A few days ago I was scrolling through social media and stumbled upon a post that stopped me cold. A 23-year-old had built three apps using ChatGPT over 18 months and pulled in a staggering $9.2 million in revenue. Honestly, the story itself didn't surprise me all that much. Social platforms are practically overflowing right now with claims of people making easy money using AI.
But if you look at the comments under these posts, you will always find the same cynical response. "If it were that easy to make money, everybody would be rich." Here is the thing. Those seemingly exaggerated advertisements don't get mass-produced for no reason. They exist because, in reality, the money is actually being made. If these methods yielded zero profit, the marketing agencies pushing them would have gone bankrupt long ago. Here is something I have tested myself. You can make money with AI. The only variable is the strategy you choose to execute.
Today I want to break down how this 23-year-old entrepreneur, Blake Anderson, generated $9.2 million using the same ChatGPT you and I have access to. More importantly, I want to talk about his core strategies and what truly separated him from everyone else.
To give you the conclusion right away, his secret boils down to one simple formula. Find a niche that people are practically addicted to, and plug a fundamentally basic AI feature right into it.
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| Three simple AI apps built by Blake Anderson that generated nine million dollars |
If you look at the apps he built, the concepts are remarkably straightforward. One is an AI dating assistant designed to help people converse with the opposite sex. Another lets users upload photos of their appearance to get an objective rating. The third automatically calculates calories when you photograph your food. How do these sound to you? Simple. Intuitive. Perhaps even a little childish on the surface.
But in the digital business space, simplicity is the ultimate weapon. Imagine you are testing products from two different startups. One gives you a grand, complicated pitch about all its features and its world-changing vision. The other hands you something intuitive and says: this is what it does, and this is exactly when it makes your life easier. Which product would you actually understand and want to use?
There is a reason short-form video content dominates the internet today. It cuts out the fluff and delivers the absolute core substance within seconds. People no longer care about companies showing off their technological prowess. They just want you to tell them, quickly and clearly, what your product is and how it helps them.
Since AI became the defining trend of our era, so many people have fallen into a common trap. They get obsessed with building cutting-edge, ultra-advanced technology to create a flawless application that will completely reinvent human existence. But the people who build truly smart businesses do the exact opposite. They take a new technology like AI and deliberately steer it toward seemingly trivial, unglamorous niches that everyone else looks down on. Why? Because that is where the easy money is.
The Million-Dollar Market in Primal Instincts
The specific opportunity Blake identified was rooted deeply in a primal human instinct. The desperate desire to appeal to the opposite sex.
Think about how younger guys operate today. When they are texting a girl they like, they constantly screenshot the conversation and drop it into a group chat with their friends, asking for advice. All Blake did was take that real-world behavior and automate it. He pre-loaded a set of structured prompts into an AI, gave it the ability to recognize images, and had it deliver tailored feedback based on the context of each conversation.
The app gives advice like "Tell her the dress she wore today looked amazing on her," or "If you overreact like that, she is going to feel suffocated." You might wonder how something this simple actually makes money. But think about it from a business perspective. Men are already spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars trying to secure a relationship. Parting with a few dollars a month for an app that guides them through the process is an easy call for most guys.
If you have even a baseline understanding of how ChatGPT works, you already know how technically simple this is to build. You use an Optical Character Recognition tool to read the text inside the uploaded screenshot, feed that text into ChatGPT, let it process the data against your pre-set prompt, and display the output on the screen.
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| People walking past gold bars scattered on a city sidewalk |
This is exactly where the skeptics chime in again. "If it's that easy, why isn't everyone rich?" But they miss the point entirely. Even when you hand people the blueprint, fewer than one in a hundred will actually take action. It is like walking down a street where bars of gold are scattered across the sidewalk, yet nobody bothers to bend down and pick them up. That is a literal reflection of how the world operates right now.
