Transcription
Today, I have Justin Brooke with me. And Justin had a tweet that went pretty viral on X the other day about how he would take $50 and turn it into essentially a business with Replet. Justin, thanks for jumping on here today. You want to give a background on what you do?
Yeah, so I'm the founder of adskills.com. I've been building online businesses for 20 years now. For the last 10 years, it's been ad skills. We teach people Google Ads, Facebook Ads, all that stuff. And I just had an idea. I saw a post come through my feed of somebody else saying, like, if I had to make money quick from scratch, here's the steps that I would take. I was like, "Oh, that sounds fun. Let me throw my 20 years of experience into that." I didn't think much of it. I was just like, "All right, I need something to post on Twitter today." And so I kind of followed that format and lo and behold, it went nuts, you know.
So, I described something that I used to do back when I was struggling to make money. If I needed to pay rent, I used to do website flipping. And but you had to actually go and build a website. And so, I was like, well, let me show people how I would do that today with all these new AI tools. And I guess the market just loved that idea and they just ran with it. And I love the idea and I know this works.
So, I don't know if you remember, it was like a year or two ago, Google had their Google websites and they were suns setting it. So, like local businesses that weren't really heavy on their websites would have these Google websites and it was like at the end of March, let's say, it was going to go away. And so, we basically just scraped the list of like a thousand businesses that were using those Google sites and we'd text them or we'd call them. And we got something like five customers. And then we tried to go build the WordPress websites and that was kind of a pain because then you know you want to like get a WordPress developer to make it kind of legit. But like this is even a better idea. You can just use Replet and it's fully custom-built.
I'm going to share my screen here and I want to pull up your tweet. Here's your tweet. So it actually doesn't even need the $50 bucks. I just chose that number 'cause I know that's a small number that most people have. You would have $50 bucks left over. It basically would give you two months of Replet. I said, "If all I had was $50 bucks, you know, make money quickly. This is what I would do." And so this is literally what I used to do for money is I would look at look around town. We didn't even have Google Maps, you know. So we would look around for who has the ugliest website in town and then we would build a website because I wasn't good at sales and cold calling and all those things. And so what I would do is I'd do the work ahead of time because when I would make a video for them and show it to them, there was this wow factor of showing them that it's already done. You know, because every other web designer that's out there is like, "Hey, I'll build you a website." But that means that the customer has to think of it, has to get on a call, has to wait for the time for them to go and build it. Has to do the back and forth of revisions, has to trust that's the right person. So, it flips the whole entire sales pitch on its head when the work's already done and you're just showing them the website.
In fact, we actually got a $2,000 Mac laptop one time 'cause the computer store down the road had a horrible website. So, we just made it for them, sent it to them, and they were like, "Oh, man. What do you want for this?" And I was like, "Actually, we really could use a new computer." And I was hoping for one of the like ghetto ones in the corner or something like that. And they were like, "Sure, take your pick." And I was like, "Like, like even that one?" They were like, "Yeah, sure. If that's the one you want." So, we got this $2,000 computer out of it. So, yeah, find the ugliest website.
But then today, the new way instead of having to build the website, you just use this prompt and you could probably come up with a better prompt. Like, that's been one of the arguments is people like, "Oh, I use ChatGPT and I wrote a better prompt." I was like, "Yeah, but I wrote this like, you know, in the passenger seat of my car on my phone." But it does work. It is a very functional prompt. You can copy-paste that prompt into a brand new Replet account, completely free to open. Copy-paste, put that in there, and it will build you a really nice-looking one-page website. Totally. And I think some people think too much on the prompt. Like Replet's getting to the point where it's so smart that it's going to say, "Hey, I hear your prompt here. Do you also want these seven additional features and what do you want me to prioritize?"
Let's walk through the pricing a bit that you have here. And I'm going to read it. It says, "They'll ask how much." And then that's when you mention the price. "If you suck at negotiating, just say, 'Pay me whatever you think it's worth.' But if you're not actually a try to get $500. That's a great deal. $250 ain't bad either. Even if you only get $100, you'll be making $100 per hour for the work you did."
