S1. Ep41 - How to Create Your Own Business App Without Coding
Think creating a custom app for your business requires a six-figure budget and a team of developers? Think again. In this episode, Katie and Noel break down how AI has transformed app development from a years-long, expensive process into something you can build in hours or weeks with tools like Google AI Studio (completely free) and Claude.
They reveal why small businesses are ditching expensive SaaS subscriptions to build their own apps, how to use Make.com webhooks to connect everything without coding APIs, and the realistic costs (spoiler: around £50/month max for hosting, often less). Plus, Noel shares his process for building apps in just 1-2 hours a day while AI does the heavy lifting.
Perfect for service-based business owners, solopreneurs, and small teams who want to consolidate their tech stack, integrate disconnected systems like CRMs and client portals, and finally build exactly what they need—not what a SaaS package forces them to pay for.
How to find us:
Join our membership over on Skool, where we support you on your AI and automation journey. We share exclusive content in the membership that shows you the automations we talks about in action how to build them. Find out more about the AI Business Club here.
We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all.
If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai
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Katie (00:27)
Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hello, I'm Katie. And as always, I've got Noel here with me. Hey, Noel. How you doing this week?
Noel (00:35)
Hello. Incredible.
Katie (00:38)
Incredible. Why so incredible? Are you getting into the Christmas spirit?
Noel (00:40)
Yeah, again that Christmas spirit. Why not?
Katie (00:50)
So Noel, this week you wanted to come and share about creating your own apps for business. So obviously apps now are so much easier to create than ever before. I know just like going back a few years when someone said, I'm gonna create my own app, you'd have to get like a software engineer, it would be incredibly expensive and was totally not doable for a lot of business owners.
Noel (01:27)
Yes, definitely it cost an absolute fortune and take forever. I mean, you get what you want, but it took a while to get there.
Katie (01:32)
Yeah, I know some previous clients and also business friends who have created their own apps. It did take years in the making. And I feel like now, just in like the past few years, we've come such a long way from that, haven't we?
Noel (02:06)
Yes, definitely. It's come on leaps and bounds, especially over last few years. But I would say within the last couple of months, it's got a lot, lot easier to do. Yeah, really exciting times.
Katie (02:21)
So I guess like the age-old question is like why would someone want to create an app for their business?
Noel (02:31)
I guess as like a small business or maybe a solopreneur, you're going to be subscribing to lots of different services and SaaS's and things, or CRMs. There's all kinds of things that you would need to subscribe to. And every now and then there's probably going to be certain apps where you think, well, why am I paying for that? Maybe I could try and bring that in-house or link things together, or maybe I want to create an app for my customers to use. So it makes my services to them easier. So there's two different ways of looking at it, I guess. Yeah, there's all kinds of different reasons, I guess they're the top ones.
Katie (03:15)
I think for me, like apps as a solo business owner who is service based, I saw apps as it was always like you would create an app for your clients and never like something for yourself. So I would imagine like a lot of other people who are similar to me would also be thinking the same. You know, you would only create an app because it's for your clients, whether it's to book in with you or it's to join a membership course, a program, a community, something like that. So I would be really interested to hear some examples that you have of apps that aren't for clients, but are for the actual business owner.
Noel (04:13)
Yeah, I guess one that everyone could probably relate to is like, let's say you run a shop. You could be running a physical store, you could have an online store with like Shopify or whatever. You could even have something on WooCommerce on WordPress, you might be selling things on other marketplaces like Etsy. So you've got all of those different streams and none of those are interlinked.
So yes, you could use automation tools like our favourite Make.com. You could use that to start gathering that information and putting it in a spreadsheet or whatever. I mean, that's helpful. That's a good start, but you could start to build an app that collates all of that information together. And then that could then be your central access point to all of your inventory, all of your orders and things like that. So you're not having to go around each individual marketplace and figure out what's going on. You could have everything come into one simple location. And yeah, it doesn't really need to be like crazy complicated either. You're just getting data in, you're saving it, and then you're displaying it to either you or your team.
You might have like a client portal, you might then have a CRM and none of those are interlinked. So you might then want to create linkages between those as well. So you get a full view. There's probably platforms out there that already do it, all that sort of thing. But then you're probably going to then have to pay a subscription fee for that as well. And it's like, well, then does it offer every feature that I want? Whereas creating your own app, you could be having a cup of tea and think, well, that'd be a good idea, and then off you could go and then add that change and then you're done. It's there and working.
