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.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

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.