What is Personal Software?

Chris Davis 0:12
And we’re back. Welcome to the All Systems Go podcast. Another episode, and as promised, I know I’ve been saying it for the last couple, Last couple episodes, that I am going to define personal software. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Chris Davis 0:29
Because again, what was what? Let me not say again, I don’t want to assume you’ve been listening to the previous episodes. If you haven’t, I highly recommend you go back and start at episode 202 where we redefine automation in this AI era. And what I want to present to you today is the idea that I’ve been.

Chris Davis 0:55
I guess I’ve been existing under. I think that’s the best way to. To explain it. But it’s this approach.

Chris Davis 1:04
It’s this approach to software using AI that I call personal software. There are people that use the term vibe coding and all of that. I’m not really into vibe coding, everyone, because there’s a part of vibe coding that just kind of says, you don’t have to know anything, just do everything because AI can do it. And here’s your app.

Chris Davis 1:32
And a lot of these quote unquote vibe coded apps have security flaws. Your data is not protected or even behind something that would require a moderate level of effort to not be hacked into. Am I saying that right? These apps can be easily hacked.

Chris Davis 2:00
How about that? They don’t require somebody to know a lot to be able to hack them. And the reason being is because there are people, I am not exaggerating. There are people who are still using spreadsheets to store sensitive information.

Chris Davis 2:13
And then that person goes and uses AI and says, hey, help me build an app. Then they build an app based on a spreadsheet that was already insecure. Right? No security on that spreadsheet.

Chris Davis 2:24
Sensitive information. Google will tell you even in its forms to do not use this form to collect sensitive information. And people use it anyway. I knew, I knew a business owner that I found out was storing my Social Security number in a Google sheet and I immediately A, requested that all of my information be deleted.

Chris Davis 2:43
Who knows if they did or not, but hopefully they did. And B, cancel all of my services with you. There’s no way I’m doing business with you. Right?

Chris Davis 2:50
However, watch. What? Watch, watch the trick. There are people that are doing that in our quote, unquote vibe coding right on top of it.

Chris Davis 3:00
So not only was your spreadsheet a threat before, now you put AI on it Vibe coded an app that you’re giving multiple people access to. You’ve just multiplied the threat to your data. This is. Why don’t.

Chris Davis 3:15
I don’t like the term. Let me, let me say not. I don’t like it. You can use it however you want to.

Chris Davis 3:21
I don’t. That’s not what I do. I don’t vibe code. I understand that there are security implications.

Chris Davis 3:27
I understand that there’s certain measures that you have to take to encrypt, encode to make sure that bots cannot hack and get to your data to be able to. If somebody does send a request, remove my data, you can do it. I know these things just from being in the SaaS space and seeing software be developed as well as being a power user of a lot of it that I do what I would call AI authorship and it’s really co authorship, but it’s using AI to create the code for me. But I’m instructing it on best practices and I’ll get into that in a minute.

Chris Davis 4:11
But the, the, the big piece of this is that personal software is something that I stumbled upon as I was evolving in my AI usage and I can’t. I do remember, I do remember everybody in the previous episodes I talked about. My first usage was copywriting and proofreading, right? Hey, can you create a social media post or read this email before I send it?

Chris Davis 4:38
Tighten it up. And as you, you know, you started to use it more and more, you started to see that generative AI hallucinates a lot. So you started to find the limitations there. And I just didn’t see what the hype was until I started test it out on some basic code, which was for like WordPress plugins.

Chris Davis 4:55
That started to happen and work well and I started to save money as well as plugin count, right? I had one website that was fairly big and it had maybe 70 plugins or something like that. Then after I’m fast forwarding like now to today, it’s down to like 40, maybe even 30, and the speed of the site is just ridiculous. So, so anyways, but, but I wasn’t limited to that.

Chris Davis 5:23
I’ve used AI to. Once I saw that, then I started to say, okay, what else can it do? Then I started to write scripts for my computer. Then I started to download tools like there’s this platform called Raycast that you can, that it can execute a script on your behalf with a keyboard, with a keyboard shortcut.

Chris Davis 5:45
There’s another one that I use too. But anyways, I started to see that. Wait a minute, I think it’s Python, you guys, that it’s writing. I think it is.

