I used these 8 AI tools to launch a $300,000 App

3 months ago, I launched an AI business that's now making around $300,000 a year. This is my Stripe dashboard right here. I had zero experience building and launching apps. I spend so much time trying out different tools to build the app. I wasted so much time and money on it. Let me save you that time. In this video, I'll lay out the eight AI tools you need to build and launch your first successful six-figure app just like I did. There's no technical experience required to do this. If you stick with me till the end, you'll have all the tools you need to ideulate, to build, to launch, and to collect money on your first AI app. I'm Alex Finn, and I spend all day building and launching successful AI startups, including Creator Buddy, an app that's now making close to $300,000 a year. If this is your first time watching my channel, make sure to hit the subscribe button down below. All I do is make awesome videos showing you how to build successful AI businesses. Let's get into it. So, I'm going to go through the eight tools you need to build and launch your first successful AI startup. No technical experience required. The first

tool we're going to go, we're going to start off easy here. We're going to work our way into it. We're going to start off with what I think is the best tool for ideiation and also what I consider the CEO of my company, Chat GBT3. Chat GBT3 is the smartest AI model I've ever used in my entire life. I literally use it as the CEO of my company. But I use 03 as my CEO, as my planner, as my consultant, basically as the most important employee of my startup. And let me show you how I use it. So in chat GPT, I have my own project. Everyone should have their own project in chat GPT. And what you do in the project is you add a bunch of documents that basically describe every aspect of your life. So I have documents talking about myself and the different projects I'm working on. And what this does is it lets chat GPT know all the context around your life so that when you're having conversations with it, it's able to give you good feedback. So I use this project as basically the CEO for my app. And this is what you need to do. Go in, start a project, create a bunch of documents that have as much context around you, your interest, what you're into, what you create content on, what type of videos you consume, anything around yourself. Then what you can do once you have all that context in there in the project is you can start having conversations with chat GPT and it'll be able to answer your questions based on everything it knows about you. So here's a prompt. I'll put this down below that you can just steal right away to come up with ideas for your app. And what's great is the answer is going to be amazing because it has context around your interests and what you do on a daily basis. So if you have a 9 to5, put in your 9to5. If you have hobbies, put in your different hobbies. It can help you answer your questions based on all that context. So, here's the prompt I used to come up with the idea for Creator Buddy, which was, "I'm a content creator in the entrepreneur space. I create content, how to start businesses online. What are three challenges people in my space have that I can solve with the really simple app? " Once you have your project set up with all your context, you can start asking questions like this, and you'll get tons of ideas for apps you can build. And then once you've gone further down the line, you start building out your app. You start adding new features. You can then use Chat GPT as your product manager, as your CEO. Every feature I build out for Creator Buddy, I'm running it through my product manager, right? I'm thinking about adding an AI content coach to my tool. What are your thoughts around this? What challenges should it solve for my users? Everything I do in my app, I'm running through my product manager here. And you should do the same thing. It should be your co-pilot, right? Anything you're doing, you always have chat GPT off to the side as your co-pilot for whatever you're building. I'll even have my iPad under my screen with the Chad GPT app so that as I'm coding or building things, I can just go on to my iPad and ask questions quickly. Super important you set this up as your kind of CEO business partner so that everything you do can go through chat GPTO3. The first tool, this is going to help you generate tons of ideas for your content. It's going to help you perfect your ideas. is going to make sure that every decision you make is the right

