Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley
How to Build Your Own AI Software (Without Knowing How to Code)
17 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the 'vibe coding' revolution?
I got to a point where I saw this AI writing on the wall of everything will be able to be automated. Do I sit back? in my business that I'm already burnout on and watch this slowly dismantle everything that I've built. Do I take the chance? Do I be an early adopter?
Do I bet on this being a technological revolution and try and be a leader, create something early that helps people, risking cannibalizing my business? That was the decision that I made. It's a never-ending grind, man. And then you feel behind if you take that rest time. Or at least I find myself doing it. That's exactly it. Yeah.
Yeah, it's like, how do you marry this desire to achieve and grow and get better with the fact that you can't just go all the time? And I think we all probably know, too, I'm sure I'd be interested if this is the case for you, but... Yeah. So... There we go. That's better. Cool. Okay. Awesome. All right, dude. Pertinent to the moment. Hot on your brain. A story that just came out.
Something that's happened recently that I wouldn't have picked up in all the research and your materials that you're like, you know, this would be really cool if we talked about it today or I'd love to talk about this today, etc. Well, the book is a big one. How deep do you want to go down the AI rabbit hole?
We can go as deep as you want because as a completely... I think that could be a really interesting... I don't want to do everything nerdy AI, but I do want to do some nerdy AI because I know... not being a technical guy. So I'm not technical at all. Like don't know how to code, et cetera. Uh, but was a math major. So I understand how the logic works behind these things.
And I'm kind of trying to download as much as I can. And, like, I have my own open claw that I set up that I've been learning the hard way on that. Learning a ton. Use clawed code to build multiple applications that I'm not – haven't commercialized, but I'm using for, like, personal stuff. Or, you know, personal in my business stuff.
And, you know, one of the things that – what was really funny about what happened this week is – so I do – Growth acceleration consulting, right? That's what I've done for 10 years. And obviously right now, everybody wants to talk about how those concepts now apply through the lens of AI. So I ended up... But the workshops I did this week...
What ended up happening was I threw out the entire presentation, sat up at the front of the room, and literally just asked. So what it was was it was a large group that they broke up into groups of 50, and then they cycled through four times throughout the course of the day. So I got four different groups of 50, which was cool.
And I would just yell out to the audience, essentially, like, what's a problem that you're having in your group? in your marketing or your sales. And we would just, I'd either pull up, you know, Manus, Claude, or OpenClaw, and I would just solve the problem for them like in real time. And it was so much fun. I know I could have done it a million times better, right?
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Chapter 2: How can anyone build software without knowing how to code?
Because I see, man, and this is where I love what you're doing. And I kind of love the way you approach it. And I was so excited to chat was... There's so much slop on how to use this, like AI slop on how to use these tools. I really want to get into like, where can people place some bets that have the best chance of producing real results?
So with all that said, how did you get into the marketing game? Why the marketing game? And what was it about AI in particular that has really caught your interest lately and diving so deep into this technology? Yeah, well, Ryan, firstly, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm excited to nerd out with you.
I feel like I was born for marketing, to be honest, as lame as that might sound. But I stumbled into social media marketing when I was 14 years old on MySpace. This is now 21, almost 22 years ago. Crazy to think. I had hundreds of thousands of followers. I was able to monetize it in multiple ways. My mom thought what I was doing was illegal.
Some of it might have been, but I got caught up in that grind really early on, and I sort of never stopped. Fast forward to about... 11 or 12 years ago, I moved out to Orange County, California, which is where my professional career really began.
I got started in an unpaid internship in a video production, video marketing agency, really worked my way up from being an unpaid intern, paid intern, part-time employee, full-time employee, ran that company, started my own marketing agency about seven years ago, and And that's when I started to grow my personal brand pretty heavily on social media. I wanted to practice what I preach.
Absolutely fell in love, got in early with TikTok. And what I started to notice, and this is gonna lead up into the AI game, is my organic top of funnel content that was attracting my prospective leads of business owners, entrepreneurs, or aspiring business owners or entrepreneurs, was useful websites for them.
So I created this series, Useful Websites That Feel Illegal to Know, and I was sharing software tools, productivity tools, marketing-oriented software, and it was a very natural pivot for me. I've always been an early adopter, and I saw in the market shift some of these AI tools start to come out. ChatGPT really early on before it was even public.
I got involved with Jasper, which was Jarvis before. And I just really went down that rabbit hole pretty early on. I got to a point in my company, in my agency, where I'm like a little burned out on this. And I'm really interested in this software game. I'm sharing these websites. I'm also an affiliate for these websites.
I'm making pretty decent money from affiliate marketing recurring with not as much work on a hands-on basis with agency clients. And so that led me to starting my first software company, which is called Syllabi. It's a little over three years now. It's an AI software company. And I'm non-technical, as we were just kind of chatting about it as well. So that's what kind of led me
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Chapter 3: What is the START framework for going viral?
