I Quit My Tech Job, Learned to Code with AI, & Built a $6M App | Starter Story

Josh Moore quit his tech job in November 2022, and a few weeks later ChatGPT launched. He had no coding experience, but he opened the chat window and started asking it how to build an app. Within months he had a working product. Today, Wave AI Note Taker has 30,000 subscribers, processes about 8,000 hours of audio per day, and generates between $400,000 and $500,000 per month in revenue. He built it all himself, without a co-founder or engineering team.

From operator to builder

Moore spent most of his career on the business side of tech companies. He joined Uber in 2012 as the first general manager of New York, working in marketing, operations, and later government affairs. After Uber, he became a venture capitalist at a series A firm, then joined the health tech startup Levels as head of operations. He left that role in November 2022.

"I was the one-to-end guy. Wasn't the zero-to-one guy," Moore says. "I would come in early, but after the thing was established. And it almost sort of defined myself as someone who couldn't do zero to one. I just had a lot of stories that I told myself about that."

Two weeks after he quit, ChatGPT launched. His first instinct was to see if it could help him build an app. It could.

Building with AI without knowing how to code