Transcription
Okay. You know, I've been on your podcast. You've been talking about AI stuff, and I've been kind of like, yeah, it's interesting, but also I'm not using it that much. Yeah. I think since GPT-3 came out, it's completely changed my entire like perception of what AI can do for my company or like my clients' companies. And I'm actually kind of like getting a bit worried, but it's also really cool, but also overwhelming. Like I don't know where to start.
Instead of hiring your first employee, you should probably just hire ChatGPT Pro. Like the mistake that a lot of people make is they pay 5, 10, 15K a month for their first employee when they should just be paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. It is crazy. I mean, again, I said like, you know, 8 weeks ago or something, I didn't really think that was true. And now a lot of things have changed my mind. One of the main things is just using the tools in my business and seeing like, a great example is we spent $35,000 to get a white paper created 3 years ago. It took them like 3 months. Um, we basically recreated that study just by doing deep research in GPT-3 in probably 10 minutes last week, and it was better. Like that sounds impossible. That sounds like science fiction. But if you know how to set up the machine, yeah, if you know how to set up the factory, then all you have to do is open the door at 9:00 a.m. and keep the lights on. And that's why I think this is such a great time to be business building.
But I'm still wondering from your perspective, like what separates person A who's going to have a one-person, the first one-person billion-dollar business and person B who isn't, when both of them have the same tools? Like what is separating these people? [Music] J ice Ice Cream, J Ice Cream, JC Jonathan and Courtney, the man who needs no introduction. You gave me like four introductions then. What do you want to talk about today? I want to talk about this thing. Uh, so we're here in San Francisco, and I think what I need to bring from Berlin is something you guys haven't been talking about for like at all: WhatsApp AI. So, we're going to talk about AI today. I think it's going to be a crazy, crazy thing. Okay, let's. Yeah. And and by the end of the episode, what will people get if they stick around?
Honestly, like for me, the last 6 to 8 weeks, okay, you know, I've been on your podcast, you've been talking about AI stuff, and I've been kind of like, yeah, it's interesting, but also I'm not using it that much. Yeah. I think since GPT-3 came out, it's completely changed my entire like perception of what AI can do for my company, for like my clients' companies. And I'm actually kind of like getting a bit worried for the first time. Like worried, but in a good way. So good worries. Are you saying that by the end of this episode people are gonna get worried? I think. Okay. Okay. Here's here's the thing. At the end of this episode, you'll, if you're running a small business, if you're an individual entrepreneur, my hope is that from the what the two of us can give to your audience is like how you can essentially feel like you have, you know, a 10-person team if you're a one-person company, a 50-person team if you're a 10-person company, and just keep making those numbers bigger and bigger, very big numbers. So like a lot of productivity hacks. How to be big even if you're small. How to be big even if you're small. Yeah. You know a lot about that, don't you? My girlfriend's in the back of this uh shoot here, and she's already like trying to say. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you.
Also, I'm going to be using this a lot. Guys, this, if you're watching this podcast here on YouTube, you do not realize how warm it is right now. It's sweaty. It's very sweaty. I don't know. But I mean, if it was so warm, why am I not sweating? Why are you not sweating? We don't get it. You just started sweating when you started talking about small versus big. That's true. All right, let's get into AI stuff. But can I read a tweet for you? Like, let me let me give you a tweet here. So, you know Thiago Forte? Yes, I do. I've had him on the pod. Forte Labs. You had him on your pod. All right. Fair. Okay. He wrote, "I'm now paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro, $100 a month for Claude Max, and $20 a month for Notebook LM." Didn't know about Notebook LM until I read that. And that $320 per month gives me the productivity equivalent of many hundreds of people. What a time to be alive. And that's just that's like encapsulates the feeling I'm feeling like, which is a mixture of it's kind of scary in a way that things have scaled up so fast, but it's also really cool, but also overwhelming. Like I don't know where to start. Like I'm kind of like jumping into all these tools. I'm trying to learn them, but I'm looking at my business. We're like 14 people, and I'm wondering like how do I even analyze what we're doing to figure out how we scale things up? And maybe that's even an interesting like starting point. Like how would you do that? Like what are you doing? Like maybe what are we actually using our tools for? That could be interesting. Okay. Do you want to start or you want me to start? I want you to start. You want me to do all the work? I want you I want you to tell me stuff. Okay. So while I drink this uh lovely drink here. So how am I using AI in my business? Yeah. And like what are the effects of it? Like first of all, actually, do you have that same feeling that now the tools are at the point where, you know, I don't know how many people are working with you, but it feels like I think a lot of the narrative was everyone's freaking out about being fired. Everyone's talking about like downsizing, but now I'm thinking about it differently. It's not about downsizing. It's about like dramatically maxing out the people who are there already with these tools. It's also about downsizing. It's also about, but I think but I think it's a the narrative is a little different. I I actually I actually think that we should be real about that because I think a lot of people say that it's not about downsizing, but like from the CEOs I speak to, I mean they're looking to get more done with the same or smaller team. Yeah. So how is that not downsizing?
Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So, Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you who want to build out their startup ideas. Now, they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, "How do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter?" All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas, or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need. So you can check out the link to startupmpire.co in the description. I mean it's uh you saw what Duolingo posted, the Duolingo CEO uh which is that they're not going to hire any more like external contractors. That's a pretty huge thing. Uh, and they're also both Shopify and Duolingo came out saying basically all of the employees have to learn all the AI tools. Plus, they're not going to hire people who don't know how to use the tools anymore. So, it's now an entry requirement. So, I think that maybe automatically starts to downsize or like restrict the amount of, even if it's just contractors that these companies are working with, which is kind of like crazy that in the last 2 weeks, Duolingo, you probably saw the Fiverr one that happened like 2 days ago, which was a bit more aggressive, which was more like if you don't get really good, you're basically [ __ ] And I think it's a these people are usually these types of companies, especially Shopify, are usually the first to come out and they're willing to get like shat on by the media a little bit, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. And like you're saying, you're having like private conversations with CEOs who are saying this. So yeah, I agree. Obviously downsizing is going to happen, but for me, I'm looking at this and thinking, okay, I don't want to fall behind. I want to make sure that my company's using these tools, and yeah, I want to know what you're doing. That's that's exciting to me.
I mean, I'm honestly looking at like every aspect of the business. Like if you if you take a business and you look at like, okay, what are all the moving pieces? So it's customer acquisition, marketing, uh sales, you know, fulfillment, engineering, design, and just looking at what are all the repeatable things that we're doing and then plugging in every single AI tool to get the team to start using it. But I can just talk about like one sliver of it just to give you a sense of like how anyone could use AI and how instead of hiring your first employee, you should probably just hire ChatGPT Pro. Like the mistake that a lot of people make is they pay 5, 10, 15k a month for their first employee when they should just be paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. So if you're starting a company, what is one of the first things you should do? Build an audience. Yeah. Why should you build an audience? Well, c you know, you'll have customers waiting for you. You'll be able to iterate on the positioning so you know like what what you what language they speak. And um in order to do that, you need to actually put out content on a consistent basis because of the fact that um followers don't count that much anymore. And it's about like hitting the for you page, hitting the algorithm uh where it where it, you know, where it hurts. So how do we hurt the algorithm? The the way to think about it is how do you hurt the algorithm the most? Yeah. Most useful clip of this podcast so far, right? Um but it's true, right? It's like how do you how do you like hit a home run, right? When you hit a home run, uh and you make contact with that baseball, uh it I wouldn't want to be the baseball. I'd rather be the bat than the baseball. Right. But it's interesting because I think you would understand this. This is an American, a baseball, but you're saying the first thing you would do is related to audience building, but in my mind when I'm thinking about my business, that's not actually even remotely part of what I was thinking of using it for, cuz I thought that was one of the spaces where it's very human. So, actually like what are you using it for? Like how are you is it to develop ideas and then like create loads of clips or like are you still the person? Are you still going to be the face of it? Is the founder still the face? Like how is this happening?
