#2304 “I make $4.5 million implementing AI”

How much money are you making? We're sitting at about four and a half million in annual recurring. I started this business with just$400. As a one man band, I was able to take it by myself with all of my AI tools to a million bucks.

Let me just tell you exactly how to do this, right? Everyone's looking for, well, what do I do? How do I do it? Here's my process. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. John, do you remember when you'd reached a million dollars in revenue?

I was like, man, I am I I took this to a million dollars by myself. And it was at that moment actually I was like, Okay, I actually I I I have enough budget to bring some people on and so I'm gonna do that and make my life a little bit easier. And it kinda snuck up on me. When I first started the company, there were um some pathways that I kinda went down that didn't work as well as others and I eventually found out, okay.

Companies really need not just some training and education and show them what to do. They need somebody that is embedded into their company, that is following up regularly and becoming part of that company. And so I built this fractional chief AI officer model. And the cool thing about that and that I knew as an entrepreneur was super valuable was this recurring revenue element. Right. And so um at at one point we hit the million dollars and by we I mean me, I hit this million dollars.

And uh and it was fun. It was fun. It was, you know, that was about eighty thousand, ninety thousand a month. Um and it was actually I got to a hundred and ten thousand a month. So it's a little bit over that million dollars. I Took my family when I hit a million dollars to get ice cream sundaes. I remember that. Do you do anything like that to celebrate?

You know what I started doing is I started buying myself a pair of shoes every time I landed a new contract. I was like, these are a hundred thousand plus dollar contracts each one. I can afford two hundred dollar shoes or whatever. And so I I I filled my closet and I I I actually stopped doing that because I was like, I have enough shoes at this point. Like I love I love shoes, but you know, I don't need to have four hundred.

And by the way, for anyone who wants to follow along and build this type of business, we'll have a playbook in the comments along with all the tools and apps and software that John recommends.

See it below. It all started because you said, you know what, I have an idea for a social network. I'm gonna go and hire this agency in the Ukraine. What was the price they quoted you? Hundred and five thousand dollars. Okay, and then you discovered that you could do this yourself using AI tools, specifically Replit. How did you discover Replit?

I discovered Replit because I don't even remember who it was. I wish I could give them credit, but somebody posted about it on LinkedIn. It was some V C and they said, I just watched a founder, you know, put together this website and this new thing in like ten minutes, something that would have taken months before.

And, you know, using rep but it was like, what does that mean? And it was literally the same day I had received this proposal from this dev shop fund in Ukraine for one hundred and five thousand dollars. They had actually sent over we'd already done some architecture discussions and they'd sent over a PDF with a proposal about here's how we're gonna build the whole thing. And so I was like

I wonder if I could just drop this PDF into Replit. So I just drag it in and said, Build this and ten minutes later I had, you know, at least the first version that pre When you're talking about a social network, you just gave it the the same request that you had to the developers and the whole thing it wasn't a one shot thing. You're sitting down and you're massaging it and adjusting it, right?

Yeah, yeah, the f the very first thing, at least back then. Today, if I gave it to REPW, I think it could actually one shot it. But interesting. But back then, this was, you know, probably about eighteen months ago, maybe even a little bit longer than that. I s I wanna say September of a couple years ago, whatever that comes out to. So probably a little longer than eighteen months. But bottom line is um they um it was able to

bring up and say, Hey, here's here's your world map and my my idea was I wanted to I I love to travel, right? And I wanted to just have a better way to share where I've traveled. And so I wanted kind of a digital pin board, a map of the world where I could then just drop a pin and then I could record everything I did and have pictures and video and share and I could see where other people have been and just have that visual interface. And so that was the idea.

And um and yeah, it took me it took me, you know, a few minutes to get to the first like hey. Wow, that's cool. Well Can I make login work? Yep, let me build that. And then login worked. I was like, I've never done that before. This was my first experience vibe coding. And and all of a sudden, you know, 12 hours later, probably I had something that actually worked.

That's one of the amazing things about it. Like unlike I love Cloud Code and all these other tools, but unlike that, you just get to see it immediately on your screen as you're asking for it with Replit and tools like that.

Um, the thing that I wonder though is why didn't you say, Okay, I know how to build this thing. I'm gonna continue with the idea. Why'd you decide I'm going to help other people learn these tools instead of using it yourself? It was so transformational for me as an entrepreneur. I had to raise money. to start my first start at back in twenty sixteen and I hated that process. I raised thirteen million dollars. I got good at it, right? And

I hated having, you know, fifty people breathing down my neck saying, Hey, how's it going? Right? Or I don't like that you'd made that decision or some people, you know, some it's it's not all bad, right, for sure. But I loved that all of a sudden I was enabled to bring to life any idea I could with almost no risk. But I I still don't understand then why not build this social network thing that you had in mind instead of building this for other people?

I went down this vibe coding kind of rabbit hole after I built this first thing called Echoes is what I called the app was the, you know, memories of the past, right? Um so anyway, this Echoes app was cool. But then I said, Oh, I wonder if I could do this, I wonder if I could do this. And so I ended up I you know

f a few months later I'd built twenty apps and and uh and then people started asking me, Hey, could you help me do stuff? Whatever and I said, Hey, have you tried this? And you know, I was able to do things for them so much faster. And I realized that there was an opportunity there and then it just kind of This just kinda happened.

How did you figure out the first thing to sell though? You know, I had a conversation with AI about it. Hahaha Seriously? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that's what I that's what I do. A lot of people they'll go directly to Replit and just say, I have an idea, I want to start building. That's a great way to waste a lot of tokens that are more expensive, right? Go to ChatGPT first, go to Claude, whatever you want. Pick your LLM of choice.

