I built an app with AI that made $19,971 in one day

So, here is my Stripe dashboard. You can see every payment I received for my AI app, Creator Buddy. And down here, you can see on January 30th, I got a payment of $19,971 for my AI app. These are all subscriptions. These are all people coming in and paying the $49 a month. I had one day where we had an absolutely massive, massive day of revenue. In this video, I'm going to show you how to do the same thing. come up with ideas for apps, launch your app, market your app, and start getting payments like this into your bank account just like I am off AI. I built this app completely by myself, and you'll be able to do the same thing, too. I'm going to show you how to start building your audience. coming up with ideas for your apps. Then, we're going to go into shipping the app itself. And then, we're going to cover how you actually make money from shipping that app. If you lock in with me until the end of the video, you'll be a master of all these domains. you'll be ready to ship and launch your first app and start making a living off your AI app. I'm Alex Finn. I built and shipped Creator Buddy completely by myself. It is now a $300,000 a year app. On this channel, I show you how to build and launch your own AI startup. So, if you never watched before, make sure to hit the subscribe button down below to follow along this journey of mine. Let's get into it. So, I broke my journey down to come up with my $300,000 app into these four categories here that we're going to cover in this video. The first thing we're going to cover is building your audience. Yes. One of the biggest reasons I'm able to make a living off my AI app is the fact that I already had an audience when I launched it. This is the biggest push back I get when I talk about my app. Oh, Alex, you wouldn't be successful in making money off your app if you didn't have an audience already. Uh yeah, no duh. It is critical to have distribution so you can make money off your app. But here's the thing, though. It's not like I was born with an audience. It's not like it was just handed to me by the audience gods. I spent a little bit of time putting out content to build an audience and it's something you can do quick if you do it strategically and you put a little bit of thinking into it. If you're watching this, I promise you can build an audience your own that you can build and sell apps to. And here's exactly how I built my audience and you can copy. I'm going to give you some tactical steps in this video that you can just copy to do your own thing exactly how I did it. All I did was I went on to act/ Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and I talked about things I'm interested in. I personally am interested in code and programming. So I talk a lot about code and programming. And so what I did that made me grow my audience extremely quick is I talked a lot about the open-source X algorithm. I literally took snippets of code of the X algorithm and broke down what each line of code meant and I talked about and that quickly built my audience. I went from 0 to 10,000 followers in under six months because of that. You can do the same thing. The biggest objection I get when I say this is, "Oh, Alex, but I what do I talk about? I'm not I don't really know what people would want to read from me. " Well, that's simple. So, check this out. Check what I built. This is a spreadsheet that I actually made myself. And this is a brain dump. And this is what you should be doing. You should copy this. I brain dumped in this spreadsheet for like half an hour every single passion and interest I had at the time. So, this was back in December 2021. I open up a spreadsheet. I create my Twitter account and I brain dump every single thing I'm interested in. I sit there, I'm just typing into the spreadsheet everything I'm interested in and then I go into my core ideas, which are like my hot takes, special opinions about those topics. And that's what I started tweeting about. Right? You need to find what you're truly interested in. Get that out of your head and start creating content around it. I personally believe Twitter is the easiest way to do it because Twitter you just need to type out 280 characters, right? You just type out 28 characters, hit send. You don't have to sit here and create videos like this which take hours and hours. Although you should do YouTube, too. Uh the biggest audience is on YouTube. But Twitter is so high leverage. With Twitter, you literally just type out five lines. I was doing it with my 9 to5 after work. Typing out five lines, put in an image, hit send. It takes a minute and you're getting content out there and you're starting to build an audience. This audience is critical because when you eventually, which I'll show you how to do in a second, come up with an idea for app, build the app, and launch the app, you'll have a group of people ready to go that will want to buy your application. So, that makes it on day one, you can make very similar numbers to this as well. Day one was almost 20,000 and we went close to thousands the day after. You can do the same thing if you start building audience. It really isn't that difficult to do. You just need to be consistent about the content you're creating. And yes, I have almost 300,000 followers on X. And yes, that did take a few years to get, but you can do this very, very quickly. You don't need 300,000 followers. You can do this with like 5,000 followers and still sell your product super well. Here's an example of a founder doing it really, really well. This is William Wang. This is a good friend of mine. He only has 7,200 followers, but he has his own app, Clova, which is selling super well. Has tons of users. And look at this. His announcement video had over 4,000 likes and 766,000 impressions, all with just

