The EASIEST Way To Make Money With AI (Copy This)

0:00So, in a world of AI, are there any particular opportunities that you think are um new and exciting that anybody listening right now could pursue to make money, whether it's passive income on the side or to leave their current role and pursue entrepreneurship for? Well, the starting point is that everything is an opportunity because what do entrepreneurs do? We find things that could be done better, faster, cheaper, or with more emotional

0:22benefits. But has AI created any particular interesting opportunities in your view that you think that's a a huge arbitrage opportunity? I think one of the best opportunities is a small SAS company. So software as a service was an elite level business opportunity that very very few people could enter. That was something that only maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of founders at most globally could have a software company. So it was very very elite. And the reason it was elite is because it was very very hard to mobilize the talent required to build a software company. you probably needed, you know, maybe 10, 20 or 30 uh developers to

0:58build a software product that would actually be a good software product. You needed to raise millions of dollars to get through the costs of developing software uh companies. And you probably needed 10,000 customers to have a break even software company. Now, because of AI, all of those costs have massively come down. And there are software companies that are wildly profitable that have 500 customers or a thousand customers. They service a tiny little niche. uh they attach a community and some media and some training to those little software niches. So one of the most exciting things is that if you essentially said that I would like to

1:34take what I know, turn it into a playbook, take that playbook, ask AI to advise me on what software we could create and then use AI tools to build out that software. You're able to get very deep into that journey for almost no money. I was thinking about this the other day because in my company, we're rebuilding our entire ATS ourselves. So, an ATS is basically the system you use when you recruit people. Everyone's name goes into the ATS. It's kind of like a like a search engine. Yeah, like a database of where candidates who have

2:05applied for your company currently are. And over the last couple of years, I've paid tens of thousands of dollars every year for an ATS for my companies. And this year, I thought, you know what, actually, I reckon we could build an ATS in a couple of weeks ourselves and it could be bespoke to us. So we started that project. I saw the the first version of it yesterday. We started a

2:21week ago. And the first version [laughter] the the version of it I saw I was like, "Oh, this is significantly better than what we were using before because it's bespoke." Yeah. And this made me think about the the opportunity of creating software generally, which is that in a world where it becomes, as you say, like cheaper, easier, faster, we're all going to be using more software, but we're probably not going to be paying

2:43other people for their software. Especially when it's these kind of tools, productivity tools and systems. It's purely a tool. It's very easy to replicate. But if it's a tool that comes with a community, if it comes with education and training, if it comes with agents that education and training. Yeah. So like for example, if you were to do an ATS, right, an applicant tracking system, a a hiring tool, and you had the DOAC uh system and method that I can go and attend the training as to how you on board people, how you create culture, how you do things at DOAC, I'm now interested in the software

3:17because it comes with that exciting training. if there was also a boot camp that I could go to that was attached to that product. If there was also an annual retreat or a dinner series, if there was also uh some funding opportunities that came with that. So once upon a time you were just simply going to focus on creating a software tool because that was so labor intensive and also it had a natural moat or protection around it that you didn't have to get creative. But now we live in a world where the AI lets you to build the product pretty quickly. It helps you to do all these other things that we

3:50talked about and suddenly it's actually quite a a fun product that you that you can spin up. What you've already created would have probably cost 500,000 in 6 months. Oh my god. 6 months. I wish not that long ago. Yeah. It would probably cost it would have probably taken about 18 months total end to end.

4:07And you've done it in a week. Yeah. And so everyone else can do it in a week. And in fact, if anyone if that's anyone's business right now, there's going to be a thousand new ATS systems a day. One's going to trend on Twitter. You know, people are going to download that one, then they're going to jump ship because a new one emerges and it's

4:23better, it's more agentic or whatever. And so again, I think are we seeing software generally become a commodity? What we're going to see is we're going to see all business opportunities be like YouTube content. I mean, if I went back 25, 30 years ago and said there's going to be 10 person unfunded little TV studios that produce content every

4:42single week for almost no money. You you would think that's crazy. I mean, Seinfeld used to cost 5 million an episode. Um, The Simpsons and Friends, these were all multi-million dollars per episode. And we've now replicated that that can be done like by a tiny little team for free every week. It's interesting because the minute we say that the answer is to do these things that are now easy and free and cheap to do, it's almost like we we then don't acknowledge the fact that if everyone's doing it, it's no longer a valuable