Now I want to push back here and say how could we build this also into a recurring business so that you get paid for making that sale two months from now or three months from now or a year from now? So the way we did that is we would sell them host, we would build them the website and we'd be like, "Well, yeah, we'd love to give it to you. All you got to do is go sign up for hosting here." And I mentioned that in the bonus that if you use an affiliate link for a hosting program, you know, whatever one you want. I don't care. I don't have a dog in that fight, but whatever one you want, use your affiliate link for a hosting program. Now, you're going to get recurring commissions off that hosting program. But then the other thing that we would do is we would just sell them like a maintenance package. You know, it's like, "Hey, you might want updates as time comes on. You want us to change anything? Okay, it's $200 a month, $500 a month or whatever." So, that's how you could turn this into recurring.
I like that idea. I think hosting is a no-brainer. And there's plenty of businesses or agencies out there built off of just collecting fees on hosting. Like just getting people to pay that recurring fee or paying a fee to say, "Hey, we'll also manage five updates a month for you." So that if you ever want something updated, you just send it to us and our team of experts will take care of it for you. So there's a management fee in there as well.
Let's talk a little bit about the type of business you're going to go after here. So, in step one, you say, "Open Google Maps and search some high-end services like CPAs, real estate, auto detailers, etc." So, you're looking for, in a different way of saying it, people with money. Is that right?
Absolutely. I think a lot of people when they're starting out, they go to their restaurant owners, the dry cleaners, the pizza shops, the coffee shops, and that's noble and good and you know, we all want to help those people. But the problem is it takes a hundred customers for them to make back the cost of the website. Whereas, if I go to a CPA or a real estate agent or an auto detailer, you know, they only need to get one or two customers from this new website to pay my fee. And so, it just is a much easier sale when you can say, "If this new website only gets you one new customer a month, then it's going to pay back my services."
And when you're looking for these, what's the website going to look? So, I know you say find the one who has the ugliest website. Are these going to be people that have already hired someone to to do their website and it just kind of sucks? Or are these going to be people that, you know, the dentist or the CPA just opened up a Wix account and was like, "This will do for now." And it still says like "warm" if some, you know, in some of the sections because you could tell they they spent zero time on it.
Yeah. So, I'm looking for even worse than the Wix website. I just found one yesterday. So, I was sitting at the coffee shop with a local guy 'cause this thing has been blowing up and people been contacting me. And so, I'm sitting with a local guy and I was showing him how to create your Replet account and do this in there and we find this. It was I think it was an accountant. His website had to have been built like 20 years ago. I mean, it looked like it was just published right out of Microsoft Word. It was just absolutely horrible. It was still using HTML on the URL of everything. It was just this static, really ugly website and I was like, "Yes, that one." And the reason why I like that, few reasons: this guy doesn't care about the web. He doesn't want to think about it, you know, and so what I don't want, I don't want to attract a customer who's going to be very finicky. They're going to be like, "Well, I want this design style. I want to make sure we have scrolling carousels." Like I'm looking for a guy who's like, "Hey, you know what? I just need something new. Pay one time and we're done." That that's what I would look for.
Now, if you want to have a whole web design business and doing all that fancy schmancy negotiating and all that back and forth revisions, then go for it. But I'm looking for a guy who when I look at his website, I'm like, "Okay, this guy's not going to try and negotiate on features. This guy, he's just going to pay me one time and we're never going to have to talk again." I like that model. So, that's what I'm looking for.
You want someone that when you send them your one-shotted Replet website, they're going to be like, "Holy crap, that's amazing." Right? Not someone that, you know, you need to send a Webflow like perfectly polished with all these different graphics and animations. You want someone that sees a general Replet website and says, "This is incredible. You take my money." You got to remember that this guy knows it needs to be updated. Like he's not a he's not a dummy, you know, he's not ignorant to the fact that his website is ugly. He's just busy and he's got more important things. But then you come along and it's like, "Hey, I just built you one. It's already done. All you have to do is swipe a card and it's a very easy transaction."
