So, give it access to like Loom Suite, I give it access. I just look at my browser window.

I have like 15, 16 tabs open and I just give it access to everything that I could, you know, I could see from Linear, Notion, my calendar, Pipedrive, QuickBooks, everything that I had access to,

I give it access. And then for ChatGPT, like for Codex,

um I just enabled computer use and browser use. So, if it cannot find it via MCP, just use my computer. That's all right. It's fine. It's whatever. I I I I just give it access. It's like allow once, I'm like, "No, allow always." That's you know, just use it. Um so, setting those up,

that was like the next thing and that just recently changed a lot of things for me, right? So, I wasn't giving it information. I would just like I could even put a typo

in the input box. I would just like give it my like a thought, like I've been hiring and talking to like a lot of candidates.

Um

I built a tool internally called um Three Pipes. So, uh and the reason I built it is because I have a firm belief that at the end of the day, we're going to be left with systems of record, like a custom database that is designed around a problem.

That's what's going to be left and then AI interface.

So, um I'm I would build these tools internally and they just become systems of record. Three pipes is for people and HR. So, now I just tell like my Grok Bot and

the good thing is I don't need a skill for this. I talk to candidate and I just say to my Grok Bot, "Hey, I just spoke to this person. Get them into three pipes." It goes through all of my email, my calendar,

looks at meeting notes, collects all that information, puts it in three pipes, gives me a summary. It's all done and it scores the candidate as well and says, "You've spoken to 15 people. This person ranks number seven on that list, just so you know, like FYI." Um and I skip down it then I can switch context to something else to sales. So, that's that's like the one piece and then the final piece of how I use AI and how I'm set up currently would be

the skills that I have. Um so, there are a couple important skills

um

that I do have and I call these important because over time, while I've gained a lot of skills, the models have gotten a lot better that I don't need these skills anymore. Um so, there are just very few that stuck.

Uh a skill I use for um growth marketing, like to create a growth marketing strategy based off what we know at Hack Naja.

Uh a skill to create a content strategy um also based on what we know and then my content disrup skill.

I I think this is so useful. I mean, for folks that have stuck around this long in the episode, you've gotten like true gold, which is: you have Codex for complex tasks,

Codex projects to keep everything organized, Grok Bot as you do this very similar to me, where like Grok Bot has roles, so it's like your marketing role, your HR role, your sales role. Um you need an Eye of Sauron that looks across everything for things going wrong. That's the last one.

Eye of Sauron. Um and then you use just like skills very precisely, like very specific ones.

Um

William, this is one of my favorite up. I'm not I've done a lot of episodes. This has been one of my favorite one of my favorite ones. I'm going to ask you our one question we ask every guest and then I'm going to get you out of here to back back to all your awesome work. But when your Grok box, your Codex, your Norwegian agent just is not replying to you, doing what you want, what's your prompting strategy? Are you polite? Do you yell? What's the what's the real truth?

I reboot um and I try again. And if it doesn't work, um I try to be a bit more specific.

Right? Cuz

I know how to do it already. I just don't want to do it because it's like low-level work. Uh so I get very specific on do this first, test this first. And also review what you've done to be sure this is what I asked for. So just asking it to like go over it again.

Um and more recently I've had um my Grok bot drive my cursor agent. Um so while the cursor agent would do like some random stuff that isn't really accurate, my Grok bot is sort of like that

agent that goes and reviews all that again and uh improves it also. Um so that that's been like one way, but the agents have just been like really good that if it doesn't get it, I just go on Twitter and I blame Tibo for not fixing it.

Yeah, I try

or I just switch the agent use something else and wait and update it. Oh, then But yeah, that's that's typically my strategy. I don't get frustrated.

The frustration I feel is if it eventually doesn't get it at the quality I want, I get scared because I'm so dependent on agents now that I fear for myself. I'm like, what if all these tags? What if I What if these agents go to zero tomorrow? What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to manage 15 different like sales opportunities in a week in tandem having all these calls, still doing my hiring, doing all these things at once. I That's the only like panic attack I get because I'm like, this goes down, I'm screwed.

What am I going to do?

uh that's that's a way to find me. And if anyone's interested in growth, especially if you have a dev tool product, and you want to reach an X5, 10K users, I'm always happy to chat about like how we could do that together,

basically.

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