17-year-old Zach Lowy and his co-founders are making $1.12 million per month with their Calorie tracker app available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. With AI, you can also create similar apps within a few hours (without programming knowledge), launch them on the Internet, and start making money online.

In this short guide, learn how to build your own AI application and start making money online with AI.

The idea of CAL AI came when a realization hit them that existing calorie-tracking apps were out-of-date and cumbersome to use. Lowy and his team realized that using AI at its core to make calorie tracking super simple. How does the Cal AI calorie tracker work? The users can click a picture of their food items on the app and will show the calorie content and nutritional information of that food. This complex-sounding idea can be executed using AI very quickly and launched online. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create AI Apps:

Steps to Build an AI App?

Here’s a simple guide to building custom GPTs or AI Chat Apps. Once you are good at building these apps, the same skills can be used with a little added complexity to launch apps that do more than AI Chat. The added features in most AI apps are built using the APIs provided by AI models like OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, LLAMA, etc. But this is a great starting point for you to build AI Apps.

Step 1: Explore 100+ GPT Ideas

Visit BuildThatIdea and browse through 100+ custom GPT ideas that you can use to build your own AI App. You can browse through different categories like Career, business, Technology, etc., and choose the idea that resonates the most with the AI app idea that you have.

Step 2: Copy the prompt template

The website will ask you to enter your email address to copy the prompt template. Here you’ll find a highly customized Prompt template that can be used as it is in the next step to build your own Custom GPT.

Step 3: Get ready to deploy the AI Template

Now that you have a detailed custom Prompt ready, you need to include that in a custom-designed and developed chat interface so that you can launch it as an App. There are 2 ways to do it, you can either write code to create a chat interface, make it responsive, add payment systems, and add ChatGPT APIs to make it live.

Or, you can purchase a ready-to-deploy template that comes with a complete code template, is pre-integrated with OpenAI, has a responsive design, and supports some additional features that would otherwise take you many weeks to build.

Once you get the AI Code Template, you can deploy and make your AI App go live instantly.

Step 4: Launch and start making money online with AI

Congratulations! Your own AI App is now live. You can now start promoting and making money online with your AI App.

How did Cal AI Become a Success?

Viral Marketing Worked for Cal AI

The key behind the explosive growth of Cal AI is its innovative way of marketing. Instead, the company opted out of traditional advertising and focused on influencer marketing through TikTok and Instagram. The company currently works with about 150 influencers who create content featuring the app regularly. Lowy’s strategy is to carefully curate the right influencers based on their engagement rates and negotiate deals that guarantee profitability. It means the team has a metric in place, RPM, to tell them how much they can pay an influencer and still maintain healthy margins.

Scaling the Business

As Cal AI grew, so did the team’s marketing. Today, they’re spending roughly $7,000 per day on paid advertising across platforms including Meta, formerly Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok. Even with the added spend on marketing, the app continues to break even every day. The company also developed in-house tools to track influencer relations and performance. It has proven so effective that it is going to launch these tools as a standalone platform, called Viral.te, for other businesses to leverage influencer marketing.

A Young Entrepreneur’s Journey

Long before Cal AI, Lowy had started his entrepreneurial journey. At 12, he launched his first game on the App Store. By 13, he created an unblocked gaming website for students that would go on to gross $ 660,000 a year. The business was sold when he was 16 to a buyer who paid him $100,000. Despite the high net worth, Lowy is pretty distilled. He has just finished high school and intends to take a gap year to work on his businesses. He sees Cal AI as a stepping stone to even bigger ambitions, aspiring to create products that will have a massive global impact.

Conclusion

With the help of readily available templates on the Internet, making and launching AI Apps has become super easy. If you are a developer, you can quickly build AI apps using Open-Source AI Templates otherwise you can use platforms like BuildThatIdea to go from an app idea to a live product within a few minutes and start making money online.