The Brad Weisman Show
The Brad Weisman Show
Mastering No-Code at Age 21 w/ Jacob Klug
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Join us in an inspiring episode where we sit down with Jacob Klug, a young prodigy from Toronto who's transforming the tech landscape with his innovative approach to No-Code Development. Jacob shares his extraordinary journey from creating his first app in grade six to mastering no-code tools like Bubble. He breaks down the no-code concept with an intriguing analogy, comparing it to assembling a PC with pre-built components, making tech development more accessible and cost-efficient than ever before. This episode promises to enlighten you on the flexibility and power of no-code platforms, empowering anyone to build sophisticated applications without deep coding expertise.
But that's not all—Jacob's story is also a testament to entrepreneurial zeal and passion. We delve into his high school days, where his journey began with a simple school-based marketplace app, and follow his path to founding his successful business, Creme Digital. Learn about the pivotal projects that took his venture from Creme Media to Creme Digital, including early successes like a Taekwondo studio's digital platform and the thrilling experience of working with large companies. Jacob's insights and anecdotes offer a rich tapestry of challenges and triumphs, serving as a guide for maintaining passion in the ever-evolving tech industry. Tune in to hear how one young innovator is changing the game with no-code development. #nocode #jacobklug #bradweisman #cremedigital
"Wow, the word "Genius" comes to mind when talking to Jacob Klug. This kid (he's only 21 years old) developed his first App at age 6 and then in 10th grade came up w/ an App that let his parents know when he arrived at school, with out him doing anything. I never knew No Code was a thing, but it is, and it's bringing costs down to do custom tech applications for small businesses and he's the expert at it!" - Brad Weisman
Listen for of-the-moment insider insights, framed by the rapidly changing social and...
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Welcome to The Brad Weisman Show (formerly known as Real Estate and YOU), where we dive into the world of real estate, real life, and everything in between with your host, Brad Weisman! 🎙️ Join us for candid conversations, laughter, and a fresh take on the real world. Get ready to explore the ups and downs of life with a side of humor. From property to personality, we've got it all covered. Tune in, laugh along, and let's get real! 🏡🌟 #TheBradWeismanShow #RealEstateRealLife #realestateandyou
Credits - The music for my podcast was written and performed by Jeff Miller.
My very first app was in grade six. One of my friends was more technical than I was and we came up with the idea to basically build an app that would notify our parents when we got to school on time.
Speaker 2:From real estate to real life and everything in between the Brad Wiseman Show and now your host, brad Wiseman. All right, we are back in the studio here for another show. Thanks for joining us tonight. We appreciate it. Uh, we got a really, really cool guest here. This guy's probably one of the younger guests that I've ever interviewed and he's also just has done so much in a very short period of time. His name is Jacob Klug. Jacob, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1:Doing well. Thank you for having me Excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Happy birthday because I think you just turned 21 not too long ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2:And I find out you're in Canada, so you could have had a beverage, even you know, for the past several years, yeah, we're rolling, we're rolling here. That's great. What part of Canada are you in?
Speaker 1:I'm in Toronto, the only city that matters.
Speaker 2:The only city that matters. Okay, good, good, good, good, all right. So you started doing and it's funny, you keep saying I'm not a tech guy. When I listen to your other shows. You're not a tech guy. You're not a tech guy. You're not somebody that knows how to code or is very good at coding, but what you've done is you've created a way to come up with apps and programs for companies at a very high level by using. Is it AI that does this? Is it just different? You go into it. You tell me what you're doing. I think it's really interesting. I think it's really interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in the last, you know, really, I think, especially the last five years there's come this evolution of software development called no code. In simple ways, in simple terms, we're basically now able to use tools that exist to basically build software on top of, with very limited coding. And so, you know, to give you an example, you know we took Airbnb as an experiment. Everyone knows Airbnb. We decided how fast can we you know, no code build this within the existing kind of eco structure that we had? You know, building a tool like that would probably take, you know, six to 12 months, usually. Right, it would cost hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars. We were probably able to redesign it and build it within under a month and our costs are minimal, but internally it probably cost us five-ish 5K maybe of our people's time. We'd probably go and charge more than that, obviously, but night and day. So, in essence, you're using tools that help have infrastructure for software, you're building on top of them, Um, and it just saves a lot of time and money. Yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker 2:That that, to me is is amazing because I, like I said I think I said to you before we started the show is I I had done an app with with a bunch of people that were investors with me, and we did a a foodie app called Better Ask Brad, and one of the biggest challenges was the cost and the time to be able to do an app, you know, and to have it be, because what we found is it was really when you had to make a change. It was very difficult because you had to change all the coding underneath it in order to get the change to happen. So this is something new or none, if it's new, but it's something that I've never heard of where you're kind of you're pulling in pieces from different programs, right, and and and kind of layering them together to create one big app or one big program.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the way I would think about it is everybody's pretty familiar with like a PC, like just a desktop computer. In a PC you have things like memory, you have RAM, you have a GPU, cpu, etc. You basically take all these different pieces and you put them in a box and most times it works and you create a computer. The way that I like to think about no-code is, let's say, we use mainly Bubble. Bubble has those pieces, those building blocks, already in it, instead of needing to go and create our own GPU not actually, but in the analogy I'm using we have those building blocks that we can go and customize.