Do you want to walk us through how you would actually do something like this?
All right. So, this is one of them here that I worked on already. So this was the site and it actually looked worse on mobile. So this was his original website. It was pretty basic. I mean, I could tell by the contact form section here. There was just a couple numbers and times. There's just not much to it. You know, if you go to the about section, there's really not much to it. And so I decided what I'll do is I'll drop this prompt. And then I also wanted to test the prompt before I posted it just to make sure. I knew that it was going to work, but I just wanted to make sure, you know, so I dropped the exact same prompt in here. "Build me a one-page website. I want the navigation menu at the top to say Home, blah blah blah." And so I just pasted it in here, but I put the Google Maps profile and his old website. That way it would pull in some of the information. And so if I scroll down, we can see that this is the new website that they created. And we can go ahead and do another one. But you can see now we've got services on here. We've got a full contact us. There's a map on here. It did a much better job.
Now, one thing I will say is the first time I put the prompt in there, it didn't grab all the information successfully the first time. And so, there's been some comments on that thread of people being like, "Oh, well, I did it and I still had to give it another prompt or two." It's like, "Guys, we're already dealing with like basically magic, okay? You pasted a prompt and it built a whole website. Like, let's appreciate that." And so I did. I had to say like, "Hey, you got the address wrong. Try again." And that didn't work. So then I just went and copy-pasted the information and said, "Here's the information. Put this in there."
The way that I've been teaching people is pretend like you have a friend who's a web designer that lives all the way across the country or something like that and you're just telling him what you want. So don't try to think about prompts. Don't try to write this mega ultimate prompt. Just be descriptive. Pretend it's a friend that's across the country. They know how to build websites and you're just trying to describe to them what you want to see and just talk. And if you'll just talk to the thing because I notice a lot of people are trying to like save prompts and different files and all these prompt libraries and things like that. That's one way of doing this thing. But if you really want to get good, you have to learn how to talk to these AIs. And that comes from literally Replet's really good at just natural language conversation. And so here's one of my prompts where I said, "You did a great job, but please check if the right information is on the page. Here is some content about Colulbert CPA."
So, one thing I want to talk about here is the whole being polite to AI thing. I don't subscribe to the Skynet Terminator in the sky kind of thing that we have to say please and thank yous or one day there our AI overlords are going to come for us. At one level, I just don't want to lose my decency in the process of using AI. Like I want to remember to say please and thank you. I want to remember to say you did a good job. And then also I believe that these are linear thinking machines. And so when I say great job, it's a positive reinforcement. It's like, oh, okay, that was good. When I then say, "Hey, that was useless. It didn't work." It then knows, oh, that was bad. And so I don't think it's, "Oh, wow, that person was a really swell kind guy. He's always very nice." I don't think it's sentient like that. I think that I'm just telling the codebase this good, this bad, and in the process not losing my decency. So, I think that's important. And so, I went back and forth with it a couple times. Here's where I had to say, "Can you update the contact information with this info from the client?" And then it finally went and put it all in there. It put his Calendly link and it updated that. And that was it. So, there was three prompts and we built an entire website.
Should we do them live? Should we?
Absolutely. And I think something that a lot of people don't talk about is also you didn't have to go in and fill in our services or where it says tax services and accounting services. It's writing all that for you. Now, whether you like that or not, this is a V1 that you can send over and say, "Hey, look, we can change all this stuff, but I just wrote all of this out for you custom just to show you what it could be." If you go to Wix right now or Web Flow, you have to do all of that copy yourself. The fact that it's oneshotting all of these different sections and things that kind of sound pretty legit. They don't sound bad. It's just incredible. But I think it would be super interesting to do one live.