So if you're going to build an audience, the first thing you need is content ideas. Yeah. So obviously human beings could come up with content ideas, but it's hard to come up with banging content ideas uh every single day. So you can use. So okay, how would I use ChatGPT Pro? Yeah, like exactly how you'd use it. So I would say I would prompt ChatGPT Pro and be like um well we can talk about your business. Which model would you use for the like initial prompt, like GPT-3 or 4.5? You'd use 4.5, the initial prompt. Okay. And let's just talk about facilitator.com, your thing. So which is a training program. Facilitators. Yeah. Yeah, train training consultants on how to add the skill of facilitation to what they're already doing. Okay. So what would be helpful if you were, you know, obviously you have uh an epic domain, so you would probably wouldn't start with facilitator.com, but no, we had like ajensmart.com/facilitation for a while. Some first step is you'd you know, register your bad domain and you'd get a handle and then you would prompt Pro to basically be like, I'm building this new company, this is my dream, here's my goal, I want to make a million every year, and I want you to scour Reddit and tell me what are the most interesting stories from the facilitation world so that I can create um content around it. So, it's going to like basically tell you interesting validated stuff because uh I would actually include in the prompt, only give me results that you know, maybe it's 100 upvotes or more, 40 comments. Basically, what you're trying to do is create a a database of interesting content from that niche, and then you can add your spin to it. So the the, you know, I think that's the mistake a lot of people actually, what you talked about is kind of the mistake a lot of people make is say like, oh, I'm not going to use, you know, ChatGPT Pro to come up with content because it's going to come up with bad content. Yeah. Or generic content that anyone else could just read. Yeah. But like that would be my worry. ChatGPT Pro is basically just like a junior researcher. It is. It's ridiculously good. Yeah. So you just say like, "Hey, go search, bring it back to me," and then I would add it to this database, and then I would basically, I mean, I would either write it, I write stories myself, film stories myself, like maybe I'm taking maybe I say, you know, create a script that's 30 seconds that is in the style of Mr. Beast, and and then you start recording, right? So the but the first step is look on social, see what's worked already, and then add your spit on it. Mhm.
So you're first you're basically saying, okay, ChatGPT, find me angles, find me ideas, like go out and do the research, and then you as a human are kind of using, you know, your intuition, looking at other stuff to get like the angle for it and the feel for it and the thing that also makes it, you know, not, you know, I guess ownable and special is the way you deliver it, cuz you're human and you're going to deliver that different to other people. % % It's interesting you said like ChatGPT is basically like a junior researcher because my worry is like, oh yeah, but if everyone has access to this then it's all going to be just generic vanilla content, but everyone does already have access to that, it's just slower, you know, when you ask a junior researcher when at at AJ and Smart when we are researching content ideas, I guess it's the same thing, it just takes way longer, which is like that you you tweeted today that uh, you know, YC sees are looking for companies that can turn a 40-hour work week or 40-hour task into a 40-minute task. And I think that's the thing, right? It's not about everyone's getting the same data. It's all going to be vanilla. It's just everyone's going to get their stuff done much quicker now. And you get to the point as the founder or as you, the content creator, where you're just doing the thing you're good at, which is then presenting it and selling or talking instead of having to do all the research or wait for the research. Well, the other way to think about it is like you're now the editor. You're not, you know what I mean? So, an editor of a newspaper doesn't write a lot of the actual articles. Yeah. Like basically you have a bunch of journalists that are giving you all these articles, and as the editor you're like, this is good, this is bad, double down on this. You know what? Go research this piece. That's exactly the role of like the billion-dollar solo founder, like this dream that we all have around like how can I create a one-person company that makes a billion dollars um with the help of AI. So what makes the founder in this case special? Like does the founder, do you think that there's going to be a situation where it's so democratized and like, you know, the AI becomes so good, you know, we get to AGI that every random person is now just going to be able to generate ridiculous amounts of money, or do you think there's something inherently special you have to have or have to learn to be good at being able to control these tools? Do you know what I mean?
