Transcription
All right, I'm going to be honest. Look, I am pissed. I am annoyed with the hundreds of DMs that I get every single day from people who want to become a millionaire, but haven't been told what I'm about to tell you earlier. And it will all make sense in a moment.
I'm going to walk you through the exact blueprint that I'd follow if I lost everything and had to start from scratch. Look, I made my first million at 23 and I went from having $50 to my name to doing over $150 million in my agency and becoming a shark on Shark Tank. And no one is more surprised than I am. That's why I'm not here to sell you some magic shortcut. I'm here to show you what actually works right now because the game has changed. All right, let's get stuck into it.
Step number one, AI is replacing jobs faster than anyone expected. Everything that moves will be robotic. Could AI be coming for your job? Concerns are growing about AI replacing some human workers. Trust in business is collapsing and everybody is distracted. And most people are going to be wiped out in this new wave of disruption. But disruption is a window. And if you know where to look, then you can turn chaos into your first million dollars.
Okay. So, what is the new game? Well, the new game is to learn to use AI to solve $1 million problems for $1,000 faster and cheaper than anybody else. And it's not that there's like a brand new vertical that it is that you need to enter. It's all about solving these problems quicker and faster than traditional businesses are able to do. And you need to go where the big money is already flowing. I'm talking about the boring cash-rich verticals like home services, legal, admin, customer acquisition. These are all the traditional businesses that have the biggest AI gap. Now don't look at these verticals and go, "Surely they are already completely swamped with competition," and think that that is a downside. That is an absolute rookie mistake because competition is proof, not danger. It shows that there is already a crowd in this market, i.e. people are already willing to part with their money to have these problems solved, which is step number one. Solve $1 million problems for $1,000 using AI.
Which brings us to step number two. And this is the biggest mistake that I see first-time founders make. I literally get 20 DMs per day from people who have made this fatal mistake. And it literally doesn't matter about anything else if you get this one thing wrong. Because most people try to force attention and compete with much more established competitors or create demand. That is a rookie mistake. You don't want to build demand. You want to channel it. The businesses that go out there and think, "Hey, I've got this incredibly innovative product that nobody else in the marketplace is selling, and it's so innovative that people don't even know that they need it." Right? These are the pioneers that die with their face down and arrows in their back. You do not want to be this. You want to go out to a market that is already proven that people are already buying things and you simply want to channel some of that demand in whatever it is that you've got to sell. You want to hunt markets where money is already changing hands, where buyers are irrationally desperate and competition is asleep at the wheel. The key is that you want to find momentum so strong that it drags you with it. And right now that stampede is AI.
When I started my agency, King Kong, I didn't invent digital marketing. I picked the fastest growing, most underserved niche in business, which was customer acquisition. And that gave me a tailwind because I didn't have to go out there and start to pedal something uphill. At the time of starting King Kong, it was 10 cents of every dollar was being spent on digital marketing. And I saw the future. I saw that there is absolutely no way that that was going to continue. And I saw a future where it would be, you know, 70, 80, 90 cents of every single dollar would be spent on digital marketing. And 10 years on, that's where we find ourselves. So I had the benefit of having that wind on my back, those tailwinds to propel my business forward, and I didn't need to swim upstream.
So how do you actually find these markets? Well, the first thing that you need to do is follow the cash. And you've got these big consulting groups like McKinsey, BCG, and Bain who put out reports that are like blueprints that show you exactly where the cash is going. And they've got all of the most highest paid consultants in the world that will do a lot of that heavy lifting for you. They are constantly analyzing the market and they will show you where the opportunities are. Now, if you don't want to read these reports, you can simply go to ChatGPT and prompt it to ask you, using McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, of what the markets are that are going to have the biggest tailwinds in the next 5 years.
Now, another lens that I like to look through in terms of picking a market is what is a service that is usually only available to rich people that you can make available to everyone. Think about how Uber, what they did is they took a private driver that was only available for rich people and they made it accessible to the masses using an app at the click of a button. Or Airbnb, they gave access to designer homes and exotic stays without the five-star hotel prices. They took services that exclusively are only available to the rich and they made them available to the masses. This is a surefire way of already testing the industry to see if there is demand for these things because people are always going to look up at those high-end services, but then they're going to count themselves out and be like, "This is not accessible to me." So, whenever you see one of those hot markets that you can see that like rich people are constantly using this service and you can think about a way to make that accessible to the masses, that is a winning idea, which is step number two. Find a hungry analog market that is bleeding money.
