I launched an AI app that hit $100,000 in 15 minutes

Six months ago, I launched my first AI app that I 100% solo built by myself, all with AI, no coding at all. In the first 15 minutes of this app being out, I hit 100K ARR, which is $100,000 annual recurring revenue. And then, as you can see here, within a week, we hit 19K MR, which is $200,000 annual recurring revenue. Basically, right off the rip, it was printing money. This was all for me launching an AI content app called Creator Buddy, which I just built for myself. I honestly didn't expect other people to get it, but clearly after launching it, a lot of other people wanted it. In this video, I'll go over exactly step by step how I did it and show you how you can do the exact same thing. If you stick with me until the end, I 100% promise you, you'll be set up to build and launch an app yourself. Even if you've never coded day in your life, you'll know exactly what you need to do to build and launch an app and start getting customers the second you launch. Let's get into it. Here's the itinerary for this video. I'm going to show you how to find a challenge to solve. actually solve that challenge with AI. I'm going to show you how to build an app that solves that challenge, even if you've never coded a day before in your life. And then I'm going to show you how to get your first customers for your app. So you can start making money right away on your app. So, my app

creator buddy that's now making around $300,000 a year came from me just trying to solve my own day-to-day challenges. I didn't think about customers. selling. I didn't even think about money. I just thought, how can I build an app that solves my own challenges? If you can build an app that solves day-to-day challenges you have, the odds are there are other people out there that have those exact same challenges. So, here's what you need to do. You need to do this exercise. You need to find challenges that you have that you can solve by building an app with AI. You need to open up an Apple note, right? If you have an iPhone, open up an Apple note. If you have an Android, then I don't know, open up an Android note, whatever they call it on there. And then start writing down every single challenge you have for an entire week. Right? Be conscious of what you're doing in your day-to-day life. And then everything you do during that day, if you find a challenge, write it down that Apple note. It's impossible to write down too many challenges. Every little inconvenience you have, write it down in an Apple note. This is what mine looked like. Right? Here's an example one I did for this video. I went around for a day. I wrote down every challenge I had that day. Do this exercise. What we're going to do in a second when we get into the next step is I'm going to show you how to solve these challenges with apps you can build with AI. But the key to having any successful AI app or building any really product at all is the product needs to solve a challenge. And the simpler the challenge, the more common the challenge, the better. And here's what's so beautiful about this strategy of solving your day-to-day challenges. Even if no one buys your app and you don't make a single dollar off your app, you will still get benefits from doing this strategy, right? because you solved your own challenge. When I built Creator Buddy, it solved the challenge of me having to review all my tweets to see what worked and what didn't work, right? the tool syncs with your Twitter and gets all your tweets. So, even if no one bought this app at all, it made it so much easier for me to review my own content. So, step one, do that exercise I just showed you. Spend a day or two writing down every challenge you have. And what we're going to do in the next step is actually figure out how we can solve those challenges using AI. And this is going to be the concept for the app I'm going to show you how to build.