Speaker 1:When you really think about most applications I would say 95% of them even though they don't seem the same to the user truly from like a functional technical stance, they're very similar. I mean, if you go from Spotify to Instagram, to Airbnb, you know these are all like lists and you're basically like going on a database and you're searching for, you know, either a listing or music or a post, etc. And so the functionality is the same. The data that's being displayed is different, obviously, it looks different, it moves different, but the underlying technology is essentially the same and so no-code. The whole philosophy is why do we need to rebuild these things? That we don't need to re-engineer these things, that like we don't need to re-engineer, and so it takes a lot of that, like you know, foundational setup work and limits it and bring ultimately brings down the time and cost to do that yeah, so are you new on this?
Speaker 2:is this something you I mean? You discovered this at what? 17 years old, 16 years old on how to do it yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1:So bubble was probably like the first like true web app, no code builder. Um, I mean to give a little bit of history, like no code has been around for probably decades at this point. Um, I mean, I'm sure most people are familiar with WordPress.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's how I was just going to say. Is WordPress a no code right Cause you're doing stuff in the background?
Speaker 1:So, like technically it is, um, I would put them in different tiers. Wordpress is like the OG. They really came around and I wasn't even probably born when they came around. They came around and basically made it so that you don't need to code from scratch really basic websites. At the time. That was super powerful because even to get such a simple thing off, you needed to hire curators and it was still a lot of money. So they kind of took that first piece and did it.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it took a long time after for people to basically go from simple websites. We eventually got things like Wix and stuff, so that was a small upgrade, but it took a lot of time until people were able to use existing technology to build more complex web apps and automations and AI, et cetera. So now we have Zapier for automations and so, you know, you can use that. Now we have, you know, bubble and WeWeb and all these different tools to build complex web apps, and I think there is a stigma that, like you know, you compare WordPress to Bubble and you think, ok, well, they're both no-code tools and WordPress isn't the best tool. Like no one really uses it.
Speaker 2:Don't worry, they're not a sponsor.
Speaker 1:WordPress has its limitations. It is used a lot, but it has a stigma for being kind of slow and clunky and you would think, okay, well, the other no-code tools are going to be like that and they're going to limit you. The case is that it's actually not that true. With Bubble, we're able to build pretty much any tool because we're able to tap into existing APIs, existing infrastructure. That allows us to kind of, as you said, put things together and kind of box it in one solution.
Speaker 2:And the APIs. Let's just for the, for the layman's out there, allows is when I just know this from real estate and we have a real estate program called Command Through Keller Williams, there's APIs that we can use where we bring in other programs that integrate into our CRM. Is that what you're talking about? Where you're? Basically they're plug-in. I look at it as like a plug-in. You're taking something over here, you're plugging it into this program and now you can use that program in this program, kind of together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. I mean, it's essentially a way for the internet runs on APIs, right. Everything is somewhat connected. When you go to Google flights, google is not actually pulling those. You know themselves. They're going into some kind of API, whether that's the flight you know, companies themselves or travel agencies. So they're basically ways to connect. The internet connect data through different databases Interesting, so it's not reinventing the wheel. Internet connect data through different databases Interesting.
Speaker 2:So it's not reinventing the wheel, it's really what it is I mean, because otherwise, so you're and you had said on this, one thing I saw was about the business to business stuff. Where you know they're, they charge a ton of money for some of these business to business programs. You know, I know my dad has an HVAC company and when he went to do a whole billing and HVAC you know, crm it cost him a fortune because we're basically they're customizing a program around his, his company. Is that something that you guys can do, stuff like that, right yeah.
