Transcription
In today's video, I wanted to talk about how to make money with AI. Now, this is a bit of a controversial subject, believe it or not, because as with most new markets or opportunities, when something new comes out, you have people that make actual real life changing money with it. And then you also have the people that are telling you that are going to teach you how to make tons of money with it, and you just have to buy their course. Most that seems to somehow end in a scam or a disaster or a scandal of some sort. In general, people that teach you how to make money, but the way that they've made their money is teaching people how to make money, that's just in general a huge problem and it ends in tears.
At the same time, I know that a lot of you expressed interest in this subject. I've been running businesses for more time than I care to admit, both online and offline. So, I have enough failures and successes under my belt to hopefully be helpful to somebody else. Certainly, if I could go back in time and coach my younger self, I know I would have seen more results with my experience now than just stumbling through it.
With that said, my sponsors pay me for my time here. So, this isn't going to end in some get-rich now quickly course. It took me about five years from the time that I quit my job with the intention of starting something for myself to the point where I realized I did not need a job anymore. And that business that wasn't YouTube. That wasn't what I'm doing now. This is some weird side quest. Or maybe it's like book two in a trilogy. I don't know.
So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start a playlist and do a video maybe once a week or a few times a month and add it to the playlist. That playlist, those videos will focus on building businesses and specifically how to take advantage of this opportunity that AI is creating to, you know, let's be real, like live a more comfortable life by having more means. Money doesn't solve all problems, but the problems that it does solve, it does very well. So, I don't really have a plan for this, but I do have some ideas that I want to discuss. Definitely let me know down in the comments what you want to know more about.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we'll talk about how to build a business from scratch, how to take advantage of this AI opportunity, specifically what are kind of the most exciting and best targets to shoot for, and we'll also talk about some counterintuitive pitfalls that I think a lot of people fall into. There's certain mental traps that I think don't allow people to make money. I often say that it's important to be humble to not let your ego get in your way. And when you're thinking about building a business, it's almost the reverse because that's when our fears, our insecurities, and something that people refer to as the resistance, that's what really kills people and prevents them from progressing.
When we embark on our business journey, we tend to sort of grossly overestimate how much money we're going to make in that first year. Often times people are like, I'll make $10,000 a month, $100,000 a month. But interestingly, most people greatly underestimate how much money they could make or they will make at the 5-year mark. In my first year, when I quit and pursued my business, I wanted to make $10,000 a month. I I didn't get anywhere near that. But roughly 5 years in, I launched a business that within that year, it did $1 million in sales. It was an e-commerce business. I've showed screenshots of the Stripe dashboard in the past. Maybe one day we'll do a full deep dive. But I would have never guessed that 5 years after starting I would have a million dollar business. That would have seemed like an unrealistic goal. So we tend to be optimists for the near-term and kind of pessimists for the long term. But with building businesses, it tends to be the the other way around. It takes time usually to build something sustainable, something good. And sometimes it happens fast. Sometimes it happens, you know, not so fast. But when you find something that sticks, that has a product market fit, that has something going for it, it provides value, that often times eventually tends to exceed people's expectations.
So, I don't know how actionable that is exactly, but the point is, if you were to tell me your ambitious goal a year from now, I wouldn't bet on it. Like, if it was my money, I wouldn't bet on you accomplishing that. Not because you're not an amazing person. It's just if you're giving yourself one year to go from zero to whatever number you want, that that might be difficult. You might get there, you might not. There's too much variance. But if your goal is like high six and seven figures, but five years out, I would be a lot more comfortable betting on that. Especially if I can be reasonably be sure that you're going to keep working and not give up. As long as you're kind of grinding away at it, then I would feel a lot more comfortable betting on that to happen versus some short-term one-year goal.
Case in point, I want to show you a real business built by somebody that didn't have too much of a technical background. It's basically one dad who can't code who launched a business. It used AI. It's something that you could easily do, but I think it illustrates a point. Now, if any of this resonated with you, go ahead and subscribe. I felt a lot of resistance towards making these videos about building a business, making money, because I wanted this channel to be about AI. I didn't want people to think that this was something different. But after reading some of the comments, I do feel that I've failed some of you by not talking about it. If you want to hear about it and I feel like it can provide some value than what some small percentage of trolls might think about this, well, I don't think it matters and I do feel on some level I let it matter and I do apologize, but I'm going to try to change that right now. So, please subscribe and let's let's dive in.
So, I did a video way back in December of 2023 where we highlighted a few different businesses where people were building businesses using AI. So, here's one of the businesses that we've talked about. This was done by David Breler and this is his business formula. So, this is actually a screenshot from the way back machine from around the time that I've covered this product. Now, David, the person that built this, he's not an engineer. He he can't code. He used something called Bubble AI. We'll come back to that a bit, but you know, this was again in at the end of 2023, this was before Cloud Code. I think this was before Codeex, or at least even if they had their first iterations of those things out, they weren't anywhere near what they are today. So, the stuff that he was using was like prehistoric compared to what we have today. And his little product started making $25,000 per month. And this was recurring revenue since this is a subscription product. So, looks like they had a free plan and a pro plan for $9 per month. So, the $25,000 figure, it was MRR as we refer to it in the biz, monthly recurring revenue. So, $25,000 divided by $9. So, let's call it 2,700 or 2,800 users who signed up for the pro plan. And that brought him in $25,000 a month. What was the brilliant plan? What was the brilliant product that he was using? It was Excel formulas. Like, let's say you wanted to average column A. This thing would tell you what formula to use. So, he provided a service where AI helped people with their Excel spreadsheet formulas.
