How to make 2 million dollars with AI in 2026

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]So, I'm on pace for a big year. It's looking like it's going to be a roughly $2 million year. Now, where's this money come? It's coming from many different places. Number one is my two SASes. So, I have Creator Buddy and another SAS I'm about to launch. It's also coming from my community. It's coming from content.

[00:00:14]There's ad revenue on these videos.

[00:00:16]There's ad revenue on X, subscribers on X, all of that. So, it's looking like a pretty good year. It's all coming from AI. The playbook I've used is really, really simple. I think it's one anyone can use. Even you watching right now, I promise you, you can use this playbook to be successful. I actually believe this is going to be the most popular playbook there is, more popular than like jobs and careers in the next 5 years. I think is as more people get laid off from the different companies, which we're seeing a lot right now from AI, it'll actually increase the amount of people going and using the playbook I'm about to show you in and out. It's a really simple one. If you stick with me here, I'm going through the entire playbook I've been building the last 5 years to be decently successful in AI and content. Now, this isn't too complicated of a playbook. I promise if you stick with me and do all these things and you do it consistently for a pretty long time, you either get a pretty decent side income or you can turn it into your entire career. I call this playbook the share your journey playbook. And this playbook is AI proof, right? is going to be all driven by AI, but AI can't disrupt it. You're going to be able to build SAS applications that anyone else can copy and you can be successful. Anyone can copy the SAS applications I've built right now.

[00:01:34]Anyone can copy and probably release a better version and my version still going to perform better than whatever they release. Why is that? Because I've been doing the share your journey playbook. So, what is the share your journey playbook? What's it about? Where do you start? If you're starting this playbook right now that this year is going to make me probably over $2 million, where do you start? Here's the first thing you do. The first thing you do is do cool things, right? Do cool things. What does that mean? That means downloading clawed code and then building a really cool game or downloading codecs and building a pretty cool SAS application or that means downloading perplexity computer or openclaw and finding a really cool workflow. It's literally just doing anything that's mildly interesting with technology. Right now, AI and tech have the entire zeitgeist. So, anything you're doing in the zeitgeist with AI or tech and you do cool things with it, people are going to be interested, right? So, step one of this playbook that is working really well for me right now and is working for many other people is just do cool things. Right? You don't need to be a genius to do this either.

[00:02:41]You don't need to be a tech genius. You don't need to be an AI master. I'm by no means an AI master. My entire journey, I have my main YouTube channel where I do AI tutorials and I have this channel where I just talk to you. All I'm doing in these two channels is trying just to do cool things and tell you about it, right? So do cool things. Download Claude Code, download Codeex, download Perplexi, Open Claw, Hermes, I don't care. Whatever you want. It doesn't even need to be those. It could be like Photoshop for all I care. It just needs to be something people care about. and then do interesting things with it.

[00:03:13]Download Cloud Code and build an interesting application, right? Do remotely interesting things that doesn't I promise you that doesn't require much effort. I promise you, you can do this in like 30 minutes a day. Do cool interesting things. All right, so you've done a cool interesting thing. What's next? What What is the next thing you should do? You should tell people about it, right? This isn't too complicated.

[00:03:38]You tell people about it. How do you tell people about it? Well, you do it in the most high lever way possible, right?

[00:03:43]What's the most high leverage pay way possible? That's uh social media. Social media. So, when I started my journey, right, I got almost half a million on Twitter. I got 200,000 on my main YouTube channel. We're building this one up here. I got 40,000 on my newsletter.

[00:03:57]This all started with me going on Twitter and telling people about the cool things I'm doing with technology. 5 years ago, I had an anonymous account. I had like a cringe NFT profile picture. I was telling people interesting things I was doing. I was trading. I was doing all these different things. I was just telling people about it. I tweeted about it. I did it over and over and over again. I wasn't doing it for engagement.

[00:04:18]I wasn't doing it for followers. I was doing it because I just wanted to tell people about the cool stuff I was doing.

[00:04:24]And I was doing anonymously. I didn't even care if people knew who I was. But something really interesting happened when I did this. Something really, really interesting happened. What happened as I started telling people about the cool things I was doing? I started attracting people to me. I started attracting followers. I started attracting likes. I started attracting offers for business deals. I started attracting people who want to give me money. All these different things. It turns out if you just do cool things, then tell people about it. You attract people to you who want to do those things. And then on top of that, once you're getting that attention from the people you're attracting, now other companies, brands, businesses, even just people themselves want to give you money. They want to give you money either to advertise for them or to teach them things personally or whatever it is. They want to give you money. So, you're doing cool things. You're telling people about it. Where do you tell people about it? Well, the easiest, the lowest bar one is X, right? You can just go on X. Takes 5 seconds to crap out a tweet. That's why I was doing it. I was working at a company called MongoDB. I was in leadership. I was managing a team of technical consultants. I didn't have much time. I was working 8:00 PM or 8 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. I didn't have time to create content. I didn't have time to do what I'm doing right here, which is create videos. And so I just started tweeting. I started tweeting. Took five minutes in between meetings. I just pull out my phone uh and and crap out a tweet, right? It was really easy, but started building the audience, right?