But listen, if you just want me to give you the market that you should enter, exactly what to sell, and how much to charge, then you're going to want to take notes because that's exactly what I'm about to give you in step number three. So, here are the five core AI skills and markets that I would enter today.
The first market is AI automation. I would build a virtual AI assistant that sets up automations using Calendly, Gmail, Notion, and ChatGPT. And you can apply this to any single market. Whenever a lead books a call, it auto-sends a personalized email, updates the CRM, and creates a custom property summary. And then I would charge $2,500 per setup to real estate agents. But it's not just real estate agents. Any single market where you have leads coming in and automatically booking phone calls and then there is a need for a salesperson or someone within the business to then interface with those leads. Having a setup like this will literally save people thousands of dollars.
The next is AI development. Now you might be thinking, "Hey Sabry, I'm not a developer." That's okay because there are hundreds of thousands of these guys, if not millions, on platforms like Upwork and you can simply go to them and get a developer to build a back-end tool using Python, OpenAI, and a legal AI database of existing legal cases. Then what happens is you get lawyers to upload a whole bunch of their standard stock contracts and then the system will rewrite them for new clients. They will flag risky clauses based on precedents and even suggest edits using language backed up by prior case law. And having a service like this will replace a $70,000 paralegal that law firms are paying right now. And I would charge them between $1,500 and $2,500 per month in order to get access to this.
And the third market is AI data analysis. So think about this one as an AI data scientist plus a growth marketer. And what you do is you connect Shopify and Klaviyo to BigQuery that uses ChatGPT to analyze trends. So you build a dashboard that alerts a team when revenue dips or checkout abandonment spikes. And you could charge $5,000 per month to install a system like this. This one can be applied to literally any single industry that uses data to make decisions. It basically gives any single business the ability to have a full-time data scientist.
Okay, so this next market is AI copywriting where you train a custom GPT agent to write high-converting sales copy, landing pages, ads, VSLs, any piece of copy that is actually deployed that its sole job is to convert traffic into money. Or better yet, you could use Kong, which is my own software. I am biased. The link is in the description. But you could use this tool to pump out thousands of proven ads in seconds and build out high-converting funnels for businesses. This is a huge pain point. Think about the market of agencies that exist that solely help businesses build out landing pages, build funnels, and write ads. And the way that Kong works is you simply copy and paste some basic information about those businesses into it, and it spits out winning ads, headlines, and landing page copy based on over $200 million in ad spend and $7.8 billion in sales. Then you could take that copy, whether it's for ads or landing pages, and you go to those clients and you simply say, "Hey, these ads are going to outperform your existing ads by a minimum of 20% or it's free." Because that's exactly what Kong promises. So whether they're running Facebook ads, Google ads, or they've got a landing page, or god forbid, they're sending traffic to their homepage, you can use Kong to basically get all of the copy that you need to completely build out that funnel for them.
Which brings us to the fifth and final AI market, which is AI design as a service. So the core idea for this one is very, very simple. You use AI tools to replace an entire design team for a small business. And the way that I would offer this is as a modular service. I would be picking of like, what is a specific outcome that businesses want when it comes to design? So a lot of businesses want to update their social media. So I would sell social media content packs where they get five high-quality carousel posts per month styled in Canva using their brand colors, their quotes, that can rip copy off their website, and then they just have 15 high-quality carousel posts that they can post on Instagram or TikTok or wherever it might be, and these are completely engineered to what goes the most viral. Or you could offer a short-form video pack where they get 5 to 10 AI-generated 15-second reels to post online via Sora or Runway or Google V3, whatever the technology might be that you choose to use, and they can simply then take those shorts and upload them to IG, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts. And the next one is D2C product photography. So you could use MidJourney to generate ultra-high-fidelity product photography or you can even create 4K lifestyle shots that takes their product and puts it in the hands of an AI-generated influencer in any single background that it is that they want and easily charge between $2,000 and $5,000 per month.
And you might be saying, "How?" Well, all of these services are engineered to solve a bleeding-neck problem that actually the client gets an ROI on. And they can look at this service and easily justify the $2 or $5,000 price tag because they're going to make way more money than what it is that you're charging. Now, who is this for? Well, you could apply this to local businesses without in-house designers. You could apply it to D2C e-commerce brands with outdated product pages or even coaches, consultants, gyms, therapists, tradies, or suppliers, or you could target influencers or info product creators that need monthly content. Everybody in business in today's day and age, they need content to post online. We are living in the attention economy. And any way that you can shortcut and you can remove the pain for them is going to be a win. And that's step number three. The five core AI markets that print money.
