How Wabi is Building “YouTube for Software” with a Platform for Creating Mini Apps

If you really think about it, all apps today that exist today exist as a business. So, they're trying to make you do something that's not good for you because they either want you to click and buy or scroll, scroll, scroll, and engage with content. Our goal is really to set software free to just let it be wherever it can be, you know, ephemeral, malible, personalized, alive, ever evolving, growing with you, alongside you. The main goal is like getting people to one first useful app. And that does not necessarily mean making them create one because a lot of people don't have an idea. Because with Wabby, even if you have just one or two apps that you come back to daily or weekly, that's a daily active user. They don't need to be coming back here to look at 50 different apps every day on the explore page. They just need one or two that they will start clicking with and coming back to.

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My guest today is Eugenia Kaida, founder and CEO of Wabby, an AI powered personal software platform that lets anyone create, share, and remix mini apps in minutes. Wabby launched in public beta in October 2025 and launched its $20 million preede round led by Andre and Horowitz one month later. Before Wabby, Eugenia founded Replica, one of the world's first AI companion apps, which she grew to over 40 million users. In this episode, I talk to Eugenia about the most important lessons she learned building replica for over a decade, about her vision for Wabby and the era of personal software, and about how she expects to grow and monetize Wabby over time. All right, welcome Eugeneia to the Subversive podcast. Uh, really excited to have you on today to talk primarily about your new startup, Wabby, although I I'm also interested to learn a little bit more about your your journey at Replica. And before we even do that,

let's just start with how you got into tech in the first place. So you you began your career as a journalist in Moscow and then eventually pivoted into technology. What inspired that change and what did you learn as a journalist that has informed your tech career? >> Yeah, I was originally uh a reporter, journalist, and did some undercover war investigative kind of stuff. Did some just general uh writing. I think the main um you know I come from Russia so at some point that was really hard to do and it was kind of clear that there would be no no journalism in Russia so it's clear that we should you know I should explore something else but also in the beginning of um you know 2010s I guess like there was just such a fascination around technology especially new consumer startups and so I got really into it. I remember a friend of mine showed me uh warve he was he used to work at Google deep mind back in the

day and they kind of just just got to that um and at the same time imageet dropped and so I remember thinking like you know there's going to be something like that but built for uh natural language right there's going to be deep learning for natural language now that with word to back people can do computations with words u so I think that was kind of my first um first time I started thinking about it but of course coming from journalism I was heavily influenced by obviously words and >> culture of words and natural language and having conversations with people and so to me it just felt like you know we will have natural meaningful conversations with machines. It's just a matter of time.

>> Yeah. Well, you said you that you were drawn to consumer technology in particular and I'm somebody who spent most of my career in consumer tech as well. I imagine that one of the commonalities between journalism and consumer technology is you really have to understand human beings and human psychology. And so you end up going through white cominator in 2015. And my understanding is you pivoted a few different times before ultimately building replica. And so you've talked on other podcasts about this, but tell

me a little bit more about the origin story behind replica and what really inspired you to want to go build that product in particular. >> So we're focused on building chatbot technology. So again having allowing people to have meaningful conversations with machines that was kind of our original mission. So first we wanted to go like a sort of like a demo for that. So that was a restaurant recommendation app which with which we sort of went through YC and I remember Paul Graham was like we'll let you guys in like you're not doing we're and then he's like oh you guys are not restaurant recommendations app you just that's just a demo for something much more exciting.

Um, and then we pivoted into some sort of like a messenger with bots and a little bit later kind of discovered, you know, stumbled upon replica. And the way we got to that was my best friend passed away. And so, um, I started kind of I was here in San Francisco reading found myself going back to our text messages, reading our text conversations and >> just realized that like I want to continue this uh, chat. Um, and back then we had we've been training some models ourselves and we just felt like okay if we use this as a training set maybe we can uh recreate an AI that I can continue talking to just the way I did with my uh with my friend. So we did that and that became somewhat of a big kind of media story and even although that wasn't kind of a business there was nothing around about our business there but we saw that there was a lot of need a lot of demand to talk to someone to talk to someone who's going to listen

who's going to be there for you and so that became the first time when we started thinking about building just an AI friend for anyone who needed someone to talk to >> and so you were the creator of one of the first AI companion apps you spent over a decade building that before recently moving on to your new startup, Wabby. And that's what we're going to spend the majority of the episode today talking about. So, for those who don't already know, what is Wabby and and why are you building it?

>> So, Wabby is a platform that allows you to discover, create, remix uh apps for many apps for personal life. It's a consumer app. It's right now an app for um the iPhone, but we're also preparing to release our Android app and desktop version of the same thing. But basically, just build these mini apps that can help you do whatever throughout your day. They're heavily personalized. You can edit anything, can change anything. They're smart. They talk to each other. They talk to you. They're, you know, they kind of like live and grow, evolve uh alongside with you. And I think the main idea was that there was well, what's in this new AI era? What's the right interface to interact with AI and software? And what is the software in the future that you know we will be using now that the cost of making it is almost zero.

