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"For serial entrepreneur Hart Woolery, designing Snapchat lenses started as a personal challenge. The software engineer, who studied electrical and electronics engineering at UC San Diego, spent three months in 2017 developing an augmented reality hand puppet before pitching the project in a cold email to billionaire Mark Cuban. \"I just kind of Googled around and found what could have been his email,\" said Woolery, who taught himself the basics of AR development. To his surprise, Cuban not only expressed interest in Woolery's AR hand puppet, but invested $100,000 in it. (Cuban has since invested an additional $400,000.) Woolery used those funds to establish 2020CV, a small Snapchat AR lens design studio in San Diego specializing in creating — or recreating — visual effects from movies. His clients now include some high-profile names, including Warner Bros., Disney, Comic-Con, and the Dallas Mavericks, whom he charges anywhere between $5,000 to $20,000 per lens. Snap released Lens Studio, a free application for building AR experiences, in December 2017, spurring creators in the years since to get creative and develop a slew of lenses for the platform. Some individual creators and studios, as a result, have managed to make developing Snapchat lenses a lucrative business. While Snap is laying off nearly 20% of more than 6,400 employees, as first reported by The Verge, augmented reality remains a company priority. As word of Woolery's work slowly spread in the industry, the Snapchat creator saw his business boom. While he earned just $50,000 in revenue in 2021, his increased and consistent monthly earnings in 2022 so far puts him on track to earn nearly $500,000 in revenue. Woolery's expenses currently average roughly $10,000 a month, with 90% of that amount allotted towards his salary, and the remainder largely going towards software costs. Insider reviewed 2022 monthly income statements which Woolery provided to verify his earnings. One of Woolery's most successful projects, a lens for Warner Bros. to promote \"Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses\" in 2021, generated 60 million views during the first week. Woolery, who generally works 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, relies on a recently purchased 13-inch M2 MacBook Air and a 55-inch TV for an external monitor; he regularly uses Snapchat's Lens Studio, as well as Mac software including Xcode, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blender to design 3D assets. Woolery's standardized work schedule is by design. In addition to raising two young children, the creator likes to spend his off hours tinkering with side projects. One recent experiment involved a standalone AR app that rendered the user's hand as a virtual lightsaber. The creator, who has explored other platforms like TikTok but stuck with Snapchat, would eventually like to reach a point where his experimental work feeds back into his contracted gigs.\"I see myself as being able to eventually produce some kind of AR software tools other people can benefit from and where I can also use that as a source of recurring revenue to some degree, so I'm not just selling my time but a product as well,\" Woolery said."
<https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-lens-creator-on-track-for-earn-nearly-500k-year-2022-8>