5:12thing to do. It's less valuable. Yeah. As it becomes easier, the other access is the decline in the value. So, we're saying we're saying to people go be a content creator. But the very fact that they can without needing a CNN size skyscraper for production equipment also means everybody can which means that that that actually is losing value at the same rate that it's becoming easy theoretically and and so what I continually think about from first principles is what is it that I can bet on that is irreplaceably human which only I can do and a kid in Mumbai cannot do. And so when we say software I go kid

5:46in Mumbai and then we say content I go kid in Mumbai. Well, uh, physical experiences in the world, real world, I agree with you. So, standing on a stage and telling your story is something I mean, you already see that thousands of people show up to see this and to be part of to be in a room with other

6:03people who are sharing an experience. See, the thing that the AI version of you can't do is turn up to an event. I agree. So, I I say what I say because I genuinely want to be challenged here. I I'm I sit here with these AI experts and CEOs because I genuinely I hope that they say something that tilts the current belief that I have and like makes me go, "Oh, actually, you know, that's a good point. I'm in search of good points on the subject matter." So, when I said what I just said about content software becoming increasingly commoditized and because it's becoming commoditized, we're like tempting people

6:36to go do more of it without acknowledging the fact that the very fact that people are doing more of it means it's less valuable and it's more of a commodity. And what I'm saying though is that these things have to go together. So simply like anyone who's doing real world experiences, I think what's going to happen is you'll go to a conference and that conference will come with custom software that lasts 2 or 3 weeks that is really really interesting and it relates to that conference and that software was created as a SAS product for the attendees of that conference and it kind of pops into

7:06existence very briefly. These things used to be separate and now they all cluster together, right? So, it's a buffet of things that you all put together. If we take most successful businesses now, they do social media that used to be a standalone business. It was crazy to think that a hair salon could also be a media business. I've met with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and the number of people who want to go big is tiny. It's a fraction of the entrepreneurial community. What most people want is a business that provides an amazing lifestyle. They want to live and work from anywhere. They want to be

7:39able to travel. They want to do three or four days a week. They want to drop their kids off at school. They want to uh do non-monotonous, interesting work that is a little chaotic, a little creative, a little bit fun, a little bit challenging. They want to work with a small group of people that they get to know and enjoy and travel through life together. And those are the types of things that the majority of people actually want. Very few people actually want big. So, one thing that I'm noticing is that it's probably harder than ever to build a big business, but it's easier than ever to build a small

8:11successful business. So, if we were to say that a business that does 1 to 5 million of revenue with a team of 10 people, that is like totally like super uh possible. But once you go beyond that, it's becoming harder and harder because you get disrupted more frequently. So you have to be an elite athlete of entrepreneurs to withstand the constant disruption and and um the the constant change that's coming. So because your natural mindset is to think really really big, you're probably missing that for many people who are working in a annoying corporate environment and their job is monotonous and they feel tethered to a desk or they

8:53feel tethered to a team that doesn't really care about them. you know, a lot of those people are going to actually end up in small dynamic little businesses that will never be big, but they'll be great. They'll be fun, you know, and people will, you know, have flexibility and they'll have uh, you know, great, you know, great

9:09opportunities as a result. I think you're right. I do have a bias towards trying to find, you know, big opportunities, but actually I think the big blue ocean opportunity, which is, for anyone that doesn't know, I think of red oceans from the the book called Blue Ocean Strategy as very competitive, hyper competitive horrible markets where it's like a race to the bottom. You're all doing the same thing. Like you're all saying the same thing, doing the same thing, and you all think that your unique positioning is is unique, but it's actually not. The market doesn't value it any differently. Like a wine company saying that their wine is a year

9:40older or that using a fancier word on the label, it's a red ocean, a blood bath. A blue ocean is an uncont uncontested waters where you have room to grow much less competition and there is actually something fundamental to your proposition your business idea the thing the value you're giving to the world that is unique I'm looking for blue oceans and yes I will try and build a big boat in the blue ocean because that's my nature but also life is easier when you sail in blue oceans for everybody even if you want a lifestyle business I think one of the great examples at the moment is if you

10:12started a marketing agency when I started one in 2014, especially a social media agency, you were in the blue ocean. You were briefly briefly. And they say, you know, blue oceans often last for 10 years. In 2024, my best friends, I'd say 70% of them run marketing or brand agencies. Yeah. I'm having the same same therapy session

10:31with them once a month at the moment. And if you look at the big five, big four, big five agencies in the world, the WPPs and Martin Sorl's business, they're all they're all competed to way their margins. They're struggling. Yeah. They're losing their profit. they're losing their market share and AI and digital technology means that this disruption cycle happens in months, not years anymore. So you said a blue ocean can last for years or decades. Not in the world of AI. In the world of AI, as soon as we've identified that you've got a blue ocean, we can replicate that real fast and we can come and fly out to