Step number four. So, how do we scale? This may be the most important step if you want to get to a million dollars. So, lock in because most people, they trade time for money. And that's fine if you want to create a job and not a business. I only like to build sales machines, and that is businesses that sell on autopilot and that compound in value. Because the new work model looks like this where you have a two-person $10 million team. Think about it where you have a visionary plus a technical director who can leverage AI. And this is the new norm where you have a director mindset, i.e. it is a high-leverage business model where you can have the visionary that thinks about, "Okay, what is that dream destination that my prospects are trying to get to?" And then you have the technical implementer who can then take that vision and break it up using AI where you get ridiculous leverage. You need to have the director mindset where you aim for 90% plus of all the repeat work to be handled by AI. And here is my filter for doing this. So the three laws of leverage. You want to be thinking about what is a business model that I can enter or a service that I can sell that has recurring revenue. You want to get paid monthly where you're not having to constantly chase new clients forever. And the next thing is that you need to have high margins. I'm talking about 80% plus. Think of it this way. Digital beats physical. So the cheat codes for these kind of high-margin businesses are services or information that you sell online. Where most people fall into the trap when it comes to selling services or info is that they simply sell out their time. But what you want to do is you want to sell outcomes, not services. Because when you sell an outcome, it allows for you to command higher prices. If you're constantly selling a service, people are like, they sit down, they scrutinize the list of everything that they're getting, how many hours that it is that you'd be billing them for, and it's constantly downward pressure on margins. But when you sell an outcome, that allows you to speak to the prospect about, "Okay, where is it that we're trying to go? What's this problem that we're trying to solve? How much is it worth to you to solve that problem?" And then you sell that outcome.
But if you stop just here, you're going to have a hard life because what it is that you want to do is you want to focus on the skills that you're acquiring while you're getting paid. And then as you level up as an entrepreneur, you want to move into bigger opportunities that leverage those skills even better than selling services, which is step number four. High-leverage business models only.
Which brings us to step number five. Listen, I sold $500,000 worth of services at King Kong before I even had a website. I actually did it with just a headset and a PDF. And I refer to this as my $500,000 PDF. I didn't sit down and think, "Okay, I need to have a beautiful brand. I need to have a brand deck. I need to get one of those big fancy websites and I need to have all these automations." If I would have done that, then I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today. But instead, I thought about, "What is the quickest way to go from zero to one? What is it that I actually need that's going to give somebody enough confidence to actually whip out their credit card and buy?" And I thought, "Hey, I can cover most of what it is that I need to cover in a simple PDF." And then I would have a basic billing form that would collect all of their payment details and away I go. Because the fastest way to waste time in business is to build something that nobody wants. So instead of building and going through all that enormous effort up front, we are going to pre-sell your offer.
So how do we actually do this and how do we get clients? Well, don't forget that we're starting from absolute scratch. We have no money, no connections, no rich uncles, right? We are starting from the bottom. So, here is our plan of attack. The first point is we are going to be building a list of dream clients. So, whatever the niche is that you operate in, right? If you're going to go after home builders, you want to think about, "Okay, cool. These are the home builders that I'm after." And we want to build a list of only all of the home building companies that are in the geography that it is that you're going to be attacking. And you might be thinking, "Oh, Sabry, that's a lot of work. How do I go out and do that?" Again, we're going to go to Freelancer or Upwork or any of these outsource platforms that we can find talent in order to do that for us. And there is endless numbers of data scrapers where you can simply say, "Hey, I want every single home building client in San Francisco or in the whole of Canada." And they will go out there and they will build you a list of only those people.
Then what we're going to do is we're going to use cold email outreach to actually send a message to those people because we don't have enormous amounts of money to spend on paid ads and building funnels and doing all of that stuff. We have to get down in the dirt, roll up our sleeves, and use human capital to go out there and get clients. We're going to send 400 cold emails per day. Again, we're not going to do that personally. We're going to use software. You could use Woodpecker or Instantly.ai. Again, these things you can get for $29 up to $99 a month. It's not an enormous amount of money. And don't worry because our clients are going to be paying for those fees for us. And I'm going to get to that in a moment. But we're not going to stop here because this is just one of the tools in our arsenal.
