What if I told you there's a $20 monthly investment that could change how you think about building apps? While most people assume you need years of coding experience to build anything worthwhile, AI has completely changed the game. You can now build professional apps that generate real revenue using nothing but plain English. Tools like Cursor and Claude Code for just $20 a month have turned English into a programming language. Apps that used to require teams of developers and months of work, you can now build them in weeks by yourself with zero coding background. But here's the honest truth. You can't just throw a prompt at these tools and expect perfect results. There's a specific workflow that makes the difference between actually building something useful versus getting frustrated with messy outputs. I've figured out this process through trial and error, and I want to share exactly what works. I'm going to walk you through the complete step-by-step approach that lets you turn app ideas into real working products. Even simple apps like this can generate thousands when you focus on good design and user experience. By the end of this video, you'll have the complete AI builder playbook. The exact step-by-step system I use to turn ideas into working apps. Let me show you how it works. Meet Sage, the productivity app that actually makes you want to complete your tasks. This isn't just a demo. It's a fully working app where real users can actually create accounts, log in securely, and have their data safely stored in our database. But for now, we can also choose to continue as a guest and go straight into the app. Here's how Sage works. You add daily tasks and assign point values based on their importance. As you complete tasks, the progress bar updates in real time. Complete over 50% of your points, it turns blue. Hit over 90%, you earn the purple achievement. Each day gets logged on your calendar with the color you achieved. This creates a visual streak that motivates you to hit purple every day. It gifies your productivity making daily goals actually satisfying to complete. Now let's check out the workflow. So the first step in this workflow is ideation. If you already know what you want to build, you can skip this part. But essentially you use chat GPT or claude and you want to be as specific and direct as you can. As you can see, I told it I wanted an iOS app and it should be a productivity app and gave it further instructions as well. It started spitting out ideas and I had a natural conversation with it. That's when I decided to take a simple concept and implement gamification because completing tasks boosts your dopamine and keeps you wanting to do more. That's why productivity apps are such a hit. I had another source of inspiration, an app that took GitHub's heat map concept and implemented it in a habit tracker. amazing app. I wanted something similar. So, I told Claude to use that as inspiration. Gave it more instructions and refined the direction toward the app you just saw. After discussing more, I arrived at the MVP structure, which leads to the next step. Before that, I also asked Claude for app names and icon ideas. It gave suggestions. I said I wanted something personalized and eventually landed on Sage, which I think is perfect. Now, the new AI image generation models are incredible. I initially thought about making a tumbleeed icon, but it didn't fit the theme. Still, you can create amazing logos with precise variations that follow your directions perfectly. Any type of artwork, you don't need graphic designers anymore. Other models aren't that great, but OpenAI's new image gen model is really amazing. I used it for the icon you saw in the app. Oh, and if you're enjoying the content we're making, I'd really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button. We're also testing out channel memberships. launched the first tier as a test and 79 people have joined so far. The support's been incredible, so we're thinking about launching additional tiers. Right now, members get priority replies to your comments. Perfect if you need feedback or have questions. The next step is making the structure of the MVP of your app. MVP just means minimum viable product. It's the most basic version of your app that fulfills the core idea you're trying to test out, so you can test it quickly and validate your concept. I asked Claude to make three pages which it had already discussed earlier in the chat. After it did that, I took the output, told it to add user login and a cover page and it added those as well. Then I had to do some rethinking and take out elements it randomly included. That brought me to my final MVP structure which I copied. Next, I went into cursor, created a docs folder, and made a structure.md file where I pasted everything Claude gave me. This forms the basis for our next step. Before we move on, I highly recommend using Git for your project because it tracks changes. I made specific commits at each step, which is what's allowing me to show you how I built the app at each stage. If you don't know Git or programming, no problem. Just ask your coding agent and they'll handle it perfectly for you. Moving on to the third step, creating your first initial prototype. Take the MVP structure you made and ask your coding agent, whether it's claude code, cursor, or something else, to build a prototype. Here's the important part. It needs to be in HTML. That's because AI agents don't have to do much work to build it. No extra dependencies, nothing. It's the simplest way to create your first prototype. So, I got to work and it came up with this initial prototype. It followed the structure.md really well because HTML is the simplest language for AI to output. Now, when I first got the prototype, even though everything was there on the page, it wasn't laid out how I wanted. For example, there was just a small progress bar, but I wanted a full widget. The structure was technically there, but not the way I wanted it to look. At this point, you need to perfect how you want the app structured. I'm not talking about design, just structure. Whether you want buttons, plain text, full widgets, or progress bars. Decide that. Now, I went back and told the agent exactly how it should be. I even used screenshots and said, "This is not how it's supposed to be. It should be this way. You need to perfect the structure at this prototype stage." Again, structure, not colors or design that comes later. Now, the next step is actually making your app look