How Nat Eliason Made $200,000 in a Week Teaching AI - Ep. 48

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Feb 12, 2025

Nat Eliason, entrepreneur and writer who builds businesses around new tools and trends. He talks about creating a viral AI app-building course that made $200,000 in a week. He demos AI-powered coding with Cursor, shares tactics for managing agent workflows, and explores AI tools for writing, editing, and solo-creator product strategies.

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ANECDOTE

Instant $200k Course Launch From a Tweet

Nat sold $200,000 worth of pre-sales for his Build Your Own Apps with AI course in one week after tweeting demand and putting up a purchase page.
He recorded videos from a fresh dev machine and used Cursor agents to minimize student support needs, needing to troubleshoot only twice for 700 students.

INSIGHT

Product Partnerships Amplify Course Demand

Partnering with emerging product teams can unlock distribution: Nat's Roam course bundled credits led to massive early adoption.
Roam credited course buyers with six months free access, which materially boosted course sales to ~$600k.

ANECDOTE

Airbnb Flip Turned Course Profits Into 6x Real Estate Win

Nat turned profits from an earlier course into an Airbnb near Austin, which suffered property damage and a major freeze but sold at peak for a 6x cash-on-cash return in 1.5 years.
The flip was luck: damage then timely market peak led to unusually high returns.

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Nat Eliason’s career arc is borderline absurd—but it works.

In the last five years, he ran an SEO agency, got into crypto, made $600,000 from a course on the note-taking tool Roam Research, flipped real estate in Austin for a 6x return, and published a book with Random House. He’s now writing a book of science fiction and running a viral course about building apps with AI.

I’ve known Nat for a long time, and I think he knows where the puck is headed better than anyone. He’ll see a new tool or trend, master it, build a business around it, and move on. Nat’s pulled it off with crypto, Roam, real estate—and now AI. His app-building course has over 800 students and racked up $200,000 in pre-sales in one week.

Nat was one of the first guests I had on the podcast and I was delighted to have him on again. We spent an hour talking about how coding with AI is creating new behaviors in programming, Nat’s best practices for using the coding tool Cursor, and his take on the future of writing with AI.

This episode is a must-watch for writers, creators, and anyone interested in the future of product building.

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Timestamps:

Introduction: 00:01:45
The origins of Nat’s viral course on building apps with AI: 00:10:15
How coding with AI has evolved over the last two years: 00:17:16
Nat creates an app using Composer, Cursor’s AI assistant: 00:20:52
Tactical tips for coding with Cursor: 00:24:36
How coding with AI is creating new behaviors in programming: 00:27:36
What excites Nat the most about the future of AI: 00:31:11
A demo of Hubbard, the AI editor Nat built for his science fiction writing: 00:37:28
When does it make sense to build custom software: 00:43:22
Nat’s take on the future of writing with AI: 00:47:48

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Nat Eliason: @nateliason
Nat’s viral course about building apps with AI: Build Your Own Apps with AI
The book Nat published about crypto: Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance
Dan’s piece about how AI empowers creators: AI and the Age of the Individual