Emergent AI hits 1M users and 1.5M apps built — Mukund Jha on consumer vibe coding for non-technical builders

expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. We have our next guest in the reream waiting room makund from emergent AI. How you doing?

Hey, I'm doing good. How are you guys?

Welcome to the show. How you doing?

What's happening?

Super excited to be here.

What's going on today?

We actually launched a product three months back and one of our goals was to be on TVPN. Super. Yes. I love the show.

Fantastic. Thanks so much. uh break it down for us. What are you building?

Yeah, so I'm mukun at emergent. We are building world's most advanced wipe coding platform uh for consumers uh for nontechnical users. They can come in, prompt an idea and get a fully built live app uh that they can take to production. Um and we launched a few months back. Over a million users have tried the platform. More than a million and a half apps have been built so far. We're growing pretty crazily right now.

How do you think about sub like like beach head markets and fra uh like like submarkets? Uh there are platforms that focus on get an iOS app in test flight. Uh build a game, vibe code, a a website like are are the people that are signing up saying I'm going to start a business. I'm going to build an app that will be the foundation of like you know some monetary thing or is it you know are we in the era of like vibe coding apps as memes somewhere in between? Are you still exploring? What do you think? Yeah. So I mean we we are the only platform that supports uh web app, mobile app and back end all integrated in one and we have consumers coming from all all parts of life. We have business owners trying to digitize their business. We have entrepreneurs building their startup on on emergent right now. Um a lot of people are building apps that are moneti monetizable right now and they are shipping them. Uh and so so it's a it's a crazy spectrum of ideas on the platform right now.

It's amazing. A million users is a lot. like what's the what's the acquisition funnel? Like how do you actually get people? It's it's it's a it's a it's a buzzy space. It's a cool tech, but I imagine it's hard to get people to go to your specific website. Like what's working?

Yeah. So, I think people really really love our product. I think that's what's sort of working really well for us. A lot of the acquisition is word of mark today for us. Uh that people are refering each other on the platform. As they get successful app, uh they refer each other. We also do bunch of influencer marketing. So we use Tik Tok, Instagram, X uh to promote our our brand and we partner with influencers and they're able to sort of create stories which resonates with their audience. Uh that's something that is working really well for us as well.

That seems to be working really well these days. I feel like there's this interesting flywheel where maybe for the first time we're seeing influencers drive drive software adoption, software downloads. I mean we've all seen like VPN ads, but uh we're in a new age where people are are pushing like 5. is what how what what's good retention in your view because obviously a bunch of people are going to come in create stuff and then uh but uh you know 12 months from now how many of these people what what is success look like in terms of routine so now I'm a real business you can have a relative I think I think

the beauty of these things is somebody can come in in 20 30 minutes an hour they can create something very cool

you don't need to retain all of them you don't even need to retain the majority of them but how how are you thinking and kind of planning planning around that.

Yeah. So we we have uh good retention on the platform with month three like roughly 40 50% of the users are still on the platform. We have a very strong power user behavior where top 10% of the users are spending a lot more money on the platform who are building serious apps. They're taking them to production and there our retention is north of like 80% right now. So uh so we think it's still early days but I think what's going to happen is like a lot of people are going to come on the platform lot of because we also take care of deployment. We host these apps on our platform. they're going to stay with us on on the platform and uh what's also happening is as they build more they they want to add more feature as they get more feedback from their users they come back to build more on the platform. Uh still sort of early sort of days but but we think that you know like uh you can build a a pretty large business around these power users uh who are trying to launch their app launch a new business uh or a new idea uh to the world.

What do you think for business model uh consumptionbased? Uh, do you want to get people to spin up an app, subscribe, and then you're acting as their hosting provider long term? Um, a lot of people build websites, and then they're happy with them and they don't actually have a lot of feature requests. Uh, we've seen Squarespace and a bunch of other companies, you know, they're they're not they're templated based, but they they wind up being great businesses because people are happy to continue managing on WordPress or Squarespace. Uh, what what what business model makes sense in the in the vibe coding AI era?

Yeah. So for us like almost uh most of our apps are actually uh like full stack web apps which has backend databases on so mobile apps. Uh so what we are seeing uh you know is is a lot of users are coming and adding adding features to them and building them. Uh I think in a steady state like a lot of these users you you'll have a power law where like you know top top x% of users are going to deploy big apps have breakout success on the platform and those are going to be continuing to be on the platform and and the business is going to get built around those people. Do you expect enterprise vibe coding or consumer proumer vibe coding to be more competitive in the long run and do you think that companies should try to do both or pick a lane? I mean we are very focused on consumer uh we think these are two separate markets uh require separate separate sort of uh personal for example like a lot of our users they call GitHub Jitub right so we have to like really you know like think think through like who we are catering to we have a lot of education baked into the product which tells them what is API like you know how to sort of you know look through errors and things like that um so I think these are two different sort of swim lanes and of course there's an intersection in the middle where like small teams use us uh as well but but largely like like we are very focused on consumer market right now.

Very cool.

That's refreshing to hear because we've had a number of of other platforms on the on the platform and they always say, "Oh yeah, we're we're doing consumer but we're really like, you know, a lot of, you know, basically not not really admitting that they're two separate markets in my field."

Yeah. There's a lot of growth masking like a lack of actually understanding what the product will be when it's mature.

Yeah. What the long-term market looks like.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean when we started we we we thought like I mean realization that we had that like a billion people have ideas in their head like and how do we sort of bring that out? How do we sort of help them launch

and we think it's going to sort a new uh sort of economy and we just want to you know be part of that.