Chris Davis 5:54
But you start to see. I started real small and localized. And as I started to get a feel for AI authorship when it comes to code, I naturally started to think, what else is possible? And I know that you can develop a Chrome plugin.

Chris Davis 6:12
I have not yet, but you can. So I started to wonder, I started to test, hmm, what is this app building stuff, this vibe coding that people are talking about? And what happened was I saw an ad on Facebook. I think, no, no, no, no.

Chris Davis 6:29
A friend sent me something and said, hey, you’re into AI. This may interest you. And it was a lady. I can’t remember her name, but she had a course for a hundred dollars, a workshop you attend, and it teaches you how to build software.

Chris Davis 6:41
So I said, well, let me just see what the hype’s all about. I go in it, and I believe it was emergent, was the platform that she was using. I hadn’t used anything. You know, when it comes to apps, I was thinking big SaaS apps, right?

Chris Davis 6:57
Apps that people sign up for multiple users and all of that. And I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my boy Damian Rufus, who in my world is the AI king. Everything that I know is because he opened the door for me to walk through and get understanding and allow me to ask all of the most basic dumb questions to understand wherever I am at now, he’s 10, 50, 20 steps ahead of me. I mean, multiples, right?

Chris Davis 7:28
But having that source was huge for me, getting up to speed quickly. He was exposing me to what was possible far beyond what I would ever go to and do. But it helped me understand the foundations of AI and its limitations. So I just wanted to give a shout out there because this lady’s course that I went into, you know, she’s building an app.

Chris Davis 7:54
And I got inspired. I said, okay, well, I’m gonna do it. I’m not gonna just pay $100 and sit on the wall. I’m gonna do it.

Chris Davis 8:00
So I jumped in, and the first app that I built was a family planning app. And what it was is to help us plan our goals as a family for the entire year. So all five of us, we set goals, you know, financially, mentally, educationally, spiritually, and some other area I can’t remember just off the top of my head. And I create.

Chris Davis 8:23
And I told it, I was just talking to, you know, and it’s. It’s creating this Thing, and I’m like, wow, wait a minute. This is really cool. Now, immediately, everyone, I’m doing this in this platform called Emergent.

Chris Davis 8:41
I think that’s what it was called. So what. What was my first concern? Those of you who are new, you’ll learn.

Chris Davis 8:48
But those of you who know me know what I’m about to say. Who owns this? Who owns the data? Who?

Chris Davis 8:55
Where? Whoa, whoa, pause. Timeout. I need what?

Chris Davis 8:59
Everybody, I need control. I need control. That right there. So I learned Vibe coding, but I wanted full control, which took me out of Vibe coding and took me into what I call AI authorship.

Chris Davis 9:15
And it changed the. In my. My entire approach. It changed my entire approach to what?

Chris Davis 9:24
How I would build software. I didn’t know it at the time. So I like the app. It’s.

Chris Davis 9:30
It’s in this platform. And then I’m starting to. Look, it wants to charge me for hosting, and then it wants to charge me for tokens and all of that. So again, I hit up my boy Damien, and I’m like, hey, what’s the difference with tokens and what is Claude code?

Chris Davis 9:42
And what is that? What’s the difference with Claude code? And then when I log into Claude AI, I was just confused. It wasn’t anywhere near as cohesive, and it’s still kind of disjointed.

Chris Davis 9:51
The Claude code thing is still kind of disjoint. They’re sweet, you know, cowork code, code in the terminal, on your computer. It. It’s all one in the same, but you access it differently, you get different responses.

Chris Davis 10:04
So that’s where I was confused, because prior to that, all of these apps that I’m telling you I was building before, like the WordPress plugins and the. In the scripts and all of that, that was. That was all from Chat gbt, no Codex, just chatgpt. Now, I would never do that again.

Chris Davis 10:22
That was the hardest way possible. I would definitely use Codex, because Codex is. That’s what it’s made for. But at that time, coding hadn’t really evolved like that.

Chris Davis 10:30
So anyways, I say, man, I need to control this. And I don’t like the fact that you’re charging me to host. I don’t like all these additional charges when I already pay for domains. I already have a website.

