Amjad Masad: How anyone can build a business with AI

**Amjad Masad** (0:00)
You know, Replit's mission has always been about making programming more accessible, so that more and more people can make applications and code and spin up a database, you can deploy and everything you need to go from an end to an end process. But ultimately, the thing that's always been hard, the hardest is code. Someone who works in operations got a quote from a company that he spent $400 in a couple of weeks building it on Replit. His boss bought it from him for $32,000. The people closest to the problems have the best ideas to solve these problems.

**Hassan** (0:42)
What are some developments you're looking out for in the next two, three, like three to six months where you're like, hey, like really pumped about?

**Amjad Masad** (0:48)
I'm really hoping and I'm sort of excited about.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:55)
Amjad, welcome to the podcast. Only one place we can start, I guess. The news you shared in the last couple of days, Replit's revenue is absolutely exploding. On six months, you guys have gone from 10 million to 100 million ARR.
How? Like that's the question everyone wants to know, like how did you guys do this?

**Amjad Masad** (1:13)
You know, Replit's mission has always been about making programming more accessible so that more and more people can make applications and code. And our approach has been, okay, let's make the infrastructure super easier. Let's make it so that you can spit up a development environment easy. You can collaborate easy. You can install dependencies. You can spin up a database. You can deploy and everything you need to go from an end to end process. But ultimately, the thing that's always been hard, the hardest is code. So, you know, Replit may be perhaps, you know, made making things, even if it is like twice as easy, you need to be 10 times easier. So I've been thinking about software development agents for a long time. I gave a TED talk in 2023 about it. And in early 2024, it felt like we're almost there. It felt like the models are starting to become smarter, better coders. It felt like they can work for longer, which I think is a very crucial thing for agents. And so scrapped every other project we're working on and told the team we have one goal, which is making programming 10 times easier, making coding 10 times easier. And the way to make coding 10 times easier is to build a kick-ass agent. And so, yeah, it took, I don't know, eight months or so, maybe a little more, to design and build the agent. We released it in September, it was first of its kind. It was the first true software development agent that you can try. It was kind of a category creator. And that was in beta. December, we got a lot of beta and that's when the growth exploded. And then we had another inflection point in February, when we updated our mobile app. And finally, another inflection point in April, when we rolled out Agent V2, which was a lot more powerful, more autonomous and things like that. You know, it was compounding on top of each other, all these trends. And we were obviously riding an underlying trend, which is kind of the vibe coding trend.
And so that's what it got us to this place. It's obviously very exciting. It's a long time coming. It feels good, but at the same time, I think, keep telling my team, like we don't have ARR goals at Replit. We think about, we look at metrics. We have some metric goals, like conversions and things like that, but we care more about the anecdotes, the individual stories, the companies we're helping, how much money we're saving them, how much money they're making with Replit. Those are, I think ARR is the outcome of that. And that is a lot more exciting, and everyone at the company gets fired up when an entrepreneur builds a million dollar business with Replit, or a company saves millions of dollars or increases revenue millions of dollars. All of those happened.
And so, excited for the future of software development agents. It's just going to be absolutely bonkers. Just over the next 18 to 24 months, it's just going to continue. Every six months, we're going to see a new step change. So, we have Agent V3 coming up, hopefully around September, October. And I think that's going to be another inflection point.

**SPEAKER_3** (5:04)
Yeah. I know the quote gets attributed to a lot, but I still want our audience to get a little bit more color around this. You know, every time I look up your name for news and everything, as I was doing the research for this episode as well, and it's like, Replit CEO says, don't learn how to code. You know, coding is a waste of time and so on. So, you know, sort of, you know, would love to get a little bit more color from you around, you know, do you really think it's anyone who's coming into building now? Do you think they should just not learn how to code and focus on learning how to maybe prompt these tools now?