I Built a 15-Feature AI App in 48 Hours as a Solo Founder. Here's the Exact Method.

On December 27, 2024, I heard Greg Isenberg break down AI mobile apps generating $50K+ MRR on his podcast. He laid out five criteria for picking a market: (1) audience actively spends money, (2) repeating problem, (3) solution involves photo/video input, (4) accuracy matters enough to pay for, (5) existing tools are weak. I immediately thought: cigars. $57 billion global market. 5–7% annual growth. The top competitor — Cigar Scanner, 150K users — had been pulled from the App Store. Cigar Dojo had 29K members on a desktop-first platform with zero AI. Every existing app was basically a manual database where you type in what you're smoking. By December 28, I had a functional app with AI-powered cigar identification, a digital humidor, tasting journal, smoke session tracker, social feed, achievement badges, subscription billing, and a referral engine. Fifteen major features. Forty-eight hours. One person. This post breaks down exactly how I did it — the architecture, the methodology, and t