Transcription
I predict this video will create more AI millionaires than any cloud code feature, any cloud code tutorial video on YouTube ever will. And it's because I want to discuss a topic that no creator online, especially in the AI space, wants to cover, which is how come cloud code is on a generational run. Feature after feature.
You wake up every day on X on YouTube, they're just shipping amazing features and they just surpassed OpenAI ChatGPT and hitting a $30 billion run rate. How come they're making billions and billions of dollars every single month, but the millions and millions of people consuming content on how to use this platform are still what? Broke. No one seems to want to cover this topic. Everybody's just talking about, "Oh, cloud code feature, cloud code feature this, cloud code feature that." But it's like, show us the bank account. Show us the revenue made from these features.
This topic has been haunting me for the last two years. And the reason why it's so important to solve this problem is because it's the unlock to the one-person billion-dollar company. Over the last four or five years, I've been running clientacquisition.io, which is a growth consulting firm. I've made $15 million over the last four years. And when AI hit the scene, I saw that it was actually a big risk to my business, as it would allow one person to be able to deliver the same value as my $7 million a year company, where I have millions and millions of dollars of expenses every single year. If one person can deliver the same amount of value as we deliver with millions and millions of dollars of expenses every year, they're going to run me out of business.
So, I started asking myself this question, which is, how can I run the same business that's made me $15 million, but as a one-person company? And today, as I sit here in front of this camera, I believe that I've finally figured out how to do it, and I want to share it with you.
Before we get into how to launch, operate, and scale an agentic firm where you're a solo operator printing millions and millions of dollars per year with this AI technology, let's discuss the elephant in the room, which is how come the technology is better than has ever been, but you're still struggling to make money with it. While Anthropic is printing billions and billions of dollars per month, what's the difference? Understanding the difference in business models between Anthropic, a frontier model, and then a solo operator is the thing that allows you to know how to play the game.
The number one reason why every solo operator is struggling to make money with AI is because they're confusing their path to revenue, their monetization model, their business model with what? With the monetization model of a company like Anthropic or another frontier model. Let me explain. Anthropic's business model is to provide the infrastructure, the intelligence layer to every single person out there, but most importantly to businesses. The intelligence and the features are provided at such a low cost that it becomes a commodity. They do not make money from charging thousands and thousands of dollars per client. They want to be embedded in the AI workforce. They want to be embedded in the AI labor economy. Your business model is not to become the foundation model of AI labor. And if you don't understand it and you keep getting sucked into every single feature release of cloud code, you're going to remain poor. You don't make money from selling a commodity or a feature or utility. You make a lot of money from selling products built from what? From those commoditized features.
And this is the number one thing that I keep seeing people fall for. They learn all these things. And it started with what? Niche workflows. How many people have watched tutorials on YouTube of building niche workflows? Where are they today? How much money have you made from niche workflows? Zero.
So if mastering cloud code features or any other AI features you can think of isn't the path to building real wealth with this technology, then what should you focus on? Over the last 15 months, I've been looking for the right answer to this problem. And after listening to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours worth of investor calls and podcasts, looking at a lot of AI startups and looking at a lot of AI infrastructure businesses, looking at the chips companies, the energy layer, looking at the data centers, I finally discovered I think that the path to making a lot of money with AI is to get us far away from AI slop, from anything that can be done with AI, from anything that can be known by AI. You need to stay far and far away from it if you want to make money with it.
And the reason why I say this is because anything that can be generated or known by the technology itself, the intelligence is not valuable because it can literally be recreated, generated by itself. So in and of itself, if something knows the answer, the solution, it can create a product, it can create a service, then you're not really going to make much money from it because anyone can go on cloud code and say, "Hey, vibe code me this app. Build me this funnel. Build me this website. Build me this appointment setter. Build me this outreach message." If AI can create it, it is not valuable.
So what should you focus on? You should go all the way to the other extreme. You need to go find proprietary data. You need to go find data that is not accessible by this intelligence. And how do you do it? You have to go inside boring businesses. You have to understand their processes. You have to understand what works for them. What customers buy from them? What ads bring them the best clients? What is the sales process that creates the shortest sales cycle? What is the thing that they're spending money on? You need to look at their P&L and look at every expense line and see, "Oh, this company is spending this money on this, and this is the ROI from this line item." And understand why are they spending money on this? And then once you figure out every single data point, every single process, every single thing in a company, then you merge what you bring it to all together with AI.