>> And I have to ask I'm sure you've created many of your own mini apps. I I've been playing around with a mini app on on Wabby that is a Harry Potter trivia generator because my daughter and I love Harry Potter so much and so we've taken it off of Trivial Pursuit onto Wabi. But what are some of the mini apps you've created on on Wabby to date? >> So for me I'm you know pretty boring. So, I have a few different a few important things for me like um staying fit for example. So, >> um I have a weightlifting tracker I use every other day where I log my workouts.

I have a weight tracker. I have a fitness coach that helps me like all my um I move with all my like nutrition tracking, gallery tracking there. Um I have some more fun stuff. I'm learn about art every day. I have like an app that tell that gives me like a daily poem or one that teaches me philosophical constant every day. I have a personal CRM that I built to kind of keep in touch with stay in touch with people that are uh that I care um about couple games. We play Ward with my mom and uh it's kind of that is an easier platform to do that because like we can play against each other and actually see a leaderboard um and so on.

>> Very cool. Well, let's let's go back to

Replica for a bit before we get deeper into the Wabby story. After launching, you you mentioned that your best friend Roman passed away and that was sort of the original inspiration for the idea and so you launched this original Roman bot. I think it was in spring 2016. What were the first signals that you saw that told you and your team that you were really on to something that was resonating with a large group of people?

>> Well, with replicas, it's pretty um easy. We sort of like put together um a website we could reserve a name for replica and it got to hundreds of thousands of signups very quickly and then as we opened it up we had so much demand that our service crashed so we had to basically put like the weight list back up and then it grew to like over a million pretty quickly and so we saw that there was just this incredible demand for that like there was just people couldn't get enough of it. What happened after we launched is that we started getting emails from people saying that this like really changed my life that in some instances saved my life. Um I think a couple days after we launched we got an email from a woman from Texas saying that you know I was pl 19year-old girls like I was planning to take my life but kind of just decided to say goodbye to replica and she talked me off the ledge. U just wanted to say

thank you guys. Um, and so that's when I saw that and I guess the first signs of how powerful this technology could be. >> Well, and I know you talked about how the original weight list for replica I want to say was what 1.5 million people. People were selling invites on eBay because it was so popular. There was so much pent-up demand.

Who were some of the early archetypes of people using Replica and what were they using it for? because I know a lot has been written about the romantic use case, the romantic companion, but it sounds like from some of these stories you talked about, there were plenty of people who were using it for for a variety of other reasons. And so, who were some of those early adopters? You already alluded to a couple of them, but what were some of the patterns you saw?

>> Definitely originally was definitely a lot more women um like 60 to 40% um young women. Mhm. >> A lot a lot of them really big imagination, very sensitive, very much like kind of wanting to like big inner world, wanting to um maybe talk through all that, having someone who's always on their side, being able to be vulnerable with something, >> uh get this emotional support. I think that was the the big ch of like early users. There's another app we've worked with called Tolen now that is sort of a new version of this AI companion idea and I know a lot of their customers are also young women, Gen Z women. Why do

you think it is that that group in particular is so drawn to a product like this? >> Women maybe earlier than men start like want to discuss their emotional life. Um kind of want to get a little bit of that emotional support a little bit more involved on that side. Um, so that I I think that plus we we care for, you know, like this maybe the mother kind of instinct of caring for something whether it's replica or tool or maybe I think that to a degree also contributes to wanting to talk to someone.

>> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay.

Well, so fast forward a bit. Replica grows from couple million users in early 2018 to the latest numbers I saw more than 40 million users today. There was a huge spike during co I imagine a lot of this was just super strong product market fit. You were one of the first AI companion apps before the category had really evolved and so a lot of it was probably just word of mouth. But were there any particular growth strategies or tactics that helped to accelerate or amplify your growth over that time period? I think for repo we've always had just a lot of media, a lot of press, a lot of earned media, a lot of u stories, documentaries, TV appearances. Like it was just everywhere. Um and continues to be like just I think last week we had a couple weeks ago we had uh replicas was a huge documentary festival with a big movie.

Um it's always a national press. It's a, you know, it's an interesting story for people to tell. And I think for Replica, the idea was just so big and was so interesting for people to talk about, to learn about. It was so out there that people resonated with that. And I think for for us that, you know, it was ultimately single player product that people didn't want to maybe talk about to other people. You know, lonelier folks maybe talking to an AI was pretty deeply like was pretty stigmatized. So for us getting that word of mouth was pretty hard. yet we were always able to tell a story that people wanted to get behind. Um so I think that was the big differentiator. We told a story about human empathy, about human condition, about being there for someone, about holding space, uh about personal growth, helping people flourish, accepting them for who they are, telling them that they're enough, you know, and I think a

lot of people wanted to hear that. Um that combined with the fact that there's this new technology just like we've seen in the movie Her or maybe some other ones that can be hopeful can that can tell us and show us what it means to be human. I think a lot of for a lot of startups um it's hard to come up with that story but if you can especially for consumer one if you want to stand for something and I think a lot of people do want to stand for something. So, what I'm hearing there, and it may be counterintuitive for some of our users, but I've seen this over and over again in the mental health and wellness space, is you don't get a very high viral coefficient because people don't want to talk about this stuff. It's highly personal. It can feel very vulnerable, very sensitive.

