I Turned $150 into $2M/Year

this guy turned $1150 into a $2 million AI app but what's even crazier is he barely even knew how to code in February I bought the domain sgt. for $150 watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials and we got our first customers in March he invited us into his house in Lakeland Florida to show us exactly how he started this thing as a solar preneur and the marketing strategy he used to grow to $200,000 Mr we started leaning up a lot into and just found a tremendous amount of Success Through that channel before the success Joseph

tried and failed several business ideas unfortunately one of those was crypto and it left him with a $150,000 penalty from the federal government we talk about what he learned from this and how it gave him New Perspective that eventually led to a new business idea that would change his life after a few days of like trialing it I cracked it in this video Joseph shares his exact ideation product development and marketing blueprints that he used to build a $200,000 per month AI app I'm Pat walls and this is starter story hi Joseph thank you for

having me in your beautiful home tell me about this business that you built yeah so we made uh stealth GPT it's a web app subscription based model like a SAS and basically what it does is it can generate AI generated text that's undetectable or it can take text from things like Claude chat gbt Gemini and make that undetectable we got to $190,000 Mr recently took us about 15 months to do it wow let's talk about some of the financials around this like how much revenue how much profit is this doing profit we're doing about10 to

$30,000 a month after all of our expenses and everything most of our money goes into marketing a new customer acquisition um it's a lot of reinvestment into the current business so that we can continue growing at the rate that we're growing at we spend about $100,000 we're we're on a pace like it always is adjusting upward we've also brought in a staff so six to seven people we're actually hiring two more people right now we spend I think about like 50 to $60,000 a month on salaries alone other than that it's like our database and

our hosting and you know our AI stack and everything like that kind of composes of probably about an additional I want to say like $5,000 so I think gave you about $160,000 worth of a picture so in the lifespan of stealth we have had 400,000 signups about 15 to 20,000 subscribers as a whole active subscribers we're looking at about 8,500 wow yeah that's amazing yeah can you give me a timeline of how you get into coding how you get into Indie hacking I was a big fan of RuneScape when I was a kid like giant

RuneScape head and I remember when I was coming out of college I started looking at RuneScape again I was like now I'm a bit older I'm a bit more mature I don't want to spend 13 hours a day playing RuneScape anymore and I kind of like the idea of coding I I know that's something it's an important skill so I'm like let me figure out how to make a bot to do some gold farming and in RuneScape I started Harvard's like CS 50 class watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials started building for my for myself

like so for example I built a website for myself and I built like a blackjack game took a few years to you know learn how to code that kind of thing and build stealth GPT all right let's talk about failure for a second so I know that in your journey you had something that kind of really set you back can you tell me a little bit more about that I was 23 years old I started my first company J squared invest and I started because I was getting involved with like crypto and stuff like that

I saw there's like a huge Market need for people who didn't understand how to get into Bitcoin or ethereum they didn't know what coinbase was they didn't know how to open up a wallet so I just an opportunity like any other entrepreneur I had no money so I bought I made I got a loan from my father got the lawyers got the company ready all that kind of stuff and we just started taking in clients 2017 markets were great very bullish everything went to the moon until 2018 came around and um pretty much I lost

all my money um I had a lot of money in the crypto markets of course the company got rinsed and then a few months later I get hit with this email out of nowhere from the cftc I guess there's like some like accusations of like oh I took client money or stuff like that every time I got an email from these people it was like it was devastating it was devastating to get an email from them but it was also devastating every day thinking like are they going to do something today are they going to

email me today are they going to who knows what cuz you're at their full Mercy you're at the full mercy of the government um at that point and you got really nothing we later settled with them after I think like two or three years of dealing with this issue it was like a $400,000 total settlement um still paying for it to this day the whole process cost us $50,000 um before we even got to a trial before anything like that because I was broke at the time I couldn't pay any of it I had to

completely borrow it from my parents having to do that was like devastating um you as like a child you want to make your parents proud and you want to make them happy everyone was really happy for me when I first started my company and they were very impressed and all that kind of stuff and then here I am having to beg for their help or else I'm going to get crushed like a bug like by the government and it was um it was a horrific situation but um thank God my parents I'm blessed to have