Have you ever read uh Rick Rubin's book, *Creative Creative*? You know, one of these books that's laying on my desk and I've like looked at little bits and pieces of it. Have you ever seen a video or photo of what Rick Rubin looks like? Yeah. He's like sitting there, you know, he's just. It's just intuition. It's all about intuition with this guy. Yeah. And he looks like Santa Claus a little bit. That's how everyone needs to be in front of their AI tools is no matter what niche you are, you have to be like, "Okay, I'm going to get I'm going to use these tools and I'm just going to be getting a bunch of really interesting ideas from it." And then I'm going to say, "That's a bad idea. That's a good idea. Double down on this." And just Rick Rubin, which is the taste thing, right? That's the taste thing. And you know, even you know this, what might be controversial, but even asking ChatGPT like, what does taste look like in the facilitation world look like? Like what do these people actually want? What actually drives them? The reason I said start with Reddit is because obviously the posts that have a lot of upvotes and comments, there's something that's triggering in those posts. Yeah. So, it's kind of like you're learning taste as Reddit, and Reddit is basically this microcosm for any niche ever. And that's why I love it so much in terms of like coming up with startup ideas, validating your startup ideas and stuff like that.
So, do you think like, okay, so I'm starting a new business or or my business, facilitator.com. Uh, one of the obvious things here is idea generation. What about execution? Like are there things that you're using AI tools for to move from this, okay, it's giving me ideas and I'm curating and editing, but now we also usually have junior employees to execute things, and that also seems to be something that a lot of these companies are saying, okay, if you don't level up you're going to be taken over by the AI tools. Like are you using AI tools for any sort of execution and output? Yes, like what specifically? That's like asking Rick Rubin if he, you know, looks like Santa Claus. Looks like Santa Claus, he does. So what, yeah, what you're you're using it for idea generation, brainstorming around the content thing, what sort of execution tasks are now getting, and what's so that's replacing. I guess the first thing is replacing you digging around for hours on the internet to get ideas, right, or having a researcher find stuff for you, so that's now like fully replaced by you being good at prompting the machine, and what, yeah, so then what sort of like practical execution tasks has it taken over for you? Well, then you know there's a there's a great tutorial we did on how I write with AI with Nicholas Cole, which is basically like, okay, how do I, let's just say I want to write a long tweet. It's like how do I get the main points across now that I have, okay, these Reddit posts that um are giving me insight and are giving me ideas. I can go and like write an outline, like a human being can write an outline, and then how do I prompt ChatGPT to actually like write the content and spit something back to me and then edit it. So that's like a whole thing that I do. But I think in general, uh, you know, I do a lot more writing than I do video stuff. But I actually think there's a huge opportunity to do like script writing and then uh like faceless video. We've we've actually like we've talked about that a lot. Yeah. But like, for example, once I mean you can just take me, like I have thousands of ideas, thousands of pieces of content that I've posted on X. um why wouldn't I take that and just automatically create faceless video from that? Yeah. So, for example, like uh the tweet I did today around the YC startups that uh YC wants to invest in in 2025, I posted it on X. In the last 2 hours, it's gotten like thousands of likes. I know that it's resonating. So why don't I just put that into uh ChatGPT, ask it to script write something that's 30 seconds, say I I'm doing it faceless, I wanted to resonate with this audience, maybe founders, solo founders, bootstrap founders or venture-scale founders, and then the creation of the actual uh video might be something like using like [redacted].ai AI or some of these other tools, and then you you do it manually at first, and then eventually you literally automate the whole thing, and this is what, you know, people call it, people like me call it vibe marketing. What is vibe marketing? Well, vibe marketing is when you figured out the manual process and and then you basically automate it all. So then eventually it gets to the point where you don't have to do anything really. You just press the go button. You press the go button, and now you're an influencer, and it's a machine. Yeah. And it sounds crazy, right? Like that sounds impossible. That sounds like science fiction. But I actually believe that that's where we're going. If you know how to set up the machine. Yeah. If you know how to set up the factory, then all you have to do is open the door at 9:00 a.m. and keep the lights on. And that's why I think this is such a great time to be business building.