Katie (06:12)
Yeah. I feel like where different platforms and softwares and CRMs, they always have packages. So the lowest base package just includes this, but maybe you want one thing that's in the highest paid tier. So you're then paying a lot of money for a very few things that you want. And actually a lot of things that you're not using or would never integrate into your business. So we can now create apps in order for us to skip paying for certain pieces of software. So things all link together and maybe things that we actually want them to do and only having the things that we want on there, or being then able to add certain things to this app as and when we want to maybe look at different reports or track different things.
Noel (07:17)
Yeah, definitely. All you would need really, I guess the only big caveat is you would need API access to those platforms. If you've got to pay more for that, then fair enough. But yeah, as soon as you've got that data, it's then really up to you to think of the things that you want to do. What would be helpful for your business? The world's your oyster at that point, which is quite exciting, really.
I've been building a few apps myself and it's just like, that'd be a cool feature. And then within like 10 minutes it's there and I can test it out and go back and forth and things like that and figure things out. And then it's done within like half an hour.
Katie (08:21)
Yeah. Whereas before that would have maybe taken like a week, two weeks just to get back to like your developers and go, this is what I want. Is this possible? And a lot of the times, no, it's not possible. Yeah, it is possible, but it's going to cost you a lot of money. It's a lot of man hours.
Noel (08:46)
Yeah, it's like when you get a builder around and they do the sharp intake of breath. That's going to be expensive, isn't it? It's one of those. Yeah, we don't... AI doesn't do that.
Katie (08:58)
When they do the sharp intake of breath. It's gonna cost ya. And we love AI for not being able to do that. I mean, there's going to be someone somewhere who's going to be able to make AI do that for us at some point.
Noel (09:04)
Yeah, definitely. Give it the builder persona.
Katie (09:18)
Brilliant. So we've spoken about like how much easier it is now to create your own app. But like really how difficult is it and like what tech experience do you need? Like what level of knowledge do you need for AI? And yeah, I guess I want to know, would someone like me who's not overly techie be able to create their own app without wanting to throw their laptop out the window or without having to be contacting support multiple times?
Noel (10:06)
I would say you would need at least a little bit of technical knowledge. I mean, you don't have to to get started. You could easily create like a minimal viable product kind of thing, just to see what it looks like and test it. But I would say having a little bit of technical knowledge does go a long way. You don't have to be some sort of coding wizard or anything like that. You won't need to figure out, well, now I've got this far, now I'm gonna have to code the rest. That's not really what you would need to do. But if you have got that knowledge or any sort of background knowledge, that is actually gonna make the process a lot quicker. But even if you've got no knowledge and you get started today, you'll find like within a couple of weeks, you'll be like, okay, you'll get that confidence and then start understanding how things all link together and things like that. You can start with nothing, but a little bit goes quite a long way, I find.
Katie (11:09)
Yeah. And I find actually just that basic knowledge can actually get you pretty far. And I've seen that with some of our AI Business Club members. Some have come in as complete beginners and actually being able to create things for themselves and being able to automate things by kind of just playing around and building up their knowledge.
Noel (11:40)
Yeah, I think with anything within the AI space, it's kind of repetitive. Like the more you do it and then the more you talk with AI or you use different tools, then you're building that skill set and knowledge without really even realising it most of the time.
Katie (11:58)
Yeah, it is very much so because it's kind of like, okay, that didn't work the way I wanted to. And it's actually thinking about why it didn't work that way. And it's kind of like, not that you're doing anything wrong, but like, could I do something a bit better? Or could I be a bit more specific here? And it's almost a bit like trial and error. But it's kind of just trial and learning from it, isn't it, more so than anything?
Noel (12:32)
Yeah, definitely. It all kind of comes back to prompt engineering as well. The more that you're up on that sort of skill, then I think you'll find you'll get to an end goal a lot quicker because you very quickly learn the quirks of each model and how they work. And then you subconsciously, especially for me, I just work my way around it. I go, right, I'm going to talk to Claude, well that's going to do things in this way. I'll do it another way.
Katie (13:04)
Yeah, Claude is gonna talk to you very differently than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is just gonna be like your hype person, whereas Claude's gonna kind of give you a bit more home truths, I find.