And say, I've got this idea. I want you to work through it with me. Okay? Ask me questions. Interview me about it. Ask the AI to interview you about it, right? And and then, you know, I I spent two or three hours just talking to it and and I said, you know what? I think

I think this is the direction I want to go. Um, you know, help me put together a big business plan and you know, plan to do all this. And so then I take a two thousand word business plan that has important things in it that a lot of people forget. Monetization strategy, marketing plan, growth plans, things like that. AI can do incredible things, but a lot of times it has to fill in the gaps that you need. Right. So if you say, Hey, I want to build a social network for, you know,

Moms that you know, single moms, that whatever. Okay, cool. They want to connect with each other and figure out how to be a better mom. Well That's where people go. And then they don't they don't worry about all those other things until they've built the platform. But the reality is, if you're going to be a subscription model or if you're going to be a referral model or if you're going to have some other thing, you actually would build the app totally differently.

If you understood how things, you know, you might place a button differently. You might emphasize, hey, sign up here, sign up now, do this, you know, or you might limit capabilities until you sign up. There's all kinds of decisions that you might make later on that are way better to do from the very beginning. And so making that full plan first before you drop it into Replit, that's where magic happens.

Okay. And so you went back to it, to Chat GPT and you started asking it, What should I do? What's the model that you came up with as V one? What what my original model actually, the the goal was to be totally self-sustained. I wasn't this was gonna be a side thing that just printed money for me. Right. I was gonna be able to sleep and it just makes money. And it didn't turn out that way. But but the idea was You know, have you ever taken an IQ test online, Andrew?

I'm not one of these lover of tests. I I can see that you are and there other people are, but talk to me about this. So IQ tests, I don't know, maybe I'm just conceited and I want to see how smart I am. I don't know what it is. But but when I see IQ tests online, I wanna see, hey, I wonder how smart I am. So I click on it and you go through it and you'll spend ten minutes or twenty minutes or five minutes, you know, doing the test.

And invariably at the end of each of these they say, Hey, you did great. To see your score, pay three ninety nine, you know or Pay this, sign up for our service, whatever. Anyway, so that's how they kind of pull you in, right? And you've already put in the effort. You want to know, you think you did pretty good, and so you want to see what your score is. And so I said, I'm gonna follow that kind of model. I'm gonna do an AI IQ.

I call it an AIQ test. And so uh so they would c they would land on the site, they would they would take this free test and instead of charging him three ninety nine or something, they just said all you gotta do is put your email address in and I'll tell you. Okay. And then depending on their score, it would the system would then go one of two directions. One, it would if you did well, hey, great, take our official test.

$39 or$59. I don't remember what I charged. And then you'll get an official certification from the General AI Proficiency Institute. Right. That was a very official name, you know. And and that was part of the strategy that I worked out. I said, Hey, I want this to feel like a standard, like we're the new SAT, we're the new A C T, we're the new whatever. Right. So and then if they did poorly, there were gonna be courses then. So whether they did poor or or you know or or they did great.

I had a monetization plan for them and this was going to be totally automated. It was going to deliver the certificates automatically if they were great. The courses were all set up in a way that could be self-administered. You could do it on your own pace and and I was just going to sit back and rake in the

And you know what? And to some degree, this is still on your site. I see on your site that for I think it's like fifty-nine dollars I can purchase a certification that I can put on my LinkedIn account. You still have courses. The courses, from what I could tell. are either live or or pre recorded, right? Yes. So this part worked. Is that where you got your first dollar?

It wasn't. It wasn't. So I I spent, so when I did this, I actually, I wasn't even planning on doing this. This business was an accident. So one thing that I do a lot is I post on LinkedIn and I post on things, but LinkedIn's kind of my main platform, and every single day for years and years and years, I have not missed a day.

And I post and but but I don't have AI help me with this. This is something that I just what am I thinking about today? I wanna talk about it and I'll post about all kinds of things. I've seen y there's like a post about ducks on there. There's a post about ducks on there from last Saturday. Yeah. Saturday I step away from AI and I live on my farm. But um but I I

Got up that Thursday morning, it was February twenty seventh, I remember it, and I've gone back and looked at the dates and the posts, whatever, and I said, Hey, you know what? I've got an idea. I I've gotten pretty good at vibe coding. I wonder if I could

Start a business today. Come up with the idea. I didn't have this idea yet. I hadn't had that conversation with Chat GPT yet. I I knew that I had this kind of hey, I can help with AI stuff, but I didn't I didn't have a business model or anything around it. But I said, Can I start it today?

And get my first paying customer by tomorrow. That was the goal, right? Two-day business, right? Which which norm which used to be a a very long process, especially if it involved software. I just said, I wonder if I can do it. So I posted, I said,

I'll keep you guys in the loop. And so I kept posting throughout the day. Here's where I am, this one doing. Took me three days. Took me three days to do it. So it took me a little bit longer than the two days I wanted, but just barely. But I spent about twelve hours a day Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Saturday at three AM, I'm done. I'm like, okay.

I think I can do this. And in all the time where I'm waiting for my vibe code or replit to do whatever, I'm setting up the LLC, I set up the bank account, I threw money in it, I set up my Facebook and X page and Instagram page and all the socials and I made it look like

General AI Proficiency Institute is a trusted place to buy something from. I wanted a complete picture. What I tell people in my course when I teach people about stuff like this and is I wanted to make sure that my potential customers didn't get any paper.

Right? Just that, oh, that link doesn't work, or oh, they don't have a social page, they don't have a presence, or something doesn't work. You know, I wanted to make sure everything worked, that they weren't ever gonna be like, ah, this feels like a scam, you know? I don't I didn't want that. I wanted it to feel very, very official and I wanted to do it well.