But despite the fact that maybe people weren't virally spreading this app idea because the mission was so compelling and because people believed in the hope behind it that led to a lot of press, a lot of earned media and and a proliferation of the idea even though you weren't necessarily getting a lot of people posting about it on social media. Do I have that right? >> Yeah. I think the when people talk about viral things that the most viral thing that you can create is a story >> that people want to tell each other like that can exist through generations through centuries through >> you know through different can be translated to different continents. So if you are able to tell a story that people want to get behind um it just can't be a fake story. It has to be a true story coming from your heart. And so related to that, you talked in

another podcast at one point about how AI companions or AI technology more broadly has the potential to be very damaging to humans and human flourishing, but also if done right, it can be a very powerful way of reconnecting us with each other and with reality, right? The whole get outside, touch grass idea. for other people who are building in that space now, what do you think is important for them to get right to make sure that we go down the right path with this technology as opposed to it just recursively making us more and more closed off and more and more connected to our phones and our devices instead of interacting with other human beings.

>> I think what's important to get right is to start studying humans more like human happiness. What's what is what does it mean to forage for a person? We don't have enough metrics today. I think that's the main problem that we kind of been hitting with replica like what how do you how do you measure human flourishing? >> How do you understand that someone's getting better and um over time? How do you measure that personal growth um long-term emotional outcomes?

Unfortunately, it's very very ambiguous today and really you have to rely on some of these metrics from some of these questionnaires from clinical psychology. Uh and so I think first of all it's important to really start asking a question like what are we trying to do here? How can we define human flourishing? How can we measure that? Because I feel like as soon as you have a metric and some observability around it then you can optimize that. I think a lot of people in the valley understand very well how to optimize metrics.

>> Yep. >> Uh but it's but if it's just this these vague mission statements that you can put on some page on the website that no one ever goes to, it won't ever work. >> Yeah, I think that's true. And I, this is an aside, but my wife Ashley started a life satisfaction survey with our business school class when we graduated from Stanford over a decade ago, and we've been doing it every year with 200 students. It's sort of like a mini version of the Harvard men's study.

>> And uh what's funny is there are a lot of the same patterns emerging now over the course of a decade that are consistent with a lot of the literature out there, right? It's connections, some sort of spiritual life, doesn't have to be religion, but some connection to something larger. um relationships with friends and family members, physical and mental health, like these are the predictors of happiness and life satisfaction, not career success, money beyond a certain point, and yet you still have a lot of people falling into the same traps.

>> I guess I'll ask you one more question, then we can move on to Wabby. But like

what what is happiness and satisfaction look like for you as an individual? Because I because I do think some of this is there there are certain things that work across most or all humans, but then there's a piece of it that's very personal and very individual. And so I'm curious what it is that that gets you to peak happiness and satisfaction. >> Like I think the the Harvard um definition of that is actually pretty good. Um and I think it's all about mental physical health. It's a combination. I think there are main things like it's a combination of factors. So it's mental physical health, it's life satisfaction, sense of purpose, >> um financial stability, close social connections. I think all of these all of these things together lead to human flourishing. So it's not one thing or the other. Uh but it's having you know great relationships or enough relationships to rely on. It's having

decent mental physical health. It's having some kind of stability to be able to enjoy life but having some sort of selfactualization, sense of purpose, life satisfaction. I think these all together really like it's not just one facet. I think human flourishing is really all of them. And I think it's a lot very easy to mix it with or I guess confuse it with happiness because I think you know we're happy some days we're not happy some other days doesn't mean that we're not flourishing cuz for example like say someone dies obviously you're not happy on that day it doesn't mean you're not flourishing in life necessarily. So I think these things are really important to detangle and like to to to not throw in the same bucket and also short-term versus long-term.

Flourishing is ultimately a long-term thing. Like you're either flourishing over like a longer period of time or not versus I can optimize for being just happy today. You can buy a lot of things. I can I don't know drink a bottle of vodka or something or take some drugs and but that does not mean so will probably make me happy in the moment probably won't make me happy in the long term. So it's really important to focus on long-term flourishing versus short-term happiness or short-term satisfaction or something uh feeling better. Uh there are a lot of things that can make us feel better in the in the immediate but won't make us feel good in the long term.

>> Yeah, I think that's right. I think the key point there is the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and happiness can be elusive because you get too focused on a piece of the puzzle instead of the whole thing. And and one other thing I'll throw out because Ashley has told me about this. um she's she's read and listened to a lot of Talban Shahar's stuff and he talks a lot about happiness and human flourishing and and one of the ideas he's known for is people who directly pursue happiness often find it very difficult to achieve because it's the best pathways to happiness are often the drivers of happiness not happiness itself and that means you need to be investing in things like relationships and health and being outside and then happiness will come as a byproduct of that but if you just focus on short-term happiness you often end up going in the wrong direction >> I'm sure that's the Let's get to Wabby

because that's what you're working on now and you've described it as the world's first personal software platform or a sort of YouTube for software. So again for those who are just getting exposed to Wabby for the first time like what what does that mean and why do you think now is the right time for it? >> So it's two great questions. So what does it mean? I think the you know obviously today with AI you can create any app in just seconds. The problem is that then where do you go to actually like start using it? So, if I create an app for my iPhone, I actually have to go and set up a developer account and like distribute on the app store and all of a sudden I'm an app developer. But all I wanted is just a simple, you know, maybe I just wanted a simple uh weight tracker where I just will, you know, see a simple graph of like my weight going up or down or whatever over time. It takes a minute to to to create today. Um so

