How I made $500,000 with Claude Code (and how you can too)

So, in 2025, I made half a million dollars off Claude Code. This is a breakdown right here of where that money came from. A majority of that money came from the SAS I built with Claude Code, which I made over $300,000 on. I also created a ton of content with and about Claude Code. In total, you can see how that content did for me. X content made me about $100,000. That's ad revenue and subscriptions, newsletter sponsorships and subscriptions, YouTube sponsorships and ad revenue as well as a private community. All of this was driven by Claude Code and I am very confident you can do something similar. In this video, I'm going to go over every single step you can start doing today, not tomorrow, not next week, today to start making money off Claude Code and AI. I'm going to go over my complete framework I built for making revenue with Claude Code. We're going to talk about building apps creating content with Claude Code. And we're going to talk about how it all ties together. And even if you have zero followers today, I had under a thousand subscribers on YouTube at the beginning of 2025. You can still start building a business with Claude Code today. Still start generating revenue. And I'm going to go over every single step. There will be no secrets not revealed during this video. This video is made for you if you're willing to start taking action today. If you're not willing, I humbly invite you to watch some sort of other video on YouTube. Maybe you can watch Ninja play Fortnite or something. I don't know. But if you're ready to take action, then lock in and let's get into it. So, we're

going to cover everything in this video. We're going to start real quick on setting up Claude Code. Then I'm going to talk about building app. marketing. I'm going to talk about getting your first customer. I'm going to talk about starting your content journey so you can drive people to your app and also open up multiple revenue streams. We're going to talk about a lot here, but basically from a high level, what we'll be talking about is the buildin public framework. And that is the framework that you see here. building in public. So, building apps, solving challenges that people have, creating content around what you're building that content driving revenue for you, whether it's driving people to your app or earning money through sponsorships or ad revenue or the thousand different ways you can make money by creating, listening to the feedback people give you based on what you're creating and then building based on that feedback. And that spins this wheel over and over. It's basically a flywheel. And the more you go through this wheel, the more your revenue will grow. And the best part is you don't need to quit your job to do this. When I started building this flywheel, I had a 9 to5 and I just started tweeting and building for 10 minutes a day. And that has led me to where I am now. So this doesn't require a massive time commitment. Obviously, the more time you spend, the better this flywheel will go, but anyone can start taking the actionable steps I'm about to start going through in this video. So Claude Code drives all this and I'm going to walk through how that works as well. So to start off, I'm just going to go 10 seconds on how to set up Claude Code. If you already have Claude Code set up, feel free to grab a drink of water or you can just fast forward to the next chapter. All you need to do to

install Claude Code is get the command to install it. So I'll leave the documentation for Claude Code down below. But here's the Mac OS. Here's the Windows command. You just copy this. You go into your terminal. I like to use a terminal. Some people like to use Visual Studio Code. cursor. I do this straight in my terminal because it's the simplest and fastest. I'm actually using Ghosty, which is a terminal emulator, but you can just use your built-in terminal to your computer. You paste in that command from the documentation. You hit enter. It installs Claude Code. Boom. You have Claude Code set up. I'm going to go through all the tips and tricks on how to use it very shortly. But first, let's go into what we're going to actually do with Claude Code. build. So let's jump into this

actually build. So let's jump into this first phase of the build and public framework which is the actual building part. You need to build something with claude code. So the first step in the process is building an app. The best apps in the entire world solve problems. So if you want to build an app people are going to want to use, you need to build an app that solves problems. Now what problem do you solve, you ask? Well, the best problems to solve are your own problems. If you solve problems and challenges that you have, odds are other people have those challenges, too. So, to give you an example, this is Creator Buddy. This is the SAS I built last year that made over $300,000. I built this cuz I had a challenge. I wanted an AI that analyzed all my content. I was spending hours a day analyzing my own Twitter content. So, that was taking up a ton of time. So, I aimed to build an AI that analyzed all my own Twitter content for me and recommended better Twitter content to make. So, I built this to save my own time, to solve my own challenge. Luckily, other people had that challenge, too. And it ended up leading to tons and tons of customers buying my product. These are the best challenges to solve are your own challenges cuz worst case scenario, even if no one buys your product, which people will buy your product after this video, you make your own life easier. But the best case scenario, if you do all the steps I lay out in this video, you'll get customers and you'll make money. So, you want to find challenges to solve in your own life. What's the best way life? I love brain dumping. Get a notebook, get a pen, carry it around with you all day and write down every single challenge you have on a day-to-day basis. Every challenge you have from beginning today to end today, write it down. Then, what we can do is we can go into Claude Code and find solutions to those challenges. So, now that we have Claude Code installed, I'm going to type in Claude in a brand new folder on my computer.

