Transcript: 'How Nat Eliason Made $200,000 in a Week Teaching AI'

The transcript of AI & I with Nat Eliason is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:01:45
The origins of Nat’s viral course on building apps with AI: 00:11:45
How coding with AI has evolved over the last two years: 00:18:46
Nat creates an app using Composer, Cursor’s AI assistant: 00:22:22
Tactical tips for coding with Cursor: 00:26:06
How coding with AI is creating new behaviors in programming: 00:29:06
What excites Nat the most about the future of AI: 00:32:41
A demo of Hubbard, the AI editor Nat built for his science fiction writing: 00:38:58
When does it makes sense to build custom software: 00:44:52
Nat’s take on the future of writing with AI: 00:49:18

Transcript

Dan Shipper (00:01:45)

Nat, welcome to the show.

Nat Eliason (00:01:47)

Thanks for having me on, Dan. Again, right?

Dan Shipper (00:01:48)

Yes, you're back.

Nat Eliason (00:01:49)

I'm back.

Dan Shipper (00:01:50)

You were here in the earliest phase of the show. You took a bet on me—on us—when we were nothing and now we're here.

Nat Eliason (00:02:00)

We've been taking bets on each other for a long time.

Dan Shipper (00:02:02)

We have been. And you're one of my favorite people in the online writer space or really just in general. But let’s say in the online writer space because I think what's so special about you is you have this ability— You have so many different career arcs and you have this ability to go really deep into something right before it gets hot and know everything about it and then succeed at it and then move on to the next thing. And I think people get so caught up in, what am I going to be? And who am I going to be? And you've had all these different topics that you're just the master of. And you just throw yourself into it with wild abandon. And when we first started working together, you were into SEO. Then you moved into crypto. You wrote a book, which you released recently that I love—I think it’s amazing. And you sort of transition from online writer to author and then most recently you've been in the AI coding game and you launched this new course teaching people how to build with AI and you have this really fun— I'm going to shut up in a second, but you have this really fun course arc where— When we first started working together, you made Roam hot and you basically launched a course and like bought a house with the money and then disappeared from the game and now you're back and it's really fun to see. Tell us about that.

Nat Eliason (00:03:28)

Well, yeah, I mean, I owe some credit to you guys, because— I don't know if you remember how this started, but Adam Keesling had a tweet and out of—

Dan Shipper (00:03:32)

Keesling. Our first Every employee.

Nat Eliason (00:03:35)

Yeah, he had a tweet in October of 2019—I think October, November—where he said, wow, I just tried this thing called Roam Research and it's really cool and nobody really knew about it back then. And I was still running my marketing agency, Growth Machine, but was looking for interesting things to explore. And so I dived into it and was just kind of blown away by the tool and started tweeting about it and talking about it. And that made other people really interested. And I just said hey, does anybody want me to do a course on teaching how to use Roam? And a lot of people on Twitter responded positively. And I just put up a PayPal link and I think I got $10,000 or something worth of pre-orders off of those tweets before I'd written any or written anything for the course. It was like, well, I better go do this now.

Dan Shipper (00:04:39)

Pretty good validation.

Nat Eliason (00:04:41)

Good validation. And then I launched the course and it did something $600,000 in sales over the next year, which was bananas. And I owe a lot of that to the Roam team because they didn't really want to build onboarding for their product. They were focused on other stuff. And so they said, if you take Nat's course, which was $100, we'll give you $100 in credit for signing up because it was like $15 a month. And so that was what? Six months of free usage. And they said, yeah, take that course and you'll basically get it for free because you'll get the product for six months. And so obviously that drove a ton of sales. And had we had a really good thing going and then I ended up being like, okay, I kind of feel like I don't want to keep doing this. I didn't want to keep doing the cohort model. And that ended up being, I think, a pretty good decision on accident, just because Roam's development fell off quite a bit—competitors popped up like Obsidian. And I think an easy way you can kill a good course business is by hiring a ton of employees and building a huge apparatus around it only for the interest in it to fall off two, three years later. And now suddenly you have all of these liabilities that you've accumulated and you lose the huge upside that you had when it was maybe just you are a really small team and crazy cash flows. So, as you alluded, I used a lot of the profits to buy an Airbnb property outside of Austin in June of 2020, the absolute pit for the real estate market. We had a really good deal on it, turned it into an Airbnb, tried doing the Airbnb thing for a bit. That turned into a miserable experience that peaked with a frat party throwing a rager at the house and somebody—I kid you not—pooping in the bathtub.

