Claude Just Doubled Its Paying Users (IPO Incoming)

0:00So, two massive stories just dropped in the last 48 hours in regards to Anthropic. You know, the company that is the creator of Claude. We use Claude in a lot of our workflows, and I'm going to be talking about how these stories impact builders and why I think Anthropic is winning the whole AI race. So, Anthropic, in my opinion, is winning. I don't care what you say about OpenAI or Google. Anthropic is the clear winner here, and these two stories point to why. So, I'm going to break down what happened. TechCrunch published an analysis yesterday based on 28 million anonymized credit card transactions. They work with a company called Indegari, so that they track consumer spending data, basically. And what they found is that Claude's paid

0:45subscriptions have more than doubled this year. So, not usage. We're not talking about that. We're talking about paid subscriptions. And these aren't anything to do with the free accounts, paid subscribers. So, people actually pulling out their wallets and paying $20 to $200 or more a month. So, that number has more than doubled just in this first quarter of this year. We're only in March. The growth is accelerating. People are starting to get more awareness. It's not just when you mention AI, they don't just refer to ChatGPT anymore. So, in January and February, it's they saw record numbers for paid subscribers, like insane. And also returning subscribers as well. So, people who had tried Claude before left, then came back. The data through early March confirms that it's still climbing.

1:31This is not a one-time spike. This is a sustained trend that's only getting stronger. So, I'm going to talk about why this is happening. There are a few reasons. The first one is they had these Super Bowl ads that came out, and nobody even knew what Claude was. So, remember when Anthropic ran those commercials making fun of ChatGPT for showing ads to users and promised Claude would never do that. Those were funny. They were effective, as well. They got under Sam Altman's skin, and TechCrunch reported that he got exceptionally testy about it. And right after those ads aired, the Claude app jumped to the top 10 on the App Store. That's marketing done right. You don't need to be the biggest, you don't need to be the most trusted, and Anthropic nailed the message. The second thing is the whole Pentagon situation.

2:17So, if you haven't been following this, here's the short version. The Department of Defense wanted to use Claude for military operations. Anthropic said no. Specifically, no to lethal autonomous operations and no to mass surveillance of American citizens. I respect that. The Pentagon got mad, put Anthropic on a supply chain risk list, and Anthropic sued them. A federal judge blocked the Pentagon's designation this week. But, here's the wild part of the story. Throughout this whole drama, Claude's subscriber numbers continued to go up, not down. Up, in the right direction. People saw a tech company standing up to the government on an ethical grounds case, and they said, "Yeah, I want to support that." And I do, too. That's a powerful statement right there. You

3:02know, you can't buy that kind of loyalty. You got to respect what Anthropic is doing. Real quick, before we keep going, if you're watching this and you want to actually build with some of these tools, not just watch videos about them, then you're going to want to check out our community down below, Shipping School. We have a full Claude code course, a full OpenClaude course, and four live bootcamps every single week, where we actually help you get set up from scratch. Like, actually set this thing up, not just watch a tutorial and figure it out by yourself. And we also provide one-on-one coaching, so you could book a call with me, we could share screens, and I can help you get Claude code or OpenClaude running on your machine. That's it, no fluff. I built this community because watching YouTube's only gets you so far. We

3:47launched it just 3 days ago, and we have over 55 members. You need people around you who are actually building, people who hold you accountable, and coaches who can help you when you get stuck. I'll put the link in the description down below. Get in now before the price goes up. Third thing is, and this one is the one that matters the most for builders like you and I, is Claude code is absolutely exploding. Claude co-work dropped in January, computer use just launched this week, Claude code auto mode shipped last week, and every one of those features drives more subscriptions, because they're not available for free tier users. You have to pay to get the good stuff, and people are paying because the good stuff is really, really good. And for $20 a month, I mean, come on. That's enough. I use Claude code every day. I've been

4:32talking about it, you know, in dozens of videos on how I've built my three SaaS products, EasyFlip, uh Magic Hand, and Snaptastic, all built with Claude code. And, you know, I just recently used Claude code to build out the mission control and these whole AI agent pipeline that I have running. And that's how I maintain the Agent Crew. That's how I code without being a professional programmer. And every update makes it better. So, auto mode means Claude can, you know, handle permissions now, and computer use means Claude can actually navigate on my computer, click buttons, fill out forms. Dispatch means I can assign tasks from my phone. This is not an incremental improvement. This is a fundamentally different product than what we had just 6 months ago. Here's where it gets more interesting. The