I've been using OpenClaw for a while. I'm using OpenClaw personally, but I haven't pulled it into my business yet because I think there's some risks and security issues there. But that's how I personally focus on it. I'll give it...
Pretty thorough tests, amount of time, test different use cases and see that cost benefit analysis of is it really worth the time to go down it or do I let that shiny object go and focus more on what's actually working. But I do a lot of testing. when I'm home.
Can you describe your process for setting up what a test may look like, how you determine what success parameters are for what you'd say, hey, this, you know, I can see it as like three buckets, right? So you try something, you're like, I just don't see this working. I see this working, but maybe not now. And I this is working like this is something I want to package up and put into the business.
How do you set those parameters up? How do you set the tests and how you determine what success looks like for things that you actually want to bring into your business? Yeah. So time and money are the two biggest KPIs that I focused on. What are the current steps or current software or current processes? How much time am I doing? And I'll give you an example. Thumbnail creation.
Right now I have this new tool creating thumbnails for me. I was manually creating them in Photoshop for most of my YouTube career. Canva made it a little bit easier, right? So that's the natural progression. It saves me a little bit of time. Bless. probably year to half a year with Gemini's Nano Banana, now it's even faster, right?
And so I compare that where I can upload an example thumbnail, a headshot of myself, and an idea, and it will give me a thumbnail that's faster than I would have been able to create it in Photoshop or in Canva. Saves me time, saves me money.
Now with tools like OpenClaw or computer, there's a lot of these Asian tools out there, it's a little bit faster and that's exactly what I'm testing right now. So I'm doing this test exactly right now. I said go do some research on the top AI tech thumbnails in this space. Here's a headshot of myself I want to create a new video tomorrow demoing this tool. Create five thumbnail variations for me.
And it's doing that. And it's learning and it's proving. And so it's a little early for me to assess if this is the perfect workflow. But if it saves me time and it saves me money and it's faster compared to the previous steps, then it's worthwhile for me to continue and go down a little bit deeper in that rabbit hole.
One of the things that I realized this week when I was working with this group was, you know, we were talking about – I think I mentioned to you before we went live. So I had guys two days before recording this, which is why I feel a little sluggish because I did six hours of workshops.
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Chapter 4: Why is doing a time audit essential for AI strategy?
I wish this thing could be sped up. This is my annoyance. I don't like doing this thing. I do like doing this thing. And just going through that, you'll find so much clarity
in all of the steps that you can then take to now agentic AI or find an AI software solution to a task that takes you a large amount of time, find somebody, a virtual assistant, an executive assistant, or somebody to do that task. That has been just the biggest life-changing thing
thing for me for for processing and outlining step by steps that applies to ai and it applies to just improving everything about your life and your business so i couldn't agree with you more I hate that my best AI advice is do a time audit. Like, I hate that that's what it is. But it really is. It works. You know, it's funny.
So, again, this is just fresh on my mind, these two days I spent this week. So, obviously, that's where my mind is. But, like, the look on people's faces when I would start my AI growth acceleration talk with – The first thing you need to do is a time audit. And you know, like they'd look at me like, what? I came here for like, you know, machines taking over the world.
Like, what are you talking about? And I was like, well, we, we don't know if, if we're trying for efficiency and effectiveness, right. In a broad stroke, if we don't know where we need to apply those things,
you're just, again, you're just chasing rabbits, you know, or shiny objects for the, for the purpose of what not having FOMO or, or, or, you know, creating a new death scroll habit, you know, which, which look, I have unfortunately like prompt Instagram prompt posts, Uh, channels like have taken over my brain for a period of time.
I'm just, I'm like infatuated by, you know, the, the psychology and the phrasing and the setups and most of them I bookmark and never go back to, but you know, it is what it is. Okay. So I get it. I get it. We can all chase these rabbits, but this idea of a time audit.
in my opinion, is so incredibly important because it allows you to go, just like you said, I do this, one, when I do it, I find, I'm like, oh my God, I didn't realize I did that thing as much as I do it. Holy crap. And then, and here's where my next question goes is,
The last time I did a time audit, which probably was in the fall, I try to do them at least twice a year, if not more, if I'm feeling off. It's almost like a recalibration hack if I'm feeling like my schedule's up, but try to do it every year. It was probably the fall was the last time I did it. And this question popped into my brain when I started to look at some of the things that I was doing.
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Chapter 5: How did the guest create a profitable internal tool?
So, yeah, virality is a controversial word. Right. It's it's also subjective. So viral for me is different from viral for you versus viral for the local plumber. Right. You if you go viral. In different niches, it unlocks different things. And I also mean strategically going viral. I don't mean cat videos and dancing. The whole thesis of my book is don't be a content creator.
