A 37-minute interview on how one AI creator stacks a $100/month community, a SaaS app and platform payouts into roughly $1.4 million a year, and what he refuses to sell.
Posted
3 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
sincere
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3.5K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Going all in early on a technology you genuinely use, then monetizing mainly through a paid community and your own app instead of sponsorships, can build a seven-figure creator business without spending your reputation.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You make AI or tech content and want to see a real revenue split between a community, an app, platform payouts and sponsors.
You run or plan a paid community and want a reference point for what $100 a month with weekly live calls can reach.
You're weighing a sponsorship offer and want a clear rule for which deals protect your reputation and which erode it.
You're sprinting on a breakout moment and starting to feel the cost of four-hour nights.
You follow the personal AI agent space and want one heavy user's read on where Anthropic and the agent race go next.
SKIP IF…
You want a tactical tutorial. There are no screen shares, build steps or prompts here, only a conversation.
You want verified financials. Every number is spoken from memory and several are rounded or approximate.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
The guest's thesis is that conviction compounds: he bought a Mac mini the night he read about a new personal agent, went all in before anyone else was talking about it, and roughly doubled his YouTube and X audiences in nine months. The money mostly comes from owned products, not ads. A $100/month community of about 700 members brings in around $70,000 a month, his first app peaked near $350,000 a year, and YouTube and X payouts add roughly $200,000 more. He only takes sponsors whose product he would cover unpaid, refuses brands that pay creators for undisclosed promotion, and rebuilt his sleep and exercise after the breakout nearly burned him out.
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30:55cohostJustin (second interviewer, surname not given)
Chapters
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:27
01 · Cold open
Montage of the episode's biggest lines: the revenue figures, the Mac mini story and the million-dollar sponsorship refusal.
01:27 – 04:28
02 · Buying a Mac mini on a hunch
The guest reads one blog post about a personal agent, drives to the Apple store an hour before close, and knows within ten minutes it will change the industry. He goes all in while nobody else is posting about it.
04:28 – 05:48
03 · By the numbers, and the Cursor origin
From 60K to about 250K on YouTube and 200K to 470K on X since January. His AI content started in August 2024, when Cursor with Sonnet 3.5 made AI coding click after 15 years as a developer.
05:48 – 07:41
04 · Two superpowers: passion and communication
Extreme passion for the technology, plus communication skills sharpened as a sales engineer, are what he credits for any success.
07:41 – 11:54
05 · Why the haters show up
Strong opinions draw straw men. Support was universal at 5,000 subscribers; once you're up the mountain, the audience wants the story of you coming down. It only bothers him when it kills a real conversation.
11:54 – 13:26
06 · The community-noted first date
An X post about an agent launching a micro business during a date got community noted because he announced the launch himself. He admits the 'first date' was framed for the story; it was his girlfriend.
13:26 – 16:28
07 · Where the money comes from
Creator Buddy (peak about $350K a year), the Vibe Coding Academy (700 members at $100 a month), X payouts, YouTube ads, platform subscriptions, a venture-backed startup with no revenue yet, and a new agency-run sponsorship pipeline.
16:28 – 19:10
08 · The only sponsorships he takes
No sponsored posts on X. The one exception was an Nvidia deal to install an agent on a DGX Spark, content he would have made unpaid. His video sponsorship rate at the time was about $10,000.
19:10 – 21:30
09 · Turning down undisclosed shilling
He refuses brands that pay creators to promote without disclosure, calls the practice illegal, and notes one such brand paid for his $1,000/month consulting tier just to negotiate with him.
21:30 – 24:30
10 · Four hours of sleep, then a reset
The January breakout took the community from 60 to over 1,000 paying members. Two months on four hours a night cost him productivity and joy; he now protects seven hours, daily steps and four gym sessions a week.
24:30 – 29:08
11 · Go all in, and the next 30 days
His case for making a tool your whole personality, then switching loudly when something better ships. His prediction: after strong model releases, Anthropic will make a serious play for the personal agent.
29:08 – 30:55
12 · Where the money goes
He pays for every AI plan because the models make him more efficient and produce content, and he just spent $4,000 on a camera to shoot more in-person video.
30:55 – 36:00
13 · Before AI: firings and NFT God
A 2.4 college GPA, fired from his first two jobs, a leadership role at MongoDB, then an anonymous NFT account in 2020 that grew by posting about everything except NFTs.
36:00 – 37:19
14 · Balance and sign-off
He admits his girlfriend would rather have his attention than his agent's, and closes by promoting a squid ink pasta in San Francisco instead of a product.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A paid community of 700 people at $100 a month is $840,000 a year, more than double the creator's best-performing app.
The biggest revenue line in a seven-figure AI creator business can be weekly live calls, not software or ads.
An app built to analyze your own posts can become a $350,000-a-year product because you are its first and most demanding user.