Let's go ahead and let me open up Google Maps. Let's go for what's like a high-paying. Let's go for auto detailer. Okay. So, just auto detailing near me. And then maps. Oh, we'll take a look at some of these here. We'll just start auto image. I can already tell that this is too nice. We don't want that one. Okay. All right. Here we go. The WordPress. We already know right here that this is probably going to be a good one because he doesn't even have his own website here. And so this is what I'm trying to tell people is like, I mean, how long did we really try, Nick? You know, it's like we're five minutes in and I think we already found what is this the third result? Dang. The guy is actually pretty good at word.
Oh, is he? Okay. So, I see too much effort in this. I think this guy is a DIYer and probably enjoys this process. You know, he probably pretty proud of this and so that's not going to fly for me. I thought that was going to be a Yeah, when you see that WordPress or Wix, usually a pretty good indicator. This niche might be hard because these are detail. Okay, spoke too soon.
And are you thinking anything about like the amount of reviews that they have?
I don't really care about that. So, that one was just going to an error. So, I don't know if he's just his website's down at the moment, but I'm just going to look a little bit more just to see if we can find one. All right. So, this one's way too good. Definitely not what we're looking for. I think we'll go with Oh, wait. Hold on. We don't have a website here. Whiteheads Autodetailing. That's a play as well, right? If they don't have a website, you give them a call, right? The only way you can get in contact with this person is through a phone.
Yeah. So, I'm just going to Google them real quick just to make sure. Maybe he just forgot to put it in here. So, Whiteheads Auto Detailing. I don't see any website, just a Facebook page. And it's really nothing here. Yeah. All right. This could be risky. I'm going to go with this one just for sakes because we only have so much time. But this could be risky. Maybe he's out of business. There's so little. But this is a good example. Like he doesn't have a website here. So we're going to go with this one.
And I think if you're actually doing this, the way to derisk that is you give them a call before you even put this in Replet. You say, "Hey, I just built you a website. I know you don't have one. Is it okay if I just send you over the link? No strings attached. I'm just in full transparency. I'm just practicing right now. I want to see if you like my website. So, what's a good email or phone number that I can text this over to?" That's how you derisk that and basically make sure that they're still in business. Yeah.
So, we are going to go ahead and paste in the prompt here. I got to change up a few things. He doesn't have a website yet. So, and then his Google Maps link. Just for people to see how I got the Google Maps link. I went to Google Maps. I click share. I click copy link. All right. So then we can go back to Rep, paste that in there. And then and also pull information about for the about services and contact session from their old website. I'm just going to I'm just going to drop this down a little bit. And since he doesn't have a website yet, I'm just going to edit that prompt just a little bit just to say with these details and I'll just go paste in from their Google maps. You know what? I can probably screenshot. And then this little function right here, in case people don't know, you can have it take a screenshot of something or you can get text content from there as well. So you can it'll basically just scrape the text content. So I like to use that more. And then we'll also attach that screenshot that I just took. Okay, I am going to go ahead and hit start building.
So it takes a little bit. Replet is programmed to try and show you an example of what you're doing extremely fast. You know, that way you're not sitting around wondering. And so, it's basically going to quickly render out the HTML and CSS and then it's going to start building along the way. Now, the first thing it's going to do is it's going to try and understand your prompt and give you a plan. They're going to say like, "Is this what you want me to do?" And then you just say yes.
Now, what it's also going to do is you'll see it's going to ask me if I want a couple more features. After watching some videos of the owner of Replet, he says that you shouldn't do a lot of features in the beginning. He says instead, do one feature at a time. It's incredibly good at making one feature at a time. If you ask it to make a bunch of different features though, it's going to struggle to do all of that work. So, I'm not going to add all these things in here. I'm just going to do build the initial prototype. The plan is good. So, we're going to go ahead and approve plan and start. And then you'll see on the side as it starts building.
