How Josh Mohrer built Wave AI

Presented by Zapier
https://zapier.com/

Episode Highlights / Timestamps

00:00 $7M ARR as a solo founder
01:21 Profit, margins, and team size
02:51 Josh’s path from Uber to Wave
05:24 Choosing ideas in the early AI days
06:18 Why summarization felt like the killer app
08:15 Competing with Otter, Fireflies, and others
10:21 Recording real-world audio vs meeting bots
12:18 Spending more on AI to improve quality
13:39 Knowing you’re onto something from user emotion
15:09 Why Wave stayed general instead of vertical
16:12 Learning to build with ChatGPT
18:00 How Wave’s architecture evolved
19:39 Using Claude Code day-to-day
21:00 AI agents analyzing analytics and logs
25:21 The tools behind Wave (Cursor, Twilio, Adapt)
27:27 Building instead of buying SaaS tools
30:00 Using AI to ship features faster
32:06 Why Zapier matters for data portability
34:03 The future of cheap, abundant software
36:09 Running Wave like a corner store, not a startup
40:12 Growth goals without VC pressure
42:18 How Wave gets customers today
49:03 Why SEO side projects didn’t convert
50:24 “If you’re good, things might work out”
54:45 Revenue breakdown and take-home profit

What does it look like when a single founder builds a profitable AI company — alone — and quietly grows it to millions in revenue?

In this episode of The Next New Thing, Andrew Warner sits down with Josh Mohrer, creator of Wave AI, to unpack how he built a $7M ARR AI business with no full-time team — and how modern AI tools fundamentally changed what’s possible for solo founders.

Josh previously helped scale Uber in its early days, but Wave AI is a very different story. It’s a one-person, profitable SaaS built around a deceptively simple idea: record real-world conversations, transcribe them, and generate high-quality summaries people actually trust. No hype. No venture capital. No big team.