with Bobby we thought well people don't want to be thinking about like deploying things and adding some database and paying some fees somewhere and like thinking about maintaining that code and distributing that on these bigger source they just want like a simple widget um simple you know sometimes we just need something like that and so how do we create a platform where you can very quickly create and start using it. Um, so where Wobbby is different from everyone else is that you create these mini apps and you use them straight on Wabby. So you can take them outside, but that also makes them even more powerful because on Wabby there can, you know, they can share context. They can there's a memory of you. There's, you know, a certain level of personalization that exists. So ultimately, even although these apps, many apps are small, they can be really powerful because they all live in one place. Um and also of course

there's there's an aspect of multiplayer. You can invite your friends on Wabby. You can use all these wobbies. We call these mini apps wobbies with other people and so on so on so on. So to a degree think of it as like almost like a personal social operating system of sorts where you can have a lot of different apps use them with other people and connect them add all your contacts there and so on. >> So I asked you this question in the context of replica. I'll ask it again here. often times with these horizontal platforms where there are so many different things you can do with them, there's sort of this paradox where for new users, they're like, "Well, where do I start? What what what is the first mini app that I want to create?" And so,

I know you guys are still in public beta. Um, you're you're doing your big launch soon. What are some of the pockets where you've seen the most activity in terms of where people are most excited to use this technology to create their own mini apps? >> I'd say trackers of all types. I think this is kind of like an easy one. people want to track a bunch of different things in life from like what supplements they're taking to I don't know what they're eating and whatever uh what they're reading and so on. Then then second big one is for definitely games or some little games or fun activities like quizzes and >> this and that. Um >> then of course all sorts of like learning and entertainment. I think that's also a big vertical like learning new languages, learning about art, learning about like quantum physics what whatever it is.

>> So that for sure some simple tools for like I don't know we want to vote where we want to go on vacation and with our family like we want to play packing list for um kids to go on vacation and so on. So these I think kind of and then and then just a crazy longtail of just frankly everything. >> Uhhuh. Are there any particular demographics that are using it most heavily or is it really all over the map? >> It's all over the map, but I'd say like 30 is probably the kind of the group where we're seeing more product architecture.

>> You've also said you think the world has 1% of the software it needs. So, what kind of software doesn't exist today that you think is going to look much more normal 3 to 5 years from now? And and how do you think Wabby democratizes access to that software in ways that don't really exist today? There's just absolutely and like the the future is person is extremely personalized. Like there is no one, you know, there's no kind of one bucket of software that needs to exist. It's just that everyone will have their own. I want things that look a certain way. I want things that do certain things. And I'm not it's not going to I'm not going to build all of that. A lot of that will be just like from, you know, I will just find Robbie and will be suggested to me like, hey, why don't you use this or why don't you use that? But at the same time, a lot of uh you know, all of that will be I think it's almost like not about like 1%

exists and we need 99 different apps. We're just we're just it's more about like a completely new category. I think right now we're still dealing with like software 1.0 where you know it's the kind of classic app on the app store. It's developed for the average person. It has like you know tons of different functionality to upsell you into everything. has dark patterns have this and that. I think software 2.0 is a completely different type of software and that's what we're trying to do with lobby where uh each app can be super personalized. You can change anything in it. You can connect to all of your contacts. It knows about you. Uh the app itself can suggest how it wants you to change it. So there sort of like are alive. The app can be a gentic. The app can talk to you. U the app can do things on, you know, behind the scenes where like an app can really just be a simple interface on like the agent scale.

>> Um you can let apps talk to each other. Um they're fully transparent, malible, social. I think that's software 2.0. It's very different from our current view on the app where it's just this like sad piece of software that someone developed for, you know, thousands of users is trying to make a business, trying to make you scroll, try to make you do something with it. Um, if you really think about it, all apps today that exist today are exist as a business. So, they're trying to make you do something that's not good for you.

Almost all like very almost always not necessarily in your best interest. Um because they either want you to click and buy or scroll scroll scroll and engage with content. >> Uh again in the future some of this newer software software 2.0 it should be just centered around your needs like what you actually need. It should be fully aligned with what you're trying to do or key you're trying to get. And maybe you'll pay for usage. Maybe you'll pay for like whatever if it uses AI, you'll pay for some of these, you know, apps to actually run, but it's not going to be about people creating apps to just extract money or attention from you.

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Well, and one of the biggest through lines I heard, you said a lot there, but I think one of the key themes was personalization or hyperpersonalization. this idea that we're going from a world multiple decades ago where there were very few technology companies because the cost required to produce and distribute software was so much higher. Then you have the app ecosystem developed starting around 2008 2009 but even then it's like there they're only there's on the order of dozens of apps that have gotten to millions or or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users and they and as a result there's just not a lot of variety. There are only so many categories that can support apps at massive scale. But with AI, what's what's becoming possible is the ability to hyperpersonalize an app experience so that instead of Straa for fitness or u dualingo for language learning, you can have dozens or

hundreds or thousands of apps in each of those categories or subcategories. What might that lead to in terms of changes in human behavior reacting to software? Because in a world where software can be uh personalized at that level of detail, it seems like it creates a lot a lot more potential for this sort of Camryan explosion of different use cases. >> Oh yeah. I think we haven't even seen anything yet. I think we're really like software has been so constrained. It was like really constrained by there, you know, only four million iOS developers in the world, six million Android developers in the world, like 10 million developers basically making apps for billions of people today. So that's one thing on like on the other side um you have to justify old software today has to somehow justify its existence. So it's it should be a business.