App revenue for a creator-built product swings with attention: the same app moved between $200,000 and $300,000 a year depending on how visible its maker was.
YouTube ads paying about $11,000 a month and X payouts of about $3,000 every two weeks are a minority of a business that clears $1.4 million.
A breakout month took one paid community from 60 members to over 1,000 at $100 each.
The only sponsor test that protects you: would you have made this exact piece of content if they hadn't paid?
Paid retweets and quote-posts with a 'paid partnership' tag erode trust because the endorsement is visibly bought.
Undisclosed paid promotion is illegal, and creators who take it damage both their own reputation and the brand's.
When a brand pays $1,000 a month for your top consulting tier just to pitch you a deal, that tells you how much they intend to offer.
Hatred online often flips on once you've climbed the mountain, because the story of a fall is more interesting to people than the story of a climb.
Sleeping four hours a night for two months makes you less productive and drains the joy from work you love.
A creator who got fired from his first two jobs and carried a 2.4 college GPA still built a seven-figure business once he found work he loved.
Switching from an anonymous niche persona to your real name doesn't satisfy critics: the same people will now say you belong to your old niche.
Takeaway
Owned products and a reputation rule beat ad money.
WHAT TO LEARN
A seven-figure creator business here rests on a paid community and a self-built app, guarded by a strict rule about which sponsors are worth the trust they cost.
02Buying a Mac mini on a hunch
When a new tool makes you sure in ten minutes that it changes your field, acting before anyone else is talking about it is where the outsized attention comes from.
03By the numbers, and the Cursor origin
Audience growth followed one clear bet: YouTube went from about 60K to 250K and X from 200K to 470K in roughly nine months.
04Two superpowers: passion and communication
Passion alone doesn't carry content; the guest credits years as a sales engineer for the communication skill that made his enthusiasm land.
05Why the haters show up
Expect criticism to rise with success, and save your frustration for when it blocks a real conversation instead of taking insults personally.
06The community-noted first date
Framing a true story for drama can invite public correction, so know which details are load-bearing before you angle a post.
07Where the money comes from
A $100/month community with weekly live calls can out-earn your software: 700 members brought in about $840K a year against an app peaking near $350K.
Platform payouts from YouTube and X added roughly $200K a year, useful but a minority of the total.
08The only sponsorships he takes
Before taking a sponsor, ask whether you would make that exact content unpaid; if yes, the deal costs no trust.
09Turning down undisclosed shilling
Refuse undisclosed paid promotion outright, since it is illegal and taints both the creator and the brand once audiences notice.
10Four hours of sleep, then a reset
Sprinting on four hours of sleep during a breakout eventually cuts both output and enjoyment, so build sleep, steps and gym time back in before it forces you to.
Treat sprint seasons and stability seasons as separate modes and know which one you're in.
11Go all in, and the next 30 days
Committing fully to the best tool right now, then switching loudly when a better one ships, keeps your content current and energetic.
12Where the money goes
Spend on tools and gear that pay you back twice, in efficiency and in the content you can make with them.
13Before AI: firings and NFT God
A weak academic record and early firings don't predict outcomes once you find work you love enough to go all in on.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Personal AI agent
Software that runs on your computer or a server and takes actions for you, like browsing, writing code or running a small website, instead of only replying in a chat window.
OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot)
An open-source personal agent that runs on your own machine and can control it. Early adopters often bought a dedicated Mac mini to run it around the clock.
Cursor
An AI code editor that writes and edits code inside your project. For many developers it was the first tool that made AI coding feel practical.
Community note
A crowd-written correction or context label that X attaches to a post when enough raters from different viewpoints agree it adds useful context.
Sales engineer
A technical specialist on a sales team who explains a product to customers, runs demos and answers engineering questions so the deal can close.
DGX Spark
A compact Nvidia desktop computer built for running AI models locally instead of in the cloud.
EV (expected value)
Shorthand for the average payoff of a decision. A 'low EV' choice is one that costs you money on average, used here as a running joke about lost sponsorship deals.
“10 minutes in, I just knew, I knew it was like the future.”
tight conviction moment from the Mac mini story→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
14:15
“There is 700 people in there paying $100 a month. So that's $70,000 a month from the educational community.”
concrete number, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
16:47
“I believe your reputation and image is the most important thing in the world. It's the most valuable thing you have. It's worth more than any ad deal.”
clear principle in two sentences→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
19:10
“I'll say this, and this might lose me a million dollars, like I'm not even joking.”
built-in tension, works as a cliffhanger→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
21:01
“This is going to be the lowest EV podcast in my entire life.”
funny, self-contained, names the running joke→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
22:54
“Sleeping four hours a night for two months straight. And eventually it caught up.”