While that's building, I'll explain a few things. I'm not a Replet pro by any means. I'm not like a Replet trainer. I'm not affiliated. I just think they're cool. But some of the things that I've learned over here on the side is you can look at the console over here. If you're ever wondering where your preview window went, you can always just reopen that here and then you can see the preview. When everything's done and you want to share this with someone, you have to deploy it first because it's only building it in a temporary install in your account. If you want to share it with someone, you either have to take a video of it or you have to hit the deploy button up here at the top and then that will actually host it in some long ugly URL. But that's what you have to do in order to be able to share this with somebody.
So what it's doing right now is it's going through and it's creating all the code. It's creating all the structure, the scripts, the index, and so we should be able to start seeing a preview any minute here. Here we got it here. Whiteheads. All right. So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to say, "Change the headline on this page, too." All right. So, updated. Let's go ahead and roll back to here. And we just got a popup there saying, "Add a database." I think this is good that this just happened because this happens every time you try to build a website or app like this, right? So, what happens when you see that?
Oh, I usually just hit maybe later. Especially if you don't know what a database does, just don't say yes to it. So if you want to edit the website, you kind of just go top to bottom. And so it's like, I don't like the one thing I've noticed, Replet seems to default to this kind of white, gray, and blue color scheme, but you could change the prompt and give it some more color. So, I'll just say, "Instead of blue accents, can you make orange?" And now it's going to change the We see we've got this little blue accent. We've got blue accent buttons. And so, whatever we want to do, we can just tell it. And then if it gets stuck, you can just take a screenshot of a section of it and say like, "I want you to change this section or I want you to fix this thing." And that's how it can kind of see what you're trying to describe it.
If there's anything on the web, if you look at a website and you're like, "Oh, I wish I could have something that looks like this." Take a screenshot of that thing and then paste your screenshot. Just attach it right here in your message and say, "Can you add this design to the services section or to the reviews section?" And it'll be able to copy that really well. Yeah. And depending on the person that you're making this for, you just go find their logo and you find like the RGB color that it is and you give it to it. You say, "Hey, make this in the exact colors of this logo here."
I think just like almost a cool party trick of this is that button at the top where it says contact us. That'll be linked with their phone number. So when you send it over to them, you could say, "Hey, click on the contact us." It's already ready to go. Oh, when someone clicks on that, it's going to automatically start calling your number. It's already like functioning and ready to go. Yeah. Yeah.
Let's see here. Anything else you want me to change on the page? Do we have their logo? Could we add that to the page? Let's go ahead and see if I can grab that. So, I went and downloaded their image. Just this big old Whiteheads Auto Detailing thing. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste that in as an attachment and then tell it, "Can you change include this?" And now I don't know if I love that design, but it is what it is. Totally. And I think if we wanted to go one step further here, we could go over to ChatGPT and say, "Hey, take this logo, polish it up, and make it look better." Pull back that logo into here. And not only did we design a whole new website for them, we also just gave them a logo that's probably nicer than the one they have. Yeah.
So, yeah, if we weren't like marked by time on this interview, there's a lot of things that we could do. But then also, there's something to be said in just moving fast. If you really want to be making $100 an hour, well, then you got to just kind of build it. Make a quick little Loom video, send that off, do it again, send it off, do it again, send it off. And if you'll do this three or four times, you're going to start getting some people that are going to bite on it. And that's what we found is, you know, some people, they posted it and they didn't get their first sale, but if they sent it to like five people, they were like, "Hey, I finally got one interested." And it usually takes somewhere between one out of five, one out of 10 to get a good deal.
What do you think is a realistic close rate for someone that wants to start doing this?