But I launched Facebook ads three AM Saturday night. I had all this stuff. I had set up, I built used AI to build all these ads and everything. I had it all ready to go. Pushed go. Went to sleep. Got up Sunday. I don't work Sundays and you know went to church and took a nap because I was tired. Slept probably for four hours that day and then just kind of let it let it flow. And then Monday morning get up and I go to check to see how many sales I'd made.

I'm so excited, right? And I had 140 people had clicked on the link and visited the site and started the test, right? It was, it was good, right? Um, and I had zero sales. Like, what the heck, man? Like I I swear I did this right. Like there anyway, so I went in and I figured out I had misconfigured Stripe.

And so I was like, ah, you know, so I post, I'm keeping people up to date on LinkedIn, like, hey, you know, I I don't have my first customer yet, but I'm gonna get it today. And I'm like, you know what? I'm a sales guy. I can do that. And so I just jumped on LinkedIn and started messaging some people and eventually, you know, that that same day had a CEO, local CEO that I didn't know really well, but we kind of had crossed paths a couple of times. So it was I would call it a lukewarm lead.

Um and uh and I said, Hey, I want to help your company figure out, you know, all your employees figure out AI. I want to see how good they are and then make sure that you know get them up to speed. And he said, We need this. This is awesome. And so he jumped on a call and by the end of the call I had a fifteen thousand dollar contract. Those were my first dollar.

So it wasn't even somebody going through your test and then at the end signing up for the certification or anything. It was you testing his people and then teaching his people AI.

What what about AI? AI is such a big thing. Is it like how do you prompt ChatGPT with questions? Is it how do you build with replit? It's a it's a company with multiple people. How can you teach one thing? Yeah, you know, there there are principles. There are principles that that are that are good. It's learning how to think differently. That's what I really like to focus on is, you know, how do you approach like today, there's a concept of like throwaway software.

Like you can literally vibe code a solution. Like so you might have a task that was going to take you six hours, but instead you could take 30 minutes and vibe code a tool that will do that task for you. And you may never use that piece of software again. Right? But you wouldn't think like that back in 2020.

Right, or before vibe coding was a thing. Right? Back when I started my company in twenty sixteen, that was not an option for me. And most people have no idea that AI is s capable of just whipping something up quickly that can actually execute on things and build stuff and do incredible things like that.

And so learning learning how to think a little bit differently, how to approach problems, there's principles like throwaway software, or even just a very simple thing like I mentioned earlier, have AI interview you. Right? That's a great skill that a lot of people haven't thought of, right? That helps you really flesh out an idea and ensures that you stay in control and your AI doesn't go off on some tangent on its own.

And so were you also teaching software or just big concepts like this and then letting them know there's software to implement it with? I don't like the big concept teachers, right? Okay. There's plenty of them out there. I don't think they're bad. I just don't think it's very valuable.

What I like to do is we'll touch on a big thing, but then we're gonna go practical and into a piece of software, right? And I'll say, yeah, you could use this, you know, we we might use ChatGPT, but you can do this with Grok or with Claude or with, you know, Deep Seek, whatever the heck you want.

There's a lot of different options out there, but these principles apply across all these things. Now let's try it. Everybody take five minutes and have a conversation with your AI about this. Great. What did how did that work? What did you guys run into? You know. I I'm a I'm a practical teacher. I want people to come away knowing, okay, I can do this now, not just, oh yeah, AI seems cool. Interesting. And so was there a specific tool that you were teaching this with? Usually Chat GPT.

Wait, so if you're telling them to throw away software, ChatGPT couldn't back then. I don't even know if now the if the chat couldn't create software. But but I would but I'm always starting there, right? J G P T is the first thing that you want to learn for most people, right? And again, pick your pick your L L M if you you can swap that out. But but the bottom line is

You need to learn how to talk to AI before you go getting crazy with Replit or some other vibe coding software or something like that. And so we always start there. But yes, when I was when I was ready to, you know, dive in and say, all right, we're going to build throwaway software. Here's the tool that I like.

Let's let's everybody pull up your account. I would make people sign up for an account, right? If I'm there, I'm like, sign up for an account right now, pay twenty bucks, get in, and let's do that. You know, it's so shocking that that twenty dollar sign up is a barrier, but I almost feel like it's the difference between buying CDs at a record store versus just listening on Spotify.

Even if it is just$2 for a CD, there's a hesitation. There's a moment of thinking versus on Spotify you go, okay, I just heard John say that he has and you do have music on Spotify. I can just go find his music on Spotify, hit play, and sample it. And um and at this point still software to really get the right experience you do have to pay. Replit does have a free plan. It is as generous I think as they could be, but honestly

You're not gonna get enough of it until you pay. Same thing with all the other tools. All right, fair point. I like I like this. Let me see. If I'm putting together a playbook based on John's experience, here's what I'm getting number one. Number one, um Get interviewed by an AI to think through where this business can go, maybe even understand what your strengths are, so that you can find a business that jives with you and think through where it's going before you get started. Number two.

I I actually think my second thing would be go on LinkedIn or somewhere where I know people and just try to sell it directly to them. The whole Facebook ad thing, maybe it's a gift that it didn't work out for you because

you got more feedback and you were able to shift the business towards something that's much more profitable than if you were selling this other thing. Um number three, keep it simple. Try to earn money very quickly. And then number four, I like this. Maybe this is more unique to your playbook, which is Teach the big ideas, not the not the tactics today. So the big ideas are throw away software, and then the tactics today just undergird it. And that might be something like

I'm going to show you how to create a throwaway plugin for Chrome using Claude code. You're going to install or Claude the actual app itself. Okay, am I with you so far? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I I one of the things that I think is is crazy just to go back to b something you said a moment ago about about the twenty dollars.

Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, right? Everyone's got a business idea. They watch watch Shark Tank and it's you know it's it's fun, right? Oh I could do that. That's so awesome, right? And then You won't pay twenty bucks? Like I I I paid I paid

A hundred thousand dollars plus times sixty engineers for my last company that I started, right? And that's why I had to go raise millions and millions of dollars. And so I have never looked at a replit bill and even been like, Oh my gosh, I can't believe I paid. I know. No. Like it's it's like this is free to me. Like anybody can make this at supercuts or, you know, go DoorDash for a couple days and you have your you've got your seed money. You're ready to go.

It's truthfully, it's not even that much money for people. There's just a barrier. Now I've got to put my credit card in, maybe it's gonna be a subscription, it's all that stuff. Um

Which is why later on I do wanna go through some software that does work for you. But why don't we take a moment to actually and talk about one software we both like, Zapier. I usually talk about my sponsor right now, but as somebody who has experience with this, do you wanna talk about what your experience is with Zapier instead?

Yeah, for those of you that don't know Zapier, it's it's it's a connector, right? It connects one thing to another thing, right? Maybe you've got an idea, maybe you want help with your social media posting for your business, right? And you say, Okay, we can do this.

Um well, we gotta just think through the process. Well, we gotta get we gotta get everything to, you know, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. And there's tools out there. There's great tools out there that you can you can find that that will autopost for you. But we got to send something to that, right? Okay, well, Zapier can connect those things for you, right? Maybe you want to drop things into a Google Drive.

And then that Google Drive connects to Zapier through a Zap, like they have right there. And it will automatically set that that connection up for you. You don't have to be technical. It's it's for it's for people like me, by the way. I don't know how to code, right? Um for people like me that want to get in and do some, you know, create crazy, you know, um

automations, right? And figure that out. And so now we gotta go a step back further, right? Oh, how how are we gonna get content into Google Drive? Well maybe you use something like Replit and Zapier together to have it use an AI to auto generate content and then Auto create a uh an image with nano banana using Google's image tool and then connect those and automatically send that to a Google Drive that's connected via Zapier over to

the you know Hootsuite or whatever you know system you're using to push that out to social media. And so boom, now you have a business automation system that you can put together in a few hours.

I've talked to an entrepreneur who built his whole business very similar to yours, but largely he's using Zapier because he can he finds it with Zapier today you can also create agents. So you tell the agent what you want it to do and it does it reliably with guardrails because they're they are an enterprise level company.

Or with Zapier today, you can keep it as simple as um saying, I'm going to use Claude, but Claude doesn't have enough connectors and the connectors it has, I wanna give it specific rules on what it can do and what it can't do with it. Zapier gives uh whatever tool you're using up to eight no, actually at this point it's almost ten thousand different apps you can connect with. All right. So go to Zapier and let's continue on with this story. Um

At that point did you shift your business completely and say, I am no longer in the IQ test for AI. I am now in the business of helping enterprise, even if it's mid sized companies, um, learn or teach their people AI. Is that what you did? Yes and no. And here's where my bus my original business plan served me well. Because I became or or I had I had built this image of I am the general AI proficiency institute. And not only that, I'm a dot org. Right.

And there's just this added level of trust to a dot organ and institute and whatever and it enabled me to get the big deals with businesses. They said, Oh, well you obviously are an institute. I mean, yeah, we'd love to work with you. I mean, I got those kinds of things. I had governments from Australia reach out to me and say, Hey, seems like you're the worldwide standard on this. You know, can you can you, you know, assess all of our people? And I'm like, Absolutely.

Right. And I'd never done that before for government. But yeah, that I mean that's part of I've got to say this to you. Yeah. first heard about you, I didn't even realize that it was you that um uh that was on that was mentioned on Joe Rogan. Yeah. But when I first heard about you and understood your business, I expected to find some shisty looking online education site. Then I hit your site. And it has such a good feel to it that it does communicate.

like trust and like you said, like a non profit vibe to it, but at the same time I see that it's a real company. It's it's all design. Does Replit do that do that too? Or is this your taste? That site that site is completely designed in Replit. It is hosted by Replit. Like I I'm using nothing else outside of that to make that.

Wow. Yeah, that is such it's such a good site that elevates your brand instead of, you know, making it look like like another education site. But that still doesn't mean that people are gonna come to you and say, you know what, we're we're a government agency, we're looking to hire people. How did you find them?

They found me. And that is where another another place where AI can just make you an expert in things. My maybe one advantage that I have on maybe just an average person who's just getting started is I had been a CEO of a company that I'd raise money and been through an accident. I've been there for eight years and you know, I I've been around the block.

And so I knew things that mattered. And you know, some things that matter to to appear and to show up in search results is you gotta have stuff like SEO and now GEO, right? I had Franklin Covey reach out to me the other day and they said, Hey Um, we'd love to work with you. We need, you know, we need some help on this stuff. And I was like, Awesome, how'd you find us? And they said, Chat GPT.

Right. Chad GPT said you guys are you guys are one of the best out there. I was like, amazing. That means that my work on GEO, and by the way, what how did I do this on Replic? I found actually the best company out there that does GEO. There's a great funded company out of Silicon Valley. It's just this awesome GEO. I don't remember the name of the company right now, but I I I handed that website to Grok and to ChatGPT and I said,

Do as much research as you can on this company, figure out exactly what they do and report back to me. Tell me down at the technical level, what are they doing? Okay. And as soon as I got and then I had them and then I had chat's response and grocks response and I gave them to each other. I said improve each other's responses and then meld them together. And then I took that. And I gave it to Replit, I said, here is a an ultimate guide to GEO. Install all of this on my web.

Done. And so what are the things that are installed on your website? Oh, it just installed all the just you know, the meta tags and the robot text LLMs and the the FAQs and all the things that the chat GPT, all these GEO engines are looking for, right?

And so it just had the structure. It had all the data that was there. And it's nothing more than just certain files and tags and things that have to be done in a way that, you know, are, you know, appropriate and optimized for that. And so because I did all of that stuff.