The thing that kills me is that every single cloud code tutorial video that I see on YouTube with millions and millions of views is focused on what? On features. And they forget to say that these features are free. You're not going to make much money from taking something that is free from this frontier model and go charge businesses millions and thousands of dollars for it. It's simply not going to work. And no one focuses on what? How do you take this feature and go connect it to a playbook, a process, a data point in an existing business? Go work with law firms. Go work with consulting businesses. Go find an agency. And then I want you to do what? Replace their entire workflow. Replace an entire function in that business with this feature.
And you know why they don't talk about that? Because it's not as simple as vibe coding. It's the boring grunt work. You have to do what? Go acquire the client. You have to do outreach. You have to spend money on ads. You have to get attention. You have to do content. Once you've done the content, you then have to master how do you actually show the value proposition? How do you shift beliefs? How do you get someone to send you tens of thousands of dollars on a sales call? A stranger that you've never met before. A stranger that doesn't trust you. How do you get them to transact? Nobody's focusing on this because it is hard. Acquiring clients, acquiring relationships is something that AI cannot replicate.
And the reason why no AI guru is going to tell you to focus on a specific niche, understand their problems, focus on outreach, acquire clients, get on sales calls, get rejected. It's simply because it's going to pop the bubble. They'd rather focus on the features because it's what? It's dopamine maxing. It fries your dopamine system and keeps you poor and distracted and broke. I want to change that for this industry. I'm tired of dopamine maxing people. I want us to focus on what? On the things that make money, which is what? Maxing. Just focus on the boring work.
Now, let me bring this all back together by walking you through how I'm converting my $15 million growth consulting growth agency business into a one-person million-dollar-a-month company. For me to be able to pull this off, I had to build an entire platform which I call TryCookAI. The reason why I call it Cook AI is because you're either cooking AI or you're simply getting cooked. But that's beside the point. Let me break down how we did it.
So, step number one to having an agentic operation: you need to give AI the same skills and the same tools that a human needs to accomplish the work. Think of a media buyer who is, let's say, working in our business and running a VSSL funnel for our client. They need to build a video sales letter. They need to be able to build the funnel. They need to be able to know the best ads that perform and know how to script them, how to create the right hooks, how to create the right CTAs, to create the best lead magnets to have the highest opt-in. All those need to be converted into skills.
Once you've documented, codified all the skills you need to do the job, then you need to solve for what? Integrations. A media buyer needs access to what? To the ads manager. They need to be able to create a campaign. They need to be able to look at the data. So, you need to solve the integrations. So, in our company, we had to integrate the ads manager. We had to integrate the CRM, to integrate the ability to create content. We had to integrate the ability to create funnels. We had to integrate over a hundred different tools.
Just to put things into perspective, once we solved for step one, we realized that the next challenge was to achieve autonomous work. And the reason why autonomous work is something that you should focus on is because a human that has access to these skills and tools in a chatbot is simply not that valuable. They're going to cap, first of all, because they don't know what these skills are. They don't actually have the knowledge on leveraging these skills or these tools. So they become the bottleneck. But the other thing is, even if they were good, they don't have enough hours in the day to chuck their weight to a million or a million-dollar-a-month company. So inevitably, to scale past a million dollars a year or a million dollars a month, you have to remove the human from the loop.
How do you do that? We did it in two ways. First of all, we created missions, aka playbooks. Within a mission or a playbook, there is a set of skills and a set of tools and a set of workflows. To make things more concrete and easier to understand, I want you to picture a playbook as being one big file that contains what? Skills, which is the how to do the job. Then the next layer is tools that each skill calls on whenever it needs to essentially do the actual output. The tools are leveraged to create the actual assets. Then on top of that, you have a workflow, which is the sequence in which skills and tools are used. So when you're media buying, you probably need to do research before you start creating ads. You need to do the research before you create the funnel. So the workflow would be the sequencing of the tool call and the skill call. And on top of the workflows, you're going to have missions, which is when should these missions run. Missions is essentially when should this workflow, when should this automation, when should this whole thing run? Is it every week? Is it every day? Is it at a specific time? And on top of that, you're going to have the playbook. Every single job, every single function, every single business is a collection of playbooks. How do you make money? How do you fulfill? How do you collect cash? How do you do appointment setting? How do you hire people? All of it is a playbook. A billion-dollar company has a billion-dollar playbook for every single function in their business. Hence why the only real path to getting richer in capitalism was always to what? Acquire more skills, learn more things. You stop learning and you're going to stay stuck at that level. If you can't break through your current income ceiling or your revenue ceiling, it's because you're not learning more, whether you like it or not.