“I'm now in the season of the iOS update where everything just works better.”
memorable metaphor, no context needed→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
31:20
“I had a 2.6 GPA in high school, 2.4 GPA in college, lost all my scholarships. I get fired from my first two jobs.”
underdog origin in one breath→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
01:27 – 05:48steadyOrigin of the agent bet
05:48 – 13:26steadyStrengths and handling criticism
13:26 – 21:30denseRevenue and sponsorship rules
21:30 – 24:30steadyBurnout and health
24:30 – 30:55steadyAgent predictions and spending
30:55 – 36:00sparseCareer before AI
The Script
Word for word.
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You have a hundred years on this planet, and then you're dead forever. We have the man, the myth, the legend, Alex Finn. I'm gonna go to the Apple store and buy a Mac Mini.
Ten minutes in, I knew it was the future. Talk me through how you make money. $350 ,000 a year, 700 people in there paying $100 a month, $3 ,000 every two weeks, 11K a month, life -changing attention, life -changing money.
Once you kind of make your way up the mountain, they want to kind of tear you down. How much, Alex? How much?
What did video pay, Alex? I'll say this, and this might lose me. A million dollars.
Like, I'm not even joking. Sorry, you just lost a million dollars, Alex. The lowest EV podcast in my entire life.
That's the goal. That's actually the name of the podcast.
Today we have the man, the myth, the legend, Alex Finn. Alex, we met on the internet when Clodbot was taking off in the world and Jason Calacanis had us on This Week in Startups. dark room, a different dark room than your current dark room.
I guess that's part of your vibe. Always in a dark room. And I had no idea who the hell you were.
I don't know if you knew who I was. But at the time, what the hell was agentic engineering and personal agents anyway in February of this year, which is crazy that it's even this year. It feels like that was three years ago.
And somehow, you and I, along with our other friend, were the best experts in the world on Clodbot. I discovered Cloudbot, I think very early, shortly after it came out, I was just scrolling X as I do basically with my entire life. And I see this thing called Cloudbot.
I just thought the name was fire. So I'm like, what the hell is this thing? And I click, it's like a blog post and I click it and it's like, it's this thing runs on your computer and it just controls your computer and does whatever you want.
I'm like, that's incredible. And I don't know what it was. But I had this like intuition in that moment as I read this blog post.
So like, I'm going to go to the Apple store and buy a Mac mini. It was like a Friday, like 6 p .m., like an hour before it closes. I get in my car.
I jet to the Apple store in Cupertino. I buy their Mac mini. They had like 10 billion Mac minis at that point.
I should have bought a few more Mac minis. I bring it home and I put Claude Bon on it and I let it rip. And I like tell it about myself.
10 minutes in, I just knew, I knew it was like the future. I knew it was going to change the entire industry, which in the nine months since it has a hundred percent changed the entire industry completely. And I just went all in and like, despite.
literally no one at this point talking about it at all. I never saw a single tweet, video, anything on it. I just went all in because I so clearly saw the future of what this was going to be and what it was going to turn the industry into.
I go out, I buy a crap ton of Micron stock, which turned out to be a good decision at that time. Everyone's going to have agents. It's very obvious what's going on.
And basically going all in at that moment in time turned out to be a very good decision because it caught the attention of a lot of people, brought me on that podcast, got your attention and just kind of, for me, brought things to a new level. But I discovered it.
I saw the vision and I basically put all my chips in the center as I'm going all in on this. And so it turned out to be a good bet. Who were you by the numbers in January before your first video?
January, I think I was 60K on YouTube. I'm at 250 now or so. On X, I was 200K and now I'm at 470.
I was still AI. I was still creating AI content. My entire AI content journey started in August 2024 when I discovered Cursor with Sonnet 3 .5.
And it was a very similar moment to what I had with OpenClaw, where I wasn't actually a huge believer in AI at that moment in time. I was just using the chatbot. I'm like, I guess this is all right.
But then I used Cursor. And I've been a developer for 15 years now. And it was kind of the unhobbling of...
AI coding for me was cursor because you can still write code like chat GPT before that but this was kind of the unhoveling of it for me and it clicked and I saw the future I'm like this is changing everything and I immediately started a YouTube channel I didn't have a YouTube at that point all my Twitter content turned into that and I just went all in on that and so I was more of like a cursor how to use clawed code to build things type creator because that's what I was super passionate about.
And then OpenClaw shifted everything for me. Like, okay, this is clearly where everything's going. It's going to be more about agents than kind of going back and forth with a chatbot.
And I'd say your bet has worked out. Congrats on all the doubling of followers across the board. It's easy when you love something and you use it and you kind of understand the industry.
It really isn't that difficult to like know when you use something awesome that it's actually awesome, you know? And so what would you say, Alex, you're best at? Like, what's your superpower?
Like your mom is bragging about you and it's like, oh, my son, Alex. Like, what is your superpower in all this? I'd say it's twofold.
I'd say the superpower is one deep and extreme passion. I am deeply and extremely passionate about this technology. I absolutely love it.