Noel (13:17)
Yeah, definitely. It does, yeah, not too brutally.
Katie (13:27)
Well, I think that's why they're good for different things.
Noel (13:31)
Yes, yeah, they all have their core strengths. I mean, they all try and beat each other on all these benchmarks and stuff, but yeah, when it comes down to actually sitting down and talking with it, you actually very quickly realise, oh, I'm not actually going to send code off to this model. I'm just going to talk to this one because they're really good at this. You've kind of just got to learn which member of your AI team is going to be best for each role.
Katie (14:20)
Yeah. And I know we've done previous episodes on like Claude versus ChatGPT, but actually I feel like there is a place for both of them in people's businesses. Kind of like what we were just saying, if you want more of a conversation, then ChatGPT is going to be the one that you go to. Whereas if it's not conversational, then I think Claude is definitely the right one to use.
Noel (14:35)
Yes, yeah, for me personally at the minute with Claude I use that as more of like my serious stuff, so like work stuff, and then ChatGPT is kind of like, hey, how do I do this recipe? I use that for more like fun things, not quite so serious.
Katie (15:10)
Well, for me, it's kind of like if I want to talk to my business bestie, but she's obviously busy working on her business. So I might have a conversation like that with ChatGPT. But if I didn't want it to agree with me and I just wanted it to give me some facts, then I'm going to talk to Claude. Claude is like your business bestie who can't help but tell you the truth.
Noel (15:24)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I like that about Claude.
Katie (15:32)
Okay. So going back to creating apps, how do you even get started on creating your own app?
Noel (15:46)
So there's a couple of ways. I would suggest you could start with Claude first. So that can build really, really simple things. If your app's going to be calculating or doing something, then it can create that within its canvas. So you can have a very early basic look and kind of get that look and feel of the app.
But when you then need to start connecting to external things, you then need to kind of move it out. So for me, Claude is kind of like the ideas guy. I'll very quickly draft something out. And then what I tend to do is ask Claude to give me the product spec for this app. And then it will detail everything. And then I take it off to my next tool, which would be Google AI Studio. That's at the minute my absolute go-to.
There's many other apps out there. You've got Lovable, there's Bolt and other things like that. They do the job. They do make it fairly straightforward. But why I like Google AI Studio is one, it's free, which is always helpful. That's a nice low barrier. And it just builds things in a really economical way.
You can give it something really vague. It can produce that for you. And then it might look very vanilla, it might look a little bit basic, but with the new Gemini 2 model, you can then say, well, let's jazz it up a bit. Let's make it look a bit more like my brand and my business. This is my website. Maybe I want it to look similar so I've got the same branding all the way through and fonts and stuff, and it can go off and then do all of that for you.
So Google AI Studio for me is my go-to right now. It's pretty awesome. But once you've kind of drafted out the user interface in AI Studio, it's then going back to figuring out what you want to plug in. So before you really even get to this point, you need to figure out what's the end goal that I want to get to. At which point am I going to be like, I'm happy with this, tick that off the list.
And once you've got that sort of information ready, you can then integrate apps and things into the app. And the real cheat thing for me is I use Make.com and I use the webhook functionality. So I'm just getting Google AI Studio to say, look, once I enter this information, go and send it to Make.com. Here's the webhook. This is the information I want you to send. And that can then connect into all of the thousands of apps that Make has and then send the information back into your app. So you're not coding the APIs for those platforms directly into the app first. We're kind of making it a little bit easier on ourselves and using either Make, n8n or Zapier to do that talking between the apps. And at least that way, if something goes wrong, you can actually see it. That's been really helpful for me recently. Once I've got that sorted out, I can see it's working, I'm getting the right thing, I can then be like, right, now let's migrate that into the app natively. And then Make's done its job for now.
Katie (19:33)
But you are saying that you still need to be able to use a platform like Make and you need an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude.
Noel (19:49)
Yes. So I guess really you can skip the Make step. It depends on which app you're wanting to connect to or which service you want to connect into. Because if they've got really good API documentation, you can just copy that into Google AI Studio and then say, well, look, this is it. Integrate it. But just to make life a little easier, you can migrate it out to Make.com and then do it there, just because it's visual, you can see it all. And if there's any errors, you can be like, oh, okay, I can understand it now. Because with AI Studio, it just gives you a really vague error message in the logs. I'm not that techie, so I don't really know what that means. And then I give it to the AI, they're like, well, I can have a guess at what that means. But at least if we've de-risked those sort of integrations outside, it makes life so much easier.
