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 asked it to help him build an app. That app, Wave, is now a note-taking and transcription tool that generates between $400,000 and $500,000 in monthly revenue. He built it alone, without a co-founder or engineering team, and he still runs it that way.

The Decision to Build Without Code

Moore spent years on the business side of tech companies. He was Uber's first general manager of New York, later became a VC, and then joined the health startup Levels as head of operations. In every role, he worked alongside engineers but never built the product himself. That created a persistent frustration. "I developed a sort of envy of, you guys are actually making the thing," he says. After leaving Levels in late 2022, he was unemployed when ChatGPT launched. His first instinct was to ask it whether it could help him build an app. It could. He started with basic websites and simple one-screen apps, working with ChatGPT in one window and an IDE in the other. The process was a grind: "full day every day, highly disciplined for years."

How He Built Wave