So, here we go. Step two. We have a list of a bunch of challenges we can solve. Now, we're going to choose one of those challenges that we're going to build our app around. Our app is going to be purpose-built to solve this one challenge. Again, if we're solving a challenge that we personally have in our day-to-day life, the odds are someone else out there or many people out there have that same challenge that we can solve and we can get them as customers to our app. So, here are my list of challenges I came up with just from writing down my challenges every day. Let's choose one of these challenges to solve. And I'll show you in a second how to actually build the app out, even if you've never coded before. So, I'm gonna choose for this one, not knowing meals, I can meal prep for an entire week. So, every day I have to make my own lunch and it takes up a ton of time. All I want to do is create content and code, but making my own lunches take so long. So, what I want to do is be able to meal prep at the beginning of the week so that I have meals just good to go that I can microwave every day. The problem is I don't know any meals I can meal prep. I have a bunch of ingredients in the fridge, but I don't know what meals to make with them. So, let's choose this challenge and let's figure out an app that makes it easier for meal prepping at the beginning of the week. So, time for step two. Let's figure out the solution to our challenge. So, to figure out what the solution is to the challenge that we're going to build, open up your LLM of choice. For me, at the moment, I think chat GP03 is the most powerful model. I use it for all my logic based stuff. Open it up. If you want to do what I'm doing, just go to chatgbt. com. What you're going to do is start a new chat and you're going to copy this prompt that I have on screen right now, which is I want to build an app that solves a challenge I have. The challenge I'm trying to solve is, then you put in the challenge you're trying to solve. I don't know what meals I can meal prep for my entire week. I have a list of ingredients, but don't know what to make. Please list five solutions I can vibe code that will solve this challenge. And then you hit enter. And what this is going to do is the LLM is now going to give us a list of possible solutions to this challenge. And what we're going to do is choose one of those solutions and actually build it out with Claude code, which I'll show you how to do. This is exactly what I did with Creator Buddy. I said, "Hey, it takes too long to review my own tweets. What are solutions I can come up with that solves this challenge? " And it basically gave me the outline for Creator Buddy. I built out the app and then I was making $100,000 in 10 minutes. So, we're going to go through that exact same process now. Okay. So, here are the list of the solutions that Chad GPT came up with. It looks like a pretty interesting list here. So, a drag and drop meal prep can man. Interesting. One-click cook once playlist generator. Turn your ingredients list into a step sequence cooking playlist. I kind of like this idea. So, you drop in your ingredients. You list all your ingredients and then an AI takes those ingredients and gives you a list of meals you can make. I kind of like that. So imagine every Sunday night you go in, you list out the ingredients you have in your fridge and then it gives you ideal meals that you can meal prep for that entire week and like remembers your past meals so it always keeps it fresh. That's an app I would use that solves my problems and I can build that and start getting customers right away. So let's do this. Let's take that idea and let's start building out an app for it with AI. So I'm going to show you now is how we can turn that into a prompt for cloud code. We're going to go into actually how to build that out with Cloud Code. Even if you've never used Claude Code before, I'll show you how to get that set up. And then right after, I'm going to show you exactly how to get your first customer so you can start making money right away like Creator Buddy did. So, let's do this. Let's go back into the AI and let's say this. So, here's the prompt we're going to do. I like the idea of giving a list of ingredients in my fridge and then an AI takes those ingredients and recommends me three meals. I can meal prep that week with those ingredients. So, I'm telling the AI exactly which one of those ideas I like. It gives me step-by-step instructions how to build those meals. Please give me an initial prompt. I can put into claude code to build v1 of this app using Nex. js. So feel free just to take this prompt and build out the exact same app as me if you didn't have the list of challenges built out yet, right? Because then we can build this out together and afterwards you can do all these steps I'm giving you. But just a couple things to note. I put in cloud code here so it knows we're building with cloud code so it knows what type of prompt to give us. And I also said Nex. js JS which is a very popular web app framework that we can build our app on top of and we're going to hit enter on this now and what this is going to do is give us the initial prompt we can drop into cloud code to actually build this app out as you can see I'm not going to write any lines of code here it's all going to be done through the AI which is cloud code which again I'll quickly show you how to set up in a second okay so wow look at this is the power of using AI to generate your AI prompts look at this prompt it built out for us it includes all the technologies we need it shows is exactly what's going to be in the app, what the components need to be, what the UI is going to look like, all the tech, all the cards, everything is in there. This is awesome. So, we're going to leave this here for a second. I'm now going to show you the next step how to set up Claude Code. If you haven't already, just take a couple seconds. And then I'm going to take this prompt and we're going to start building out V1 of our app together before we get into how we're going to get our first customers. Let's go.