It's what brings me joy. I go to bed disappointed that I have to close my eyes and I wake up as excited as humanly possible to get out of bed. I absolutely love this technology.
It brings me a deep sense of joy and passion and purpose. That's one. None of that really matters in the content space if you can't communicate.
your thoughts and ideas and passions. And so my other superpower, I'd say is my ability to communicate my thoughts and opinions. It's something I've had to work on for a very long time since birth.
It's something that I harnessed during my career. I was a developer and then I turned into a sales engineer. Sales engineer is basically the nerd on the sales team where you talk to clients and you convince them to buy more stuff.
And so that helped me hone my communication and my charisma abilities. I think that's a skill as well, charisma. And so I think the two superpowers of passion and communication combined has been the reason why I've been able to have any amount of success in anything I do.
And then one of the things that I've found with any level of success for anyone, you look at celebrities, you look at, I call myself like a D -class AI influencer. Maybe you're like C or B. C, if at most C.
But you have real haters, which means you're not a C. That means you're well above that. Why do you have haters, other than you're successful?
But for real, why do I see all these comments, these X posts? And what has affected you? You said you've got thick skin.
But my first question is why? And then my next question is how it affects you.
very strong opinions and presents those very strong opinions in very opinionated ways will garner some sort of hatred. I just think that's the nature of everything. When I was coming up and I didn't have much attention and I had 5 ,000 subscribers on YouTube, it was all love and support.
across everything it was all love and swear every comment oh finn fan love this uh then there's just kind of this flipping point where all of a sudden everything kind of goes the other way and everything just turns into hatred i think there's two narratives that make are interesting to people is the journey up the mountain and then the journey down the mountain and once you kind of make your way up the mountain that's no longer an interesting story anymore so they are much more interested in the down the mountain and they want to kind of tear you down and so I think it's just kind of the nature of things I think no matter what you do if you have any sort of attention on you and you have strong opinions there's going to be a large collective of people on the internet that want to straw man, no matter what it, anything you say whatsoever, no matter what it is, you say they will straw man you just because it's a lot more interesting to tear people down.
It doesn't affect me as in like, I take it personally. There's no one who's ever said like, oh, you're stupid. I go, you think I'm stupid?
Uh, man, like that's, I could never, like, I don't take any of it personally. The only time it really frustrates me is like when I Go into a piece of content wanting to have some sort of conversation Like if I present an idea and I'm like curious what other people think because I'm a very curious person like I want to have Conversation and then all the replies are like people strawmanning and it's like man I just wanted to have like a conversation about this and like get other people's opinions and there's just a bunch of idiots going Oh, well, technically you can't do that.
You have to do it this way And it's like, I don't care. Like sometimes you just want to have productive conversations and it's just a bunch of morons, like trying to straw man, literally anything you say.
And like, that's when it gets frustrating. So yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say I'm bulletproof and just everything bounces off me. Cause at some point times you just like, you want to, you're having this one way conversation with a camera.
It's like, I want to put it out there, put this work out there and have a conversation. And then it's just like. all these straw men on the internet.
And it's like, well, technically you said, like I had a, I owe, I, a couple of days ago, I had Grok bot build and launch and maintain a new micro business for me. It's called agent use cases. It's a website that scrapes the internet all day looking for use cases for Grok bot for muse, uh, for all the agents out there.
And like, I'm telling the story of like this, this business, I, this micro business I built. And how Grokbot's running it and doing like all these legitimately very cool things that you were never able to do before. And like, it gets like a community note that's like, well, technically he announced it.
So the announcement was done manually. So it wasn't completely autonomously done. And it's like.
I'm trying to tell a story. I'm trying to have this conversation. I'm trying to inspire people.
And, like, these straw men are like, well, he announced it, so it's not autonomous. And it's like, man, like, I just want to have, like, a conversation. You know, that's the part that gets, like, frustrating, you know?
So I got the notification that, hey. A tweet that you, an ex -post that you've interacted with has been community noted. I'm like, uh -oh, what did Alex do?
And so I got that notification and I was like, what? He announced something in a tweet that he pre -announced that he was going to work on? I don't understand.
Right. It was like, it's not autonomous because he announced it himself, so it can't be autonomous. I'm like, what?
I think I'm one of the top comments. You are. You have 34 likes on it.
Keep scrolling. Keep scrolling. There we go.
There it is. So is there a second date? That's what I wanted to hear.
That's why I commented with the meme. Here's where there should have been a community note. If anything is getting community note on this, this should have been the community note.
It wasn't a first date. It was my girlfriend. This was like our 500th date together.
But I angled, this is where the showmanship comes in. I angled it in a way where the narrative was kind of, it felt like it was like a first date. All right.
So I'm going to have to community note that, that it wasn't even a date. Technically on Matt Van Horn's podcast, he mentioned it was his girlfriend of many years. So it's not technically a first date, even though I didn't.