5:18second story is Bloomberg reported yesterday that Anthropic is preparing for an IPO launch, an initial public offering. They're looking at October 2026 as a potential timeline. Who's going to get in on that? Comment down below. The valuation could be over $60 billion, though earlier this year they had raised money at a $380 billion valuation from MGX. So, the IPO could be even bigger, depending on the timing and market conditions. They've already started talking to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley about organizing the share offering. These are the biggest investment banks in the world. This is not a rumor from some random blog. This is Bloomberg reporting it, and it is

6:03very real. And Anthropic is also investing up to $50 billion in building their own data centers right here in the US. That's a massive signal. You don't invest $50 billion in data centers if you're not planning for massive growth. They're building the infrastructure to support what's coming next. More users, more developers, more agents, more compute. That is all needed, right? So, here's something else that's kind of crazy about it all is like right before the IPO prep news broke, about 3,000 internal Anthropic files ended up online due to a configuration error. I broke this story the other day, and in those files, there was information about a new model called Mythos, the most powerful model ever, right? Significantly outperforms everything they've built

6:49before, already being tested by a limited group of clients. So, if you imagine that, a new flagship model dropping right around the time of an IPO, that's going to be a huge catalyst growth right there. So, why this matters for people like you and I, people building on the Claude ecosystem. What does this even mean to us? Well, when a company goes public, everything changes. They have more money, they have more accountability, and they have more incentive to keep their products best in class, because now shareholders are watching. That means Claude gets better, Claude code gets better, the API gets better, infrastructure gets more reliable, because Anthropic now has to justify that valuation at every single quarter. So, more importantly, it validates the entire ecosystem. So, if you think about it, every video I've

7:34made about Claude code, every tutorial about OpenClaude running on Claude models, every person inside of our Shipping School community building businesses with these tools, we're all building on a platform that Wall Street is about to value at potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. That's not a toy, it's not come and go, it's a real thing happening right now. And I want to connect this to something bigger, because I think a lot of people miss this. When I started building with AI in August of last year, getting into Claude code, I had to make a choice. Which AI platform I was going to bet on, which model provider I was going to build my entire workflow around. Because switching costs are real. When your agent has a sole markdown file tuned for Claude's personality, when your prompts are optimized for Claude's thinking

8:20style and reasoning, when your entire code base is built with Claude code, you're invested. You're in the ecosystem. And I chose Claude, I chose Anthropic, and every single week more evidence comes out that this was the right call. You know, paid subscribers doubling, Claude code becoming the standard for AI coding, Anthropic standing up to the Pentagon on ethical AI, computer use putting AI agents in control of actual computers, and now an IPO at $60 billion plus dollars. So, none of this was guaranteed when I started, but the pattern was there. Anthropic was building the best models, shipping the best developer tools, and taking safety seriously. And now the market is confirming it with real money. So, here's what I want to tell the people who are on the fence, the people

9:05who keep hearing about AI agents and Claude code and OpenClaude, but have not started yet. This is the moment, right now. Not 2 months from now, not 2 days from now, not next year, but like right now. Because when Anthropic goes public in October, the attention is going to be massive. Every news outlet's going to cover it. Every business podcast is going to talk about it. And every entrepreneur who's been sleeping on AI is going to wake up and say, "I need to figure this out." But, by then, you'll be too late. The people who started building now will have a 6-month head start. They have their agents running, they have their workflows automated, their businesses are producing results while everyone is still setting up their first agent. I'm not saying this to create urgency for the sake of it. This is just my opinion on what I see happening now and how fast this space is