Was this an instant success? No, it was an instant catastrophic nightmare, borderline failure. It went viral on Reddit/Twitter and uh he racked up a $5,000 OpenAI API bill overnight. So, he woke up $5,000 in the hole with zero revenue. So, he nearly shut it down, but he decided to add a paywall, ask for donations. He persevered and he decided to keep going and within a year of starting he got to $25 to $30,000 per month. Again, that's obviously on the faster side. So, I don't want people to think that this is the average timeline, but as you'll see, this is not uncommon. We'll have enough case studies here to, I think, hopefully convince you that this isn't some capturing lightning in a bottle. There's tons of these. Some of them are known about because the founders talk about it. They they get showcased. They go viral and and some of them are not known about because the founders keep their mouth shut and just print money. In fact, probably most people would tend to go the, you know, the covert route because loose lips, as they say, sink ships. Although, if we're being serious, I do believe that in the kind of modern era with internet and stuff like that, it's usually better to get exposure. Even if you're talking about how you build your business and how much money it's making, just kind of that word of mouth, you're better off talking about it for a million different reasons. Not just because it brings customers in the doors, it also just gives you a lot more opportunities.
Now, obviously, this was a few years ago, right? So, this is 2023. We're in 2026 and since then the amount of stuff that our AI chatbots can do has just multiplied. That's probably why I'm showing you an image from that time period instead of the live web page because I'm sure he's shut down the business and uh no longer making money. Right? Ask yourself where do you think this business is now? Here it is. Trusted by 1 million users worldwide. The web page is a lot nicer now. Very slick, very beautiful. There are more plans including enterprise plans yearly, monthly, etc., etc. So, how much is David making right now this website? So, year of our Lord, 2023, he's making $25,000 a month recurring. We're now more than halfway through 2026. But how much? Take a guess. Well, he just about 10xed it and maybe actually a little bit more because for 2025 reportedly he was making $226,000 per month again recurring. So $226,000 a month. So that's a cool $2.7 million ARR or annual recurring revenue. Now, reportedly he also turned down offers from Microsoft to I, as far as I understand it, wanted to purchase this and bring it into Excel to become an official plug-in. He turned down venture capital money, including again reportedly from Sequoia. He just wants to continue selling his Excel spreadsheet formulas directly to the consumer. And you know what the funny thing is? He still can't code.
So the takeoff of the business was super fast. Again, keep in mind that's kind of kind of way ahead of schedule. So in the distribution of the different businesses, how they grow, this is definitely kind of in that tail end. It's much faster than we you would expect to see. Probably driven by kind of the AI hype. But again, notice he got to $2.7 million per year recurring with within four years or thereabouts. Another quote-unquote startup or you know one-person team that we covered back in 2023 was this thumbnail test. So this thing was generating about $20,000 per month back in 2023. Looks like he sold it for six figures. So it looks like he sold it for six figures in 2024. So he's saying he sold it for low to mid six figures. So $300,000, $400,000 maybe something like that.
Then of course we covered PDF.ai. So again this was from the original 2023 video that I did. This was Damon Chen. So he is a one-person team. So this is a solo wolf founder and the revenue was about half a million per year. This was purchased for $20,000 from some dead GitHub repo. So the code was just available. He purchased it, paid $20,000 for it, turned it into this, and it grew to half a million. Half a million in annual recurring revenue in 2023, then peaked out at $1.5 million annual recurring revenue. And if I understand correctly, that was kind of the peak of this boom. It went back to about half a million annual recurring revenue. Still not too bad. Again, for purchasing something for $20,000 and then, you know, turning into six and seven figure annual revenue is pretty amazing.