So for this app, we are going to use Claude Code, which in my opinion is the most powerful AI coding tool in the world right now. Very easy to set up, very easy to use. I'm going to show you how to set it up. we're going to put it into Cursor, which is my favorite way to use Claude Code. If you already have Claude Code set up and are a Claude Code genius, maybe you watched my other videos, feel free to skip to the next chapter, or maybe you just watch it to get a quick review on how it all works. But let's set up Claude Code so we can start building out V1 of our app. So Claude Code, very easy to set up. Just go to anthropic. com/cloudcode. It has this commands right here that we're going to run in a second. Leave that there. We're going to use it in a moment. And then what you also want to do is install cursor. So cursor is the development environment we're going to install claude code in. It just basically makes Claude code a lot more visual for us. So we can see the code and all the components very easily. So go to cursor. com, download that. There's a free tier that we can get this up and running with. Just download that. And then what we're going to do in a sec is install claude code inside of cursor. We're inside cursor now. Let's get this set up. We're going to put in cloud code. Let's just first open up a new project. So we're going to click open project and we're going to create a new folder. I created a new folder inside there called meal prepper. So we got that set up. Now let's just install clawed code. So you hit command till day to open up your terminal. I'm going to move this over to the right hand side of the screen. There we go. We can close that up. Close that. And now we're just going to paste in our Claude Code command from that last screen. So, paste in that command from the Claude Code website. And then you're just going to hit enter and you're good to go. Claude Code's installed. Then all you need to do once it's installed to run it is hit Claude. You just type that in, hit enter, and boom, Claude is going to open up for you. All right. So, there you go. on the right hand side in that terminal is now claude code and we can start building out this app. So for those who don't know claude code extremely powerful AI coding tool. You just give it prompts on what you want to build and it goes and just builds it out for you. You really don't have to mess with any code whatsoever or have previous technical experience or abilities. So I'm going to take the prompt from chat GPT we just showed a second ago and we're going to paste it in here. And this initial prompt is what's going to build us v1 of our app. Once we get this built out, which should be pretty quick, I'm going to go into how I started getting customers for Creator Buddy. So, you can start doing that for your app. I hit enter and Claude Code now got my entire prompt from the last step and it's going to start building that MVP, the minimal viable product, so that we can get our app up and running and start getting customers as it goes. Just feel free to hit yes and let Claude Code run on every kind of question it asks you there and it'll just keep writing the code for you. Okay, looks like the app is all set up now. Couple more things we need to do. We just need to add the AI API key. So, we're just use an API key for OpenAI. This is going to allow us to have AI functionality inside of our application. Cloud Code pretty much oneshoted everything else. So, let's just get our OpenAI API key and we'll be good to go. So, if you go to openai. com/api, you'll be on their platform site. I can just hit log in here. All right. Once we're in here, we just click on API keys on the lefth hand side. And we can set up a new API key that we can use in our app. You just click create new key in the top right. We're going to give this a name. We'll call it meal prep. And I'll click create secret key. And this will give us our key. Once you have that, just copy it. Paste it right here next to open AI API key in the env file. And you're good to go. All right. So, let's do this. Let's actually run the app. Now, if you don't know how to run the app, feel free just ask cloud code, hey, how do I run this app or get installed? Is it good to go? Once you do that, should be pretty simple for us. It's going to just be npm rundev in the terminal. I hit enter. Bada bing, bada boom. We click on that. Let's see what this app looks like. Okay, there we go. In one single shot, we have this app. Let's do this. Let's put in a few uh materials from our fridge and see what we got here. Let's see if it can build us an actual meal. So, I'm going to put in chicken, rice, asparagus. We'll say salt, pepper, broccoli, eggs, potato chips, paprika. All right, let's do this. Let's plan my week. Let's see what it can do here. All right, look at this. It looks like it generated Okay, it gave me three options. Oh, I like that little hover effect it gives me. Gave me three options and told me exactly how to build uh those meals using the ingredients it gave me. That's pretty awesome. We now have officially have an AI app. Now, there's a bunch of things we can do here. I can sit here for the next 10 hours and show you how to add really cool features and make this better and improve. But the point of this video is to show you how to build and launch an app that starts making you money right away. We have our app good to go. Let's start talking about how we can get our first customers.

So, I had people lined up to buy the app on day one for one very specific reason. It's because I used a marketing framework that I invented that I like to call the share your journey framework. And basically what this means is every step of the way I built out Creator Buddy, I shared my journey on social media. And yes, I did have a following on Twitter, but there are numerous examples of accounts who shared their journey even with no audience and were able to successfully get customers. One example I talk about all the time is my good friend Will Wang, who right now, yes, he has 9,000 followers, but when he posted this video, I think he had like a couple thousand, so not nearly as many. And he put out this tweet that just showed what he was building, which was this AI video editor called Clova. So, he didn't have many followers at the time, but what he started doing was he started posting videos of his app as he was building it. So, basically, he was sharing his journey. And so, he posted this video. Look at the numbers it did here. 800,000 impressions, 4. 4,000 likes. This video went bananas and it got him thousands of people on his waiting list. You can do the exact same thing. Set up an ex account, start posting videos the app you're making, even if you don't have many followers. It will start presenting that video to other people in the AI space and they'll see how your app work. You explain exactly what your app does and the problems it solves and it's going to start putting that content in front of other people that have those challenges. That's what I did here. I put out this post that has a video of me demoing the app months before I launched the app. So, I literally built the prototype like I was showing you of that meal prep app, right? And as I was building, I just posted videos of Creator Buddy as I went. So, let's put yourselves in the shoes of this app we're building with the meal prepping. I would at this point of building the V1 of this app, record myself using it and demoing it and then I would just make a tweet similar to this with exactly everything going on in the demo. Have a video of me explaining what's in the meal prep app and people will just find their way to that video even if you don't have much of an audience. As you can see, this video which was my first demo of Creator Buddy had over 1. 8,000 likes, 300,000 views. It did so well because people were so interested in what I was buying. They get invested in your journey as you're building. That's why this framework works so well is people fall in love with heroes journeys. When you're making videos and posting content and you building, people fall in love with that journey because they start putting themselves in your shoes, especially if they're facing challenges similar to the ones you have. And this is what starts building that organic excitement for your app that's going to lead to sales to day one. This is why Creator Buddy performed so well and was at 100K ARR in 10 minutes, 200K ARR in a week, and now at 300K ARR a few months later is because people fell in love with my journey. So, you tweet out the videos. I like Twitter because it's really quick and easy to put out content, but obviously you can do this with YouTube as well. YouTube has a way larger audience. But now, the next steps are super easy. We've started building momentum. We've started getting eyes on our app. Now, we keep going. Now, we keep building and sharing our journey. So let's go back into cloud code. So I'm going to cloud code. I'm telling it another feature I want to build out. I'm saying make it so that an AI generated image gets generated with every meal that's shown. So there's a visual with every meal. I'm going to hit enter on that. And now Claude Code is going to go and start building out that new feature. Now what do you think we do from here? It builds out the new feature. We record ourselves using the app with that new feature and we post again. Hey, check out this new feature I'm building. This starts building us so much momentum around our app and getting us a lot more attention. And the best part of all this is it's free. I'm not spending any money on this marketing here. Me posting on Twitter is completely free and getting eyes on our app. And so this is what I did. What you see here is every tweet I made that mentions Creator Buddy and has a demo of the tool in it. So here's another one. Here's another tweet I made that has a demo of the tool in it. So I added a new AI model to Creator Buddy and I just put out a video showing me how I did it. just demoing the app with the new model. This again got more eyes on my journey, more people invested, and more people signing up for Creator Buddy. But this is how we build momentum. How do you now actually get customers on day one? Let's talk about it. So, you've been sharing your journey on