People are finding me. I looked at my Google Analytics this morning. I sent it to my team because I was actually happy about it. But it said that out of the uh let's see, I'll just tell you the numbers. Uh in the last week, I've had 876 people visit our website. From organic search. Okay. I've had four hundred and twelve people go direct, so they're finding me on a podcast or LinkedIn or something like that.

Hundred and sixty six people found us via organic video, a hundred and five via organic social, forty four via referral, and thirty five unassigned. So we're talking sixteen, seventeen hundred, uh maybe not quite that much, twelve, thirty four, yeah, maybe fifteen, sixteen hundred in there. of total visits in the last week, ha over half of those are organic. And oh I love it. That means that Replit structure my site in a way that actually works.

And you know what? I know that now they actually have built in SEO into the system. And I interviewed Corey Hein, who's got um marketing skills that are on GitHub that basically will do SEO for you. creating pages. So there are ways now to automate it. But you did nothing off site. You didn't go to Reddit the way that the Zapier team showed me that they're doing. You didn't go to other sites and ask them to link to you. None of that.

No, no, I haven't gone and done any of these, you know, backlink strategies, which I've done in the past with past businesses, right? I just for this one, I went out and did that. And I also one thing I'm good at is I'm good at making noise, right? And so I called up my local news agency. You know, K U T V, you know, two channel two news. I said, Hey, I built a business in a weekend, did a million dollars. You guys want to do a story on it? They're like, Yep.

Interesting. Awesome. Now I've got a news story. Now I've got a very verified, you know, really nice referral source that comes. And then, you know, someone did a story based off of that and then other things. And then obviously, you know, stuff like Joe Rogan and other things that started getting better, you know. But but bottom line is

Um, you can make yourself look really, really legit quickly if you're not afraid to just call up. News anchors and people, their their job is to go find stories. If you've got a cool story, call them up, tell them. Maybe they'll do a story on you and you'll get business. You know, one thing I've been trying to get uh from Repli to do and his team to do is

Find more your your case more case studies like you and then just introduce them to people like me so that my audience who is trying to figure out what could we build with these tools has some examples of what's possible. Otherwise it feels like um It feels like this is the place to build an MVP before you go and build your actual business, but it's not. It's like a full business. In fact, even when he talked about Juan Rogan, he said

Yeah, John went over and he created an MVP and something like that. It was more than that. The business is built on Replit. If anything, he undersold what

what he does and I've been trying to get his team to introduce me to more people like that. Um Okay. Let's talk a little bit about the evolution of the business. So it started out with that with Yeah you You getting a customer directly and teaching their people.

At some point you said, I'm actually not just going to be the teacher who comes in. I'm going to get referral, I mean, um, I'm going to get ongoing revenue, recurring revenue. What's the thing that allowed you to earn recurring revenue from customers? What's a service?

Yeah, so I I came up and it was I remember the moment I came up with it, I was on a call with somebody and I had been selling these, you know, fifteen thousand dollar AI training days, right? And people would pay me fifteen grand to just come in and teach their twenty employees or their fifty employees or whatever it was to

you know, how how it was uh how it works and we do an eight hour kind of AI, whatever. And uh and I was talking to somebody and I happened to know this guy. He was an old neighbor and yeah, owned a pool company. And uh, you know, good one, doing doing about twenty million a year, you know, he's doing great and um

And he said, Meh, John, we need help with AI, you know, can you come in and teach us and show us? And I said, Yeah, absolutely And I said, You know, I and I just thought on the spot right there.'Cause he asked me the question, he said, Well, what do you do ongoing? Like, do you come in and teach us again? I said Absolutely I do. Uh huh.

Right. And I I said, Yeah, you know, we have this fractional chief AI officer model. Right. And when I'm saying we at this moment, it's still just me as a solo guy, right? Um, plus my, you know, quad and and everybody else helping me out behind the scenes. Um But uh I said, Yeah, we've got this fractional chief officer model and it's about the same price. It's fifteen grand a month and um

But then you get me ongoing and so yeah, we'll do some trainings. You won't get as much training in this first one, but I'll help you build stuff and we'll figure out how to actually optimize and work with your people. And he's like, That's what I want. Send me a contract. And I was like, Okay. And I sent him a doc sign that day and it was paid by the end of the day. Done. And um I was like, that's cool. That's$180,000 a year.

That's a big contract, right? All of a sudden, I'm you know, my hockey sticking on my ARR. And I said, I wonder. And so I called a few other people that I'd been working with and I said, Hey, I've got this new thing. And four more businesses signed up.

Meaning the existing customers, you sold them the same thing that you sold to the other one. And now so far what we're talking about is, um, for people who are just listening, he's nodding, yes, this is enthusiastically, this is the way that he found his recurring revenue model. From what I understand, you went beyond teaching to actually become more of a CTO to having some kind of frameworks that you're installing. What is that?

Yeah, you know, the the fractional chief AI officer model that I came up with, I I realized that there were three kind of buckets that that made sense. And I said this on the first call and it has stuck, right? But it's S T E is the kind of framework that I like to say it's strategy, transformation and education.

I was already doing that education piece a bunch, right? I had been teaching people and coming in and helping them get up to speed. But I also had been doing strategy as well with a lot of these CEOs, you know, before a call or before an education seminar thing I would do with people. I would sit down with the CEO and having I I had the benefit of again having been a CEO for a decade and so

I I had experience, I had ideas, I could I could actually consult at a decently high level. And so um I was able to say, look, this is what I think it means for your business. This is how things are gonna change, here's technology, this is this is what it means. And then that transformation piece in the middle there

is hey, and I'm really good at building. I can build stuff super fast. I can vibe code. I can show you guys how to do it and work with you, work along alongside you. But ultimately I want you to really start becoming An AI, you know, first company where AI is doing things. It's taking tasks away from you. It's saving you money. It's saving you time. It's giving you back time. All of those things. And so ultimately that framework has worked really well and we still do it to today.