9:51moving. You know, I'm saying it because I care about you. You know, people are getting laid off, people are needing to learn new skills to keep up with the demand. That's why we built the community. I have it linked down below to help people take their first step with AI. I just see this happening in real time. Every day we break AI news, we cover open claw use cases, we cover things happening with Anthropic, and it's moving at a really fast pace. And I release these videos every day. I can't even keep up. So, for example, inside our community, we've got 169 members now in the last 17 days, people who are actually building real things. Not just playing with AI, you know, building businesses, automating their workflows, shipping products. Some of them have already made money from what they built. And the common thread is they started before it was obvious. They started when

10:37most people were saying, "I'll get to it eventually, later, I don't have time." They didn't [clears throat] wait for permissions, for the perfect moment. They just got going. If you're struggling to keep up with content, what I'm about to save you about 40 days worth of work. [music] I built something called content machine. It's 10 AI agents that run on the open claw orchestration, and they handle everything. Scripts, [music] thumbnails, X posts, blogs, outreach, clips, newsletters, all of it. So, I went from 1,000 subscribers to 4,000 subscribers on YouTube in 7 days using this exact system. Every single morning I wake up, [music] and the content's already done. I spend maybe 15, 20 minutes reviewing and approving them, and I move on with my day. It works for any niche, fitness,

11:25finance, real estate, marketing, whatever you are building, and it is 100% completely customizable to your [music] use case. So, you get the mission control dashboard, all of the cron jobs, everything I've built over the last 40 days helping me gain more and more people to subscribe and join the community. So, you plug in your own thing, and it molds it to you, it learns how you talk, and it writes so it doesn't sound like AI slop. $97 one time, it's not a subscription. I'll put the link down below, and you'll thank me later. So, let me point you to something about the competitive landscape, because this is going to get more and more competitive as the barrier to entry becomes lower. Let's say chat GPT, you know, they still have more users overall. TechCrunch made that clear. OpenAI is still the biggest consumer AI

12:10platform. But, here's the interesting part that they left out, like the devil's in the details. When OpenAI announced their deal with the Department of Defense, chat GPT uninstalls surge by 300%. Almost three times the normal rate. So, while chat GPT is growing on one side, it's losing people who care about ethics and safety on the other side. And guess where those people are going? There's only like, literally, one other option. So, this is a values-driven market shift, and I think it's going to accelerate. Because the people who care about how their AI is built, they really do. You know, the developers, the builders, the founders, the people like you and me, those are the highest value customers. They're the ones paying for pro, team, and enterprise subscriptions. And they are the ones building the products on the API. They're not, you know, they're the

12:56ones creating tools, skills, and workflows, and we're choosing Anthropic, right? So, what does this actually mean for us practically? So, if you're already using Claude or open claw, keep going. You're on the right track. The platform is about to get a massive injection of public market capital that's going to make everything better and faster. So, if you're thinking about starting, just start today. Like, it's free. Get going. Open claw is free. Spend $20 on a on the pro plan. I mean, come on, just get it going. Start today. You're not going to regret it. Set up Claude code, try open claw, join a community if you'd like. We'll help you walk through all the setup step by step. Community of builders where we do six live calls a week. And, you know, from 6 months from now, when Anthropic rings that bell at the stock exchange, you'll either be someone who was already

13:41building or someone who wishes they had started sooner. I said this from the very beginning on the channel, we're living in an amazing time to be a creator. Content creator, builder, founder, startup, idea guy. The tools to build things that used to require entire teams of engineers and tens of thousands of dollars of capital are now available to regular people for $20 a month. That's crazy. And the company behind the best version of those tools is about to become one of the biggest public technology companies in the world. So, I got into this because I was tired of sitting on the sidelines. I worked a minimum wage restaurant job for 15 years before I decided in 2020 to become an entrepreneur and build my own business. And then, now the tools that are available for builders, so I wish they were available when I first started in

14:262020. You know, I started my entrepreneurial journey, um, back in 2020, but this is nothing compared to what we have now. Like, so much better. Open on open claw didn't exist, Claude code didn't exist, none of that existed. Um, you know, and now I'm so thankful it does. I'm so thankful that I got off the sidelines and started using these tools. All I'm saying is the company that's behind all of this is about to go public. That's a signal. That's a green light for you to start today. And if you need help, leave comments down below, and we'll try and help you. If you haven't subscribed already, please do. We release four to six videos every single day. We'll see you guys in the next one. Bye-bye.