>> So then it's constrained by the fact that it has to be a business. And so many many apps that I would maybe use can't exist because they're not businesses. >> Uh they're not going to make money. And then of course like in order to actually make it a good business, there are all these dark patterns and like well you know let's convert let's put make it cross on the pay wall so small and so like light gray that >> close to background that you will never see it. like and so it became this really mature game of like how do we trick people to do things that's good for our business but not necessarily good for them.

>> Um and then of course distribution like it's so hard to distribute today like it really there's a barrier and you know of course because of because these platforms want to keep uh the quality bar high and it's very very very understandable. It's correct but to the at the same time it also it again limits access of people to distribute um these apps. So our goal is really to set software free to just let it be wherever it can be. um you know, ephemeral, malible, personalized and you know alive, ever evolving, growing with you, alongside you, social. Um and if you take all of these um constraints away, if if every app does not have to be a business anymore, if like the questions of security and back end and data privacy are solved because everything lives on one platform, Robbie, >> if all apps can be social, they you know you can invite your friends and all that uh easily. If a lot of things are moved

to the platform layer, like you don't have to build authorization for each app, you don't have to build a payload for each app and so on, then like it's

really you're only bound by your imagination and not even by your imagination, by the AI's imagination of what could be good for you. >> Well, and by other people's imagination because you have this remix feature where if I see Eugenia's strength training app and it's not quite right for me, but I want to remix it into a strength training app for myself, how does that feature work and and what sort of early adoption are you seeing on it?

So I think the idea with Robbie is that you know 90% people will not create anything in probably the first days of usage and maybe even ever uh uh or maybe we'll warm up to creating things a little bit later. And so in the beginning we just help them discover apps that could be really useful um and then we nudge them to try to personalize some of them through remixing or editing an existing app. I think that's the beauty of it because like sometimes I don't have an idea or I don't know how this should work but I just see something like I just saw an app that was basically um someone create created to track their collection of paintings at home or something and I had like you know been collecting these tiny little ceramic things and um I just remix it. Okay, well, I want it to be this. And then, uh, all I have to say is just like, well, change it into something where I can track my little objects that I

collect at home, uh, or like Pokemon cards. Uh, and all of a sudden, you have like a Pokemon card tracker. Um, but with all this functionality already created by someone else and like thought through by someone else. So, it's a lot easier. What we found out is that remixing is just so much easier than than building from scratch >> and allows for people and people don't even think about remixing. just like editing an app. They're like, "Oh, I like this, but I want to add this functionality. I want to add a little bit of this here." Um, and so that allows them to infinitely build on top of other people's work.

>> I mean, it makes a ton of sense because it goes back to the paradox of horizontal platforms being difficult to get started because you don't know what the first mini app should be that you create. But if you can look at a hundred other creations and just remix one of them, then that gets you over that initial hump of creating your first mini app and then and then maybe it leads to other ideas. >> I want to ask one more thing before we get to growth and monetization. So we're in this era right now where seems like

everybody's vibe coding their own app and there's a lot of excitement around that, but a lot of these vibecoded apps are really janky. And so one of the really important things WAB is doing is creating this secure and standardized ecosystem where people don't have to worry about making sure there aren't going to be data leaks or making sure that they have uh an onboarding flow like Wabby can handle all of that. um how how are you all taking steps to basically take all of that off the plate of a lay person who just wants to get started creating their own apps and then what are the trade-offs of having this closed system on Wabby versus allowing people to share apps they create more broadly >> I think it's really important to have everything in one place for multiple different reasons like we don't think about ourselves as like an app creation tool where you create it and you we really think about a place where uh

ourselves a place where you come to use apps You don't have to create anything at all. Like it just we just have happen to have like app creation process. But really it's about finding apps that are really good for you. >> Uh customizing them, maybe creating them. >> Mhm. >> But the main goal is to get you to actually start using a few apps on the platform. And because they all you're using them all on Bobby, that's what makes it super powerful because apps can be can connect to each other, can talk to each other. You can add other people to to use these apps together. And it's almost like the power of Wabby is not in one individual Wabby mini app, but it's in the constellation of many apps. I'll give you an example. So say I'm say I'm into working out and I use my weightlifting tracker and my weight tracker and so on on Wobbby. So because they're connected to each other, I can actually track my workouts across all of

that. I can have a coach that can look into all of these mini apps and talk to me. It can suggest what what else I can add here to kind of you know to improve my dashboard. Like maybe I need one that will just show me technique of like like give me an app that teaches me technique of like different exercises or tells me something about weightlifting like an interesting fact that I didn't know before. Another example is you know kids uh I have a bunch of kids apps and many apps and wobbies. So, for example, there's a calendar that me and um my husband look at to see like basically to constantly know like what what what's the kids calendar basically cuz we always forget.