And it is going to boot up Claude Code. So, I'm going to say yes, I trust this folder. And boom, Claude's there to go. We're going to do shift tab, which is going to put us in plan mode in Claude. And this is basically our conversational feature in Claude. We're just going to talk. We're not going to build anything. We're just going to talk to Claude. So, I'm going to do is this. I'm going to say, "Here are all my challenges I had today. Please recommend solutions we can build with Claude code that will solve one of these challenges. Then I'm simply going to list the challenges I wrote down in my notebook. So I wrote down a bunch of example challenges I have. And you can do this along with me by the way. So feel free to pause as we go and just do this along with me. You'll come out of this video with an entire game plan ready to go. It takes me a really long time to analyze my tweets. Scripting YouTube videos takes hours. Creating YouTube thumbnails is difficult. I don't know what to cook with the ingredients in my fridge. I don't know what workouts to do at the gym to get big muscles. And I'm going to hit enter on that. And what we're going to do now is we're going to have a conversation with Claude Code around potential solutions to those challenges. So this is one of the biggest things I see from people trying to use claude code is they just don't know what to build. They have no idea what to build. This solves that for you. So here are the challenges that are well suited for building with cloud code. Tweet analysis. The solution is CLI tool that analyze engagement sentiment best posting times. YouTube scripting script generator with hook structure templates and inter refinement. Recipe finder. Inputs your ingredients. Get recipe suggestions with instructions. A workout planner. Generate muscle building workout plans based on goals, equipment, and experience. And a YouTube thumbnail builder. You know what? Let's actually go with this workout planner. I need that. I go to the gym every day. I'm not seeing the results I want to see. Let's build a workout planner. And if you do this with me, by the way, you'll not only have an app that'll help your life, but you'll also have an app you can start selling. You can take whatever we build in this video and just start selling it right away. So Claude's going to ask me which I'm most interested in. I'm going to choose the workout planner. So I'm going to scroll down, hit enter there. It's going to ask me follow-up questions, which I absolutely love about Claude Code. So any specific design styles. I like dark and bold. Dark and bold's always nice to me. So let's do dark and bold. And it's going to finalize the plan for us. If this is your first time using Claude Code, one of my biggest tips I can give you is just always ask questions to Claude. Treat it like a co-orker. collaborator and feel free to go back and forth with it. So, it's going to give me this entire plan. And if you don't understand the technical stuff, it's no big deal at all. It's going to give us personalized muscle building workout plans based on user input. So, multi-step forms for user preferences, a clean, responsive UI, and it's going to generate entire workout plans for us. I love that. This is something we can start selling to people and creating content around right away. So, I'm going to hit yes. Let's start building it. And Claude Code is going to get to work building this. By the way, once this V1 is done, which will be done in like 15 seconds here, I'm going to talk about getting your first customer. So, starting a content journey, getting your first customers, and iterating from there. You'll have a bulletproof plan for making your first dollar with Claude code in just a few minutes. All right, looks like it's done. Been working for a while here. Do I want to proceed? Yes. Let's build this and let's see what this V1 of the app looks like. All right, looks like Claude finished building the V1 of our app. Let's check it out. All you need to do is go to the address it gives you. I then pull it over. Let's look what we

got here. This actually looks pretty nice. This doesn't look like an AI build app at all. Build your perfect plan. Let's get started. Oh wow. So, it gives you this nice multi- menu approach. And we'll talk about getting our first customers and all that in a second. Say I'm an intermediate. How many days? I work out like five times a week. What equipment do you have? We have a gym at the building. Let's do full gym. How long are your sessions? There's 60 minutes. We'll go medium. And wow, look at this. It gives me an entire plan. Wow, this is all out of the box. I didn't have to implement any AI or anything and just implement. This is awesome. Push day. It gives me exact workouts. This is incredible. So, we already have a full app. If you were to stop right here and like this is the end of the video for you, you already built something that's going to improve your life and you did it in just a few minutes. So, that's amazing. But the point of this video is making half a million dollars a year. So we need to go into getting our first customers, making our first dollar, building more revenue streams on top that. So let's go back to our framework. So we did the build