Then what we're going to do is we're going to use LinkedIn automation tools to get 150 contacts per day. You can use LinkedIn Helper, Salesflow.io, or Apollo. Again, it doesn't matter about the technology. These things are forever changing and there are endless platforms that you can use to do this where it's basically you're going to again identify who your dream client is, whether it's home builders, and you're going to use these tools to automatically go and request connections to these people and then even message them and follow up with them for you so you get inbound leads coming into you.
Now, once we've got all of these contacts on LinkedIn, then what we're going to do is we are going to send one-on-one personalized Loom videos to a whole bunch of those contacts every single day. I like to spend 1 hour per day and send five super customized and personalized videos to those people because then we have a mixture of like the shotgun approach where we're doing 400 cold emails a day. And again, you got to warm up to those numbers. You can't just start on 400 straight out of the gate. But we're not going to get into all the technicalities of sending cold emails because there are endless videos on YouTube that do a much better job at that. And you can walk through step by step exactly what it is that you need to do. But the whole thing is to not get bogged down. It's movement, not meditation. And the way that we do that is we do this level of activity and we create a down-and-dirty PDF that summarizes what our offer is. And then when it comes time to somebody to actually buy, look, we're not taking clients right now or we're at full capacity, but we're going to be opening this up in 2 months' time. All we require from you is a $2,000 deposit to hold your spot. Only once you take deposits do you know that you have got product-market fit because people are actually not just talking about doing business with you. They've pulled out their credit card and they're willing to pay you for this solution.
Which brings us to step number six. So at this stage, we have all of the groundwork laid. It's now time to introduce you to where most people get stuck because they get in their own way of ever becoming a millionaire because they overcomplicate things. So, let's make this super, super simple. As Elon Musk says, you either help a lot of people, a little, or you help a few people, a lot. So, you want to think about like, how big is this problem that I'm solving? And how many clients do I need to get in order to hit that million-dollar per year mark? And the way that I like to think about it is that the math needs to be so simple that even a third grader could grasp it. Let's break this down in terms of you've got your million-dollar target. So, this is what that looks like. You can either get eight whale clients that happily pay you $10,000 per month each, or you could go for 16 high-ticket clients that pay you $5,000 per month, or 41 medium-sized clients paying you $2,000 per month each, 83 small businesses paying you $1,000 per month, or 166 micro clients paying you $500 per month. But what I will tell you from experience is I probably wouldn't recommend going for 166 micro clients. People look at it and they think, "Hey, it's going to be way easier for me to charge somebody $500." Like, they're going to be so much more willing to spend that than they will for $5K. Right? What I will tell you is that those $500 clients, they're going to make your life a living hell. It's always the clients that pay you the least that cause you the most problems. And it's also a much bigger number that we need to go after, 166. So, I like the price point between $2 to $5K per month. And you need to be going after a problem that's big enough in order to justify that. But that's the sweet spot. And what you can see is that you're going to need between 16 and 41 clients in order for you to hit that million-dollar per year mark, which is super, super achievable, especially if you're following the plan of attack of reaching out to all these businesses like we just ran through. And this is step number six. It needs to be back-of-the-napkin math simple. If it's not, you're just completely overcooking it.
But none of these steps will matter unless you apply the seventh and final step because this is the difference between you building a business and not a job. Most people build a beast of a business that literally digs its claws into your back and leaves you with nothing but the scraps. Okay. So once the business is growing, it is all about building a machine and not a circus. Because the amount of businesses that I look at and I speak to every single day, they are not businesses. They are a circus. It is complete and utter chaos in these businesses. People are running around with their hair on fire. And that is not what it is I want for you. So a good mental model for this is that you want to build a pizza-sized team. So, the way I want you to think about it is that you want to keep your team under eight people until you hit a million in revenue because every extra person that you add, it adds drag and not lift. And the more it gets bigger, the more complex it's going to get, the more managers that you're going to need to bring in to manage those teams. And at the end of the day, if you're sub-$1 million, all of that is just noise. You want to keep it as lean and efficient as possible. You need to systematize your business, otherwise you will die. So what do I mean by this? Well, you need to document and delegate absolutely everything.
Now, at this stage, there's probably a voice in your head that's telling you all of the reasons why you can't execute this plan. But let me go back to what I told you at the start of this video. You do not need money to start. All you need is courage, a starving market, and a strong offer. And if you want to know exactly how to craft an offer that people simply can't refuse, then I made this whole video here that walks you through that whole thing step by step. And remember, the world doesn't reward the cleverest, it rewards the most committed. Go get them.