Chris Davis 10:40
Is there a way to put this on my website? Can’t I put this on a platform that I already own? And that became an exploration in itself. Then I started to learn about GitHub and Vercel and Netlify and Cloudflare.

Chris Davis 10:56
And after all of the learning, I figured out how to deploy that same app on a domain that I use that I could set a password to and give my family members a password to and they could go in and, and start to enter data. The data will then go to a backend database that I controlled. At that time it was airtable. But since then I’ve moved on.

Chris Davis 11:23
I’ve moved on to airtable. I have my own database structures so that I truly control everything. And here was the powerful piece in it all. None of the software to do this costs a dime.

Chris Davis 11:37
So imagine me looking at people on the lovables replace emergent, VA, vibe, co, or all, all of these platforms and I’m in the Facebook groups and everybody’s complaining about running out of tokens, how the platform is limited and all of these things. And here, all along the wild, I’ve got my own framework of using Claude code locally on my computer and how I’ve got my app suite set up and I’m like, I don’t have any of those issues. None of them. And at that time I was on a $20 a month Claude plan.

Chris Davis 12:10
Now as I started to build more apps, I had to go up to the max. But I’m just like, I don’t have those problems because I took control. Now I’m saying this to say I’m not against any of those platforms. I’m against not having control and having to pay for something that I’m already paying for.

Chris Davis 12:26
I’m not going to pay Lovable for hosting when I’m already paying for hosting for my other websites. I’m not doing that. Call me crazy. Call me.

Chris Davis 12:35
Oh, Chris, you overcomplicate. No. And I’m going to save a coin while doing it. Right.

Chris Davis 12:40
But if I get it, it does take some technical acumen. You have to understand some things. Technically, if that’s not you. Yes, go through repl.

Chris Davis 12:48
it go through vibe code, Lovable. Whatever, Whatever the case may be the most important piece of this. I just wanted to give you all context of how I got here. So I start, I got the bug, I start building these apps and before you know it, they go.

Chris Davis 13:03
From my personal life, I built a basketball scoring app, right? Because I was assistant coaching my son’s team and I’m like, I want to keep stats for the kids. I’m a numbers guy too, so I want to let them know how they’re performing to help them improve. So big buttons that you click and if someone shoots a three, I click the button.

Chris Davis 13:22
Then it got five circles, who shot it? Then I click who shot it? And then it said made or miss, right? But then as I used it more and more, I tightened it up because the basketball game is moving so fast, I couldn’t answer all those questions.

Chris Davis 13:37
So I started to put some shortcuts in there. If I swipe down, that means they made it. And don’t even worry about it. If, if I swipe up, just log it, then I’ll come back and give attribution later.

Chris Davis 13:47
What was I seeing? I was seeing the, the power of creating software for my specific process. I don’t know how anybody else scores a basketball game. I don’t.

Chris Davis 13:57
This is how I scored though. And I built the software for it. So now in my personal life, I’m seeing the fruits migrated my from airtable. I think my budget was in airtable to an app.

Chris Davis 14:10
Oh my goodness. I can’t tell you how much time it saves every month when I’m budgeting, how clear it is for my wife to follow. No overdrafts, no any like. It eliminated all of that.

Chris Davis 14:20
So I’m personally receiving the fruits of my labor. So then I start to look at my business. I’m like, hey, wait a minute, what can I do over here? What can be fixed over here?

Chris Davis 14:32
And that is where the game changed from. Being able to create an app that acts as a, what I call a CRM viewer, which gives me all of the visibility into my CRM that no CRM gives you. They collect all of this data, by the way, it’s in a database and they give you what they feel you should see. I bypassed all of that.

Chris Davis 14:56
I learned how to use AI to duplicate those databases, put it in, duplicate them into a database that I control, sync it at on a timely basis, and then use AI to create a visual layer that I understand so I can see everything. There is not a metric that I desire to see that I cannot see. And this started to really open my eyes and say, oh my goodness, this is powerful. Why are businesses not doing this?

Chris Davis 15:25
Well, they simply don’t know how to, right? Everybody’s so focused on building the next SaaS company, the next big million dollar software company of one founder and a bunch of agents that they’re not doing. What I call think small. And that’s what personal software is.