one. Let's move on here to the second tool. And if you want a deeper dive on any of these tools, by the way, I'll do a separate video for each, let me know down below which tool you'd want me to do a deeper dive on, and I'll do like a full halfhour video on that tool. So, let's go on to the second tool. We're moving down. I hope you like this little visual I built. This took me like an hour to build out. So, I hope you like this visual I made with Free Form, but we're going to move on to the second tool, which is bolt. new. Once you've set up your business partner, your product manager, your CEO, a chat GP03, now it's time to start building out the prototype for whatever app you want to launch. Bolt. new, in my opinion, is the best prototyping tool. This is a noode prototyping tool. You can build out your apps, your v1 your app, really, really simple with just AI prompts. So, here's bolt. new. All you need to do is put in a prompt of what you want to build and it builds out the v1 that app. Super simple. One prompt, go. So, I'm going to build a to-do list app. We'll use this example for the video. And it's going to build out that to-do list app for me. So, I'm going to hit enter on this prompt. It's going to start building out the to-do list app. No coding required. If you're thinking about launching an app, you need to use bolt. ne to build v1. It's going to be the easiest way to validate your prototype. And it's completely free. There are paid tiers, but the free tier is very, very generous. So, you put your prompt in whatever you want to build. It starts writing all the code for you. It starts installing all the tech. Super simple, super easy. you'll have V1, which will be a great setup for the next tool I show you in a second. All right, let's take a look. Here is the app it built. Here's the todo. Listen, this was one prompt. Now, I have a to-do list app. Uh, let's put a to-do in here. Record a video, add the task. Boom. It has the Look, it even has uh priority for the tasks in there. So, you can set that, edit it, delete it. This is V1, but it looks pretty good. Bolt new is so good for building V1. It's just the most reliable. I've tried them all. I tried Google Firebase. I tried Vzero. I tried lovable. It seems like bolt new is just the most dependable, reliable, and easy to use for beginners. So that's tool

number two. We covered having our consultant for generating ideas. We covered building V1. Let's talk about tool number three that we're going to use for launching and building a very successful AI app with no technical experience required. That is Windinsurf. Windsurf in my opinion is the best AI app builder on the entire market. Period. I've tried Cursor. I've tried them all. Windsurf is the absolute best for building apps. It just seems to be the smartest. It seems to mess up the least and it's the easiest to use in my opinion. This is the Windsurf site. So, you can come in here, download Windsurf. Again, has a very generous free tier. And what you're able to do Windsurf is take that V1 of Bolt and put it into Windsurf. So, you can start building out the advanced functionality of your app. It has an AI agent that goes in and actually codes your app for you. So, so you'll be able to go in and do things like, okay, add this functionality, add this feature, and the AI agent actually goes and builds that functionality for you. I used Windsurf to build out all the functionality inside Creator Buddy. I have like 10 different AI tools in here. All was built with Windsurf. And again, I didn't write a single line of code. So, the AI agent in Windsurf was able to handle some really advanced stuff completely for me without me needing to write any code whatsoever. I'd highly recommend downloading Windsurf. I've tried Cursor. I think Windsurf is better and it can handle large code bases and tons of functionality. If you want a deeper dive on Windsurf, I think it deserves like a full 10-hour course by itself. Feel free to let me know again down below. I'll build like a full windsurf course for you. So, so far we've covered three tools that are super critical for getting ideas for your app and then actually building the app. Next, we're going to go into the tools you need to actually run and monetize your app. So, these are the tools your app is going to

be powered by. Before we get into the next tool, real quick, if you learned anything so far, make sure to hit that subscribe button, leave a like and let me know in the replies if this has helped generate any ideas for you so far. Moving on to the next tool though is going to be Superbase. So, Superbase is what's going to be powering your app. This is the database that powers your app. For those who aren't as familiar, for your app, there's a front end and a back end, right? The front end is everything you see, the buttons, the visuals, how everything looks. The back end is where all your data is stored. So this is where all the information about your users is stored. This is everything about anything that's being saved is stored there. All the data that's stored about your users is in the database. So you need a database. And for me, the easiest to use database I ever used is Superbase. It has an incredibly generous free tier. And this is where you're going to store all your data. What's great about this is there's tons of documentation online about Superbase. And so the AI you use to build your apps like in Windsurf or in Bolt are going to be so familiar with how to use Superbase. So here's what you would do to get Superbase into your app. I'm in Windsurf right now. Over to the right in Windsurf is the AI agent. This is where you communicate with the AI to tell it what to build. All you do is go ahead and please integrate Superbase for my app. You hit enter. The AI agent will go and then actually implement Superbase as a database. And then if you really want to learn along the way as well, and I'd highly recommend this, put please explain everything to me as well at the end. And then I'll actually walk you through step by step exactly what it's doing. So you can learn how all this works as well. What's great is you don't need to be super technical to get this implemented. You enter in the prompt, the AI will do it all for you. It'll get it all set up and your database will be good to go. Again, if you want a super in-depth guide on Subbase, happy to do a dedicated video to it. Let me know in the replies. Whatever tools get the most replies on what you want me to do an in-depth guide for, I'm going to just make those videos and put them out for you. But you need Superbase, you need a database if you're going to be building a full scale application. It's where all your data will be saved. Super important to have. Luckily, the AI agents are really good with it. They'll be able to get it installed for you very easily. So, we talked about the database. It's