social media with my patent share your journey framework. Now, we got to get people to actually start using the app. So before day one, you want people beta testing the app to try it out. You have people beta testing your app. You now have people ready to go that are warmed up and ready to buy. And so what I did was very simple. Went into my tweets where I was demoing the app out and I would go into the comment section and I would look for people that were excited. I would go in, okay, going to be epic. Can't wait to try says Jackie Raco. I would click on their profiles and I would DM them and say, "Hey, do you want to try the app out for free? " Typically, because they were excited in the comment section, they would say yes. I got personally over 100 people to beta test Creator Buddy before I launched. Anytime someone would say how excited they were, Excalibur was one of them, Mr. Dude was one of them. I got I DM' them, I got them in, I started having them try the app for free. This built so much excitement around the app because we had people beta testing it, talking to their friends about it, coming to me with feedback, helping me improve the app based on their feedback. It just built the energy up so much more. These are going to be your first customers on day one when you launch are these beta testers. So, you want to make sure you beta test this. How do you beta test it? Well, make sure you get your database set up again. Superbase authentication with Clerk, your payments with Stripe. Again, I have other videos. I'll link one down below for my Claude Code master class to show you how to build out your app. That's how you're going to get people to start using the app and telling others about it. Beta test right before your launch. So, you have beta testers. Now, let's get to day one, the successful launch, which for me was a day we hit 100K ARR just 15 minutes in.

So, day one, we're ready to launch. We chose a challenge. We chose a solution to the challenge. We built out the solution. We started building excitement with the share your journey framework. We got some beta testers. How do we start making some of that sweet moola? Well, it's time to launch. And this is how we did it. We continue our share your journey framework. So, here you can see my launch tweet from the creator buddy launch. I again just shared my journey. I talked about my journey to that point. I talked about the challenge I originally had that inspired creator buddy. I talked about the solution I built and I basically made a whole narrative around the app. I didn't sell the app. I sold my narrative around the app. And that's what's so powerful about the share your journey framework is you're not pushing apps on people. You're pushing your story on people and people buy into that story and want to use your app. Right? So, I put it out. I talked about the app, the challenge it solves, my journey up to this point. I did a whole bunch of live content. I live streamed on YouTube. X. I did Twitter spaces on X which is a wildly underrated tool and I just talked about my journey and talked about my story and that got people buying in. Most of the beta testers that were beta testing the app actually ended up converting and buying the app and then a whole lot of people who were friends with the beta testers who saw my tweets, things like that. This tweet got over se almost 700,000 views, 2. 5,000 likes. It got so many people into the app and it exploded the customer base on day one. That again is the power of the share your journey framework. Right? It comes down to this. Choosing a very simple challenge that you have in your own life, figuring out a very simple solution to that challenge, sharing your journey of building that solution to the challenge and getting people bought into your journey. The people who buy into your journey are probably going to be customers of your app. This is the way you build businesses in 2025 and beyond is you build solutions and you share your journey. People aren't falling in love with products. They're narratives and journeys. And that's how I got Creator Buddy to where it is today and how it's going to keep growing from here and how every other app and product I build is going to keep going is people buying into my own journey. If you learned anything at all, make sure to leave a like. Make sure to subscribe and turn on notifications. If you want a deeper dive into Claude Code and all its technical specifics, feel free to check out my tutorial video which is somewhere on the screen. Click on that. All I do is make videos on building cool stuff with AI. and I'll see you in the next