Be a business owner who creates strategic content. You have to have the back-end systems in order to... execute as well as capitalize on it as well because you could just- Very glad you made that clarification, dude. I'm very glad you made that clarification.
I think that's very important when we talk about this because you could post a video of one of your employees kicking you in the nuts and it would probably go pretty far if you had some trending music around it and a doink sound or something, right? But like- that's not actually, well, depending on your business, I guess that's not necessarily helping.
And I would say the predominant amount of people that are certainly listening to this podcast, that's not going to really help them grow their business. So I appreciate that quite a bit. We're talking about getting, we'll say maximum reach and exposure on content that builds brand and real audience. Yes, absolutely. Specifically in your niche. So I love Think about a content funnel.
At the very top of the funnel, you have the broad, awareness-oriented content. This is at the furthest reaches, touching somebody and bringing them into your ecosystem that could be a customer or could eventually be a customer. Just the broadest. I brought up this example earlier, right? When I was growing my personal brand for my agency, I was sharing useful websites that feel illegal to know.
All of those, you know, powerful opening hook. I'll get into kind of framework stuff if you want. Love it. Yeah, no. Let's do all the nerdy shit. As far, as nerdy as you want to go, we can go. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. All right. How much time we got? So, There's broad top-of-funnel-oriented content.
There's middle-of-the-funnel, the nurturing, the how-to, the authority-building-oriented content. It's where you go deeper on individual topics. And then there's the sort of FOMO conversion-oriented topic at the bottom of the funnel. I love to stay at that top of the funnel. This is where virality happens because it is the most broad appealing. It reaches the most amount of people.
Another great example of this, shout out to Roger Wakefield. Just an example that comes to mind. The expert plumber. Massive, massive social media following. Millions of followers in the plumbing niche. Was a local Texas plumber. Actually sold his practice because he was so successful. Now he teaches other plumbers.
um he had a lot of great how-to content how to fix a toilet how to you know change the spark plug or you know the whatever plug on back end you know whatever but his viral content is comparing uh popular uh tools or plumber reacts to um septic tank explosions or something like that, right? It's very niche specific. It's broad appealing. It's interesting.
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Chapter 6: What factors influence the build vs. buy decision in software?
when they do do it, it comes off as like braggy or egotistical and it gives you almost the opposite feel. So love to talk about the hook and then how we do that kind of authority part, the why you should care part really well. Yeah, so the other nuance here as well is short-form content tends to go viral faster than long-form content. Keep that in the back of your mind.
With that said, the infinite doom scroll on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Reels now, YouTube Shorts, all of these platforms, we have to capture attention immediately or the next piece of content probably will. There is an endless supply of content now and now. Salkku X. Five numbers. Five messages. Estimates. Conclusions. Power. 10 weeks to solve the code. 10 000 euros as a gift card.
Salkku X is waiting for its opener. Go to www.power.fi.x to participate. That is the importance of the opening hook. You also have to remember that nobody is doom scrolling on social media for you specifically. They are there for entertainment, for education, edutainment, distraction, time killing, whatever, right? So you need to have all of those components in mind.
What I see a lot of people get wrong is placing that A, that authority, that alignment at the beginning. That is not a good opening hook. You can save that for later. It's important to mention who you are, why they should trust you. There's different ways that you can do that. Stop doing it at the beginning. Nobody cares, right? So think about it from newspaper headlines.
You should be able to read it in your head in one to two seconds. I think you have the grace of three to four seconds if you're really good with it. You can also stack this with series as well. This is a little bit more nuanced. So a series, for instance, I'll give you some examples of opening hooks that I use. So I said earlier, these five websites feel illegal to know.
It takes two and a half, three seconds in order to say that. It's a recurring series because I can swap the five websites in there each individual time, but it stops the scroll. What are the websites? Why are they illegal? Are they actually illegal? It's a curiosity gap.
Another series that I have recurring right now, actually variable, is ChatGPT Secrets You Should Know Part X. Claude AI Secrets You Should Know Part X. Gemini or Google Gemini Secrets You Should Know Part X, right? It creates that curiosity gap. If it's something that I'm interested in, I'm going to continue to watch. And I can fill in the blanks every single time.
So think about it from that perspective. Oversensationalize it a little bit. Create that curiosity gap. And then the A, the align, there's different ways that you can do this as well. By the time you're in that process, so we stop the scroll, you have your opening hook, talking about a problem so you're expanding it a little bit, now you're maybe 15 seconds into the video.
This is a really good view extension retention hack that if you follow that strategically, especially in a short form video, much more likely to go viral with that content because short form content has that drop off point immediately if you're not hooking them. That align, keep it brief. You've earned their attention for 12, 15 seconds or so. you can say, hi, my name's Austin.