It is crazy. I mean, again, I said like, you know, 8 weeks ago or something, I didn't really think that was true. And now a lot of things have changed my mind. One of the main things is just using the tools in my business and seeing like, a great example is we spent $35,000 to get a white paper created 3 years ago, which we used in a lot of marketing. Basically, we wanted this company to go and research all of these things that were happening at businesses so that we could have all of these crazy quotes and, you know, whatever we could pull from the study. $35,000. It took them like 3 months. Um, we basically recreated that study just by doing deep research in GPT-3 in probably 10 minutes last week, and it was better. And this is really crazy. This type of stuff is really, really crazy. And even things like creating Facebook ads, you know, we love Facebook ads, but they are, you know, they take a long time to create. You need a designer, videographer, you need like the person to put the ads on Facebook. And one of the things that works really well with Facebook is having crap tons of variations. And now with ChatGPT and just also the new imaging tools that came out, I can just like prototype, you know, hundreds of Facebook ads before we have to go and maybe shoot them or put me in them and and just figure out what's working. And even figuring out like recently what color one of our products should be by messing around with having ChatGPT generate ad images and looking at which ones were actually standing out the most. It's just things like this were very manual before. It would take us weeks, months even. And now it's like now it's like the creativity is in the creation of the products themselves, just to make the products special and human, but also in just coming up with the prompts. Like like that's the thing I've realized is like a a bad prompt gets me really crappy results. And I think that's what kept turning me off using these tools. And I also think that's what I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this podcast who've repeatedly tried using these tools and they're like that doesn't work for my business. But it's probably because they didn't really learn how to use the tools, like I didn't. And now I feel now I feel I can get like 10 times better results just because I understand how the machine is working and like understanding how to like teach it things and and add stuff to memory, and it's just really crazy. Yeah, I also think that there's a lot of people who play...
With these tools and get, like, for example, they use ChatGPT image gen, and they ask it to create a Facebook ad, and the the the words are wrong. Like, it it said “spell face,” and it spelled “face” f-a-c-e. So they look at it, and they’re just, “This is dumb. This sucks. This sucks. Doesn’t work. So dumb.” There’s all these people like us hyping up AI, and then they make fun of us.
That’s what I thought. Even you were making fun of me. I was watching your podcast, crying myself to sleep. I was watching some of your podcast episodes, and I was like, I don’t know, like if Greg is actually like what like the the people you have on talking about the AI stuff. I’m like, I’m not getting any results like this. Like the stuff that I’m getting looks looks crap, and like the the text that I’m getting out seems really, you know, ChatGPT. And then I just dug a little further and started to realize I’m just doing it wrong.
Like, even the image generation thing, like I only I only learned last week like a great hack for Facebook ads, just this is a complete game changer for me, which I’m sure I could have learned if I just Googled it or ChatGPT it, that if I find an ad I like the look of or an image I like the look of, and and I’m I’m just like screenshotting it and asking ChatGPT to recreate it, it’s not working. And if I just ask ChatGPT to reverse engineer the image and tell me exactly the prompt it would take to get that exact look and feel and then use that when I’m making Facebook ads. It’s completely different thing. It goes from like, you know, a person holding a product and it looks completely fake to indistinguishable from reality with like perfect text and everything.
Are you talking about image ads specifically?
I’m talking about image ads.
Yeah. So, this is interesting cuz you’ve spent many millions of dollars on Facebook ads promoting Facebook and YouTube ads promoting video videos.
Yes. Like, you know, you’re you might walk down these streets in San Francisco, and someone might recognize you from…
They recognize me, but they don’t know why.
Yeah. They’re like, they don’t know that they’ve seen hundreds and thousands of Instagram and YouTube ads with me in them, but they don’t know. They it’s like it’s in their subconscious. So I think that we’re getting to the point with AI where you can use a tool like Arcads or icon.com.
What’s AR?
So that’s something I don’t know about. What is that?
