How Andrew Built an AI App over Thanksgiving with his New PDD Method
👀 Andrew has a new way in which you prompt AI to write code for you
Hello 👋
I’m so excited to bring you this inspiring story this week. I talked with Andrew who created distll.ai
Read about:
📚 How Andrew went from developer to product manager, and now focus on No-Code
🛠️ Went from a URL-based summarizer to an automatic interest-based summary
👀 A methodology he’s developing in which you prompt LLMs to write code for you
🗣️ He used TikTok, YouTube, and Substack to grow a freemium model
Enjoy and happy building!
Spotlight ✨
🤝 Meet Trae
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Simply describe your project needs in natural language, and watch it build by Trae
Upload your design files and let Trae assist in translating your visual concepts into clean, workable code.
As you code, Trae learns your project patterns and provides contextually relevant suggestions to help you code more efficiently.
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🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
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Hello! What's your background?
15 years in tech, worked across 3 industries at a wide range of org sizes (series A, B, C startups, PE backed, Public).
Started as a dev, then UX, then PM for the last 7 years or so. As new frameworks and tools with different syntaxs rose in popularity, my own coding fluency degraded overtime. So I began to turn to no-code / low code alternatives as a means of more quickly prototyping our my product ideas.
Most recently I’ve been using Cursor and building using the Prompt Driven Development methodology.
What did you make and how did you come up with the idea?
Originally I wanted to solve the problem of having too many articles to read. I was receiving links from friends, family, and colleagues and only reading about 10% of them. So the v1 was a summarizer app. You submitted the URL, then dist*ll would scrape the webpage, read it, summarize it, and email you a summary.
As I shopped this around I received some feedback from a mentor, “It would be better if dist*ll just sent me summaries that I was interested in, without me having to submit the URL.” Yes, this would be better. So I built that instead. The v2 was this exactly.
What problem does it solve?
The problem: At a high-level the problem is “keeping up to date on a particular niche or topic”. This can be broken down into a few use cases:
Competitive research
Market intelligence
Content creation ideation
Etc.
Can you walk us through how it works?
You submit a topic or idea
Everyday dist*ll grabs all webpages published to the internet in the last 24 hours
It finds pages that are semantically / topically similar to your prompt
It reads, summarizes, and emails you those summaries with citation links
Which No-Code tools did you use to build and run it?
I am using Prompt Driven Development primarily. This is a methodology I am developing in which you prompt LLMs to write code for you in a structured manner.
What was your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
There is a free tier with limited number of pulses available. Then there are two paid tiers (Plus, and Premium). Plus increases your limits and Premium provides unlimited pulses so you can track as many topics as you like.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
I’m marketing primarily through social media and building in public. I use three channels:
TikTok (~40k audience)
YouTube (~2k audience)
Substack (~350 audience)
What's your advice for No-Code Makers who are just starting out or want to sell their business?
Start building.
Pick some tools that look cool. Ship early and often. You’re going to get a ton of things wrong, and that’s just part of the experience. Don’t worry about it. Take the learning and adapt.
Keep building.
Keep shipping.
Thanks for sharing your story Andrew!
You can find more on:
Substack - bimonthly long-forms, building in public
YouTube - tutorials, thoughts, building in public
TikTok - quick takes, building in public
👋 Hey!
Did you enjoy this interview?
Andrew is one of the first No-Coders to develop his own methodology called Prompt Driven Development.
The very same methodology he used to create distll.ai over Thanksgiving.
That’s the reason I reached out to him to lean more.
Which brings me to an exciting announcement:
Andrew will be hosting a live session to tell you more about PDD (Prompt Driven Development) on Friday, February 21st at 10:00am EST
But there’s only one catch…
With our audience of over 13,500+ members
This event will fill up…fast.
If you want to get on the waitlist before everyone else…
Thanks for the feature Josh! Excited for the Prompt Driven Development lightning talk