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Chapter 7: How can AI tools enhance content creation and marketing?
Like I've, you know, if it's five best toilet unclog strategies from Home Depot, you can be like, In the last 20 years, I've unclogged over 20,000 toilets in the state of Texas. Boom, you know, and then move on from there. Like a stat achieved based on the opening hook. Again, yeah, like you've got like two, three seconds in each little segment here.
The resolve, you can, that's where your meat and potatoes are. You can put more emphasis there, but specifically for this alignment, Remember, like, again, this is discovery oriented content. They don't care about you. Sorry. Sorry, everybody. They don't give a crap about you. If they want to learn more about you, they're going to click on your bio. They're going to click on the website.
Maybe they'll DM you. Maybe they'll go to the website. They're going to do a little bit more research. This is the user journey. Stop making it about you and always make it more about who you're trying to reach. Give your best information away for free.
Just have that two to three second alignment piece in there associated with a stat or a number that you've helped, again, tie it into that opening hook. That's all you need. Yeah.
And guys, I don't mean to spend so much time here and I want to move on from this particular topic, but I did think it was incredibly important because when when when you guys send me your posts and you'll say, hey, can you just take a look at this? Right. And again, I don't present myself as a viral expert. I am not. But.
The reason I had Austin spend so much time is that I feel like we go right to the info that we want to barf on people. And while that is important, right, unfortunately, you can't skip these two steps, guys. These are the two things I see kind of – we'll call them more amateur or non-professional marketers make is that –
this is where you psychologically hook people in so that they do give a shit about the stuff that you're actually going to teach them. So, you know, they're never even going to stop and you'll be in that like 200 view, you know, death Valley forever if you can't get past this point. So I just wanted to spend a little bit of time.
I appreciate you letting us languish there for a minute, but I did think that was important. Um, you know, so now you, uh, hadn't had an agency and now you start, uh, uh, AI tool that does video marketing, video creation, video editing to a certain extent. Aren't you cannibalizing your business by doing this? Why would you go out and get into this? And I think the tool is wonderful.
And please dig into it. Tell us about it. Guys, not a paid sponsorship or anything. I just think it's wonderful. And I really want to think through kind of Taking your business and ad agency and going, we can turn this actually into an actual product that people can use. I want to think through that whole process. Yeah, it did cannibalize it. And that was strategic. That was on purpose. So...
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Chapter 8: What steps should you take to vibe code your own applications?
Now we have a script that is based on my framework of the start video framework that I mentioned, but it's based on tens of thousands of video scripts that I've handwritten myself and have studied as well. That's alignment right there, folks. Do you hear him just align? It works. Because now you believe what he's about to say. I didn't mean to call you out, but that was perfect.
One stat, one line. It's so ingrained. Yeah, I know. It was perfect. Like literally, you guys, he just did what we were talking about before, right? So now the next part, and I didn't mean to interrupt you, but it was like so perfect based on what we were saying. Like now, like I know I just said, I go, oh shit, he knows what he's talking about. He did 10,000 scripts by hand. Like
OK, like I literally I like felt myself leaning in. That's why I'd interrupt you. I'm sorry. But that's that's what it is. I love it. By setting the stage there and saying I did 10,000 handwritten scripts myself. I can tell you from blood, sweat and, you know, blisters on my fingers from holding the pen, you know what this scripting process looks like and what produces a good script.
So just wanted to point that out. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, no, no, great catch. I don't even catch myself sometimes. It's just habit now. And then, so what's the next step? So you have your video script, right? Then it's the actual video creation.
And that's gone over through a lot of iteration processes and so by an image generation based on the context of the scene to now AI video generation with all of the models based on the scene. Edits everything together. And then you can connect all of your social media platforms and schedule and publish it out. So it's basically...
all of the steps that I was doing manually at my agency, charging a lot of money, multiple five figures per month in some instances. And it's self-serve, it's automated, it just helps a lot. And I don't mean to be self-promoting, but I just thought that I got to a point where I saw this AI writing on the wall of everything...
will be able to be automated, do I sit back in my business that I'm already burned out on and watch this slowly dismantle everything that I've built? Do I take the chance? Do I be an early adopter that I've historically been? Do I bet on this being a technological revolution and try and be a leader and create something early that helps people and risking cannibalizing my business?
And that was the decision that I made, and I think it was the best decision that I possibly could've made. I'm in a better situation mentally, physically, financially, in my relationship. Everything because of that decision. But yeah, I cannibalized my own business. I shut that agency down. But it was worth it. I mean, I love it.
One, I love that it's a product that you created out of your own business. And I want to put a pin there just for a second because I want to come back to this concept because I do think this is where we're headed with some functionality. However, I'm okay with... Just one, to clarify here, I'm okay with you talking about your business being a little self-promotional.
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