[00:05:53]What are all the I think that's the easiest. I think that's kind of the lowest bar place to start. Anyone can do it. I mean, you you don't you don't have to have a pretty face. You don't have to have a voice. You don't have to anything. You just tweet anonymously. It takes five seconds to do. So, that's easy. That's kind of low barrier. But what else? Where else can you go? Well, then there's also kind of the holy grail, which is YouTube. Uh here, YouTube is the largest social media site on the world. I think I read like half of all internet data and traffic is YouTube or something like that. Like just like half of everything anyone does on the internet is YouTube. uh it just takes up so much data and so many people are doing things you so many people are on YouTube it's insane but here's the thing though because X is low barrier that means you have a ton of competition right on the other hand YouTube is high barrier which means you don't have much competition and so YouTube is the holy grail there's way more people using it and it's higher barrier so you have less competition X is kind of a lower stakes platform because it doesn't have many users, but you also have more competition, right? So, YouTube long-term is really where you want to be. X kind of I think is a good gateway drug into telling people about what you're doing. It's a good gateway drug into sharing your journey. I think everyone should go there first because it kind of gets you comfortable with talking to strangers on the internet.

[00:07:17]It's kind of weird at first. It feels kind of cringe and strange to create content and to get on social media and interact with people, interact sometimes with a-holes, but a lot of time it's also nice people. It's strange to kind of get past that feeling of strangeness.

[00:07:33]I think X is a really good place to be.

[00:07:35]But YouTube long-term, that's the holy grail. My life opened up when I started on YouTube. I started on YouTube a year and a half ago. I started posting on YouTube. It took me a year and two months to hit 100K subscribers and it took me another two months after that to hit 200K subscribers. I'm about to hit that. So like it it takes a long time and it takes a good amount of effort.

[00:07:56]But my life completely changed when I started on YouTube because that's where companies want to be. That's where the people are. That's where the people that want to spend money are is on YouTube.

[00:08:07]It's the holy grail. It's the Super Bowl. It's the NFL of social media sites. So long term it is where you want to be. And I know what kind of the first objective is you're going to give me is uh that's difficult. I don't want to turn on the camera and talk to it for hours on end. Yeah, that's really weird.

[00:08:23]It does feel really weird at first. If you go to my main channel, Alex Finn, and then sort by oldest, and look at my first videos, uh they're really awkward and weird. I'm behaving really weird in it because I feel really awkward in front of the camera. But you kind of fight through that. You fight through that and eventually you get into a flow state and eventually you can do what I'm doing here which is turn on a camera with not much of a plan and start talking and interesting things come out of your mouth, right? You eventually get to that point. You kind of got to fight through that and I'm glad it's difficult. The fact that it's difficult means not everyone can do it which means you have less competition which means if you have the coahones to do it or if you're a woman the metaphorical coahjones to do it then you're going to be ahead of a lot of people. Okay? So you do cool things. you tell people about it and then you go back and you do more cool things, right? You're constantly in this cycle of experimenting, trying new things, and telling people about it. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. We have to sneak it in here. What you want to do is you want to listen. Let's do this. Let's instead of me drawing because I'm not artistic, I do this is so we're listening and we are also shipping. What does this mean? So you're listening here and you're shipping here.

[00:09:39]So you're doing cool things. You're telling people about it. After you tell people about it, you listen. What are you listening to? You're listening to the signal, right? You're listening to what are the replies? What are people asking for in the replies? You're listening to what are other people creating? What's the other content in your niche that people are creating?

[00:09:59]You're listening to uh what people are liking. What content of yours do they like? What content of yours do they don't like? What you start to get is signal around the challenges people are having. Where are the gaps? Where are the challenges people are having? So, you're kind of telling people about it.

[00:10:14]You're listening, you're getting signal, then you're doing more cool things. And you're telling people about it, you're listening, getting signal, then you're doing cool things. You do it over and over and over again. Eventually, some signal you get will be so clear that you actually can build and ship something.

[00:10:28]You can build and ship something. So, for instance, I started using Twitter. I had a hard time creating content.

[00:10:36]Eventually, I got pretty good at it. I was listening to objectives people had about creating content on Twitter.