Yeah. Can we, can we double community note it?
I should just have someone following me around. Just community note, community note, just verbally community noting me at all times. I'm super curious about Alex Finn Inc., like this influencer, because you're so hot right now.
What does that look like? Talk me through how you make money. The kind of thing that started making me money as a whatever I am, I don't like to call it influencer.
That feels cringe as hell. But Creator Buddy was my first app. So I discovered Cursor.
The first thing I do with Cursor is build my own app, which was Creator Buddy, which basically was like an AI that watched all my posts on X, told me what worked, what didn't, what angles and subjects and formats of posts worked and gave me recommendations for continuing to create good content. And so I built that out, put it out, makes about at its peak was about.
$350 ,000 a year. Now it fluctuates between 200, 300, bounces back and forth depending on how much attention I'm getting at any given moment. That was kind of my first foray into monetizing.
having a platform. On top of that, there is the Vibe Coding Academy. So that's my educational community.
That's where I put out the educational content. I do weekly live calls on Thursdays and Fridays. There is 700 people in there paying $100 a month.
So that's $70 ,000 a month from the educational community. That's the biggest revenue stream at the moment. Then there's X revenue.
I think I get like $3 ,000 every two weeks on that or something from X revenue. YouTube revenue, I think it's like 11K a month on just like the YouTube ads they roll during your video.
There's X subscribers is like 100 people paying $10 a month or something for that. There's YouTube subscribers paying, I think it's $5 I have on there. There is, what else?
So I raised money for Henry Intelligent Machines, which is my... Venture backed startup, building that out, not making any revenue on that yet, but hopefully sometime soon. And then the one revenue area I just kind of opened up that I purposely didn't pursue before that I'm pursuing now is sponsorship.
So not much of my content at all is sponsored. YouTube, X, I've just purposely never got it sponsored. Mostly because I hate dealing with sponsors.
I hate negotiating. I hate tracking payments. I hate emails.
I hate emailing people at all. But also, I just feel like ads are annoying a little bit. And so I just didn't want to put it in.
But someone reached out. I guess there's an agency, marketing agency, who finds sponsors for you. And I don't trust most agencies.
I think most of them are jokers. But this one, they represent a few people I know and like, and they gave me the thumbs up that, yeah, it's actually good. And so now they've been getting a bunch of sponsors.
And so that'll be kind of a new avenue for me is sponsors in YouTube and stuff like that. So that's going to be sweet. So that's how, yeah, that's how I run my business and run my life.
That's all my money. Pretend you don't know me. and I start a company called the June Oven, and I send you a DM, be like, we've got a big launch.
We're launching the AI Oven. You're like, an oven? What the heck?
I want a tweet and a video review. What does that cost me? I don't do sponsored Twitter content, so you can't pay me for that.
I just don't believe, with some exception, and I'll tell you the exception in a second, I believe your reputation and image is the most important thing in the world. It's the most valuable thing you have. It's worth more than any ad deal.
And if you do ads that don't align with who you are and your image and reputation, you could very quickly erode your reputation. And to me, I don't believe X, the culture of X is conducive to advertising and sponsorships. You see this a lot on X.
It's like kind of really cringe thing where. ai companies have a launch and they're like they pay people to like retweet or quote tweet and they quote you this is the greatest thing ever and then like under it's like paid partnership and it's like well you're lying because you got paid to say that i think that erodes trust and reputation so i just don't do that i don't do that at all now i will say this with some with some exception that exception being If what you are talking about and what is sponsoring you is perfectly bullseye aligned with who you are.
And what I mean by that is I've done one paid partnership post in the history of my Twitter account. And that was in June. And that was with Nvidia.
Nvidia sponsored me to install Hermes on my DGX Spark and talk about it. They said, hey, we will give you however much money. to install Hermes and show people how to do it on a DGX Spark.
And at that point, and still now, and before that, that's what I do. That's my content. That's my brand.
I show people how to do stuff with local AI and run AI agents and do cool use cases. So like literally nothing outside, like nothing they asked me to do was outside what I do. If they didn't pay me, I was doing it anyway, right?
And so for me doing that partnership, was nothing but a net positive. How much, Alex?
How much? What did NVIDIA pay, Alex? At the time, I was charging $10 ,000 for sponsorships and videos.
Somewhere around. The only reason I don't want to say the exact amount is because if NVIDIA watches, they may never work with me again if I'm giving out exact numbers. I want to work with NVIDIA more.
NVIDIA is awesome. They're sending me a laptop in two days. It's going to be sick.
What's the... The craziest request you've ever gotten related to sponsorship, like something you were like, eee, the ick, nope, can't do it. I'll say this, and this might lose me a million dollars, like I'm not even joking.