So you're not implementing your own software, you're just continuing to to do what you did before, more strategy, more getting their people on boarded into this new world? So I guess this is as good a place as any to announce our new our new direction here. So

Obviously, you know, the open claws of the world and every agent system, you know, opened everybody's eyes up like, Whoa, this is the future. This is really what we need to do. And obviously open claw was really scary to touch in the beginning. Um but you know, we we set up Nemo Claw. Right, which is NVIDIA's secure infrastructure sitting on top of OpenClaw. And we started using it in our own company and we used Open Claw in a sandbox environment and we we tried a bunch of things, right? But now

Jarvis runs my company, right? And and it's incredible. Jarvis is This is your A that's the name that you gave your AI. That's our AI and we're not gonna sell it as Jarvis because you know Disney likes to sue people. So we're calling it Jenna for Jenna I P I. So Jenna and we're launching it in about I don't know, 10 days or so here. And um, but basically it is an agent that can run your business and it is incredible. It allows you to talk to your business.

And uh and so basically the way that this happened is, you know, fractional a fractional chief AI officer operates a lot like a consultant, right? And so you're really trading a lot of time for money. And and that, you know, has a very linear growth pattern.

Right. I don't like that. I'm a SAS guy. That's what my previous startup was. So I want I want to I wanna turn that curve up a little bit and add some parabolic momentum. And so I said, Hey, you know, guys, we need to turn the things that we're doing with these companies into systems and processes that we can then

systematize and turn into marketing engines and growth engines and operations engines and things that sit inside of Jenna, right? That Jenna then has access to all kinds of tools and things that it can then, you know, plug into a company. So now We've already been doing this with our current clients and we've been using it internally and it's just it's

time. It is amazing. Our clients love it. It's it's incredible. But we're turning we so we've we've turned the corner of saying, okay, yes, we this STE model still is there, but now it is assisted by software. So now we we really believe that Jenna becomes uh the AI infrastructure for our clients, right? And that becomes also much stickier. No one wants to turn that off.

And essentially what that is is Neo Claw with your twist on it, customized for what you've seen your customers need over and over. Exactly. Like why so NVIDIA, you know, builds this nice this nice structure, this harness, right, that that makes it safer and more enterprise ready. Okay. And so then we spin these things up.

There's there's can you know, look, it doesn't matter if you're selling, you know, oil rigs or, you know, paint or, you know, if you're a a a one man band, uh maybe we actually have a one woman band, um, you know, doctor that works with us and she's uh she does

you know, facial s you know, all kinds of skin things, dermatologists anyway. Um they all have invoices that they hate sending out and they all have customers they need to communicate with and they have, you know, new customer requests come in and they have people send requests for information and the people want to buy things and there's just so many similarities between all of these businesses.

Right. They all need their website redone. They all need SEO and GEO set up and you know, so we just have all these tools and s and things that that that work across all of these different businesses. Now we do then we're part of the part of why we don't just charge, I don't know, five grand a month and go sell it as a software alone is we still do bring the fractional chief AI officer with it to help set it up. It takes time to get it integrated into the systems and to work with

you know, Net Suite versus QuickBooks versus this system and HubSpot versus Salesforce. And you have to do some connections and things like that. But then every business has their own stuff, their own custom things that need to be done. And so we then train Jenna, their instance of Jenna, to work within their framework and their systems. And and by the time it's up and running, and it usually takes a few weeks to get it up and running.

There's CEOs sitting there and just talking like, tell me about this. Oh my gosh. So you just identified this pattern we have never seen before, and we've never been able to even ask this question. And they can correlate things in ways that just hasn't been possible until you can connect a central nervous system into the middle of it.

You know, it's interesting. My business partner, Jesse Fuji, had sent me all these different companies that basically supported other software to show how big this this type of business can get. And I think that we're finally seeing an opportunity to do one of these types of companies here in AI and it's probably around OpenClaw. OpenClaw has tremendous power.

But it's also a blank sheet that needs to be connected and configured and I could totally see a humongous business being built around just implementing this in businesses with customization and maintenance and and everything else. That that seems like a huge business. This is our billion dollars. That's exactly it. Yeah. I mean honestly you can see businesses that are built to billion dollar ideas with with this in other areas.

Yeah. All right. We're gonna go into software, but let me see if I understand the framework, fill in the gaps wherever I wherever I'm missing, and we'll we'll give people this whole playbook um in the comments if they want it. All right.

Number one, interview with AI, we talked about this before. Two, have a business plan that doesn't just take into account where you are today, but also what's the future. You mentioned earlier if you're going to sell it one way or another, you need to think about it in the beginning or if you're gonna implement features you need to know about them in the beginning. Forget about these Facebook ads, just go and reach out to customers on LinkedIn.

Keep it simple. Then um start selling uh recur look for revenue recurring revenue opportunities. For you it was the the fifteen hundred dollar ongoing training. Once you get one fifteen thousand oh I had a I'm missing a zero. Fifteen thousand. I love that you stopped me to say that. Okay. Um actually let's pause on that.

Thinking well, we'll come back to it. I'm curious about this thinking big thing because it's very easy to say I'm just teaching. I should sell for less. You're always selling for more than I expect you to. Um when you're selling, sell this a framework for you is a strategy, education, transformation.

then ultimately look for that bigger opportunity and the big thing that you saw was sell software to assist the service that you just sold. So essentially you see peop what people want, create the software. Am I missing anything in there? Yeah, uh no, you you you nailed it. The one thing I'll point out on the software piece is

The software is what makes it sticky, right? What we you know, we had a few early clients that are like, Hey, great, thanks for building all this stuff out. You know, we're good. And we're like, Okay, cool, we made sixty grand, that's good, but we were good and in four months we transformed their company.