Arcads.
Arcads is basically ChatGPT image gen but for videos. So you can go like… I just pull it up. I’m just getting a free lesson here from Greg.
Is this the one everyone was posting about having like an ugly landing page?
No, that’s icon.com.
That’s Icon.
Yeah. Okay. That one I create winning ads with AI actors. Okay. So, what’s the like legality around this? Like, do you have to say the person is not real in the ad?
Not yet. I don’t… not yet, but probably soon.
Soon.
Yeah. Like, look at these. That looks 100% real. Is getting too many useless emails? Number two is not being… This is not real. Not real. your storage and productivity. Instead, try this app for free. Clean Fox will block useless emails and stop spam in one tapilist. Download it for free. Yeah, we’re not even that far yet. We’re still doing still images. Like, that’s… didn’t know about this. That’s what I mean. It’s kind of like I feel like when you if you don’t know about this stuff like okay the way I was being ignorant about it feels like instead of accepting that for now I can have like double the size of the company I’m just not doing it that like I’ve just decided I’m not doing that because I’m too ignorant to look at these tools. Well, which is seems ridiculous.
And on top of that, I want to ask you just separately in case I forget. People on X are saying right now is like, you know, this golden time where everything’s subsidized and cheap, but like these tools might cost a lot more money later, a lot closer to actual like employee costs. That’s that’s like one of the theories that it might go in that direction.
I think that’s probably right eventually. Like I remember taking Ubers in LA, and it would go I’d go from like West Hollywood to Santa Monica. They were nice and they were nice and it was like $8. It was like a 45-minute drive, and then now you go from like West Hollywood to Santa Monica and it’s like $800. So, do you think this is going to happen and that like now this is what I’m trying to figure out like should I drop everything and really get my entire team to learn this stuff and like go hardcore on it like while there’s this almost you know special period where it’s ridiculously cheap or will it be cheap forever or will it even get cheaper?
Well, the first thing is I think we have to acknowledge that this is like an insane arbitrage opportunity. It seems ludicrous. So, you know, things like Arcads and Icon you’ve never even heard of and you spent millions of dollars on Facebook ads.
Yeah, I never heard… I heard of Icon. I didn’t even I didn’t even try it. I just saw like people talking about it and I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting, but I’ll I’ll check it later,” and never checked it. And you know how important having a winning ad is to creating a business, right? It’s literally our entire business, you know, and and a lot of people’s business, right? Like if you have the right ad then that could be the difference, you know, it could be it could generate millions of dollars a year, right? So uh of course using these tools makes a lot of sense to do it now. So I think the mistake a lot of people make is they they well there’s a few mistakes people make. One is they tell their teams to look into it.
Yeah.
And the founders like…
Yeah.
Yeah. That’s that’s kind of what I did.
Yeah.
Like it’s…
Yeah. You shouldn’t tell your team to do anything until you understand it. Yeah. So, the thing that you should do is map out all the boring repetitive tasks that people do in your business from by each function and then try to do those tasks yourself. But use chat chat GBT to start and then if chat GBT isn’t giving you the result, ask chat GBT, hey, I’m not getting great image ads out of Chat GBT image gen. Can you recommend five AI a uh ad image gen tools that are highly rated? Yeah. One, two, three, four. Oh, I never heard of arc ads. Oh, I never heard of this. Right. So the way to think about it is chat GBT is like the top of the the triangle.
Mhm.
But there’s going to be hundred other tools that you’re going to be using. Uh that are more specialized for individual use cases and I know one of them which is Claude. Like that’s the level I’m at. Like I’m using chat GPT extensively and then just Claude and nothing else.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous. And you know, well, for now, it the good news is like you’ve acknowledged that you have a problem, and this is an intervention. This is an AI intervention. I mean, being here in SF is also a ridiculous wakeup call. Just like being in every cafe, listening to the conversations that people are having last night, just all the different conversations that came up, I’m like, “Okay, it’s happening now. This isn’t like I don’t know. I maybe I got a bit burned from the crypto like wave, and I was thinking maybe this AI thing is also a bit of a hype trend and I maybe that’s also a good way to just like not have to think about new things. But yeah, now I think I 100% realize that it’s not.