[00:10:41]Everyone's like, I just don't know what to talk about. I don't know my niche. I don't know what I should be tweeting about. Eventually, I'm like, hm, I could build a solution to this. So, I built an app called Creator Buddy that helps people figure out their voice, helps people figure out their interests, what they can tweet about, get templates for tweets, and just make it much easier to start on Twitter. And so eventually after doing cool things and telling people about it and listening long enough, I shipped the solution. I shipped it. It did well. It's making $300,000 a year. It kind of set me off.

[00:11:11]It helped me build a reputation as a builder. It's been nothing but amazing for me. Then I kept going back. Do cool things, tell people. Do cool things, tell people. Do cool things, tell people about it. Then I started getting some signal that people don't really know how to use AI. They don't know how to implement AI in their life. They know AI is amazing. They know it's incredible, but they don't know how to implement it in their life. So, I did a couple things. I started building my second SAS application, Henry, which beta testing will start in a couple weeks. I also shipped Vibe Coding Academy, which is a community, an AI education community.

[00:11:45]Uh, I shipped a few months ago that's doing spectacularly well. Bunch of people are in it. And that keeps growing and growing and growing my business, right? So, I'm doing cool things, telling people about it, listening for signal, and then shipping solutions to what I'm hearing in that signal. And I just keep doing it more and more. And the more and the faster I can do this, right? The more action I take, the more signal I get, which means the more signal I get, the more product I can ship, the more product I can ship, the more money I can make, and the more value I can create, right? the more and faster I can get through this loop, the more successful I am, right? So, the more I can go and cut anything out of my life that isn't any of these things. Cut out anything that isn't experimenting, that isn't telling people about it, that isn't shipping, that isn't listening, I get rid of it. Doom scrolling, get rid of it. Video games, okay, maybe five minutes at the end of the night, but get rid of it. All the other things.

[00:12:43]Drinking and drugs. I was never really a drinking and drugs guy to be honest with you. But cut it out. No point. If this I mean listen, you can have fun, but if your focus is having success in 2026 or whatever year you're watching this video, if that's truly your main priority is creating a better life for yourself, then you can you could probably cut those things out. Also, you and I'll make a video on this later, so subscribe to our notifications. You define what fun is for you. You define what fun is for you. For me, my definition of fun is this loop. My definition of fun isn't going out, drinking, going to bars, clubs, all that. That's some people's definition of fun. It's not my definition of fun. So, you can recreate your definition of fun.

[00:13:27]And if you're able to turn this into your definition of fun, this loop right here, you're going to be uh much more successful than you can imagine, much more successful than you were before.

[00:13:38]I've been doing this content thing now for about 5 years. I started tweeting in uh December 2021, right? And I just been, you know, first year I made a couple thousand dollar. Second year I made like $90,000. Third year I made like 200k and just kind of continued to grow and grow. The more you do this, the more it kind of exponentially increases and compounds on top of it. I quit my job three years into this. Uh so I worked and this was kind of my side hustle and it gave me a nice supplementary income. Eventually, it made enough for me to quit my job. And I quit my job. Now, I'm doing this full-time. It's accelerated all this even more. So, you can do this even with a job. You can do this even with kids.

[00:14:21]You can do this even with family. I'm telling you, it takes 10 minutes a day to tweet. It took me another 10 minutes a day to write newsletters. Maybe you got to stay up to midnight. Maybe I stay up a little bit later. I have a friend I know from the gym here in this building I uh live in who uh we met each other like a year ago and he's been watching my journey. He didn't know who I was before and he just started his own YouTube channel a month ago, right? And now he's at like 400 subscribers on YouTube. He's got a kid. He's got a job.

[00:14:50]He works for a really good tech company you heard of. He stays up to midnight every night. You know, he's got to put his kid away. Then he shoots videos edit. He's making a little bit of sacrifices. If you make a little bit of sacrifices, I promise you, no matter where you are in your life, no matter what you're doing, no matter what your circumstances, you can build something amazing. You could build something incredible. And what the best part about all this is is like this makes you recession proof.

[00:15:16]This makes you layoff proof. You turn on the news, Coinbase is laying everyone off. Cloudflare is laying everyone off.

[00:15:23]This makes you layoff proof. If you're making your own money from all this stuff, you are layoff, right? So, I highly encourage you, no matter who you are, start doing cool things. You're probably already doing cool things already. Start telling people about it.

[00:15:37]Start sharing your journey. You do it over and over and over again. This is the playbook. This is the playbook to making a crap ton of money with AI in 2026. maybe take a year or two to really build the momentum, but eventually you'll be finding success with this stuff. I hope this was helpful. This is my second channel. Uh, all the videos on here will be kind of me sit down, talk to you in the camera, hang out, give advice, not just on AI, life, business, every everything in between. If you found it helpful, subscribe, turn on notifications, subscribe to the main channel if you haven't yet. Leave a reply down below. Just say hello. I just like to see that people, real life people watch this. Hope it was helpful.