How to make your first dollar with AI

Your step by step playbook

1 year ago today I made my first dollar with AI.

I launched an AI SaaS called Creator Buddy that I built 100% by myself and with AI. Within 10 minutes of launch it passed $100,000 ARR.

I didn’t do anything special. I didn’t do anything you can’t do right this moment. I just took an extreme amount of action over the course of 5 months. In this post I’m going to lay out every action I took, that you can start taking right now.

Use AI

The first step of everything is just using AI daily. This is more critical than anything. Whether it’s just for 15 minutes a day if you’re just starting, or for 10+ hours a day if you have the discipline, you need to be using the latest tools and models.

The most bleeding edge tools will give you the best productivity gains. These tools and models are Claude Code, Opus 4.5, ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, and Claude Cowork.

If you don’t know where to start, just open a ChatGPT window next to whatever you’re doing, and run all your tasks through it. Just ask how it could help with that you’re doing.

But more important than ANY advice I’ll give you in this post, you NEED to be using AI EVERY SINGLE DAY. This is not optional.

Nobody neglecting AI right now will be successful over the next decade.

Find a problem to solve

Now that you understand AI and the contributions it can give you, you need to start solving problems. This is how you attract value/money.

Think about the areas you’re passionate in. There are absolutely no areas in the world AI can’t disrupt. Brain dump a list if you need to.

Once you have that list, dump it into AI. Ask for a list of the top challenges from those niches.

Then, ask for a list of simple solutions you can build with Claude Code to those challenges. Choose one of those solutions.

Create content about it

Before you start building the solution, you need to start building your distribution. This is how you’re going to spread the message of your solution and get your first customer.

When I first started building Creator Buddy, which is an AI tool for creating X content that performs well in the X algo, I started writing a TON about the X algorithm.

I would write tips and tricks, and share everything that was working for me with the algo. It helped build my authority in the niche.

Then when I released Creator Buddy, I had an army of users ready to go and sign up. I just simply released a product that implemented all the advice I was sharing.

It’s never too early to start creating content and building authority in your niche. X is the easiest place to start because tweeting requires at most 15 seconds of your time a day. Youtube takes significantly more effort, but the potential rewards are more than you can imagine. Start small then scale up.

Start building

You have your challenge. You’re building your authority. Now you need to build your solution.

It’s never been easier to build. If finances are tighter go with one of the free tools (Google AI Studio). If you can afford it go with the best tool (Claude Code). If you need help getting started, ask AI or join a community.

Share your journey

Now that you’ve built your solution, time to get customers. You’ve built your authority on social media, so now you share your journey of building. Talk about your product. Talk about how it makes people’s lives better. How it solves their problems.

Every time you ship, share. The more you ship, the more you can share, the more people discover you and your product. All of your success will be downstream of shipping.

That’s it. That’s the process. Find problems, build solutions, share your journey. The best part is, this is all basically free to do. It can also be done with a 9-5 as well. All of the steps I laid out are 100x easier with AI.

I can understand if this seems very intimidating. Especially if it’s new to you. But I promise, just getting started with get the boulder rolling down hill. The more you push it forward, the easier it becomes.

Start pushing.

PS. want to learn vibe coding with me and a community? I launched a community of builders using Claude Code. We build cool stuff together then meet weekly to talk about it. Join here.