Well, I’m not saying AI is perfect.
Yeah, by any stretch.
No, that’s what you did say actually.
Yeah, AI is perfect.
Yeah, that’s correct. No, I think uh it’s not. and you’re the human editor, right? So, you can make it perfect. Um, eventually we’re going to get to a stage where I believe uh it is going to be perfect in some cases, but we’re probably like 95% now, 92%, so it’s like pretty close. You’re getting really, really good stuff now. And you’re right, the prices of these things are going to go up. They’re going to go up just because VCs subsidize the cost of a lot of these products. Also, people are going to see that like you’ll have some of these products. Uh, you’re literally sweating. That’s how excited you are. Uh, I should have worn way less. Um, VC subsidize the products. They’re going to get more expensive. You’re going to integrate things like Arcads and Icon into your workflow.
Yes.
and they’re going to see, oh my god, uh, facilitator.com is making $8 million a year and we’re charging them $200 a month.
Yeah, that that’s how it feels right now. Like the the tweet from Thiago, it feels like, okay, there is some sort of arbitrage right now. I was actually thinking as well like of pitching you a business idea like cuz this is a startup ideas podcast that I think you and I could do and because we probably won’t do it because we’ve got a lot going on maybe your audience can steal it. If you like the idea too much you can just cut it out of the podcast. I think a very short-term like I think a business that probably a lot of people should start in the short term maybe in the next three year like for the next three years that I think would make a lot of money if you know how to run a business is a business that helps other businesses especially small businesses use this [ __ ] properly like you know I’ll come into your company and do like a six-week sprint of diagnosing all the places where you can use AI setting all of that stuff up so that your you know I just thinking of the ads for it your 10-person team is now 100-person team I think you could I think that as a service would be very highly needed at this point to the point where even my company where we’re relatively like savvy we would probably be willing to spend 50 60 70k if someone was like we’ll just come in and do this over two weeks and give you a big like dump I think it’s a I think we should just do this business now. So, or you already have it. Are you actually already doing it?
Well, boringmarketing.com does like the vibe marketing setups and automations and stuff like that. But I do think that uh this idea is is is basically the equivalent of starting a social media agency in the era of social. Exactly. It’s going to be really profitable for about 2 years and then it will be like diminishing returns and then maybe you just don’t you move on to something else. But like let’s let’s talk about the social media era for a second. Uh who started a big social media agency back then?
Gary Vaynerchuk.
Yeah. And then you know Gary like Vayner Media I think is maybe a thousand employees. They work with all these big companies Pepsi and stuff like that. Well, uh, one of the things I think that Gary learned, uh, running a social media agency was, well, actually, how do I grow on social myself? He created a personal brand, YouTube channel. Now he’s like a a celebrity basically. And the number one reason it’s interesting for people to start AI workflow agencies and AI agencies and service-based businesses that help implement this stuff is actually not not because you can make millions of dollars a year from that, but it’s to learn the workflows and learn the tools so that you can implement it on your own software product or your own product. So doing it for other people, seeing all the different cases that it can be used essentially having the pressure because you’re getting paid to learn it and paid to getting being paid to get very good at it and then use that power for yourself.
Exactly. And I will say that you need a niche. You can’t be AI for everyone agency. So it’s like for finance for like law firms.
Yeah.
Yeah. And if you need ideas for that, like go to ChatGPT and be like, “Hey, I want to target a niche. I want to build a product. I want, you know, I want it to be high value. Um, give me 10 ideas around niches I should go after that are high value, that have boring tasks that are repetitive, that would be open to someone with not a lot of experience. uh you know, starting cuz you know, if you’re a kid out of college and you’re 21 years old or something like that, a law firm might not be the right niche for you. Um but small businesses might I think you you could make a lot of money just with small businesses. Yeah. just because they pro especially small businesses where the owners are like you know older than 50 or something where they maybe haven’t looked into how this stuff has been developing and it can be pretty overwhelming looking at this stuff for the first time and being like what the hell is AI you know like it’s moved so quickly I think there’s a huge massive I I I don’t really want to do it but someone should do it like your audience should be doing this I think it’s a really good business to learn you know do it for 12 months you’re getting paid to learn. It’s a good like $10,000 a month business.