also really important when you're building an app to have authentication. What is authentication? Authentication is the ability for people to log into your app, right? If you're going to be paid by people, they need to log in so you know who they are. Whenever you're going on a site and it says something like login with Gmail or login with Google, that's authentication and you need to have that on your site. So the next tool I use to build and launch my successful app is Clerk. Clerk, in my opinion, is the best authentication on the internet. Super free, super easy to use, really good free tier, so you can get this up and running without paying any money. And again, tons of documentation online. the AI agents you use to build your app and say Windsurf or Cursor are going to be intimately familiar with it. And what's awesome is you can have it log in a million different ways into your app. So if you want to get people the ability to log in through Google, through X, through Facebook, whatever, they'll be able to do that through Clerk. And all you need to do to get that running again, go to your AI agent inside of Windsurf or inside a cursor and just use this prompt. Please integrate Clerk for my app, explain everything to me. It'll go in it'll implement authentication for you so that now your users can start logging in. Critical critical get implemented into your app. So we

went through building the app. We went through the database for your what you need to authenticate on your app. Next, let's go through how you're actually going to put your app on the internet. The main tool you need to put your app on the internet so people can use it. I truly believe Versell is the best for hosting your app on the internet. This is how you're going to take all your code for your app and put it online. Like right now as you're building your app, you probably see like localhost 3000 as where your app is. If you actually want it on the internet, like you want it on a creator. io or whatever domain, you do it through Versell. This is what hosts your code. They have a generous free tier so you can get up and running very easily. And they make it super easy for you to get your website online. Here's what Versell looks like when you upload your code to it. Super easy to do. It is integrated with GitHub. So it'll actually connect to your GitHub where your code is saved and every time you update the code, it'll deploy it on Verscell. So it's very easy to manage. But what's awesome, it has alerting. If you get a ton of errors, Verscell will email you and say, "Hey, you're getting errors on your app. You want might want to fix this. " It gives you security recommendations. It tells you about performance. Gives you a ton of analytics. It's really awesome, really easy to use, and again, AI agents are super familiar with it, so you can get it up and running just through a couple of prompts. I'd highly recommend getting your app on Versell early so that you can start beta testing early, right? Like I try to get my code hosted on the web as quickly as possible so I can then send out the link to people and say, "Hey, do you want to beta test my app and give me feedback? " I talked about this in my last video, but beta testing is super important. So make sure you host your code online. I put it on for sale so other people can start using your app early. Two tools left and these

two are as critical as it gets. We're going to talk about collecting payments and getting people onto your app and promoting it. So, next we're going to talk about Stripe. Stripe is the best payment processor online. They're innovating the quickest. They're doing the most and they're basically the golden standard for payment processing when it comes to building and launching apps. They make it unbelievably easy for you to start collecting money on your app. Again, tons of documentation online so your AI agents will know about it. But they basically handle all your payments. Anytime a user subscribes, anytime a user renews, anything at all, they're going to be managing that for you. So, all you have to do is check your dashboard every day and see how much money you're making. Here's a little preview of my Stripe dashboard looks like. I'm on this a thousand times a day, mostly cuz I just like to see money rolling in. But you can see how much money you're making that day by the hour. You can see how much money they owe you and how much they're going to pay you out. You can see your volume, so how much money you're making by month, your net volume after fees and all that. So, it is really, really easy to use, really easy to understand. And basically the way it works is your AI agent when you're in Windsurf is going to be implementing code for Stripe in your app so that when a user hits pay, it sends that data to Stripe to collect the information and manage that for you. So again, it'd be as easy as going and saying, "Hey, please integrate Stripe for my app. " Then the agent goes and walks you step by step what you need to do to make it work. But once you get on Stripe and once you're seeing money roll in like you see here, your life changes. You're refreshing this Stripe app every 5 seconds to see the money come in. Helps you manage a lot of other things, too. It helps you manage chargebacks if those happen, refunds, customers, everything. It is so simple, so easy to use. And again, AI agents super familiar with it, so they can implement it very easily for you. Stripe is the best payment processor there is. We're going into the last tool now. Last tool is all about getting people onto your app. The last tool I'm going to talk about is a

