nina: Hi, my name is Nina Kollari and welcome to AppMinded. In August 2025, I decided to completely change my career. I was talking with Jatch APT and Claude about what I should do next and they kept coming up with the same suggestion. iOS development. And I honestly thought it was completely ridiculous. I did not know anybody who built iPhone apps. I'd never written code. It felt completely outside my world. But I made myself a deal. I'd commit to it until January 2026 before deciding whether to quit. Spoiler alert, I'm glad I didn't quit. September was frustrating. October wasn't much better, and November was toughest of all. I had no idea what I was doing, but I promised myself I'd keep going no matter what. Then something happened. In early December I walked into my first hackathon. It was hosted by Curse, AI Development Tool. And in that hackathon, I built an iPhone app for myself using AI. And somehow I won the whole thing. And that changed everything. And it wasn't really about the winning. It was realizing that someone without software engineering background could actually pull products that people cared about. From that point on, I stopped trying to learn everything first. I skipped most of the tutorials and started learning by building. One app became two, two became five. Today in July 2026, I have 11 apps in the App Store. I've also helped hundreds of people build their own apps with AI. Along the way I met an incredible community of builders. Some had never coded before, others had been engineers for years. Some came from marketing, design, product, SEO. Or completely different careers. But everyone had one thing in common. They built something real. And I realized something else. There are thousands of podcasts about startups, AI, and programming. But almost nobody sits down with the people who built the apps and asks them how they did it. Not the polished success story, the real one. Where the idea came from, the tools that they use, what broke, and what nearly made them give up. One thing you probably notice is that many of my guests are women and that is intentional. I think AI has opened the door for people who might never consider building software before, and that means we are starting to see products created from lived experiences that have often been overlooked. I think that's a huge opportunity and I want those stories to be heard. And that is what App Minded Podcast is. Some episodes will feature complete beginners who built their first app with AI. Others will feature experienced developers with a totally different approach. We'll talk about AI, design, marketing, monetization, accessibility, app store launches, growth, mistake, and everything in between. If you ever thought I'd love to build an app, but I'm not technical enough, I hope this podcast helps you change your mind. You can find me on Instagram and LinkedIn as Nina Kollari, and you find all the episodes, show notes and resources at appmindy.co. Thanks for being here. Let's get into the first episode.