Dan Shipper (00:06:38)

Oh my god.

Nat Eliason (00:06:40)

And leaving it for our cleaner to find where— And she was wonderful. She was like a Rottweiler. She was so pissed at the people. She wasn't pissed at us. It was very much, oh, I can't believe these people. They disrespected your beautiful— She was amazing. She handled it so well. But they did that and they broke off an outdoor water faucet that flooded the whole yard and caused all this damage and then, literally two weeks later, Austin had this terrible freeze that blew out the shower pipes upstairs and flooded the second floor and it was like a $15,000 repair. And after those two things happened, we said, okay, this sucks. This is not worth it. Anything we think we're making, we're losing in repairs. And so we sold it on May ‘22, which was the peak of the Austin real estate market. It was like literally just two happy accidents in a row. And it ended up being like a 6x cash on cash return in a year-and-a-half on a real estate investment, which just doesn't happen ever.

Dan Shipper (00:07:74)

You just have great timing. I just want to fast-follow all your trades sometimes.

Nat Eliason (00:07:50)

I also opened a cafe in January 2020, so it's not always the best timing. Crypto Confidential, coming out in the middle of last summer when nobody was talking about crypto, could have been timed, I think, it's a little bit better. It picked up with when the market picked up in the fall, but, yeah, those timings are pretty, pretty great.

So, fast forward to today, you and I have been talking about some of the cool potential with this AI stuff. I remember when GPT-3 launched, you and I were playing around, you were doing it a lot more than I was. We were texting about this, about, okay can we train these models— Can we use them in our writing and things like that—

Dan Shipper (00:08:29)

Do metaphors and like all this kind of stuff.

Nat Eliason (00:08:31)

Yeah, I was trying to build a stoic bot so I was calling it Stoic Therapy. So I was training it on Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And so you could have a conversation with it like you would a therapist, but it would respond to the way a stoic would. And it wasn't great back then, so I kind of put it on the shelf and you kept going with it to your credit. You went a lot harder than I did. I put it on the shelf for a while. And then last winter, from December ‘23 to January ‘24, over my holiday break I started playing with it again because these AI-augmented software tools, Cursor predominantly, were just coming out. And I had this question of, okay, could I use this to actually build a mobile app?

Because I'm primarily a writer. I've been doing all of my writing tracking in a spreadsheet. I thought it would be cool to have a Strava-like app for tracking writing. And it seemed like you could maybe build that without a ton of knowledge using Cursor. And so I tried and it worked. I got a basic version of the app working pretty quickly.

Dan Shipper (00:11:00)

I think I still pay for that, by the way.

Nat Eliason (00:11:05)

Oh, do you? Well, I won't be hurt if you cancel. I mean, it turned out that nobody really wanted that tool, which was fine. Even I kind of stopped using it after a while. I was like, yeah the spreadsheet is actually— Every good software can kind of be replaced by Excel at a certain point. It has to reach a certain level of pain to graduate from Excel and that level of pain just wasn't there, but that got me started using these tools to write software for my life. But back then it was okay. You still had to have a pretty good grasp of programming to get anywhere with it. And then it feels like four months ago, maybe so fall of ‘24, the agents started coming out. So you had the Replit agent, you had stuff that came out more recently, like Bolt and Lovable. And Cursor added its own agent, and this was this really new step function in how much programming you could do without knowing any programming, because you if you had a rough idea of what you wanted a basic understanding of programming, you could kind of just prompt it and it would start writing full apps for you.