loving parents and they're always there for me um and they always have been there for me so really appreciate that yeah coming off that how do you find this idea for stealth GPT how do you come up with the idea 2022 rolls around and chat GPT is like a thing and I was like okay this is going to dominate online content people are going to produce all this content with AI and they're going to put it online naturally there's going to be some kind of push back there's going to be people who care is the

content that I'm reading right now human or is it Ai and Tik Tok because it I guess spies on the neural Nets of your brain or something like that just knew I was thinking about this and served me up a video in my timeline it's like hey there's this AI detector called gp0 they're able to scan with like a 99% accuracy is this content AI generator not so I started going to work just reverse engineering it really trying to figure out can and I consistently beat this AI detector and keep making it say that this

is human generated after a few days of like trialing it I cracked it like eventually it just every single response I was throwing through the AI detector was coming up human and I was like okay we got something here and so around January is like when I first had the idea for steal GPT after seeing that Tik Tok video and then in February I bought the domain steal gp. for 75 bucks a year and they make you buy two years minimum so it's $150 by March we had our first uh real website with nextjs and

react live and we got our first customers in March Joseph was able to change his life because of one simple SAS idea he turned into millions he showed us that all it really takes is a willingness to learn from others paired with a solid problem to solve if you're serious about doing something similar but you're still looking for an idea well you're in luck you can download our 52 micro SAS idea report to show you ideas just like Joseph's that will give you inspiration to get started on your your own project just click the first

link in the description and you'll get it all for free and if you're serious about actually building it alongside other successful Founders consider joining starter story and we'll help you with that much love and hope you guys enjoy the rest of the video you build your MVP how do you get your first customer I listed the website on future pedia which I saw some people talking about we kind of let people use the service for free like 10 tries for free and then they would have to pay for subscription so we offered like three different

tiers of pricing for as low as like $4.99 to like 15 bucks yeah and then we got these two customers and I remember thinking at the time I was like how the heck did these guys find us like in the in the wide ocean the internet and they're like oh well we actually heard about you mention on the show from this Tik Tok guy this guy named Phil covers a lot of products like basically every single day like obsessively over like every project so when we listed on futurepedia I guess he follows that and tracks

that and it was like a cool little cute video and that's how we got our our first customer so Bill thank you wherever you are thank you so much that's the power of just posting your stuff you never know what's going to happen right exactly yeah that's true so you got this product it's pretty much validated and now you're trying to scale it how do you actually scale a business like this yeah we kind of went at it with like a ucg type strategy on like Tik Tok and Instagram talking about like the service and

just kind of letting people know at that point it was like Market education because something like this has never existed before we need to tell people like hey what is stealth GPT what does it do just kind of intrigue them into it so a lot of focus on just explaining what the product is and why people need a product like self GPT when we got past the summer we started leaning a lot into Google ads and really investigating Google ads and just found a tremendous amount of Success Through that channel they were converting like insanely

low cost per conversion $10 $15 $20 in the early days and that allowed us to scale a ton so we would get a lot of money in and then we just pour more into Google ads and it was just like putting gasoline on a fire just kind of kept going and going and going so you've built this software to hundreds of thousands of users what's your approach to building a great product when you're trying to build a solution to a problem you're trying to make money on it you're trying to build a business you need

to make a solution to as broad of a problem as possible and so yes I talk to my users I do get their feedback I do ask them like hey what would you want to see on these different tools and whatnot sometimes I'm like okay that that that's a good suggestion let's let's kind of play around with that that could help a lot of other users but then sometimes I'm just like n that's something that maybe you would like and that would be great for you and no I'm not going to spend hundreds of hours

building this whole complex like method that you want or feature that you want so really what I use our customers for as far as feedback goes is how is the quality and then also with the experience like how is it using the app was it easy to figure out what this tool does what that tool does and that's where the users come in and they're very helpful as far as like other features and stuff like that like core stuff Engineers out there and coders they really want to build like the most complex like high powerered

application out there and give the user so much Freedom that's horrible people want to use the internet like this I want to be able to give you my problem and in one click get that problem solved don't make it complicated don't add all that stuff now not every problem can be solved in one click but as much as it can be try to get it to one click yeah let's talk about tools and languages what is this company built on we're built on xjs and react I think that's like the best stack that you can

work with these days one thing that was very critical to our infrastructure was like versel uh versell works really well with NEX and allows us to like deploy something out there in like a few minutes and hey if a user has a problem with it we can roll it back figure out what the problem is and then push it back into production and we use super base for our database and they've been phenomenal we use Discord a lot for our communication and we use buffer for our marketing management for like our different channels Instagram Tik