phase, right? We built out this new workout app that gives us workouts every single day. We solved one of our own challenges of we don't know what to do at the gym. That has been solved. So we go to the next phase, which is the create phase. So getting your first customer is done through creating content. That's how I got my first customer through Creator Buddy. And this also leads to making money four or five different ways, which I'll go into in a second as well. But you need to start creating in order to get customers. And why should you create? Why is creating the best way to get your first customer? Well, creating content is free. So, you're doing free advertising basically to get your first customers. It helps you build your brand so people start learning your name, knowing who you are. Ever since I started building this YouTube channel a year ago, I've made unbelievable connections, met huge people in the Silicon Valley. It's been amazing. There are so many benefits to building your brand with content. It opens up more revenue stream. So, as I showed you at the beginning of the video, I'm now making money off YouTube advertisement, YouTube subscriptions, newsletter advertisements, x ad revenue, literally eight or nine different revenue streams. Creating content won't only get you customers to your app, but open up many, many revenue streams. You're nice, diversified, and safe. And it allows you to sell your next product. So, whatever we build after this fitness app together, we'll be able to sell that as well because we already have our existing platform and brand that we built through this one. So, this sets you up for success even in the future. So, what exactly should you create? Well, I think the three best options are right here. You have X, which I think is the easiest. takes literally 3 minutes a day to write tweets. That's all it takes. Creator Buddy is all about creating content for the X algorithm. So, this is all I did was create content about the X algorithm. My account blew up because of my content around the X algorithm and talking about what works, what doesn't. Then it was a natural cell to transition from talking about the X algorithm to talking about Creator Buddy and getting people on the app because they were very related. So if we are going to do something like sell our fitness app that we just went through which I think Claude Code named Iron Forge. Yep. Iron Forge. I like that name actually. All we would do is we would start creating content around fitness. So maybe I'd go in here and I just talk about my fitness journey. ers sizes I did this week and then I go through my entire fitness routine. Maybe I'd post a picture to show my progress over the last week or the last month and I would continuously post content around fitness. Then I would use the jab hook methodology which is give value, then take value, right? So for instance, maybe we do a few tweets around fitness advice and then we do a tweet talking about Iron Forge. Iron Forge is the best way to get started with working out, right? So, we did a few valuebased tweets. Now, we're talking about our app. This will get people onto our app. And yes, if you have zero followers, it will be a little more challenging. But if you do this enough, you'll get your first customer and you'll make your first dollar. And if you make your first dollar off your SAS right now, that's significantly more than you're making before that first dollar. And that's a win. In order to get to 100,000, you need to start with one. You also can do YouTube. This is significantly harder than X because X takes a couple minutes. I started building my ex with a 9 to5. Literally in between meetings, I would just put out a tweet or two. It took 5 minutes a day to start building. Now I'm up to 300,000 followers just by doing that. But you also have YouTube, which is much harder because it takes a lot more effort to create videos. But the reward is much higher as well because it is the biggest social media platform on planet Earth. Literally 2% of all human time spent is on YouTube. 2% of all time human beings spend is on YouTube. So it has the highest reward, but it is the most challenging. So if you have a couple hours a week to spare to script, film, and edit, you should be posting on YouTube as well. And the good part about that is you can take the videos you post on YouTube and post them on X, too. Every video I post on YouTube, I also post on X, and they all perform really, really well. The X algorithm is built for video. So you also want to crossost to X. You also have a newsletter. If you enjoy writing, I highly recommend starting a newsletter. You can just start a Substack for free. Beehive costs a bunch of money. You can do that if you want. Substack's completely free. Start a Substack. Newsletters are amazing because your content is going directly to people's inboxes, which is the most personal place that it could possibly go to. It guarantees they basically read the content. Newsletters are amazing and they are absolutely amazing for driving revenue as well. Once you do this, we