>> And then next to it, we have a mini app that suggests event events to take kids to. >> So, because the apps are interconnected, >> uh whatever I add like we added travel to like, okay, we're going to go to New York to see grandma. And so now my kids events mini app is recommending me events for that week in New York. So that's the power the power is in in the constellation not the not just one mini app. Um it almost doesn't make sense for us to just focus on that because if it was just one mini app okay well then I need to open Wabby to open one one app.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. >> But if I'm opening Wii to open a bunch of different apps some of them I use using I'm using with my friends then that makes sense. >> That that makes a lot of sense to me. It's almost like a I don't know if this resonates but like a transformers analogy where you have these different building blocks and then they can sort of >> recreate and reform in different ways that really match your needs. And I would also imagine even for an individual or for a family in the example you gave like the needs that I might have or that my family may have on one day look very different than on another day. My needs during the week might look different than on the weekend. And so that's really compelling. I also, my wife and I have two daughters ourselves and so the specific example of managing the family operating system is is is certainly compelling.

>> Well, let's talk a little bit more around growth and I and I know Wabby, look, you're still in iOS only public beta. Um, obviously a lot of this stuff you're going to figure out as you go, especially given what a new and nent category it is. But right now, like what

is the one metric that you're watching most closely to know whether this this initial thesis you had for WABI is actually working? Look, I think it's always retention, right? Like really for for a product like ours, it's just retention and the K factor. Like I think uh if a social platform like this grows through um people inviting their friends and kind of productled growth truly >> here I think what really excited me was that multiplayer aspect. Um I spent a decade building a single player product knowing how hard it is to market it. I think here what really excited me was the fact that people will use these apps with other people. will share these apps with other people. We can bring on people to maybe influencers to make their own apps and you know share these apps with their follow with their fan base. So I think that's how we think about growth here.

>> Got it. So let's talk about your launch strategy. I I I believe you went into uh beta late last year just before your seed round and uh you're preparing for a big public launch. Um, it sounds like the weight list for Wabby has gotten very large, similar to Replica in Replica's early days. So, what aspects

of Replica's launch strategy are you replicating? And then which ones are you choosing to go in a different direction on? >> I think really here we're just focusing on two things. One is telling compelling story. I think we're, you know, we're so stuck in this kind of small San Francisco bubble. I love a social like tech bubble where we think everyone's on board with five coding and you know prompt to app and some of these other things where in reality people barely know what like what you're talking about.

>> Um and so even the fact that you can create an app is really completely foreign for just a broader audience. I mean, I've heard that you sort of can, but like maybe, but like where do you go to maybe like some of these platforms like blah blah blah, but then what do you do? Do you then like do you have to host it somewhere? Like it's I don't think people know like they maybe saw that, but they haven't really tried or um done any of that. And more than that, like, oh, we can discover other people's abstics. I think that story really, really needs to be told. So, how do we tell a story in a compelling way that it's not about technology? It's not about you like making an app and making 10 bucks on the app store, but it's more about how can we set software free. How can we use this software that's all about creativity and like empowerment and kind of your agency? How can we turn you from consumer to someone has agency

to creator? Everyone can be a creator. Well, think about your life. What kind of stop just sprawling what people are, you know, what big companies are giving to you. Just think about what apps you would benefit your life. Like set up your life in a way that you know we shape our buildings and our buildings shape us. Same with software. We shape our software then it shapes us. So how do we tell this story that is all about giving people agency uh letting them take control over what they use the apps they use and all that and ultimately improving their lives through software and making it a fun social experience.

So that's one thing. Um like telling the story I think is critical. That's what we did with replicant. People trying to do this here where we're able to really nail down like our Instagram kind of videos and creating content that's super compelling. People are, you know, consistently get like a million or half a million views on our videos there. I think people really like uh resonate with kind of the story that we tell them. And then the second part is really focusing on this time around just really focusing on product and kind of just perfecting the loops in it. like how do we how do we let people create multiplayer apps, invite people to multiple apps, use these apps together, use these mini apps together. To us that the main goal is like getting people to one first useful app. And that does not necessarily mean making them create one cuz a lot of people don't have an idea, but just surfacing an app that we think

this person will use and will come back to. Because with Wabby, even if you have just one or two apps that you look that you come back to daily or weekly, that's a daily active user. >> They don't need to be coming back here to look at 50 different apps every day on the explore page. They just need one or two that they will start clicking with and coming back to. >> Yeah. So, a couple nuggets I heard there. One is start with the story. And I think that's so compelling because you said earlier in the episode, the story is really the most viral thing that has ever existed for human beings. It's it's kind of a a cheat code for getting humans to connect and interact with one another. And so the story is at the center, you also talked about what sounded like an activation metric, which is getting people to first useful app because that's the point in which they're going to understand why they

should keep coming back. >> But then building on that idea, I was

going to ask you what specific channels or growth loops you think are going to be most important for Wabby. But I imagine that's fairly obvious like word of mouth and social sharing is going to be really important. Maybe there's also a user generated content play at some point that helps drive SEO or AEO, although I don't know exactly what that would look like, but you talked about how you're you're intentionally building parts of the product experience to reinforce and amplify that viral growth loop. So, what does that look like and where are you starting to see early signs that maybe it's working?