Anyway, building playbooks is bottleneck number one of achieving autonomous work. Bottleneck number two is you need AI employees that own each playbook. You need an AI media buyer that has access to the AI media buying playbook for the specific business. For us, we have a media buying playbook, and I was able to build what an AI employee called Alexander, who owns the playbook of media buying and taking care of paid media. Now, think about this for every single job in my business. You build the playbook, then you build the AI employee, and then you combine both and you create workflows. You create missions that are triggered every single day, every single morning, multiple times a day. And today, I just chat with my AI employees on Discord. That's where they all live.
Now, you'd think that this is all that it takes to run a one-person company, but unfortunately, it is simply not. Because a lot of people have been able to figure out how to build skills, how to do the integrations, how to build bots, how to build playbooks. You can do this on cloud code. You can do this on a lot of different things. But what people have yet to figure out is what? Context management, data management. And this is by far the most important variable to achieving an agentic operation. To be able to run a one-person company, you need to solve for context. If these AI employees do not have access to all the knowledge, all the context, all the data about your business, they will be useless.
And this is why even with all the AI hype around things like Cloudbot, Mac Minis, Paperclip, you've yet to see one person make millions and millions of dollars with an agentic operation. It's because to truly have these AI bots drive great value in a business, they need to know everything about that business. Data about sales, data about marketing, data about content, data about customer support, data about everything. Jack Dorsey talks about this idea of building a world model that knows everything about the organization. And instead of having the memory live on each agent, I believe that's how open claw and cloudbot works. Each agent has its own memory, but that's not going to work. We need all the agents to be able to work together on a common goal. And that is the last step that we've been able to solve, which is build a file system that has everything. The sales calls that my team is taking, the data from my content, the data from who has spent the most amount of money with us, why are clients working with us, who's getting the best success. Because now all of these AI employees that is are in step two now have a common ground, common knowledge, and every time they do something, it feeds into that common database.
Solving for context is how you achieve true autonomous one-person companies. If you do not solve the context layer, you're never going to have a one-person business. It just simply does not make any sense. And you're also not going to be able to sell AI employees to businesses, AI agents that do meaningful work, because they simply don't have full context. And the number one reason why companies have yet to see real value from AI is because they have to prompt the agent every time. They have to remind them every time where they're at. They have to remind the agent everything about everything, and it's annoying. It's much better to just get the job done with ChatGPT or cloud code by prompting it yourself than to expect an AI employee that doesn't know the little things that make all the difference.
Now that I've been able to achieve this, I believe that the future of business is going to look something like this. If you want to make a lot, a lot of money with AI, the only way was possible for me to be able to solve for all of these variables and make it possible for me to convert my $50 million business into a one-person operation is by what? Building an infrastructure platform that allows you to be able to create scales, integrate every single tool you need to drive value, allow you to be able to build AI employees and then playbooks, but most importantly have context and be able to take all the context from ChatGPT, from Cloud Code, ship it all into one platform. Take all the data in Google Docs, all the data from sales calls, from your Fathom, from your payment processor, every single data point that is valuable by your business. You can migrate it into one workspace where AI agents can actually do the job. And all you have to do is speak with them on Discord or Slack. And we call this platform Cook AI because I believe that you're either going to be cooking with AI or you're simply going to be getting cooked by AI. It is that simple.
And to summarize things further and to conclude, I believe that the future of business is that one person is going to be able to go own an entire vertical, an entire niche, understand every single playbook within that business, build AI employees that run those playbooks and connect these AI agents to the entire context about that business. And guess what? The beautiful thing about AI is that it is now recursive. Once you give these employees the right playbooks, the right skills, the right tools, and the right context, and it starts generating outputs, it will learn from its own outputs to improve everything, to improve itself, to improve the system prompt, to improve everything about that business. Which means the mission is: find the client, find the niche, build their AI employees, get them to pay you month after month without you having to lift a single finger because these AI bots, these intelligent machines are going to keep working for you for a lifetime. Actually, they're going to be working for your clients, delivering value, and you're going to get paid for the AI employees that you integrated into every company.
And if you're courageous and you want to go after bigger goals, start acquiring the businesses. You don't need to get a retainer or a monthly uh payment from these businesses. Acquire the entire business. Strip of all the waste and own businesses. Boring businesses from boomers who are about to retire and they don't have anyone to leave their companies to because their kids and their kids' kids don't want to operate these annoying businesses. But now with AI, you can operate these businesses with nothing but AI employees.
If all of this makes sense and if you resonate with everything that I just covered, please leave a comment in the chat, leave a like. And if you'd like to try Cook AI, uh, our platform, uh, you can find the link below. You can learn more about it or join my upcoming workshop where I walk you through how we're building six-figure-a-month AI growth firms in three to six months, going after specific niches and leveraging TryCookAI to get us clients and to fulfill. Click the link below to learn more. See you on the other side.