Chris Davis 15:42
Personal software, software created that serves your individual needs for your individual workflow. And you can swap out individual for company because personal software can be developed for you or it can be developed for your company, but it’s specific to your process that you’re already doing in your needs. It is. It is the process of you becoming your own customer.

Chris Davis 16:13
I’m creating software for who? For you. Who’s you? Me.

Chris Davis 16:18
Right. And when you take this approach, it simplifies everything because you know exactly what it needs to do. You understand all of the specifications, you become the user. So when something doesn’t work, work, you know how to go back in and just say, hey, do this instead of that.

Chris Davis 16:34
And the reality that you don’t need to know how to write code was groundbreaking to me. It took me a while to trust it, but now that I’m in it, I’m just like, if I would have hired a developer, I wouldn’t know how to write code. I would just have a human writing the code, right? So there was really no difference.

Chris Davis 16:55
And this idea of personal software goes against. It doesn’t. I’m not pinning it against. It’s just a different approach.

Chris Davis 17:01
Approach. It’s an opposite of. It’s a contrarian approach to software development. Most of the people that you see online are teaching you how to build software, that you’ll have thousands and millions of dollars and all of that.

Chris Davis 17:12
What I’m saying is build software for you that will help you generate the thousands and millions of dollars. That’s my approach. That’s why I call it personal software. And my stance is make it personal, make it, keep it.

Chris Davis 17:25
The smaller, the better. You can always scale later, but the smaller the. The better. Solve your problem first, make you more money first, make your business more efficient first, then go out.

Chris Davis 17:38
And in that process, what you’ll find is that you’re learning how to be in the relationship with robots. You’re learning, you’re creating a better relationship with robots, right? You’re learning how to prompt, you’re learning the process of software development. You’re learning best practices.

Chris Davis 17:57
And if you’re not learning those, you need to be connected with somebody who’s teaching you those. And that’s a lot of what we do in my community is say, hey, like for instance, I have a skill that’s part of my app building. When I’m after, I’ve got a whole process of when do you use Claude in the browser and when do you transition it over into your computer to build the app, to deploy to your phone, to be able to view on your phone as a progressive web app? I’ve got a whole framework for it, right?

Chris Davis 18:24
But the part that I’m talking about is when you’ve finally got the idea finalized and You’ve created a specification document, they’re called PRDs. You move it to your computer. I have a skill that looks at that, PRD builds the app, but it, it built the skill within the skill. And if you don’t know what a skill is, we’ll talk about that again, join the community, get up to speed.

Chris Davis 18:44
And all of this, it goes through and makes sure every app that I build has the five security checkpoints, so that bots can’t hack, so that I’m secure, input fields are not spammable. Like all types of things that I figured out over time, talking to real developers, doing the research myself, so that when I build an app, every single time, you follow this framework. And I’m always secure, right? So now I’ve got my processes governed by software.

Chris Davis 19:18
Instead of these workflows in N8N because that’s what I essentially migrated from. I may have 2 or 3 still running in N8N, maybe 1 in make none in Zapier. Again, not against any of them. I’m just telling you guys my evolution.

Chris Davis 19:31
So now it’s software doing the work. And guess what? Software is a lot stronger than a spreadsheet, than a workflow, and having to log in somewhere with a visual editor, drag and drop. I still do visual editing, dragging and dropping, everybody.

Chris Davis 19:49
I’m at about 80, 20, 80% of the time I’m writing software to do it. 20% of the time I’m actually logging in, doing some stuff quick and dirty. But the idea of personal software is what changed the game for me. And then when I started to do it for clients, they needed dashboards to see their data a certain way.

Chris Davis 20:07
And they couldn’t do it with the tableaus and the Google, what is it? Google Looker Studio now? Who knows? By the time you guys listen to it, they’ve renamed it something else.

Chris Davis 20:17
But they were paying all this money, $6,000 for this Google Analytics person to create this dashboard that doesn’t populate the information that they need because they’ve got a complicated tech stack. Well, hey, look, I just plug in to the tech stack, sync up their databases, put a AI layer on top of it to create the code to visualize it for them. And it’s magic. I’m not when I say seems like magic, because this is data, this is information that they’ve been looking for, they’ve been trying to find easily for years.