So if you if you don't have any sales experience, probably one out of 10 would be I. If you're just absolutely horrible, probably one out of a hundred, you know, but most people if you have a somewhat of an eye for design, you make a good video, you got a nice background, if you're not like wearing a hood and you're masking your voice, if you don't look scary and you send a decent video, then you should be able to close one out of 10. I seem to be able to close like one out of five, one out of three. Yeah. But I've got 20 years of sales experience. But even a 10% close rate is pretty incredible. If you have to do 10 of these, which is going to take you what, three hours if you're really hustling, that's pretty insane that you can send out 10 of these and get one customer. And by the way, that's not just one customer that's going to pay you once. That's one customer that is going to pay you for the next two, three years. This is so sticky. is like the best part about this is the the fact that once you get them on, they're not going to say, "Hey, I'm going to figure out someone else to pay $20, $30, $50 a month for hosting. It's just going to be baked in and it's just going to be an expense that they're used to paying."
And reaching out to these people, how do you recommend it? Are you cold calling them? Are you texting them? Are you just emailing them?
No, actually, let's do it real quick. So, I'm just going to pretend like I opened up a Loom video and we'll have it on the script. So here I opened it up in a new tab, the full website. And so I'm just going to pretend. All right. So, open up Loom. Gives me the three-second countdown. "Hey guys, I just wanted to show you this new website that I built for you. I saw you didn't have one when I was checking out your Google Maps listing. And it's it's real fancy. You can just click the about button. It scrolls right down. Services scroll right down. So you don't have to wait for page loading times or anything like that. Your reviews are on here. Now, it tried to pull from Google Maps, but I can change this section to whatever you want. If you have other reviews you want on there, and then it built you a nice little contact us, and we can fix up this map here. Anything you need changed, I can change it for you. But I just wanted to show you that you now have a website. Let me know if you want it, and we can talk about how to get this over into your hands. I'll talk to you soon. Bye."
So, one-minute video, couple of little, "Hey, we could change this." So, this is what the benefits, you know, drop a couple of benefits. Mention that you can change anything on the page for them. Give them a quick little tour, but you want it to be like a one-minute video, two minutes max, because you want to I'm just trying to open a conversation. I'm not trying to actually sell the thing in a one-minute video.
Absolutely. And something that I think you can do here that I've done is you go find all of these businesses or let's say we just built this for them. We take their number and we just drop it in iMessage. And when you drop it in, you can see one if they have iMessage, right? So if it turns blue or if it turns green, maybe part of your strategy is to only go after people that have iMessage. That's what I was doing when I did something similar. And you just drop this to them. You send, "Hey, this is Justin. I built you a website. I made you this video. Let me know what you think." And then you just drop the link to the to the Loom video. Yeah. I think that's a killer. Yeah.
There's guys that are now automating this whole process where they're using like Make and Zapier to scrape Google Maps, grabbing the information, drop in the prompts. I mean, this thing's become like a whole method online. It's pretty cool. It's out of my hands. You know, they're all doing it and they're just sharing results and that's really cool. I just I don't need to control it. I don't need to be like the course creator or anything like that, but I do enjoy hearing like how people are using it and that it's working for them. Like that just makes my day. So, if you do use this, just hit me up on Twitter and let me know. Just it just brightens my day. Let them know when you made your first $100 or $500 and built this into a full business that you know makes you recurring revenue off of working one time and prompting Replet in an afternoon.
So, this was awesome. Justin, I appreciate you walking me through this because I think this is a real opportunity, right? A lot of people get intimidated by AI and it's like, oh, I need to build this massive AI app that does all these different things and you have the 11 Labs of the worlds or the Gammas that are raising tens of millions of dollars to build these AI tools. But this is really the easiest way to get your foot in the door with something like AI. And anybody can do this with $25. I think I just saw if you know Lenny's letter, if you sign up to his $200 a year newsletter, you get access to Cursor, Replet, Lovable, year-long memberships to them or accounts to them. So, everybody has access to these tools now. Everyone can find $25 to try out Replet. So, this is this is super attainable for everyone. So, thanks Justin. Anything else you want to leave us with?
No, I'm good. Just thanks for having me on and jazzes me up to share these things with other people and just if you would like to talk more, I'm on Twitter or X. I am Justin Brook.
Perfect. Thanks, Justin.