7,000 followers. And he started taking X seriously about 4 months ago. Now, when I met him, I was like, "Hey, you on X? " He's like, "No. " I'm like, "Well, you got to be on X cuz it'll help you sell your product way better. " He started going on X four months later, 7,000 followers. His app's selling out the wazoo. He's getting over 4,000 likes a post. You can do the same thing. You just go on, you start talking about things you're interested in. Do that over and over and keep the consistency going. Reply guy a ton, right? Reach out to connections. Reply to them. You'll get a base audience where you can start selling your product just like I did, just like William Wang did. In the age of AI, when anyone can build any product, distribution is the moat. So, if you're watching this and you want to make a couple dollars off AI, one of the most important things you're going to need is an audience. Get on X. There's a huge indie hacking scene there. Get on YouTube, start creating videos. Once you just start getting a few thousand followers, you really can start building and pushing products really well. Critical to selling well in AI. I could do a massive deep dive on creating content to build an audience. And I will eventually do that. Let me know if you want that down below in the replies. But just to give you one more big pointer when it comes to creating content that builds an audience, there are three things you need to do to make an excellent piece of content. If you get just one out of these three things in your content, you're going to grow. If you can get all three into your content, you're going to supercharge your growth. But a great piece of content does one of three things. It either entertains, so it's funny. Haha. It's educating, so it helps you learn, helps your brain get bigger, or it's motivating or inspirational, so the reader reads and they are super inspired, right? Why do comedians do well? Why do comedians grow? Because they're very entertaining, right? They're very funny. Then there are a lot of accounts that succeed because they do really well at teaching you new things, right? and people follow along. And then there's motivating, right? Someone like a Gary Vee, super motivational. Every time I see a Gary Vee video, I go, I want to make a 100 Tik Toks in a day, right? Motivating. I personally in my channels, I try to do all three. If you can do all three at the same time, if you can teach people in a really entertaining way that motivates them, your videos are going to take off, your tweets right? So, when you make content, try to get at least one of these three things. If you do one of the three right, you're going to grow. If you can do all three, you got a banger. So, that's building your audience. I gave you some tips. You need to be focusing on any entrepreneur that wants to get into AI, that wants to make money, you have to be building your audience. I recommend Twitter because it's super high leverage. Although, I'm on YouTube. So, YouTube has a massive audience as well. Make videos here. But once you started building your audience, you can start coming up with ideas for your app. So, we're building our audience. We're cooking here. We're cooking on YouTube. We're cooking on X. Now, we're coming up with ideas for our app. And this is exactly what I did, right? I started building my audience. Then, I came up with my idea for Creator Buddy. So, this is what you're going to do. The key to coming up with a great idea for an app is one, either solving your own challenge or two, solving other people's challenges. I prefer solving my own challenges. I prefer being a little selfish here. Why do I do that? Well, one, because if you're solving your own challenge, a day-to-day challenge you have, you most likely are also solving other people's challenges, right? If you have a challenge, the odds are there are other people out there with similar challenges. So, if you build an app that solves your own challenges, the worst case scenario is you built an app that makes your life easier. Even if nobody buys and you don't make a scent, you've made your life easy. There's the other side, which I'll show you how to do as well in a second, which is finding other people's challenges. I do this all the time. on building other apps, finding other people's challenges. I'll show you how to do that in a second, but let's start off with the first one. Solving your own challenges. How do you come up with ideas for apps that solve your own challenges? Well, think about your day-to-day process. What are things you do day-to-day that are monotonous and boring and take up a lot of time? I'll show you mine. Here's a spreadsheet I used to maintain when I first started creating content on Twitter. In this spreadsheet, I literally would copy and paste every single tweet I wrote into it. And then I'd type in the likes, the retweets, the comments, the views. I'd put in the link. I'd categorize by topic and type. I spent hours building this out. And there's thousands of tweets in here. Look at this. Look at the column numbers here. I have thousands of tweets I manually copied and pasted into this spreadsheet. So, this was taking a ton of my time. And the reason why I did this was I wanted to review my content, right? I wanted to see what tweets work, what tweets didn't, what hooks work, what topics work, all that, right? And so I'd spend a lot of time studying my content. I do that by putting my tweets in this spreadsheet. I wanted to make this easier. So I built Creator Buddy, which is just a way to sync your posts from X and then do an AI analysis of it. I built a tool that solves this problem and saves me hours a day of copying and pasting tweets. The worst case scenario was Creator Buddy would make my life really easy. The best case scenario is it'd make my life easy and make me money. So you want to do the same thing. You want to look at your process. You want to see challenges you can solve for