So after Crypto Confidential came out, I've been working on the sci-fi novel and I've been going really hard on that for the last six months. I finished a draft of it in December and was letting it sit in the drawer. And I said, okay, while sitting, let's go play with these tools because maybe there's a way I can actually use them for my work. And so the first thing I thought about was. I'm sure you have this too. Maybe you don't anymore since you have Spiral, but a lot of people who do writing have a bunch of saved prompts somewhere and they're kind of copying and pasting those into Claude to get similar results. And my good friend, Nathan Baugh, he's also a fiction writer. We write together every week. We were trading prompts back and forth, but it was kind of this complicated process of, okay, we've got to paste it into Claude and then get the output. Maybe we have to make a new chat and you kind of have to jump through these hoops. And I was like, well, I could probably just make an app that does a lot of these things. And the other benefit of doing that is with some models you run into text limit issues. The one context window is actually 200,000 tokens or whatever, but per chat, it's only 40,000. So, if you want to put in a full manuscript of your book, you have to break it into three or four messages, which is super messy. And so I was like, well, let's just use these new Cursor agents and let's just try building an app to help me edit my book. And I started hacking on it and literally within a day I had something that was better than what I could do on the Claude front end and that was pretty awesome because one, I was still getting Claude Sonnet responses, but I had all of my prompts saved and I was slowly turning into this editing tool. I can show it to you in a minute.

Dan Shipper (00:14:30)

I want to see it, yeah.

Nat Eliason (00:14:35)

Unfortunately it's not done. It's not nearly to the point that I thought it would be at this point because I started tweeting about it. I was like, yeah, I built this thing. This was so easy. And then Nathan and I started a podcast called “Between Drafts” where we're talking about The journey of being an author and growing your audience and selling books and writing and editing. And I mean a podcast requires a decent amount of work on the backend. You've got to get the show notes and the timestamps, and you've got to format it for YouTube, you've got to make social media. And like that takes a decent amount of work. And I've hired people to help with that in the past, but my thinking was, okay, well, I can probably create an app to do this too. And so I started hacking on that and a day later, I had an app where I could just upload an audio file and it would make a nice description timestamps so it would handle all the show notes. It would format it in different ways. So I could just copy and paste into YouTube and Spotify and my blog. And I was like, this sick because this now saves me a few hours a week and it's just very useful. for running a podcast and so that was useful and then I was tweeting about that and then it literally was just like history repeated itself. I thought I was never going to do a course again, I didn't really want to get back into that business, but somebody tweeted at me and said hey, I really want to learn how to do some of this stuff. You're doing it looks really cool. So I put up the bat signal again. It was like, hey, does anybody want me to do a course on this? Just building your own apps with AI. I got 100-plus responses to that tweet saying, yes, please do it. I put up a page where people could buy and it did $200,000 of sales in a week.

Dan Shipper (00:15:58)

That's crazy. I hate you.

Nat Eliason (00:16:02)

I mean, I've never seen anything like this. I don't know if I've ever heard another story like that of a course launch. Obviously people have done much bigger course launches. There have been—

Dan Shipper (00:16:20)

Except for the last course you did.

Nat Eliason (00:16:25)

I mean, but it even blew that out of the water because it didn't really start selling until the course was done. I mean, yeah. It was just like the pre-sales. and so that's literally all I've been doing the last three weeks, recording videos and getting that built out. And it's been really— Dude, it's been so cool to see people go through the course and to see. They post all this stuff that they've built that they didn't know how to build beforehand, not stuff that I'm directly teaching them. They're just like, okay, I've learned how to do this. Now I can go build this other thing that I want. Paul Millerd wanted to build this calculator for solopreneurs for a while and built that and got it launched on his site. And Cat Lavery built a journaling tool that's like forced morning pages where it deletes everything you wrote if you stop writing for more than five seconds. It's just cool stuff people are making. And I literally just finished the last video of the last unit this morning, so I'm hopefully going to get all that edited and get it plugged in. I'm still bug fixing, so I can't do a full demo right now. But literally, I've got to give it permission here. Let's see the thing that I did for the course is I got a fresh computer to start recording from so I could show, here's a computer that's never done any development and, let's get the development environment set up. The way the course works is it kind of walks you through building these basic apps. And then in the end, I've sort of built this whole AI content studio, landing pages and Stripe payments.

