185 - How to Build and Sell Apps with No Code with Billy Howell Artwork

Nikonomics - The Economics of Small Business

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Nikonomics - The Economics of Small Business

185 - How to Build and Sell Apps with No Code with Billy Howell

June 10, 2025 • Nikolas Hulewsky • Season 1 • Episode 185

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Join me, Nik (https://x.com/CoFoundersNik), as I interview Billy Howell (https://x.com/billyjhowell)! I'm so stoked to have Billy Howell back on the show!

Billy is a prolific entrepreneur who has built over 60 apps with AI despite having no traditional tech background. His agency, Stupid Simple Apps, helps other entrepreneurs build their own custom AI apps.

This episode, I challenged Billy to teach me how to build a chatbot specifically for my podcast, so I can easily query my extensive archive of 200 transcripts. We also dive into practical small business use cases for chatbots, from HR and onboarding to sales processes and internal SOPs.

You'll hear us discuss the challenges of managing large data sets and context windows, exploring solutions like OpenAI's embeddings (also known as RAG) and document summarization. I even share a Google Apps Script I built to summarize my transcripts into a spreadsheet database, which we then use as the foundation for our chatbot.

Billy walks me through using Replit and its powerful AI agent, leveraging ChatGPT to create a PRD (Product Requirements Document) and build a functional web app in minutes. We troubleshoot real-time issues, from CSV upload failures to database storage (shifting from in-memory to Postgres), and even touch on managing OpenAI API costs.

Enjoy the conversation!

Questions This Episode Answers:
How can a small business use AI chatbots for internal processes?
What's a cost-effective way to build a custom AI chatbot?
How do you handle large data sets, like 200 podcast transcripts, for an AI chatbot's context?
What's a PRD and how does AI use it to build an app in minutes?
How can you manage AI API costs and avoid unexpected token spikes?

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This week we covered:

00:00 Building Apps with AI: A New Era

03:01 Chatbots: Revolutionizing Business Communication