Chris Davis 20:57
And now all of a sudden, here it is, right at the tip of their fingertips. And I started to see how it was changing how businesses operated internally. And that’s why I really doubled down on the approach to personal software. So it is the idea to start small, create software for yourself and your employees that solves the.

Chris Davis 21:21
That executes the profitable processes you’re currently using right now. Do that first. Build your muscle. Then once you understand, you get your environment set up, you push out some apps, then you can go on and start to build upon that.

Chris Davis 21:37
But this is the foundation, everyone. I’m not telling you to start big. I don’t want you to. I’m serious.

Chris Davis 21:45
Start small. There’s so much in AI, it’s too much to get lost too quick. And there’s a lot of sloppy teaching from some of the kings and queens of AI. Very sloppy and irresponsible teaching.

Chris Davis 21:56
You, you go this way, this is the way. These, these personal apps, they have no more than two to three features. And you will be shocked at how many considerations you need to take that take into account for just one feature and you start adding two. It doesn’t just add up.

Chris Davis 22:14
Like, one feature is 10, two features is 20. No, it’s like one feature is 10, two features Is 50. Considerations, it builds quickly, right? So some of you have never built software.

Chris Davis 22:25
You just have to get familiar with the software building process, prompting. There’s just a lot. So my approach to it is exactly that personal software should start small, solve your need first, and, and then maybe go out and solve the needs of others. I’ve shown people my basketball scoring app and they’ve asked me if they can buy it.

Chris Davis 22:46
I’m just not ready yet, everyone. I’m not ready to sell it. I’m not ready to go that far yet. Maybe I will be in the future and maybe if the price is right.

Chris Davis 22:57
But right now it’s just solving my need. It’s improving my team’s performance. And then in my business, I’ve literally been ready to hire a VA and can’t find a reason to. Because every time I can create a software, a set of software that does exactly what I would have hired them for, right?

Chris Davis 23:22
So here’s what I would say to you. If you are already creating software online, I hope you’re doing it in a way that’s secure and safe and scalable. Also, I hope you’re doing it in a way where you own all of your data, that you’re not dependent on any platform, that if it goes down, all of your data is lost. Third, I hope that you’re building software focused on you first.

Chris Davis 23:55
Kind of like the airplane when they say if we’re going down. Put the gas mask on you before others. Serve yourself with software first. Become your customer.

Chris Davis 24:05
You see the power of it before you go outward. It will make everything easier and the entire process better. I promise you, if you would just trust me. I’ve got over 30 apps built for myself, by the way, for myself.

Chris Davis 24:21
And I have built some very extravagant. And when I say I’ve built, it’s not me writing the code, I mean me instructing the AI agent. There are times where I’m instructing the software developer in the company. You get what I’m saying?

Chris Davis 24:36
Giving them guidance. I’m just saying built to simplify it. But I’m not being hired to build anything. You have a team.

Chris Davis 24:43
I’m showing them. I’m leveling up their skills so that they can produce more personal software for your company so that your company can operate more effectively. Right? And efficiently, all profitably, all of that.

Chris Davis 24:55
Right? All right, with that being said, that’s personal software, everyone. And that’s my personal story of using personal software. I’ll talk about more apps that I’m using over time in the podcast.

Chris Davis 25:08
I’ll highlight some, have some YouTube videos to walk through. It’s a wonderful thing once you learn it. Like I’ve mentioned in the previous episode, we, we do have ways for you to speed up your path to learning. Wherever you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a link to join the community.

Chris Davis 25:26
Just click that link, it will take you. You can join at no cost. And if that’s not fast enough for you, there’s course in there that will show you within two hours. If you go all the way through it, maybe even less.

Chris Davis 25:40
Get your local app creating environment set up for unlimited apps and for no charge beyond whatever your clawed subscription is. I can’t make this up. You won’t be charged for hosting, you won’t be charged for all of these extra things that the lovables and all of that charge you for. And you’ll be in full control to publish, update, modify as many apps as your heart desires.

Chris Davis 26:04
Right? It’s so the resources are all there for you if you want them. Just go ahead and click join the community and go from there. But with that being said, I hope that in this episode something was said to expand your mind even further, to understand the possibilities that you have in this new AI era with automation.

Chris Davis 26:28
So until next time I see you online, automate responsibly, my friends.