Right. And so we said, okay, what can we do to start building in, you know, something that's gonna make us stay around for years and years and years, right? And uh, you know, selling annual contracts as opposed to these, you know, thirty day by thirty day, whatever, you know. And we of course I I

I put a, you know, I got rid of barriers like, hey, we're not gonna make you sign an annual contract or it's not gonna be a certain project length. You wanna fire me like any other employee? That's fine. Because that's about the price we're charging. About a an employee, right? Ten to fifteen grand a month. Our average our average customer at this point is seventeen. but uh monthly. With some of them being, you know, obviously higher. So um

The the real big thing that it that has turned that and and that Jenna obviously is gonna open up even more. But all of our clients now we've installed the Jenna for, they're they're never going anywhere. We've changed their lives forever. We're a we're a core piece of their business. I totally I totally understand that. Usually as a consultant, you turn that over to somebody else, right? You might install HubSpot. Now HubSpot's a core piece of their business.

Here you've got it yourself. Okay. Um and then the other thing that I kind of missed and brushed past actually no, let's talk about pricing. How do you think about pricing? Why do you charge more than others who are doing the same type of AI transformation? You know, I really just looked at what would what would they have to pay if they were bringing someone internal, right? You know, I believe that every company Every single company should have somebody in charge of AI. I don't care if it

you know, director of AI implementation or a chief AI officer. Somebody needs to be in charge of AI and their job is to go around and keep people accountable. Hey, we have these tools. What are you doing? You know, are you trained on this? Do we need to do training on that? Do we need to do this?

Why are you still doing this manually over here? You could you know AI can do that easily. You gotta have somebody that's in charge of this and I also was bringing a level of uh sophistication in terms of I I I'm not a twenty-two year old out of college.

I had I've been around the block, I built companies, I've sold them, I know how to run a business. And so I just said, you know what? In order for me to provide ongoing support, and really this is what drove it in the beginning, in order for me to actually provide ongoing support, it's gotta be worth my time. So I'm gonna charge it kind of at a you know, a good a good employee, fifteen K a month to start and um and then we'll we'll go from there and

And you know, it's kinda like, you know, once someone runs the four minute mile, like it's easy to run the four minute mile for people that are at that level. Right. And I have never I have never felt like, oh man, I'm not I really want this client. I'm just gonna charge him four thousand'cause I think that's all I can get. I'm like, look, there's so many companies out there that are willing to work at this level and you know, they might be a little bit bigger.

That's okay. Those are the companies I'm going to work with for it to be worth it for us. We need enough resources. And honestly, I've even said, man, I don't want any clients under 20 grand now. Like I've I've I've said that because it does take a lot. I've got a team now that's working and delivering and to really make an impact.

You know, we're not we're not selling, you know, snake oil here. This we are really making an impact on these companies. And so it's you gotta have the resources, you gotta have enough money that you can put other people on it and bring software in and do everything and have the time to actually make an impact. And that that number is why it landed there. The anchor for this was a human being. I think every company needs this human this role.

Instead of hiring somebody full-time internally, hire me part-time. I'm gonna be stronger than a full-time person because I've got all this experience. Okay, the anchor was a really big one. Brand seems like a really important part of everything you do, even the way that you talk about your experience. I had a funded company. I am somebody whose time is valuable. All of that. The website has this feel to it. You chose a dot org. What's your philosophy on brand?

Well, let me answer this in a different way. Software is almost useless. It's almost worthless now. Because anybody can create it. My eight-year-old made his own version of Robo. And built twenty games inside of it. Mm-hmm. And he did that in a day with Replit. You know, I just said uh you know he said, I want to play the computer dad. I said, No, but you can use this replit tool. And he spent like four hundred dollars of credits.

Just building crazy stuff all day. But I was like, whatever, it's w it'd be way cheaper for me to let him go play rip Roblox or Minecraft or whatever. But I wanted him to learn and and so I'd love that. But but anyone can do it now. Anyone can build that software. And so because of that, well what's the mode? Distribution. Right. And how do you get distributed? Well, people need to know about you. Right. Very simple principles here, right? Gary Vee talks about all the time.

Right. Just you don't even have to read the book. Just think about that concept of day trading attention. And by the way, read the book. It's good. But If people don't know about you, they're not gonna buy it from you. Simple.

If they know about you, they might buy from you. So now you're at least in the conversation. And so your brand has to be something that's memorable, it's easy, it has to, it has to make sense. It also has to be trustworthy. That's a big thing. Stay away from the paper cuts, right? Death by a thousand paper cuts happens to a lot of companies. I'll land on their site and I'll say,

These guys don't even have their pricing, you know, figured out and and they don't you know, their buttons don't work and their their Instagram button at the bottom I click on it and it doesn't go anywhere. It goes to the top of the page and I'm like, okay. So these guys

You know, they might be big. They might have it's possible they've been around for ten years, but they never took time to get their website right. And so uh if if that's how they do their work there, then what's the rest of their work like? I do notice that by the way, about distribution.

You being on social every single day is part of your distribution. You feeling comfortable and saying, This is what I'm selling. You even being comfortable with some of your social posts, really, not not getting a lot of likes, is part of your philosophy. Okay.

I got the playbook and by the way we'll have a link for it below to anyone who wants to get it. We'll just obviously we're doing it for free. Let's talk about software. A few tools that you use. Replit we talked about. Zapier, another tool. What else are you using that you like?

