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

In November 2022, Josh Moore quit his job in tech operations and, a few weeks later, ChatGPT launched. He had never learned to code, but his first instinct was to ask the AI whether it could help him build an app. It could. Within a few months, he had a working prototype. By mid-2023, he had launched Wave, an AI note-taker that now generates between $400,000 and $500,000 in monthly revenue—built entirely by a single non-technical founder.

From Operator to Builder

Moore spent his career on the business side of startups. After joining Uber in 2012 as the first general manager of New York, he held marketing, operations, and government affairs roles. He later became a venture capitalist and then head of operations at the health tech startup Levels. In every role, he worked closely with engineers and spoke their language, but he was never one of them. Over time, he developed what he describes as "envy" of the people actually making the product. After 18 months at Levels, he left to go out on his own. Entrepreneurship had been a "common thread" since childhood—he taught himself HTML in the late 1990s to sell items on eBay—but he had always been an employee with an entrepreneurial bent. "I would often find that over time I would sort of as it got bigger, I would feel frustrated that I wasn't really running the place," he says. "In a lot of ways I'm unemployable."