So, what should you be doing now? If you wanted to build something on your own, maybe it's a software like what I showed you here. Maybe it's a completely different product. First and foremost to understand that the kind of fundamental thing here, the the engine that's going to drive a lot of it is probably going to be some frontier AI model. I have Fable 5 in one window. I have GPT 5.6 Soul on high in a different window. By the way, I'm not recommending you give it full access or just put it on autopilot. There are real dangers with that. So, know what you're doing. But if you haven't started yet, maybe you were a little bit intimidated by what seemed like a lot of developer tools. It seemed very complicated and tech heavy. These new releases and updates really they they erase a lot of that. They make this a lot simpler. This new ChatGPT desktop app which now has ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Code Interpreter. A lot of people, developers, people that are be using this, they they're not loving it. They're they're hating how everything got smooshed into one thing. But if you're coming in brand new, this might be just the easiest, smoothest onboarding process. Just get an OpenAI account, download ChatGPT 4 desktop. It's it's available on Windows, Linux, on Apple. Both of these are across all platforms. And or also get the Claude desktop app. This also as of recently has everything baked into it. So it's got the the decoding aspect, the chat aspect. So if you haven't seen Claude recently, so here's kind of like what it looks like, what it has. So on the left hand side you have your regular chat. So I'm talking to it. I have it running on Fable 5 High. I know that's total overkill. I also have it developing something. So that's that's why I'm using that for this particular use case. And so I just chat back and forth. It does the research and and and writes out a bullet point article for me. So, I don't have these chatbots writing scripts for me because you just end up sounding horrible. But I do have it do deep research, pull out these like bullet things that have the right numbers, dates, the right sources, and it gives me these little cheat sheets that I can reference while I'm talking about something. I have all my notes, all of my figures, and all of the links so I can show it to you as I'm doing it. And then I can say, okay, actually, let's put this part first. And it changes it. And then throughout the video, like for example, at some point I asked it, oh, what happened to thumbnailtest.com? As you can see, my attempting to type in here and asking it for that information. This was while I was doing the video. It goes, it researches it, it finds all of those things and it adds this 2026 update. And at that point in the video, I say, "Oh, by the way, you know, he sold it for six figures." And I can see his interview on Bootstrapped. So, I'll move this over to the left so I can show you the other thing that they've recently added. If I click on, let's say, the founder interview, it opens up within Claude Code. They have their own sort of browser that's built in there. And I mean, you can make this larger or smaller. You can arrange it however you want to, but here's the browser with everything and you can actually have Claude interact the browser, pull information from it, etc. So, I I would say if you haven't gotten started with using this to their for ability. So, it should be doing research for you. It should be writing for you, not the final output. So, don't have it write scripts or tweets or blog posts. Do the research and kind of just manage all that for you. You write the final output or you speak the final output. You don't let it do that because that causes issues. You never want to become the mouthpiece. You don't want to try to outsource your understanding because that's impossible. It's your assistant. You you should still be in charge of understanding what it is that you're doing that you're talking about. But step one is offload as much as possible as here. Start doing coding. Start building a little apps for yourself. It's not that complicated. I'll have a few future videos coming talking about how to do that exactly. And go ahead and get a paid account. You should have either ChatGPT or Claude or one of the other bots. These two are kind of probably near the top of most people's list. They tend to have the top models. They kind of bounce back and forth, but have one of those plans. And and this is a little bit more advanced. This is maybe for the more intermediate people. If you type in slash usage, it shows you how much usage you have left in the current time period. So right now GPT 5.6 came out. So I'm trying to use that. I'm also trying to get the most out of Fable before it goes away. So as you can see here, it says 22%. So I've used it this much. And this is how much I still have left. This is your enemy. This is the goal. This is the thing to burn through. And I don't mean to waste. Your goal should be every day, every week, whatever, to put all of your allowed quota, how much sort of usage you have left towards building or researching or doing something useful, something that moves you forward, moves your business forward. If you're building software to then put it online and try to sell and get users, build a bunch of different things. See what works well, what doesn't. Learn how to utilize this to build. Most of the software that I'm building is mostly for myself to make my business run smoother, make it easier for me to automate certain aspects of it. And it's getting kind of stressful cuz my goal is for each of these periods to try to utilize it as much as possible and then just Anthropic comes out and just resets the limits randomly. You're like, ah, you're almost a little bit mad because then you know you have that much more to try to catch up to. But that's a good problem to have. So if you're not using Claude or ChatGPT, start. If you're already using it, again, I understand most people watching this are probably using it, then really start using intelligently and effectively all of the quota that you have available.
Okay. And what happens if you already did that? So you're using Claude or ChatGPT, you're doing your best to maximize your your quota, your allowance, you're building stuff. What's the next sort of tier? Next tier is to actually ship something. You don't have to make money with it. Just put something out there. Create a way for, you know, the internet, the public, the world to visit it and interact with your thing and then try to get some people to come over there and take a look at it. Reddit or Twitter or wherever. Maybe have some of your friends check it out. Don't worry about getting mega viral growth. Just can you get a few real humans to come and visit your site and interact with what you've built? It doesn't have to be the final project that's gonna make you millions of dollars. It could be kind of like your little playground business or your playground app. You're just getting comfortable with it. You're getting comfortable with building something and then shipping something. It doesn't have to be polished. It doesn't have to be great. It just has to be interesting enough for people to visit and check it out.
All right. So, I think that's it for this video. Let me know in the comments what you want to hear more about. Again, I have a few sort of ideas that are scheduled that are going to be coming out about building businesses, making money, etc. But feel free to sort of steer me in which direction you are going to. Just comment down below so that I get the comments that I need so I can directly read them as well as a kind of a summary overall gist of what people are talking about so I get both. So subscribe and I will see you in the next.