To be completely fair, what Blake did in practice was slightly more grueling than that. He had to navigate multiple stages, procedures, and endless rounds of iteration before launching. But conceptually, it remains the same. And the fascinating part is that he had absolutely no background in coding or app development whatsoever. He literally started by asking ChatGPT how to build an app. ChatGPT walked him through how to use Swift and Figma, and he simply followed the instructions step by step.
Blake quickly accepted his lack of technical expertise. Instead of letting it stop him, he used ChatGPT as his co-founder, asking it how to execute every single action, write every line of code, and solve every bug that popped up. After about a month of operating this way, he reached a stage where he had mastered the art of prompting. He knew how to phrase his questions to get the precise outputs he needed. Today, he admits he could probably build the same app in a single day.
Validating Demand Before Writing a Single Line of Code
Looking at Blake's journey made me think hard about how I would approach the same challenge. First and foremost, as I always do, I would ruthlessly validate demand. I would need absolute proof that people are willing to open their wallets for this solution before investing my time.
I also would not bother touching a native development tool like Swift at the start. Instead, I would map out a simple automation using a tool like Make.com, integrate a basic OCR function to read images, plug in the GPT API, and build a bare-minimum interface that looks clean enough to use. Then I would drop it into online communities to see if I could get even ten people to pay real money for it.
If, and only if, someone pays and the market shows a clear signal of validation, would I then follow Blake's footsteps to develop a native app or scale it up using a sophisticated no-code tool like Bubble.
This is basically the exact mistake I made with my own first product. I spent weeks polishing the build before I ever confirmed a single person wanted it, and I only found out demand was weak after I had already sunk the time into it. Reading about Blake's approach stung a little, honestly, because he validated in days what took me over a month to even question.
I have spent a lot of time explaining how simple the development phase can be, but I want to be incredibly clear that this simplicity applies strictly to building the app. Building a product does not automatically mean it will sell. The real reason people say "everybody would be rich if it were that easy" is because while building is accessible, selling is brutally difficult. It is a reality I explored in depth in Why AI Made Selling Harder Than Building.
Creating a product and marketing it are two completely opposite skill sets. And this is where Blake's second core strategy separated him from every failed entrepreneur: his masterful execution of content marketing.
When he first launched Rizz GPT, the initial performance was entirely flat. It makes sense. Who is going to download an unverified app they have never heard of? To solve this, Blake invested about $100 to create short-form videos showing the app being used to flirt with people in real time.
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| A guy successfully flirting with a girl using AI prompts (Credit: @imvincentgao) |
Those videos took off in a big way. Almost overnight, the app began generating $70,000 a month in recurring revenue. The format itself was incredibly simple. It showed a guy successfully flirting with a girl using the AI's prompts, and closed with one line. "The reason I was able to pull this off? Rizz GPT." That was it.
Why Content Is No Longer Optional
If your goal is to build a solo business, monetize your knowledge, or launch a startup, there is a truth you must commit to memory. This entire blog exists because I bet on that truth myself. No matter what industry you are in, you have to create content. It is no longer an optional marketing strategy. It is a fundamental requirement for survival, which is exactly Why Media Is the Most Powerful Business Leverage in the AI Era.
Here is why. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur who does not even have a product yet, you should start building a presence on YouTube, launching a newsletter, or creating content on any platform right now. Use it to establish your brand and build a highly targeted audience. Once you have their attention, you can design a product tailored specifically to them.
On the flip side, if you already have a product ready to sell, you must go all in on content through platforms like YouTube or newsletters to drive traffic and accelerate your sales. Every piece of content you produce becomes a powerful marketing asset, and it costs you nothing but your time.
This is why I say the opportunity is right there in front of everyone. Yet the vast majority of founders I observe do the reverse of all this, causing them to fail in one of two ways. They either become creators who build an impressive subscriber base but fail because they have no product to monetize, or they are builders with brilliant ideas who fail because they have zero content engine, meaning nobody cares when they finally launch.
Blake's ultimate leverage was his ability to simultaneously build an audience through video content and immediately redirect that attention to his own product. It is exactly the same math I am running with this blog and my own app right now. You have to do both at the same time, and that is how real wealth gets built in this era.
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