Speaker 1:So when we started, we were kind of we were focused at first on startups, right, we thought, ok, well, you know, for startups that are looking to get their foot in the door, build their first software and get it up cheaply and not too expensive. But we later realized we started getting hit up by businesses like that, smbs, in fact. Now we work with some of the biggest enterprises in the world. We work with multiple Fortune 500 companies and we started to realize internal tooling exactly what you just said is a much bigger opportunity. Businesses will pay a lot more money compared to startups, but businesses are also getting tremendous value out of it Because, as you said, they're still saving 10x the money and also in the time. Since this is a real estate podcast, we've built multiple real estate analysis tools.
Speaker 1:If you wanted to go and get the SaaS or get the software and pay for it, you're probably looking at tens of thousands of dollars in annual fees, right, depending on the skills, and you don't own it and you have headaches. It's not yours, it's not custom to you and it's a liability year after year, where now we're kind of seeing okay, because NoCo has brought in the cost and the barrier to entry so much lower. You're now able, as a small, medium business or a large enterprise, to have it make sense to build software using no code, instead of needing to go and pay in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for subscription software that you don't own. That's not custom to you. But with no code, you can do the exact opposite. You pay $20,000, $30, grand to get this product. You build it in a couple months. You can iterate it. You know either fast or slowly, get it super quick and you get it for life and you don't need to pay another subscription fee again.
Speaker 2:You do that. You bring all the APIs together, you do the different things. You're bringing in this, different programs, to create this program. For me Now, off the top of my head, I'm thinking okay, doesn't that make it work slower, because I'm constantly pulling information from different areas, as opposed to having a program that is all together and works. Is is came together as one is it is it. Is there any speed differences? Is there any things that you come across with that?
Speaker 1:no. So I mean every app use apis, like? That's not like. I don't think that's where necessarily no code is special. Okay, I think it makes it easier in some ways to do APIs, just because it's more plug and play, but that's not really like the superpower, right? Tell me the superpower. I mean the superpower is what I was saying. Right, it's not necessarily about APIs, but it's just about the infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Taking a feed, the most basic example, normally if you want to go build a feed, any kind of feed, you need to go code that feed and then you need to engineer it etc. And, by the way, all front ends, all normal web applications, they all use APIs. Sometimes the APIs are to external services, but sometimes they're just to the backend. Anytime you load a page, it's calling an API from the backend. Apis are used everywhere. The more thing is going back to the feed example. I don't need to hire engineers to go rebuild a feed. Instead, I can go hire engineers to just make the feed look and work how I want it to work. So you're taking out the foundational work, basically Gotcha.
Speaker 1:My general story is that ever since, probably, I was in grade 6, I've always kind of fanned a knack for building stuff. My very first app was in grade six. I've always kind of found a knack for kind of building stuff. My very first app was in grade six. One of my friends was more technical than I was and we came up with the idea to basically build an app that would notify our parents when we got to school on time. That's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd always forget to text my mom or whatever, right when I got to school. So she built an app that basically would just like once you're in a certain radius of the school, you just get sent a automatic text. That was like so that was like my first like glimpse into, like I guess, solving problems with technology. I think that really inspired me to like build my own stuff and, you know, not go the traditional path. And so I would say, like probably middle school, but especially high school, I was super determined to not go the traditional path and so I would say, like probably middle school, but especially high school, super determined to not go to university. That was kind of like I was that kid like that, would like go around to my friends, be like I'm not going to school. Parents, would you know if I was with my friends, parents. They would be like that's a horrible idea, right like like I was that kid that just like wanted to be an outlier for whatever reason.
Speaker 2:Well that's funny's funny though, because you know. But when you're somebody that has the ideas and the vision that you have, I mean you can't teach that, you can't, you can't go to college for what you're doing or what you started doing in sixth grade. I mean that is just not the the standard of the norm for people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't even think at the time, like I even knew that that was that special and, to be honest, people, people thought it was cool, but I don't think anyone, even my parents, they weren't like that's incredible, I don't know.
Speaker 1:You know, then in high school I built an app myself using bubble because, again, I wasn't like technical enough to build that.
Speaker 1:The other app I had a friend build, more so and I was more like the idea kind of business guy not that there was that much business going on in grade six, but um, but this app I was like, okay, I want to build like a two-sided marketplace.