social media network that may not be the most popular in the world, but it is the absolute best for getting customers onto your app. And that is, my friend, the artist formerly known as Twitter X. For those who don't know and those who aren't familiar, X is the greatest community of indie hackers on the planet. Yes, there's a lot of politics involved, but there's also an incredible community of indie hackers, people building apps, people who want to try out new play around with AI. X is the best at it. You need to have an X account if you're going to build and launch an app. I have almost 300,000 followers on X. I've been building it for the last 3 years now, tweeting every day, twice a day. That's all it takes. Takes like 15 minutes to do, but by tweeting twice a day, I've been able to get almost 300,000 followers. It really isn't complicated. I just talk about the news in tech, what's going on. I talk about how my business is going. I share my journey on my business. And just by doing that, I attract people to my platform. And then once I do that, I talk about my app. I talk about Creator Buddy. And every time I talk about my app, it gets me new subscribers and gets me new payments. This is by far the best place to promote your application. If you are launching an app and you're not on X, you're not going to get users. Period. anyone who's getting users onto their app right now or on X and they're creating content and it really is dead simple. Just talk about your journey. Talk about what's going on in your life. If you do this, people will get attracted to your journey. They'll pay attention and they'll be begging to join your apps. It's also a great place to beta test your app as well. If you put out a video demonstrating your app and say, "Hey, who wants to beta test? " People will just reply and say, "Yes, can I beta test, please? " And you'll get people using your app. It's very simple. Yes, YouTube is much bigger and there's way more users on YouTube, but when it comes to just building personal relationships with other builders, other people interested in AI, other people using apps, other potential customers, I really do believe X is the best. I think you need to be creating there. And the best part is takes a lot of time to build a video for YouTube. Takes 5 seconds to write a tweet on X. It's so simple. Make sure you're on X. This is how you're going to promote your app. If you get comfortable with these eight tools and listen, you don't even need to be super technical here, right? This isn't crazy. You talk to an AI, you say, "Ai, how do these tools work? What do I do? How do I integrate them? " The AI does it for you. You don't need to spend years getting technical here, learning the code of Superbase and things like that. The AI agent explains things for you. It gets it done easily. The issue for a lot of people is they get intimidated by these, right? They get intimidated. They see authentication and they go, "Oh, that's I don't know about that. I don't have a computer science degree. I can't do anything there. You can't let yourself get intimidated. You have the greatest intelligence of all time available to you now. Chat GBT or Grock or whatever. All you need to do whenever you get confused or have a question, go to the AI. It will guide you. You have super intelligence guiding you right now. There's no reason to get intimidated. Go out there, start from the top, right? Watch the video over. Start from the top. Go back to chat GB03. Generate your ideas. Go through this slowly. I promise you if you spend two hours next Saturday instead of doom scrolling or instead of playing video games I'll be playing Marvel Rivals. I already launched I can play Marvel Rivals. But for you spend two hours next Saturday. Go through this right use every tool. Build your V1 of an app. Get all this integrated. It'll I promise you it'll take under two hours and you'll have a V1 of an app ready and you can start building on top of that and growing and start making money for yourself. I did it. I talk about this from experience. I built this out myself. I started my own now $300,000 a year business. You can do it, too. I promise. I hope you wrote these tools down. If you forgot, just go back, watch the video again. If you learn anything, make sure to subscribe. Leave like all I do is create videos showing you how to do really cool stuff with AI. Also, make sure to follow my ex link down below as well and subscribe to my newsletter. I write an AI newsletter. Has over 30,000 subscribers to it. Make sure you do that as well. Completely free. See you in the next video.