I just like refuse to work with companies that I think move weird. One of those is like Higgsfield. They have paid a tremendous amount of people to undisclosed shill their product.
I see nonstop Higgs field, people talking about Higgs field. It's obvious they're getting paid to talk about those things and they don't do pay. They don't say this is a sponsorship.
That's illegal. That's highly illegal. I think that makes Higgs field look bad.
I think that makes the creators look bad and apologies to you, Matt Van Horn. If you've ever been sponsored by Higgs field, I haven't researched your past sponsorships. I've had no sponsorships.
They offer to pay tremendous amounts of money to people to shill their stuff. I've turned it all down. And I just like, I put my reputation over everything.
And I think for a large chunk of people out there, they view that brand as seedy and fishy because they do all that undisclosed advertising. I mean, honestly, I kind of judge the creators who do take that back, knowing that there's a lot of weird fishy stuff going on there. Thank you for sharing that.
Sorry, you just lost a million dollars, Alex. They offer a lot of money. They offer a lot of money.
What'd they offer? Give us a number. They've paid money to join the top tier of my community just to talk to me and try to negotiate.
So that's how I know they're going to offer a lot of money. What's higher than $100 a month in your community? $1 ,000 a month to do one -on -one consulting.
You're losing me so much money, me being on this podcast. It's ridiculous. This is going to be the...
Lowest EV podcast in my entire life. That's the goal. That's actually the name of the podcast.
The Lowest EV Podcast. Lose Alex Money. Low EV Podcast.
We hope you made some money in the last 30 days because you're not making any in the next 30 days. I'm laying in bed with my eyes open for at least two hours tonight after this podcast. When I met you in San Francisco, you looked tired.
And again, you're on camera all day. But whatever that week, you said something to me. I wish I had the granola logs.
That was something like, I haven't stopped working on this since this is probably what four months ago, since since like that podcast in January, that like, you just haven't been sleeping. You've been up like, I feel like you're in a better spot now. What what changed?
Because you haven't slowed down. The velocity of your videos has not not changed the best of my knowledge. How are you in better shape now?
I for sure have prioritized my health more. Yeah, at the time we met. You know, I have this big tipping point in January where I put out, you know, my open clock content.
It all blows up million plus view videos. You know, my paid community goes from 60 people paying $100 a month to over a thousand people paying $100 a month. You know, life changing attention, life changing money, like everything.
My life changed very dramatically. On top of that. I discovered technology that I'm incredibly passionate about and I know is life changing and I know is a life changing opportunity.
So I have all these very life changing things happening at once. And like there's a lot there's just a lot of emotions and dopamine hits that come with having that kind of tipping point. And so I just wasn't sleeping much.
I was working all day, sleeping four hours a night for. two months straight. And eventually it caught up, eventually it caught up.
And I wasn't as productive and didn't find as much joy in what I was doing because of the health catching up to me. And so I've, I've for sure over the last two to three months reprioritized my health a ton, you know, made sure I'm getting at least seven hours a night, made sure I, I think the worst thing I was doing was just like not leaving my desk.
for entire days on end and now i like i make sure i go outside i bought like a little treadmill thing i hear and then make sure i get steps in every day making sure i go to the gym at least four times a week but from a just existing side the the the the experience of existing is better now since i've reprioritized my health and i've figured out ways to be more efficient on the content side to make sure my content efficiency doesn't go down despite prioritizing my health more.
So it's all been good things. And like, I do think there's different seasons of life where there's seasons where you sprint and be unhealthy and live a little bit more dangerously. And I think there's seasons where you like kind of.
You have your iOS. They have the iOS updates where they change all the graphics and they change the way everything works. But the performance goddamn sucks.
And then you have the iOS updates from this year where it's like there's no new features, but everything just works better. I'm now in the season of the iOS update where everything just works better. Back in January was the iOS update where I change everything.
There's all these new features. Walk me through your last 30 days in technology, right? Like you, I asked last 30 days, I ran it on Alex Finn.
Do you know what it said? It probably says Alex Finn focused a lot more on Grokbot and giving updates for different AI agents. Grokbot is his whole personality right now.
Your whole personality.
I nailed it. So I feel like you've made it your thing to make something your whole personality, right? That's kind of become your shtick.
So what's your prediction for the next 30 days? Because a lot of the core thesis of this podcast is that tomorrow was invented in the last 30 days. So what does the future look like?
We're moving so quickly. Everyone has personal agents. I see you.
Excited about Hark. I see you talking about new things. Still going back to Grokba.
You don't talk about Hermes much anymore. You certainly don't talk about OpenClaw much anymore. What do you think's in store in the next 30 days?
Let me give you two answers. Let me just first comment on going all in and making your whole personality something. Life, you have 100 years on this planet.
And then you're dead forever. Maybe unless AI solves aging. Right.
But let's assume AI doesn't solve aging. We're all going to 100 years from now, everyone on planet Earth is going to croak. We're all dead.
