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

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. I go in depth with Nat Eliason, author, podcaster, and prolific internet creator. We get into how AI changes the way Nat thinks about his career, the progress of AI coding agents, and the writing tool of his dreams. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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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. 

You can check out our conversation here:

If you want a quick summary, here are some of the themes we touched on:

Discover a new tool—then make six figures teaching people about it (00:03:32)

Nat discovered Roam when Every’s first employee Adam Keesling tweeted about it. Blown away by the tool, Nat tweeted about it—and when he saw people were interested in the app, he asked if anyone wanted him to do a course on how to use Roam. He got $10,000 in pre-sales and made $600,000 in revenue over the next year, in part because of a partnership Nat had with Roam. 

The origins of Nat’s viral course (00:11:45)

“I thought I was never going to do a course again,” says Nat as he tells the story of his viral AI course. When coding agents became popular in the fall of 2024, Nat used them to build apps for himself—an AI book editor, and a tool to automate show notes and timestamps for his podcast. Then, history repeated itself. He tweeted about the apps he’d built with AI, saw people’s interest in the topic, and asked if there was demand for him to do a course. I think it’s wild that he closed $200,000 in pre-sales that week.

In the words of Sam Altman, “there is no wall” (00:18:46)

Back in February 2023, I ran a course about how to build an AI chatbot. Some of my students were non-technical, and while they could do the course, I had to provide a lot of sample code, and there was a limit to how far we could go. Two years later, AI coding agents are both more intelligent and intuitive to use. “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,” Nat says.  

The rise of AI coding agents  (00:22:22)

I had my holy shit moment with AI code agents when Windsurf launched in November 2024—and since then, many AI coding assistants like Composer in Cursor have been released. They’ve changed a lot in a short time. For anyone who has never used an AI coding agent or used one a long time ago, Nat demos the experience of coding with Composer live on the show (see the video above!). He makes a type of time-management tool called a Pomodoro timer without writing a single line of code in under a minute. It’s incredible that just two years ago—what feels like the dark ages—it would’ve taken Nat or me half an hour to write that code.

Nat’s best practices while using AI coding agents (00:26:06)

Nat opens a new window in Composer whenever he’s working on a new feature or part of the app that he’s building, or if the agent is getting stuck on a bug it's trying to fix. He uses OpenAI’s model o1 Pro inside Cursor when he’s running into an issue that Claude’s Sonnet has trouble fixing, or if he wants to create a plan, like reviewing all the code in his AI podcast tool app before deploying it, and making a checklist of all pending items.

What Nat finds most exciting about AI (00:32:41)

I’m drawn to AI because it enables me to do a lot more in domains that I know relatively little about. It’s because I’m a generalist, a quality Nat and I share. What excites him the most about AI is “the idea of the hyper-prolific solo creator business…what I really want to be able to do is predominantly write and do and talk about things that I'm interested in, but have a pretty robust business around that with as few people to manage as possible—and the ability to do that has just increased dramatically.”

One of the ways AI helps Nat be a prolific solo creator is by giving him good feedback on his novel draft quickly. The AI editor he built is called Hubbard—after L. Ron Hubbard, a prolific science fiction writer as well as the founder of Scientology—and he takes me through its features on the show.

When does it make sense to build custom software (00:44:52)

As self-confessed productivity nerds, Nat and I have wondered if we're spending too much time designing elaborate note-taking systems, and not enough time actually using them. I think there’s a parallel with using AI to build custom software. You have to assess the trade-off between making custom versus using a tool that already exists. 

According to Nat, it’s worth building personalized software for “the thing that’s most important to you”—in his case that meant a custom book editor for his science-fiction novel. He also thinks it's worthwhile to build small tools that you can make quickly if they will save you a bunch of time and money.

The AI writing tool of our dreams (00:49:18)

The best way to be a great writer is to be prolific, and in my view, AI is helping writers more than any tool we’ve had before. There is a problem, though—as a writer, you can prompt AI to generate an entire novel, but that isn’t helpful because you want it to be your novel, not a novel. To solve this, Nat wants to hack together an application that’s like “Cursor for writing”—a tool that’s trained on your writing style, and couched in an interface that allows you to easily accept and reject changes suggested by the AI.

This episode is a must-watch for writers, creators, and anyone interested in the future of product building. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

You can check out the episode on X, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Links and timestamps are below:

• Watch on X
• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify (make sure to follow to help us rank!)
• Listen on Apple Podcasts

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Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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