went from build to create. Now we're earning, right? If you create content enough and you start building your following, even if you only have 20, 30, 50 followers on X, one of those people will buy your product if you talk about your subject enough. You'll also do a few other things. You'll start making money on ad revenue on X. As you can see, I've made $50,000 on ad revenue. You also start making money on subscriptions. I've made almost $50,000 on subscriptions. So, this has turned into a $100,000 revenue stream for me just here, just by posting my ideas a couple times a day. You also start making money on YouTube ad revenue. I've made almost $5,000 in the last month off YouTube ad revenue, which is amazing. And this is all a byproduct of talking about your app and talking about what you're building and sharing your work in public. Most people when launching a product, they pay for advertising. But with this framework I'm showing you right here, you're actually getting paid for advertising because every piece of content you make is making you money. So again, create content around the challenge you're solving. If you're building a workout app like we're doing in this video, you give workout advice. If you're creating a content building app like I do at Creator Buddy, you give content advice. Maybe you're huge into basketball, so you make a app around how to shoot a free throw. And then you go on X and you start tweeting about how to shoot free throws, right? There's so many ways to do this. It doesn't matter what you are into. I promise you can find a challenge to solve and then create content around it. So you built, you created, you started earning. Claude Code is supporting all of this. I regularly have Claude go and look at my social media channels and give me recommendations for content I can create. I have Claude Code going every day, look at my YouTube channel and come up with new ideas for things I can build. So Claude Code is driving all this. Remember Claude Code's not just for code. It can also look at websites and give you advice, too. So we built

we created, we earned. Now we listen, right? We started building a community, we started getting customers, now we listen to what they have to say. I started getting so many tweets and DMs about Creator Buddy when I launched it. For you, if you're just starting and you're small and you don't have many followers, maybe it's just one tweet you get about your product. Maybe it's just one DM, but you listen to it. You see what people have to say. You take their feedback of what they want out of your product and you go back into Claude Code and you give that feedback. So maybe we put out our fitness app. We get some feedback. Hey, I want to be able to record my workouts inside the app. We can say, "Hey Claude, someone asked to record their workouts in the app. Can we implement that? " We take their feedback, we give it to Claude. Claude goes and starts building out their feedback in our app for us. They're basically like our employee here. This is the best way to keep building our app is to take user feedback and just implement it. Take feedback, give it to Claude, right? You don't even have to think of the features yourself. You can literally just copy and paste the DMs and the replies you're getting, give it to Claude and say, "Hey, what the hell do I do about this? " Claude will take it, as you just saw a second ago, will start asking you questions about the feedback and then build out the functionality itself. I'm working on a way at the moment to have Claude code automatically every day scan Twitter to see what they're saying about Creator Buddy and just automatically implement itself. There are going to be so many ways in the very near future. You can just automate everything you're seeing here. It really is amazing. So, we started listening. We started getting feedback. What did we do from there? And what did I just show you? We started building again, right? The whole loop starts again. So, we started building. So, boom. I look at my app. There it is. We have now logging where we can put in uh exactly what we're doing for every exercise. That is amazing. Now we can start now that we built do the loop all over again and go and start creating. So I would go back to X at this point. I would say best ways to track your workout and I would give tips on logging and tracking your workout. Then after this is done, I'd put a second tweet that says, "Track your workouts easily with Iron Forge. " And then I'd link to our app, and boom, maybe this gets us another customer, a fourth customer, a fifth customer, and on this goes. We created content again. This gets us our second and third and fourth customer. We listen to their feedback. We build a new feature. This is the playbook of the future. 2026. I've been validating this the last few years and trust me, it works. It allowed me to quit my job. make a full-time living. Allowed me to launch the app of my dreams. It allowed me to start this YouTube channel. There's nothing I do special. This is the playbook. There are no secrets involved. Build, create, earn, listen, and build again based on all that feedback and go over and over again. The more you can do this cycle, the more money you will make. Period. And the best part is nothing special is needed. You can start the moment this video ends. Go to Claude Code, do the exercises we talked about at the very beginning in this video. Feel free to go back to the beginning again and do it along with us. Brain dump your challenges and you're good to go. There is no reason you can't at least get to the create phase by the end of today. If you start now, I personally guarantee this. I personally guarantee if you start right now and you go through this phase every single day until the end of 2026, you will make at least your first dollar this year. And if you're making zero dollars right now off of AI, that is a monstrous big win and puts you in the top 1% of AI builders. If you learned anything in this video, make sure to leave a like down below. Make sure to subscribe and turn on notifications. All I do is make amazing videos about AI. I have full video series about every one of these four steps inside the Vibe Coding Academy. Link down below for that to join the vibe coding community I built over there. and I will see you in the next