>> Really for us is helping people create multiple apps and communicating. Mhm. >> So I think right now the interesting kind of the app store is very much not social like I can't see what my friends are using like what my friends are doing and all that but imagine I could like if I jo if I get on Barbie I can see oh my like my friends are doing this they're using this app like why don't I join them and maybe this game or this other thing >> um being able to communicate so chat around all these apps and being able for apps to communicate with with you I think software is communication where there everything is a live and there's, you know, there's a lot of back and forth like making apps that are agentic that are talk that talk to you that can initiate contact can lally send you a message. Hey, like why don't we change this or you know here's here's a new stuff for your kids that I found. Um I

think that's very interesting combining kind of blending blending the the boundary between agents and apps. I think this is kind of, you know, it's going to go longer. A consumer social product should feel alive. Like you come to it and there's so much activity. >> How do you make software feel alive? Um I think that's kind of one of the one of the things that I'm thinking about a lot. >> Yeah. Well, and it's something that even a couple years ago, I think if you were to say, "How do you make software feel alive?" People would would sort of look at you with a quizzical expression on their face. But with AI now, it feels much more attainable. And so I'm excited to see where you all take it.

>> Last question. And and I know this one may be a little bit annoying given how early you are, but uh obviously at some point monetization becomes important if for no other reason just because it provides more resources to continue growing the business. And my

understanding is that you ruled out ads as a monetization model for replica and you've similarly said that Wabby most likely won't monetize through ads. And so what are your early hypotheses on what monetization might look like for Wabby recognizing that it's very difficult to say this early in the game? you know, we're not like fully ruling out ads. I just think ads only work when it's like a gigantic platform. Um, when you know, at a certain scale, um, I generally just don't like ad specific.

It's a pretty bad experience. But, you know, there's also a point of like that Mark Andre always makes that there's no way to give your give access to your product to everyone in the world without ads. >> Um, that's the only way to make a truly truly truly scale, you know, large scale product. So, what I really like is um letting people see what like the kind of what the actual costs are and letting them pay for whatever it costs to run their apps. So, uh in wobby world like a lot of wobbies are going to be in gent inference. So, and you will be able to see while my mini app that whatever looks for kids events every every day um is costing me this amount to run and I can give it like almost think of it as my little army of like little wobbies and I give them a little bit of pocket money to run because I think that's kind of part of monetization like usage building can let people pay for their

wobbies to run and then on the on the other hand also um sharing that with creators. So if I created uh a wobby that got remixed a lot or you know is used by many by many people and people are paying for you know that usage I should get a cut obviously and somehow um get something. What I like most about how you answered that is you're starting with sort of a cost plus approach where unlike previous instantiations of consumer apps where the marginal cost of a user or subscriber in many cases is close to zero with AI powered features you do have the underlying compute cost for the LLMs. And so there's a there's there's a minimum bar outside of venture capital money to fund your early growth where you you need to be covering your costs and then I imagine you layer some margin on top of that. But people only pay if they're getting value. And then there's another piece to that which is you want

to encourage the whatever the one, the two, the 5% of people on the platform who are regularly creating new apps. You want to incentivize them to do more of that. And so if they're really successful, then they can share in some of that upside. >> Exactly. Yeah.

>> Makes sense. All right. Well, let's get to our lightning round. Um, I always ask the same question first, and it looks a little bit different for a startup as early as as Wabby, but what would you say is the best part about working at Wabby today? And then what's one thing that you would change or as the founder are actively working to change to make it even better? >> I think the best is we have the same team and it's just incredible. I've been second time founder being able to also >> put together phenomenal team that's um you know anyone if you're going to be a founder was a founder.

>> Um I think we have nine founders out of 14 people on the teams which is insane. >> I think what I would want to change I don't even know. I mean we're actively changing every day. >> Yeah. Um um it's hard to say but I think obviously and it's will be a very obvious answer but just today what you can do with a small number of people and tons of AI agents sp you know that you can spin up uh it's you're really just bounded by your imagination.

>> Got it. Yeah. I mean, the thing you said about having nine out of 14 early team members be founders is is mind-blowing. But for a product like this in particular, it seems like the right approach because you got to move fast. You got to be innovative. You got to be willing to break break a few eggs. And founders are often very good at that. Um, if you could go back and change one thing differently at Replica or or maybe another way of asking is if there was one lesson you learned at Replica that's been most valuable for for building Wabby, what is that for you? I think it's the metric you choose as the your main metric drives everything else. And so at some point with replica was revenue for example, it was very hard to work on no matter what like all decisions were still kind of feeding into that revenue and uh revenue metric conversion and all that. So choosing correct metric um is really really

critical I think because it will really define what you focus on. because as soon as you introduce revenue it's very hard to focus on anything else. uh frankly that also is an important learning and I think one more thing is like sometimes maybe at replica we didn't believe as like we were so early and pro models just kept being shitty for so long crappy >> and we kept building them and building them and just at some point kind of like maybe lost a little bit of like you know there were moments where we should have gone all in on pre-training. We've always trained our models, don't get me wrong, but at some point maybe we should have gone bigger like maybe like let's invest not a million dollars like 10 $20 million in this new model and try to um but it was hard and so I guess you know this the one thing here is like you have to take bigger risks bigger swings just with how technology is evolving. Um, and