Absolutely. I mean, at a minimum, if you know how to if you already have like an agency and you know how to get clients, if you know those types of flows, uh if you’re a consultant who helps companies do anything related to efficiency already, it’s a no-brainer.
Yeah, I think that’s the episode. So, how to be more productive with AI, how to build a one-person business, uh, startup idea, and there’s going to be one thing just to end this on. There’s going to be people in the comments just cuz I know what the comments are like, and I know this general topic of AI where people are going to be like, okay, you know, we’re saying this on this podcast, everyone can listen to this, so why doesn’t everyone just do it? and uh you know then basically there’s no advantage there’s no arbitrage. I’ll just say my part first of all not everybody watches you know if you look at the the numbers it’s not like 8 billion people or whatever it’s a very small sliver of society is watching this. Uh the second thing is most people don’t do any of the things. Like people watch things, they will hear us saying do this, this will make money, but it will be a small percentage of people who actually really dig into it and really nerd out about it. But I’m still wondering from your perspective like what makes someone what separates person A who’s going to have a one-person the first one-person billion-dollar business and person B who isn’t when both of them have the same tools like what is separating these people is it an inherent thing like is it something about their like they were born with more intuition or creativity or do you think it is actually learnable.
I think it’s 100% learnable. I think that the difference between person one and person two, person A and person B is that the first one, the person that ends up building the billion-dollar one-person startup is okay to use these tools, realize that they’re not perfect, but by the time that they’re perfect is a master at it. It’s really about mastering the tools, knowing them extremely intimately, uh because they’re highly nuanced and using the tools such that the first person gets such incredible outcomes, but and the second person doesn’t. Like I could play the guitar and uh Jimi Hendrix could play the guitar if he was alive. A dead person can’t play a guitar. That’s true actually. Um, but you know, it’s the same instrument, but Jimi Hendrix gets obviously a lot more than an amateur guitar player like me. So, I think it’s the same thing with musical instruments, right? And I think the only difference is you you can speak any language in this AI world. You don’t need to speak just English or just Mandarin. you could be anywhere and there’s like no gatekeepers anymore because you just build audiences to get customers or pay for Facebook ads to get in front of people. So, I think uh the tools are out there, but it’s it’s hard work, you know, it’s hard work to get good at the guitar. It’s hard work to get good at understanding how these I think it’s like a p like a thing you have to intentionally say every day I’m like what I’m doing now is like every single task that I’m doing from now on I’m going to use ChatGPT to do it. I’m not going to like bang my head. I’m just going to at least see if this tool can do that and improve that. And that’s like building it into my It’s just becoming a habit now that I just open this that I have this tool open next to what I’m doing all the time.
Yeah. It’s kind of like if you’re working at your desk and you always have water in front of it, you’ll probably drink more water. But if you don’t have water and there’s no and maybe you know you don’t even have water in your house or the water is downstairs like you’re just going to drink less water. So just making it a part of your workflow, seeing it, having a tab open, always just having it open.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. That’s what I’ve been doing. That’s my practice now.
Cool. Maybe you’ll come back on again and and share your screen. My one-person $1 billion business and be a billionaire. Maybe you’ll come back again and be a billionaire.
Well, you know, eight weeks from now, we will launch our fir like we will have launched our first funnel, which is every team member at AJ and Smart having the ChatGPT tab, Claude tab, whatever else they’re using open the entire time as like an internal requirement. So, I’m curious what’s going to happen with that. And it’s our first like attempt at using these tools completely integrated into building a funnel. So, I’m curious.
All right. Worst one ever. Makes $1. We’ll see. Thanks for coming on, man.
Thank you for having…
Yeah.