Dan Shipper (00:18:00)

So, for people who are listening, basically, you're on this website. It looks like PodBuddy.ai

Nat Eliason (00:18:05)

PodBuddyAI.com Somebody had the dot AI.

Dan Shipper (00:18:10)

Very frustrating. PodBuddyAI.com, which I guess is what students who are in the course are going to end up with when they're done. And if you scroll up and go back to the homepage for a second. So yeah, it looks like it's a podcast studio. So it does transcriptions, content generation, and social media. I can't believe you're competing with me here.

Nat Eliason (00:18:35)

Did you build an app for this?

Dan Shipper (00:18:38)

Well, I mean, this is sort of like Spiral, but it's okay. This is very cool. And I think what's most interesting to me about this is how complete it looks. There's a lot of things that people are building and I did a course like this a year ago and it was not as popular as this, but it was like a big deal back then. And it was like, “How to Build an AI Chatbot with...” And that feels so archaic now, but what's interesting is I had a lot of concerns like, okay people who are non-technical are taking this, is it going to be possible for them to actually do the course? And it turned out that it kind of was, but it was a big pain and the amount that we could do is sort of limited. And I had to provide a lot of sample code and all this kinds of stuff to make it work. And we're just in a completely new era right now where English is just— You can just build with English way better and if you have enough like sort of gumption and stick to itiveness to copy-paste back and forth between o1 and like and your Cursor instance you can get through any bugs you find it's crazy.

Nat Eliason (00:19:50)

Dude, that was my big concern with doing the course. That was my really big hang up. If this is popular, am I going to have dozens of people messaging me every day with the bugs that they're running into and the problems that they're having that I'm going to have to try to troubleshoot remotely. Because if that happens, this is not going to be sustainable and it's going to be miserable. But the first lesson started going up two-and-a-half weeks ago. There are 700 students in the course. There have only been two instances where I needed to help somebody troubleshoot something that they couldn't resolve using Cursor.

Dan Shipper (00:20:30)

That’s wild.

Nat Eliason (00:20:32)

And it's absolutely insane because the course starts by showing you how to use Cursor and how to troubleshoot things and how to get errors fixed. And I err on the side of playing dumb through the course to where even if I know how to fix something, I'll still let Cursor do it to show that it can handle stuff and people can just figure it out. It's pretty wild. And there is a common problem of, as the code base gets bigger, as the app gets more complex, it starts hitting more issues and you start having to get a little more intelligent with your prompting. But people are kind of figuring that out too, and it's really neat to see just how much you can build now without having that much of a programming background And I've noticed too it's making me a better coder because I'll go look at how it's doing things. You can ask questions about why it did things certain ways. It'll explain it and it's kind of a neat new way to learn programming. I think this is just how people are going to learn programming now.

Dan Shipper (00:21:35)

I agree. Totally. Because I think that for some people listening and watching, maybe they know about AI, but they haven't used Cursor yet. Or maybe they used Cursor a year ago and they're like, I kind of get it. But I think the whole agentic experience, which I actually first used Windsurf and I was like, holy shit. Windsurf, I think, was the first one to really have the full agentic thing. And then Cursor now has it—

Can you just show us a little sample of making something with Cursor and then we can talk about it from there? I do want to get into your more advanced Cursor tips, just honestly, selfishly, but I think we should sort of set the table for people who aren't, don't know yet know what's possible.

Nat Eliason (00:22:10)