Katie (20:50)
Okay. So we were saying earlier that back a couple of years ago, it would take years to create an app for our business. So you've just described the process and the tools of creating our own app. Realistically, how long is this going to take someone to create?
Noel (21:15)
It kind of depends. The big factor is how complicated, how big is your vision, I guess. But if you've got something that's quite small and constrained, it's only got a few things it needs to do, you could...
Katie (21:28)
Can you give us an example of that?
Noel (21:33)
So let's say with the CRM or you've got a client portal for your service clients and things like that. So that's only two integrations that you'd need to bring together. Depending on all the different things that you need in there, it can only take like a couple of hours probably to get something basic and functional.
You could do this while having a cup of tea. You can get AI started on the work, go off, do something else, come back, see what it's doing. So that's how I tend to work. I have AI working away in the background, doing its thing, and then I check in on it in an hour and see what it's done. So yeah, you could go from zero to something working within a couple of hours, I would say. If you've got something that's really complicated, you need databases and all that sort of stuff, then that's probably a couple of weeks, but that's not a couple of weeks if you're sat there 100% of your time watching it. It's like a couple of weeks and you're maybe doing a couple of hours a day. The more time you could put into it, then the quicker you'll get there. But for me, it's just a couple of hours a day.
Katie (22:47)
As an example of the apps that you have built, how long did those take you?
Noel (22:59)
So there's one I'm building at the moment, which is not quite finished yet, but that one's been going for about three weeks currently. I'm doing that as kind of like my 4pm to 5pm at the end of the day. I'll be like, okay, now I'm just going to do this feature. And then I've got a big tick sheet of all the things I want in the app. So I just go in there and go, right, this is what I want to do now. And it goes off. And then the next day I'll come back and right, tick that one off, next one.
Katie (23:37)
Okay. So it's fairly speedy depending on how much time you've got, how much technology you have as well. Apps, I mean, I always knew that they were very, very expensive to create. So only like the really big businesses were able to create them. What cost are we talking about if we're making it ourselves like you've just been talking us through the process and the different tools?
Noel (24:13)
So if you go down the Google AI Studio route, that's free to start off with. So your development team is costing you nothing, which is amazing. But obviously, if you're then connected into Make or Zapier or anything, you might then have to pay your subscription fee for that little part. If you've probably already got those anyway, if you don't actually need them, you could integrate it directly. So yeah, the costs are incredibly low.
And then going forward, the only additional cost you would have after developing would be where are you going to host it? If you're a solopreneur and you work from your laptop, you could just run it on your laptop. So there's no ongoing cost. But if you've got a team or you want to give it to customers, then you will need to look at hosting it somewhere on the cloud. But there's loads of inexpensive ways of doing that. So realistically, if you budgeted maybe $50 per month after, I mean, it'd probably even be a lot less. If you've got AI in there, obviously you would then need to factor in your token usage and things like that.
But there's no massive upfront cost to pay to anyone really. You're just paying for your usage and wherever you're going to host it.
Katie (25:45)
Yeah, so there's not that huge like $10,000 upfront fee before any work's even been done. It's going to cost you, you think, depending on what you're building, from $50 per month.
Noel (25:56)
Yeah. I would probably set that as like your maximum budget. I would say you could easily do it for a lot less. It all depends on where you're going to host it. If it's got AI in there or if it hasn't, then that's going to be super cheap.
Katie (26:23)
Sounds great. And of course we are helping people inside of our membership AI Business Club how to create their own app. So if you want some more hand-holding, step-by-step processes, or even someone who's going to be able to answer your questions and give you some support, and of course, cheer you on when you actually create your own app, we would love to invite you into our membership. You can find all the details with the link below, or you can just go onto Skool and search AI Business Club and we will come up. We would love for you to come and join us. We'd love to see what you create. Or if you have created an app, come and tell us, we want to know what you have built because what I have found is that people just create the most amazing things, whether it's doing something really cool for their business or it's helping them out in everyday life. Honestly, I love hearing about it and so do you, don't you Noel?
Noel (27:30)
Absolutely. Yeah, it's incredible what you see.
Katie (27:34)
Yeah. Thank you so much for listening and we will catch you next week for another episode. Take care.