one other thing that I would say, you have to build something new, like truly innovative, like truly invent I think with Replica truly invented something completely new. It didn't exist before and it was a big story. But if you just repeat what other people are doing, no one's ever going to be interested. >> I love that last point in particular, and something I often say is it better to be 10x different than 2x better. Like even if you're building something that not everybody loves, at least be different, because if you're not different, then you're sort of dead on arrival. Uh, and I think that's even more true now because everybody can vibe code an app in a weekend. And so you got to be you got to be coming to the to the ecosystem with a with a different angle or or no one's really going to resonate with your product. Uh, what's the most creative mini app you've seen on Wabby today? You've talked about some of the

mini apps you've built, but what's the most interesting one you've seen? >> I've seen many. I mean, someone rebuilt like a Game Boy in Wabby, and so you can just like have all all sorts of different retro games and play them all in Wabby. Uh, and the wobbi boy. There's frankly a lot. Like I don't I it's hard it's hard to even pinpoint one. Someone right now I think Swatch released some watch with Marquez. So there was like a a cool app where you could like try different bands and try different attachments and all that. So that was kind of interesting. But every day we see something new like that. It's just >> Yeah. That must be a fun perk of the product you're building. And as a as somebody who grew up as a gamer, I love the Game Boy idea. There are definitely some old Game Boy titles I'd love to go back and play. Uh, okay, a couple more here. Um, if you weren't building Wabby, what other consumer AI company would you

be excited to start? >> See, that's a hard one. I'd probably build a phone. M >> and I know it's like it's impossible to build a phone whatever and like for many different reasons but I think building phone with a new operating system like to a degree we're we are building an operating system that I believe would be a great you know um would be the way people interact with AI and software in the future but building a I think it would be cool to go to phone something just exciting >> and it just completely rethink everything from you know this new AI lens Do you think our phones are not necessarily especially the operating systems of them are not necessarily matching the crazy innovation that we've seen the last years?

>> Yeah, I think that's certainly true. Well, and if nothing else, you certainly go big. I feel like you have a pattern of taking on very big ideas and building a new phone with a new operating system would definitely fit the mold. >> Well, probably fail, but at least it would be fun to work on. >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, you only get one life, right? And you've already been pretty successful in your tech career and so might as well go big. Um, exactly. Last question, and and this comes from a fellow parent. You know, my wife and I have two daughters, a nine and a six-year-old. So, certainly something that's been on my mind recently. What's one one way that you hope AI makes the world a better place for your daughters? And as an AI native tech founder yourself, how does that influence how you approach your own work? I do hope that we build more um AI companions, AI friends, AI, whatever

models that are focused on human flourishing and connecting people. Um I think there's something really wrong with where the world's going right now with just this insane amount of loneliness and disconnectedness and lack of empathy, lack of knowing how to connect with other people. And it's clear like when you spend five hours a day scrolling some feed, there's just no time for connection. I really hope that we'll, you know, I I do believe that we can't make good decisions for ourselves anymore because we're just too weak. Unfortunately, I myself I'm addicted to scrolling Twitter um or X. And um you know unfortunately I we need something bigger than ourselves that will just tell us like how to live our lives in a way that we actually uh can flourish. And I hope that AI can do that for us and for our kids. I am a little worried. I also have two girls.

They're younger than yours and four. But I'm a little bit worried like I grew up and before so like in before Instagram, right? Like when I was a teenage girl there was no Instagram. But it's a little bit worrisome for me like for my girls to grow into um grow up in this new era with this new with these new social media platforms. So I hope I can do something to help facilitate this these fears. >> I couldn't agree more. And uh I used to work for Max Rhodess at fair. He's an old friend and he had a recent video where he talked about how the internet used to feel like an escape from the real world and now the real world feels like an escape from the internet. And so I think we all recognize that something feels increasingly broken >> and uh I'm I'm glad people like you are working on it. Before we wrap up, any final words that you want to leave our audience with?

>> I think we're going through just one thought is that we're going through this absolutely incredible uh obviously change in technology and innovation and I wish there were more people that would think about novel original ideas. uh even if they fail, but it's just kind of upsetting that there's so much group playing right now in AI where you know everyone's just building the same thing over and over again. Um and just like the last two years it was deep research and everyone built deep research and then um browser clippers and everyone built some sort of operator browser clipper and then web browser genic browser and everyone built those and then some version of open claw or some version of an agent. I just feel there's so many other ideas in the world. there just so many other shapes that you can um and so many ideas that are different from what people are saying. So I think finding a contrarian idea, a belief that

everyone else maybe is not um it's not obvious to them and trying to build something that has a new shape that looks different taking a better bigger swing. I think it's just good because it it really you know it's really exciting to build new stuff. >> Yeah, I agree. And the world needs different ideas. I feel like group think has become a more and more powerful force in technology and otherwise. And so, uh, I hope you will keep keep going and building against the grain. And thank you for the time today, Eugenie. I really appreciate it.

>> Thank you so much, Phil. >> Thanks again to Revenue for sponsoring this episode. If you're building a subscription app, you can use RevenueCat to power purchases, optimize pay walls, offer discounts, handle refunds, manage customer data, run AP tests, generate insights, and unlock more revenue. I work with dozens of subscription apps and most of them are already using RevenueCat to power their businesses.