Speaker 1:Because I saw people selling shoes and phones etc on like instagram or snapchat, and so I was like let's just build a platform where just my school and just other schools in my neighborhood can interact with just people in their school. And so I built that in bubble, probably like literally three or four days I mean, it wasn't the nicest looking thing, but it worked and I got probably like 60, 70% of my school to join within the first week, because what I did was every school kind of had like a meme page on Instagram and so I would just like message the meme page on Instagram and for my school I obviously went there. So I could say I went there. But then for the other schools I would just say I went there too and they would be like I'd be like I'm working on this thing and they'd be like they wanted to help, I guess just because I'm a fellow student, and so they would post about it on the meme page and and I got users, that's amazing.
Speaker 2:That's your. So that was your real startup of seeing what you can do with that, uh, with that kind of platform and and and doing what you are, what you do. That's amazing. And and you didn't go to college then you didn't. You talked your parents into this whole. I'm going to not go to college.
Speaker 1:I think what happened was in grade 11, I met my co-founder and we originally started a media company. It was a media marketing thing. We were shooting a lot of real estate videos, etc. When the pandemic hit. We had a lot of customers needing to transition to a digital world. One of them was a Taekwondo studio and needed to build a platform. So I was like, interesting, I don't know how to build it, but I do know how to use Bubble, and so I was like maybe there's something here, and so we built it and it really ended up working out.
Speaker 1:I think the one mistake I probably made in business up until that point is that I was doing things mostly, um, because I had a lot of different hustles and stuff in between, um, you know, like doing video stuff et cetera. I didn't really have like a passion for those things necessarily. I just like kind of, you know, it was a hustler and wanted to make some money in high school, sure, um, but once I kind of found bubble and building products and doing it for one customer, I realized I actually really enjoyed doing that and I also believed in the space, and so probably around 2021, we went all in on just building like no-code products.
Speaker 2:And that's really when things kind of took off. Is that when Cram Digital?
Speaker 1:started then? Yeah, so it was originally Cram Media and then we pivoted to Cram Digital Cool.
Speaker 2:Awesome. You know it's funny. I told you I wanted to, uh, talk to you about this because you said you've had this before. What's interesting enough, a lot of times when I bring up this drink, people are like, oh, that's new, I don't know what it is. I wanted to tell you about this drink that that I've been taking. My wife and I take it, my dad, my mom take it. It's called magic mind. You said you've heard about it. Did you see it on facebook or where did you see it?
Speaker 1:yeah, no, I think I've seen their, their ads, for sure yeah, they're definitely getting around, definitely around.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you what's really cool about it. It has a lot of cool stuff in it. It's uh nootropics, it's got some uh special mushrooms, it's got ashwagandha in there and things like that. I just wanted to let people know that. Um, if you want to uh purchase this product, you can go to our facebook pages and all that stuff and there's actually a discount code in there. They've been really just great to work with. We love the drink. It definitely makes you feel like more energy without the jitters. There's no like weird stuff in it as far as you know caffeine or anything like that but give it a try. It's called Magic Mind. Maybe even you'll try it then, jacob, who knows? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:No, coffee is a.
Speaker 1:I have a love-hate relationship with coffee. Why do you have a love-hate relationship?
Speaker 2:There's like a running joke in my company that when they see me on like my morning call with a coffee.
Speaker 1:They're like shit, it's not going to go. Well, I just become a different person.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, that's funny. It sounds like when people say oh, when I drink tequila, I've just turned weird, you know. Or when I drink whiskey or something like that. But that's funny, with coffee I can do one cup a day and I actually do it with Magic Mind and it just, it actually does a good job. I really like it. But let's go back into some more stuff here about, about your company. So Creme Digital is what you're doing now.
Speaker 1:And you have a lot of. You're working for some big companies. I saw some names that were on the website which was like amazing, Now that this is what you do for a living every day, is it still fun? Do you still enjoy it? Yeah, that's a good question. So, yeah, overall we're doing really well.
Speaker 1:I was lucky enough that, like in grade 12 things kind of really, that was when we kind of transitioned fully to like no code and at that point we were doing really well to the point where where it was easy to convince people not to go to school, and then we started building a team around hiring salespeople operations. I never actually built any of our products, even though I can. I knew very early delegation is important, especially when it comes to building a software. That could take a couple months. I didn't want to be stuck in the trenches for that long.
