E155: From Idea to App Store: bilt.me's Plan to Become the Shopify of Mobile Apps

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Superhero Capital News. We've been waiting for this news to go live. So, Uku, welcome. And congratulations on your round announcement. How are you feeling, guys?

Yeah, thank you so much. I mean, we've been working really hard to make the announcement. I think the announcement itself was a pretty huge success. We got tens of thousands of impressions all on socials. So, yeah, a dream come true.

Amazing. Congrats. 615K euros. A great start to build your dream and your mission. So I guess I want to jump straight into the question. So why build

me?

When there are so many AI app builders, how did you get to this point? And what makes you so unique? What's your mode?

We think we have a pretty unique background. So we started out a year and a half ago building our own mobile apps. We started building the first app, which was a menopause app for women. Clearly it wasn't great founder market fit. So we pivoted from that, but we became pretty good at building mobile apps. But what was holding us back was how long it took and how hard it was. So we had like three and a half full-time engineers working around the clock and it still took two months from the idea to actually getting it live on the App Store or Google Play Store and distributing it to the world. So we bunched up the best engineers we knew and created an internal hackathon. The goal was simple, just to make app testing a lot easier and faster. And it turned actually into what now is built. So the first idea was to make building simpler. So let's use some agents. Let's try to figure out how we can build those apps without us having to actually commit the code ourselves all the time. Then became the second part, which was how do you actually publish those apps? How do you make it available to the world? which is in and of itself a whole kind of ecosystem that Apple and Google have built up. So you got to get through that. And now a year later, we're in a spot where all we're thinking about is how do we distribute those apps? So how do we get people actually to share what they're doing themselves? And how do we help them like proactively get users?

What's the most difficult part of doing that? Because it doesn't sound that easy, especially, you know, we're all struggling right now with all the distribution and the growth.

I mean, it is probably distribution. So yeah, like a couple of things we're doing right now is like, for example, building brand books for each app. So it has the context. Whenever the user goes to another AI agent or our agent and wants to share what they're doing and create some kind of assets, for example, creatives for like paid ads or creatives for organic, or they want to send a brand book to a creator who's doing UGC content for them. Like you always need context for that. And now we generate it. So it's like really on point.

Amazing. And now, okay, so people come to build, they create their apps and they can also make money with that. Or how does that work?

Yeah, exactly. One of the things we were struggling with was that to enable payments in any kind of mobile app, you need to use a third party service. Usually it's like Revenue Cat or Superwall.