Doesn't matter. Right. So you might as well just go all the way in and live everything to with with balance, live life to the most extreme.
When you love something, go all the way in. When you find joy from something, go all the way in. I love Grokbot.
It's sick. It's making my work so much easier. I'm going all the way in.
I want to go to the highest mountain and yell, Grokbot is the best, as loud as I possibly can. And then you know what happens? Then they come out with an update tomorrow and ChadGBTDots is good all of a sudden instead of bad.
And then I go to the top of that same mountain and I go, ChadGBTDots is the best. Why not? Live life to the fullest.
Live the extreme of everything. It's a lot more fun. You're dead in 100 years.
Second, how do I think the next 30 days is going to go? Anthropic's been laying in hiding for a few months now. I think we went a few months with them basically releasing nothing.
Their only update being like Opus 5. And Opus 5 kind of wasn't great. And now all of a sudden, the last couple of weeks, we get Opus 5 .5, which is by far the best model.
We get Sonnet 5 .5, which is for the efficiency, incredible, right? They're better, faster, cheaper, stronger than any other model out there. And I think there's been some sort of breakthrough the last couple months for Anthropic.
On top of that, they're preparing to go public, rumor says, over the next several months. And so I think that... It's clear the future is AI agents.
I think AI agents are the holy grail. I think the human mindset around privacy and data goes out the window with AI agents. Everyone connects all their personal information, AI agents, and that is unbelievably valuable data.
And I think Anthropic sees that. And I think now that they've kind of put their stake in the ground, like, hey, no, we're back. We got the best models.
I'm interested to see. what their take on the agent is, the AI agent, right? ChaiGBT has shown their take.
Grok has shown their take. Meta has shown their take. I think Anthropic's going to show their take.
I think they're more than anyone else trying to be a model company and be like kind of the intelligence layer and haven't gone too much into applications, right? Like ChaiGBT, if they released an application for everything on planet Earth, Anthropic's been more focused. But I think that...
The value in winning the agent race is so high and so valuable that Anthropic will make a play at it. And just based on momentum and patterns from the last month, they've been crushing it. And I wouldn't be surprised if they put out an agent that's like, wow, this is incredible.
Where do you spend money, Alex? Where does the outflow go in terms of subscriptions you have, API balances you go over? What does your dashboard look like?
I mean, I pay for everything. Everything I pay for. I'm on every plan.
I pay for every subscription. I'm now paying for Meta starting today because they said their new wonder models only coming to their premium subscription. So now I'm paying for that.
You know, I pay for things that I think have ROI. Right. And I think that paying for these models has ROI because they.
are more efficient but they also allow me to create content on them and content uh is profitable um i just spent four thousand dollars on this camera the sony camera um because now i'm doing more irl content i did like a grok bot video a couple weeks ago in my uh cyber truck and it performed really well and i think people really enjoyed it but i want to do more like in real life content moving around doing things rather than you know, on a camera like this.
So I just bought this camera. I'm just trying to invest in myself as much as humanly possible. Behind you, is that my beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy vinyl?
What is that? Yes, that is my favorite album of all time. Here.
Here we go. Some of my favorite albums. Dark Twisted Fantasy, best album of all time.
Channel Orange. Is that Baby Keem? Is that Baby Keem?
Baby Keem. Great guy. Know him personally.
Awesome guy. Great musician as well. I didn't know we were so music music compatible, Alex.
I think we are. Yeah. Well, this is what I want to know.
So Alex obviously, you know, came on the scene super bold, super loud. And we know so much about your public persona, but don't know too much about you personally as a sales engineer. And in your career, you obviously at some point graduated from sales engineering to making content.
And I don't know many. engineers doing that so maybe you could tell me about a little bit about your your history and having jobs keeping jobs have you ever been you know let go of a job before becoming a youtuber i have i been let go of jobs yes that is for sure i i mean i here's the thing about me i absolutely hate the things I do not enjoy, and I love the things I love.
As with everything in my life, it's all extremes. It's all one or the other. It's all all in.
I had a 2 .6 GPA in high school, 2 .4 GPA in college, lost all my scholarships, everything around that. Then I get to the workforce. I hate all my jobs.
I get fired from my first two jobs just because I hate them and don't put in much effort. For most of my life, up until 30, I was pretty lost. My career was good because I...
I was a developer. I had a skill set that's very valuable, but I kind of just skated by. I finally found a job I liked when I worked at MongoDB and moved my way up to leadership there, and things were going well.
COVID hits, 2020, and I'm not going out anymore. I'm in my basement at all times, and I kind of wanted a creative outlet. I've had a lot of creative outlets in my life.
I ran a sports blog at one point. I'm a big Boston sports fan. You know, I had a finance blog at one point where I got into investing.