yourself. But on the other side is finding other people's challenges. Maybe your life's optimized. I don't know. Maybe you don't have many challenges. You can also look for other people's challenges. So here's what I do. Come into chat GPT. I did this many, many times. This gets me really great results. Choose whatever model you want. I like 03. I think 03 is the smartest model out there right now at the time of this video. So, here's the prompt I use to come up with really awesome ideas for other people's challenges. I'll put this down below, so feel free to steal it. I am a content creator in the AI, entrepreneurship, and content creation space. What are some daily basic challenges people have in the space? What are some basic apps that would solve these challenges? And what this is going to do is you're now having a conversation with AI. It's going to present a whole bunch of challenges people in your space have and then give you ideas for apps you can build to solve those challenges. I'm going to hit enter on this. All right, so let's check this out. Let's see if we can find a good challenge and app idea from this chat. Okay, so 10 everyday pain points and no fill app ideas for each. A daily challenge content creators have is scattered content ideas. Great hooks pop up in the shower during commutes, etc. Then vanish an idea inbox, one tap capture of automatic tagging by topic and an AI daily digest that bubbles the best ideas back to you writing. Well, creator buddy kind of does this, but let's do this. Let's just build it out anyway. Let's take this idea. I think this is a great one of being able to make it super to write down and save your content ideas. You might need this app anyway because you're starting your content journey right now because of this video. So, scattered content ideas. If you're watching this, might as well build it out with us. An idea inbox for capturing ideas. I like this. We found a challenge people in our audience have. Maybe you're super into sports, right? Maybe you're into basketball. Challenges people have. They don't know how to shoot a jump shot. I Maybe you find that challenge and you start building that app, right? You build an app around how to shoot a jump shot. I'd buy that app. You sell it for $10 a month. I'm sign up right now. DM me or send me a message if you build a how to shoot a jump shot app cuz I'm buying it. I'm buying it immediately. You take this concept. We're going to move on to the next step here. So, up to this point, we either chosen a challenge we have on a day-to-day basis or we found someone else's challenges. I showed you how to do both. So, there's your homework assignment for this step. Talk with AI to find challenges. Feel free to pause the video and write that down. Let's move on to the next step, which is actually shipping an app. We're getting close here. We're getting close. Once I show you how to build and ship this, we're going to move into actually making money. We're getting close. Stick in with me here. Also, if you learned anything so far, make sure to hit the subscribe button. Leave a like. All I do is make awesome videos about how to build and ship your first AI startups. Also, let me know in the replies if you've come up with a good idea so far. If you're willing to share with me, I'd love to hear about it. All right, so let's get into shipping. We're going to talk about building and shipping the app. This is not going to be a super intense coding tutorial. I'm just going to show you a couple tools you can use to build and ship your idea. If you want a super intense coding tutorial, I have a hundred other videos on that as well. Make sure to check that out on my profile. But here is the tool I like best for building and shipping prototypes. This is bolt. new. You enter in a prompt, it builds you an app. Couldn't be simpler. So, let's take that idea we came up with in the last step and put it in here and get our V1 built out. So, I want to build a content idea capture app that the idea for a piece of content and categorize it by platform and content type. We're going to have the AI build it out for us. So, the bolt new AI agent is now going to take our idea and build out the V1 of our application for us. Again, I'm not going to get super in-depth here. into the code. I have a lot of content around building apps with AI. Feel free to check that out as well. But, I'm just going to show you the basics how this works. And then we're going to talk about how to market this app and idea once you've shipped it. Okay, looks like the AI agent stopped working here. Let's see. We This is a beautiful looking app. Look at these colors. I'm a big fan of purple. I think purple's cool. This is sick. Okay, so let's see how this works. Capture your content ideas. Never lose a brilliant content idea again. Okay, so uh let's do video on building AI app. Let's do this for Wow, it's got all the platforms built in. This was one prompt, by the way. I didn't skip it. This is one prompt. YouTube content type. This is going to be a video. Create the idea. Oh, boom. There it is. It saved it. That's amazing. And it did the uh color category based on uh what platform you chose. The red for YouTube. That's this was one single prompt in Bolt. Is like you can do light mode, you can do dark mode. Look at that. Right. So, we have our V1. We went in, you built your prototype. Obviously, there's going to be more work than this, but in this video, I'm covering the highlevel tactical how to get your app built, launched, and marketed, right? So you're going to go, you're going to take this, this code, you're going to export it, you can put it into cursor, windsurf, and you can keep prompting the AI to build it out further. If this is good enough, you think your v1's good enough, and it could be, it could be good enough, this v1 prototype, you can just hit deploy and it's live on the internet, and you can send it to your friends to use, right? All we're trying to do is solve a very basic challenge that either we have most ideally or other people in our audience have. We're