Speaker 1:We're now a team of probably 15, 20 people, a mix of part-time, full-time Working, with mainly now small, medium businesses that range everywhere from real estate, media finance, etc. We have some pretty big clients I can't disclose their names Some of the top media companies in the world that everyone would know and some other big Fortune 500s. These are all internal tools. I think what's really interesting now in 2024 is obviously AI is the word now and no code and AI play really nicely in together and you know happy to chat more around that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, we have a little bit of time yet. So why don't we get dig into a little bit with the AI and no code together? You know cause? What I was thinking in my mind is as computers are learning to do more and more of the things that we used to do in the background, is AI also able to do the kind of coding in the background so that we don't have to do it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it already is. There are things like GitHub Copilot. That is probably 50% as good as a junior engineer at this point, so we're already there. I think that's not as much as the world I hang in. That's more traditional software development using AI to make engineers faster. So there's two paths of software accelerating. There's that of the AI just being able to code, and that right now is more of an assistance kind of more like chat, gpt. It's not perfect, you'll still need a human, but it helps facilitate. And on the other path, the one that I kind of hang more on, is the no-code and using these tools to build and accelerate, which, again, you still need humans, but it's a different way. It opens it up to not just technical people.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting with the no-code AI stuff that we're seeing is everyone's familiar with ChatGPT, everyone's familiar with all these AI tools. But I think businesses especially are struggling with how do we actually use these tools? I'm sure you have the experience of writing a blog or whatever and using ChatGPT and going in and pasting it. It's cool, it works. There's an element of gimmick, there's an element of not really built into your business, and so what we really believe is the next three to five years of our company is how do we integrate the no-code elements of building software faster and making it easy to plug and play, as we were talking about with AI? Because all TribeDrivity is using the same models. It's using OpenAI, which is an AI model that anyone can tap into via an API. But the thing about a software is that for us, for example, we operate all our project management using just a normal project management tool. But what we're doing instead now is we're building our own tool that will integrate with, you know, ai and will help automate a lot of these tasks that before it didn't really make sense to use AI, because it would just be one person going in and copying and then going back.
Speaker 1:So, for example, if we have a new project and we're like, okay, this client has come to us and they want to build a 10-page app, they want to do this, this and this, and we give it some of the basic information, now what it will do is we can click one button and it will basically create a sprint board in our new tool that we've created, of all the cards that we need, it will scope out everything in a beautiful doc, it will set a timeline and it will do this. In Chats with BT it will do this. But the difference of it being an internal tool is that it's now moldable. It's like the difference between having a spreadsheet of data and having a dynamic tool that you can edit and share and manipulate. So now we have a tool that basically replaces a project manager, because now you don't need someone switching between you, don't need different contexts.
Speaker 1:A client can come into this dashboard, see everything they need. We can move things across the timeline and AI will just be an assistant to that. That's where things are heading and that's just our example. We're seeing that across all businesses and so if you're a business and you're struggling how to figure out how to use AI to actually streamline your business, like that's kind of where we come in, because, like, ai is powerful but like how you use it is like more probably the more important thing well, yeah, I think it's like anything.
Speaker 2:The people people like yourself that are in that space every day know how to use the tool better than somebody like myself who just goes oh this is cool, I can write my bio. There's just so much more to it. Obviously, I know that ChatGPT is not just a bio writer. It's a lot of different things. But you're somebody that digs into it, really knows how to get the most out of AI and everything else going on, but no, it's just amazing stuff.
Speaker 1:Real quick before we end the show show. What do you do for fun? Um, I like to like.
Speaker 2:Uh, I played a lot of tennis and I work good and sports and yeah, just like normal people, things just normal things. Well, that's good. Well, I gotta tell you what I appreciate you coming on. You opened me up to uh and our, my audience here, to a whole different thing. The whole no code thing is is is very interesting to me and I appreciate you coming on and I just want to say good luck with where you're gone Creme Digital. If somebody has any kind of interest in talking to him, just look that up. You can pretty much easily find that. You can also look up his name Jacob Klug. Jacob. Thanks so much for coming on today. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for having me Great talk.
Speaker 2:Awesome, all right, there you go. Jacob Klug you can look him up. Just look up Krem Digital. Look up his name. He's on social media Instagram, pretty much anywhere that you want to look, you'll find him. That's about it, all right, see us next Thursday at 7 pm. Thanks for watching the show.