I was just sharing my journey in investing. And then I start a Twitter account in 2020 because I needed a creative outlet. This was when like NFTs were popping off.
I bought like a board ape for like $30 ,000. And I'm like, man, I need to like. do something with this.
And so I create like a Twitter account and I make it like the profile picture, like make like an anonymous account. And I'm like, what could be like the most cringe name humanly possible? So like gets people's attention.
And so I went with NFT God, just right off the rip. As my entire content career has been, most people hate me because I didn't talk about NFTs a ton.
I talked about a little bit, but I was talking about tech, sports, my passions, life, things that made me happy, morning routines, meditation, things like that. And the NFT is like, oh, you're LARPing. You're not really an NFT guy.
Okay, whatever. You guys are both Bored Ape owners. Do you currently own Bored Apes?
I currently own it. You still have yours? I sold.
You're a LARPer. You still have your eight. Well, here's the issue.
Here's the issue, Matt. You can't access it. So you don't actually have it.
No, I can access it. I bought it and then someone hacked me and stole it. And then I bought it back from them for whatever the price was at that time.
So I've bought it twice now. I'm in deep. you know what's crazy too is like the ape people have never acknowledged my existence not that i like expect them to acknowledge me not that i'm alex finn respect my not that it's just you know who i am type of thing but like i've had that ape as my profile picture way too long i was getting retweeted by elon i was getting retweeted by mark cuban i was getting all i was like the first normie I was like the first NFT person to break into Normieville and they didn't acknowledge me, follow me, say my name, nothing once.
Again, not that I think I'm like so important where the people got to say my name, but like - I'll say your name, Alex Finn, Ape Holder. And YouTuber. Matt Van Horn respects me way more than the ape folks.
Now those guys can go kick rocks. Their video game they've been building for 40 years hasn't even released yet. So they can suck it.
But yeah. So anyway, the point being is I started there. Then I evolved.
Then I discovered Cursor, started all the AI channels. And now you know where I'm at. There you go.
Have you deleted your old like NFT content or is like. Is there NFT underscore God stuff still on Alex Finn somewhere deep in there? If you scroll back, you can find my first tweet, which is like every piece of real estate will be on Bitcoin one day.
Hashtag Bitcoin. And then my second tweet is, hey, just bought an ape. Isn't it cute or something?
All of them are still there. You can find it. You know, what's amazing is like when my name was NFT God, you're a LARPer.
You're not really an NFT God. You don't talk about NFTs. And then I changed my name to Alex Finn and like talk about AI.
And they're like, you're LARPer. You're not really an AI. You're more of an NFT guy.
Like those same people that were like, you're not an NFT guy. You just can't, you can't, you can never win. Just one last question on the personal side, because I'm more interested in Alex Finn, the personal.
So you have this girlfriend, you go on dates, you're building new businesses while you're on dates. How do you manage the balance? How's your girlfriend?
Is she okay with you on the phone building apps while you're on dates? How do you manage that? I'm sure she wouldn't prefer it, to be honest with you.
I'm sure it's not like, if the choice is between, hey, I wish this guy was paying attention to me, and hey, I wish this guy was talking to his grok bot, I bet she'd probably prefer me paying attention. I am actively every day trying to be a better man for her, for myself, for my parents, for my friends. So I'm working.
I'm always trying to get better, pay attention a little more, do a little less work, talk to my agents a little less. So I strive to be a better man, Justin. So Alex, as we come to the close here, what are you promoting right now?
What do you want to give a shout out to? I had a great pasta dish last week from this restaurant called Seven Hills in San Francisco. Shout out Seven Hills.
Shout out there. Squid Ink Pasta. That's what I'm promoting.
Seven Hills, San Francisco, Squid Ink Pasta is my promotion for this podcast episode. Awesome. Thank you so much, Alex.
This was great. Thanks for having me on, Matt Van Horn. Anytime, my man.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open is a fast montage of dollar figures: $350,000 a year, 700 people at $100 a month, $11K a month from YouTube. Then the guest admits one answer might cost him a million dollars. The rest of the episode explains where every one of those numbers comes from and which bigger checks he keeps turning down.
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A 46-minute interview with the founder of Charisma on Command on fame-jacking, back-to-front offer building, the call-to-action bridge, and why he let his biggest channel die.
A creator with 2 million followers maps his whole agent stack onto one grid: Claude for making things, Codex for running the business, Composio as the shared toolbelt, and GrokBot as the Twitter specialist.
A 1-million-subscriber creator skips the celebration video to sit down with her mentor and explain why the three years after her pivot were the hardest part.
How one creator wired Higgsfield Supercomputer to his phone, Google Drive, and YouTube account and now runs a full content repurposing operation by talking to a Telegram bot on a walk.
A 50-minute live session: five mindset shifts that separate pro YouTubers from hopeful amateurs, then a plain model for turning a channel into sales without ads, DMs or sales calls.
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