not looking to change the world here. build the next Google or build the next Facebook. You just build a simple app that solves a simple problem. You get it online and we want to get it into our audience's hands. So, that's the shipping part. Now, we're coming up to the most important step of them all, which is the making money part. But, how we make the money part? How do we do that? How do we get more people onto the app? This is what I like to call the SYJ framework. And the only reason I call it the SYJ framework is because now it sounds really professional and now I sound really professional. But SYJ framework, the share your journey framework, this is the most powerful marketing technique in the world. Why is this world? Uh because it's free. It doesn't cost you any money and it's completely organic. Okay. Sharing your journey. How do you do that? How do you share your journey? Well, sharing your journey is very simple. You do things, then you talk about it. So, this is the exact framework I use to get to $300,000 ARR. Every time I use this framework, I instantly make a few thousand dollar a day. This is very, very simple. You build stuff. I just showed you how to build stuff. You go into bolt. new. You go into cursor. You go into wind surf. Whatever you prefer. You build things. You prompt the AI. You don't need to know how to code. Say, "Hey, I want to build this. " You build stuff. Simple. Next step, we'll go down here. We're going uh we're going counterclockwise with this little chart I made here. So, build, then we go down. Talk about it, right? You build something, you talk about it. Here's me talking about it. I'd like to introduce you to Creator Buddy, the greatest AI content tool ever made. It's eight AI tools. And I go through all the AI tools. I go through the value of what I'm building. I show a video demo. Simple. You build stuff. You talk about it. You don't even need to ship it, right? it. As you're building stuff in Bolt new, take screenshots, do demo videos, show exactly what I just showed you in Bolt. Right? Literally just screen record this. Screen record what I just showed you here. Screen record it. Tweet it. Say, "Hey, check out what I'm building. " Then once you built it and talked about it, then you ship it. You put it live. You go in here, you hit the deploy button. It's live now. People can use it. So you've shipped. Now next step, you talk about it again, right? We go back. You put a video out of what you just deployed. Say, "Hey, it's live on the internet. Go use it. " It's all a circle, right? Build, talk about it, get feedback, iterate, then ship it, then talk about it. People give you feedback, you iterate, you improve, then you build whatever their iterations were, right? Once it's built, talk about it. And all along this way, you're going to keep doing two things, two very critical things you're going to do. One is you're going to make money every time you put out a tweet saying, "Hey, look what I built. look what I've shipped. People are going to sign up and buy because it's solving their challenges. And two, and maybe even more importantly than making money, maybe not. But equally as important, maybe is you're going to get feedback and you're going to iterate. People are going to tell you what they like about it. don't like about it and you're going to take that feedback and you're implementing your app and you're going to change things and you're going to improve things. And then you're gonna keep doing this cycle over and over and over again. Build, talk about it, ship, talk about it. It's a tongue twister. Four times fast. Say that out loud. Right? You go through this cycle and every step you make through this cycle, the more money you'll make. And the faster you can go through this cycle, the better. The faster I build and ship and talk about it, the more money I make. That's the only thing slowing me down is how fast can I build and ship and talk about it. Right? So simple, so straightforward. You built your audience. And again, you don't need a million followers. 100,000 followers. You don't even need 10,000 followers. Get like two or three thousand. Just tweet about what you're interested in. You come up with ideas that solve either your challenge or their challenge. You ship it and then you use the SYJ framework to make money, which is build, talk, ship, talk. Right? Over and over and over again. This is the exact framework I used for Creator Buddy. Period. This is all I did. This was it. This is my secret. This is how I make $300,000 a year. pulled in $19,000 on the first day of shipping Creator Buddy, right? Was this framework. I just did this framework. Boom, boom, boom. And I started making money. This is all you need to do in 2025. You don't need fancy ad campaigns. You don't need to dump money in ads. You don't need to hire influencers. I'm tired of the videos. Here's how to hire a Tik Tok influencer. Show your app. Screw that. You be the influencer. You can Why can't you influence people? You're an interesting person. You're good look. I mean, you could be a little better looking, but you're good-looking. I'm kidding. If you're in my audience, if you're in FinFam, you're very good. Put yourself on camera. Write some tweets. Start building your audience. Build stuff and talk about it. It's so simple. It's free and it's organic. You don't need to hire 18-year-olds with curly broccoli hair to dance around in a video and talk about your app. Just do it yourself. Out of all the people in the fin fam, I'm probably the least

good-looking of all of you. So, I went out there and started selling this app. Go put your face on camera. Go write tweets. Talk about your app. Ship, build, talk. It's that simple. This is the framework. There's no secrets. I didn't hold back any secrets from you here. It's simple. And only 1% of people watching this video are going to do it. Unfortunately, 99% you're going to take your dopamine hit you got from watching an instructional video. You go, "Okay, cool. Good video. " And then you're not going to do anything. Be the 1% who does something. If you learned anything, hit subscribe. Leave a like. Let me know what you're going to talk about on social media. and I'll see you in the next