The Non-Coder Who Built a $6M App With AI

Josh left his job at Levels in November 2022, ready to go out on his own. Two weeks later, ChatGPT launched. He opened it up and asked it to help him build an app. He didn't know how to code.

Today, his app Wave AI Note Taker does between $400,000 and $500,000 in monthly revenue. It has 30,000 subscribers and processes about 8,000 hours of audio per day. Josh built it alone, without a development background, using AI as his co-founder.

The Framework for Building With AI

Josh's approach to building with AI is deliberate and disciplined. He never lets the AI do things he doesn't understand. "If you go too far, it gets complicated," he says. "It makes assumptions that maybe you don't want." His rule is to keep the steps small and to ask the AI like it's a human: "How do you do this? How does this work?"

In the early days, this meant having a ChatGPT window on one side of his screen and the IDE on the other. There was no integrated tooling like Windsurf or Cursor yet. "This was a grind," he says. "This was like full day, every day, highly disciplined for years."