good. This is about the design.json file you see here. It's a way to style the structure you've already made and give it proper design. You can manually design every component one by one. But there's a better method I've covered before. You take a picture or UI inspiration you like. Give ChatGpt a specific prompt and it creates a JSON file with all the visual data to replicate that design. place it in your directory and you can style your app based on that inspiration. I've tested this many times. It works really well. Here's the prompt I used. I told it to look at the design.json implemented on the HTML prototype, but restricted it from changing the layout because we're already done with layout and don't want that changed. This created the new redesign based on the colors it picked up from my inspiration. You can see it's much better fully colored now and even the settings page looks decent. Now, here's an important lesson. You need to finalize your colors and other design elements that you want implemented at this stage. Not animations or 3D effects. Those come later. Not how the app feels to use, but how it looks. I made this mistake and had to redesign later while building the iOS app. What could have taken 5 hours took seven because I had to go back and fix small things I didn't like. Finalize how the app will look at this stage. HTML format is perfect for this because LLMs can easily follow your lead and make designs look exactly how you want. Now the fifth step is conversion. I needed to convert this HTML prototype into an actual working iOS app. You can convert from HTML into pretty much any framework using this method. All frameworks have templates. Nex.js is basically a template. And for iOS apps, you can get template apps in Xcode as well. I got an iOS app template, went back to Claude and explained my situation, how I needed to convert one file format into another. I specified the formats and told it to give me conversion rules. You can also enable web search if you're using less known frameworks. It gives you amazing rules that your agent can follow. I put those rules into cursor rules and set them to be followed. I told it to convert the HTML Sage prototype into an iOS Swift app using Swift UI. At the top, I referenced the rule file from Claude and it converted beautifully. I didn't really have to do anything. It replicated the designs and kept the pages exactly the same. The components were slightly different because of the iOS interface, but they still looked good. You can see the UI that was implemented. There are some small changes here and there, but overall it was a complete working app. Now that our app was complete, the next step was implementing the backend and database to turn it into a real working app with persistent data that wouldn't disappear and could handle different users with separate data. So the sixth step is building the backend and database. Now in my case, my app didn't really need a separate backend. It was already built right into the Swift app as part of the prototype. So, the app was already working, but I did need a database to store all the data and authentication so users could securely keep their data linked to their account. For that, I went with Superbase. Superbase is super easy to integrate. You don't even have to host it yourself. It's all hosted on their platform, and they give you three free projects to work with. But here's the crazy part, and this is honestly the best part. You literally have to do zero work to set up the database and authentication. And that's all thanks to their MCP server, which just does everything for you. When you add this MCP, you get access to tons of tools. It'll even create the project for you. Before this, you had to write SQL commands yourself and paste them into Superbase manually. Now, they've got a tool that does it all. You literally just sit back and watch it happen. So, I told it to integrate the app with Superbase using their MCP. I also created this data structures file in my docs and had Cursor scan the Sage app to figure out what database tables I'd need. When it came time to actually implement everything, Cursor just went ahead and did it all. Called the MCP, created the database, installed the Superbase SDK, and handled the entire integration in about 15 minutes. That's how fast I got authentication and backend setup. Now the app has full login functionality. It's become a real fully working app with actual database and authentication. The only thing left was making the app actually look good. You can see the app looks so much better now compared to the initial prototype and even the converted app. That's because I had to go back into cursor and make tons of changes. When I wanted animations, cursor couldn't really help. So, I switched to clawed code since it's better at complex thinking tasks. Here's the reality. If you want good apps, refining the UI takes the most time. This has taken me about 3 hours so far. For a perfect app could take a week or more. Without AI though, this would have been a month, maybe two. You can't just type one prompt into AI app builders and expect amazing UI. You have to build it yourself. I'll be honest, the UI is good right now. Not great. I'm still iterating on it. That simple animation took me 20 minutes, but I think it looks really good. I also added color changes based on progress. Still working on the calendar and settings. This is how you make apps with good UI. There's no single prompt that does it all. You need to add those small details that make it perfect. I used chat GPT to create the icon. I uploaded the basic icon from the HTML prototype, gave it instructions to improve it, and it generated this version that I really love. It's all about the instructions you give it. This chat GPT model is crazy good. Then I just went into Xcode's assets folder and dragged and dropped the icon. Super easy. You can also add versions for dark mode or tinted versions. After this whole process, iteration is the most important step, the time you spend perfecting it. You can get the logic and layout close from the start, but what makes an app look good are the animations, tweaks, and subtle effects. You've got to spend time on those finishing touches. That's what creates apps capable of making real money. That brings us to the end of this video. If you'd like to support the channel and help us keep making videos like this, you can do so by using the superthanks button below. As always, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.