You know, we've mentioned it a couple times, but I actually love Grok for market research. Because Grok is plugged into X and X has all kinds of people on there from every age range and every political persuasion and just about every industry. Um there's it's not everybody, but but it's pretty dang good cross section and Grok has access to be able to say, what are people thinking about this, right? And so you can take that business plan that you make in Chat GPT and drop it into Grok and say,

Tear this apart for me. What are people thinking? What are people gonna say about this? How will people respond? And it's pretty dang good. So I use that for market research. I love that.

Um, I also love Mid Journey. I don't know why I love Mid Journey. It's just a fun maybe it was an early tool that I just got enamored with. Um, but I was I I try all the different platforms that are out there and Mid Journey's a fun one for for creating that. I mean Nano Banana's amazing and there's other great ones out there. Uh but I just have I have a good time with that one.

You know, the tools that I used when I created the business um i in a weekend were, you know, uh Chat GPT, Grok for sure, you know, uh pressure testing my business plan and then so that's really what I do. I create it, pressure test it, and then get it into Replit, right? get into replit, start building things. Then when I needed images or I needed logos, then I'll go to some of these other platforms that uh that allow me to to, you know

be creative and get my images. And you need you know, you need hero images, you need a logo, you need, you know, product images. You need, you know, just all kinds of stuff. And then and then at some point you actually do want to get real people in there. Like if you go to my website today you'll see You'll see my face there and you'll see my team there. And you know, we have people now and it's great. But um and that and that helps. That helps.

Any out there tools that you're especially excited about? Anything that's a little bit weird? I mean I would say I I mean I would say Nemo Qua is pretty out there uh for a lot of people. Uh you know, a lot of people are scared scared to use it and uh I was terrified. I have never installed it on a personal machine. Like I just

I you know, I everything I'm doing on a virtual machine so that if I need to you know and I don't give it access to everything. So yeah, there's right ways to do it. There's right ways to do it. But I would say Nemo Claw is an out there tool that people know about, but but not a lot of people are using because they're afraid. Are you using clawed code at all or are you not touching any of those tools?

I I know how to use them. I of course I go in and I try everything. Mm-hmm. My job now is to is to really know about what's going on out there. And so there's a lot of tools I'll go out and I'll try the base forty fours and the levels and the bolts and quad code and codecs and everything. I have codecs on my machine. I do use that. I like that.

Quad code's awesome and Claude agents are great. I I think that Claude is the best. Replit under the hood uses Claude, right? I mean Claude four point seven is the latest now and it is it's excellent. It's it's amazing. But the quad code experience Um while it certainly is. accessible to a normie like me. Uh-huh. I feel like it's a little bit more accessible to developers. And that's why

I just built my processes on top of Replit. And so I'm just so dang good with Replit. I've never run into something that Replit couldn't do. And I've never felt the need to go try other things to build. What what's a what's a weird thing that you're doing on Replit that I wouldn't have anticipated? Obviously, yeah, tell me.

So I built a a video game just to see if I could like a full on like it's called Moon Command. And go to mooncommand.ai. It's free. I just I wanted to see if I could do it, right? I just decided to do that and that was hard. That was hard. There were crazy things. I had it because it's multiplayer, right? You and I could jump on and we could play against each other right now. And so in order to have live real time syncing of the game.

There were all kinds of web sockets and things and communication and chats and unreal time stuff that was that took me to you know, Replit has their, you know, their system kind of monitors, you know, how good are you? Are you a level one developer, a level two, level three, four and five? And before I built the game I was a level four. I had built hundreds of apps on there and that game took me to a level five.

I do actually really like the personal projects on this. I want to encourage everyone on my team, just create a personal project on any one of these tools. Because for work you tend to be more precious. For fun, you realize I could destroy this and it's not such a big deal. I don't have to answer to anybody else. I could say yes, implement the user um user accounts on it. No, I don't wanna do that. Whatever it is, and you get to play with it. Okay. Uh when you mentioned when you got to a hundred

uh over a hundred thousand dollar uh revenue, you decided you were gonna splurge. At that point when you hit a million dollar run rate, was it all profit? It was essentially just you, right? You plus a little bit of software. It was mostly profit. Yeah. In the beginning it was it was ninety nine percent type margins, like really. And and and even this, you know, I would I would work in Replit, but what I would do is part of the contract was

I need a company card. So I would put all replic charges and everything, you know, were on the company. It's your account, I'm building for you. And so any, you know, additional cost accrued, it wasn't coming out of my pocket of that fifteen thousand. That was That's what you're paying me to be in in the room, right? And so yeah, that was that that was basically I had you know six

you know, C A I O jobs at the same time. Um, which is why I said, okay, you know what, I'm okay to let's let's switch to forty percent or fifty or sixty percent margins by hiring some people and building systems into that. And so that's That's where we are today. Closer to about fifty probably. What's the revenue right now? It's growing very fast. We're um we're sitting at about four and a half million in annual recurring. Wow. And by the way, for for reference sake, I hit a million

Let's see, we're in April. So I hit a million in September. What is that? Eight, nine months? So I went one to four in nine months. We will absolutely be at ten million uh well we'll we'll be at one million a month by December for

Do you think anyone else could do this or is this one of these opportunities that comes and goes then you were early and so you were able to do it? I had somebody ask me the other day how many y how many more years do you think this type of business could be launched and started? And my answer was five. Five more years for people to be able to bring others, bring other businesses on board to AI. Yeah. And then it becomes what

Right, you know, to to to to have a great success. There are hundreds of millions of businesses in the world If I help a thousand of them, I will be wildly successful and rich from it. Right? That means there's room for thousands more. I cannot believe how open, how generous you are with this, and I appreciate you s coming on and doing this interview. Uh for anyone who wants to go over to your website, it's genaipi.org. And of course John's a really good follower on LinkedIn. Thank you, John.

Thanks so much, Andrew. Happy to be here. Thanks. Bye everyone. Subscribe for more.