Tok Facebook whatever zenes for like support Google Sheets and Google Docs and whatnot I mean they have a perfect suite for like us to collaborate on our documents and stuff like that you know GitHub of course got to be in there cool so you started this thing as a solopreneur you did it all by yourself tell me a little bit about that experience when I first started out building the idea I didn't really think I needed too much you know it was going to be like a very basic rudimentary idea let's see if it works

and after the first 2 months once I actually started to see like real traction I I knew at that point in time I knew it in my gut we got something good over here and if I can just get some more hands in the in the cookie jar that'd be really helpful to help me build this thing cuz remember I mean before that I didn't even know how to Cod so we went out there and did that I'm so happy that we did our team is uh phenomenal all of our developer hires have come through

Twitter post so no one has a pedigree no one has really done anything before we've built this thing and we're kind of just building an amazing piece of software over here let's talk about ideas a lot of people watching this are looking for the right idea what advice would you give to someone who's looking for an idea that can make money like yours so the best way to kind of go through this is like think about problems in your life and I I've seen that as like common advice and it's true think about a problem

that you have dealt with like something that bothered you something that pisses you off something that wastes your time wastes your money everything like that everyone's got problems like that or talk to people and ask some like problems in areas that are kind of passionate to you because obviously if you're working on something that you care about you're passionate about you it so much better than if you didn't care it was monotonous and it was boring also you need to honestly be able to critique your idea and and be honest with yourself to say is

this actually good will people actually buy this or am I just kind of hyping myself up and thinking I just came up with a next big thing all right let's talk about Day in the Life what is it like to have built this business and run this business fulltime the first thing in the morning is just systematically like checking all the systems making sure everything's green everyone's good now we're done with that let's check on our ads performance so I go look at what our ads are doing right now I look at what our ads

were doing yesterday after we get through all that kind of stuff the rest of the day is just kind of a lot of ideation a lot of talking with the team making sure everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing I'm very like hands off for the most part like I'm not like hey man what are you doing it's more like you know what your role is you know what your role is you know what your role is and then constantly kind of getting updates and feedback as we kind of go through it and learning

like I actually spend like a considerable amount of time like scrolling the timeline on Twitter I see a lot of your posts on there I see a lot of other great like Indie hackers and Founders and whatever and even some accounts like a non account accounts anime profile picture get no traction they get maybe one or two likes on them I'm like you know what that's a that's a good idea like I'm I might give that a shot a lot of learning like always trying to stay up on the like the dayto day we're never

out of the loop and that's very important to the process yeah well the last question that uh that we ask all of our Founders who built these amazing businesses if you could uh sit on Joseph's shoulder you know when you're just starting out what if advice would you have for him I would say like the marketing really is just important if not more important than the product itself at the end of the day if you cannot get distribution if you cannot get eyeballs on what you're building you're toast also there's never been a better time

to build you can if you have a laptop and Wi-Fi even if you don't have Wi-Fi there's a Starbucks down the street or something that does you have the power with AI with things like versel and super base and the free tear out there you have the power to put something online today don't waste this opportunity I love it thank you so much yeah what you built is amazing follow this advice and you'll make millions you could make millions with AI good luck all right see you yo what's up guys thank you all for watching

Joseph's story I think the coolest part is how he took just a very simple idea and turn it into a massive business thanks to this crazy AI track he's proof that all it takes is a simple idea and some hard work and you can build a life-changing business if you're serious about starting your own thing but you still don't know where to start or you need some inspiration head to the first link in the description and we're going to give you our free micro SAS Deep dive report 52 different SAS ideas exactly how much money

they make and a bunch of other cool information you'd want to know just click the first link in the description and we'll send it over also leave a comment on some other types of businesses that you want us to cover or any other content you'd like to see us do I'd love to hear your ideas all right that's a wrap I appreciate you guys a ton and I'll see you in the next one peace [Music]