11:00your blue ocean with with an with lots of competition. Here's something that's interesting. Throughout all of history, whenever you find societies that have low social mobility and hyper competition, there's lots and lots of festivals. So you go into medieval times, they've got a festival for every season. They've got a festival for every life event. There's just constant festivals. You go into rural Africa, rural India, and it's

11:25festivals, festivals, festivals, right? Weddings, funerals, seasonal festivals. It's a huge part of human culture that we have lost in big cities like we don't do a lot of festival or r it's rare that we do a lot of festivals these real world experiences but I don't necessarily think it's a blue ocean because uh as soon as people realize how much people want to do festivals and want to do real world experiences a lot of companies can also add this to the mix I think what is defensible is community experience and embracing the constant chaotic change and coming up

11:58with new stuff all the time. One of the bets I'm making and it goes back to what like again reasoning up from first principles. If the question is what can I do that an AI agent or AI could not do and especially in the context of what humans will continue to need. Mhm. When you were born down, you're born with a bunch of needs and those needs like fundamentally haven't changed. One

12:18of them is like connection. I think you'll always be able to discern what is real human connection from artificial connection. I remember being 16 years old and in my psychology class at the back when they told me about the recess monkeys experiment where they got a recess monkey, this little small little monkey. They pretended that its mother was a wire mesh. So they made a wire mesh mother. The recess monkey grows up to be a psychopath because it's it's fundamental human need of connection is not met. They then did it with a cloth and the recess monkey grew up to be a bit more stable. And then

12:48obviously they showed the examples where the recess monkey actually had a physical flesh mother and it was it was fine. So I say this to illuminate the fact that we have fundamental needs that if not met there will be consequences. One of ours is connection. So as a content creator I can sit here and I can tell you what happened today. Right? I can say at 6:00 this guy broke into this bank and then he left. I think that's a commodity now. I think the thing that I can do as a podcaster, as a behind the scenes content creator, as a streamer, this is why I'm so bullish on streamers

13:20is they're making irreplaceably human content. There's no AI that can an AI can tell you what menop what happens in menopause. An AI can't tell you its experience of menopause. Yes, we need to find something that only we can say as humans. And every single person has this, by the way, but a lot of us overlook what we can say as a human. I recently came across a financial planner and his name is Matt Pitcher and he gave a TED talk and the TED talk is about what it was like for him to meet 100 people who had uh won the lottery. So he had a partnership as

13:53a financial planner with the uh British lottery and every week someone wins the lottery and then he goes in and meets them a week later after they've discovered they've won the lottery. Wow. But what he did did is he looked back at his history and he had lots of different things that he was doing. But he looked back at his history and he connected some dots and he said, "Hey, wait a second. There's something that only I can talk about. There's something that is that is my thing that I've experienced that I live through that I've sat in those living rooms. I've sat eye to eye with those people and only I

14:21can talk about that." And because of that TED talk, he's he's had half a million views in the first few weeks and you know, his business is obviously going to explode and all of those kind of things because he found something that only he could say. I believe that every person has something that's human that only they can say that's highly relatable. You shared with me an interesting philosophy. Uh when we first met, I did my first episode on Diary of a CEO and it got millions of views. And I said to you, why is it that my episode got millions of views, but a few weeks

14:48ago there was a billionaire CEO who only got a few hundred thousand views and a few weeks before that there was a billionaire CEO who only got a few hundred thousand views. And you said, "Daniel, relatable beats impressive." Yeah. And a lot of people think that they have to cure cancer or launch a rocket to Mars or that they have to win a Nobel Peace Prize or float a company on the NASDAQ. And actually, each individual person, we have to discover what I would call your personal intellectual property or your personal intellectual capital and your personal story, your personal playbooks, you know, your your triumphs and your

15:22disasters, the things that you've done that are interesting to a certain group of people that you can quantify, that you can describe, that you can give me what it was like. Those are your personal playbooks. Now once you have personal playbooks, you have the ability to turn that into all sorts of products and services through AI. But you but it

15:39starts with having personal playbooks. I think this is the key mistake that a lot of content creators are um making, which is because it's easy to make stuff now. Well, it's tempting just to churn stuff out. Yeah. Whereas I'm making less content now in a world of AI. If you look at my LinkedIn, I used to post, [laughter] if you go back like three or four years, I was just churning stuff out my quote picture, anything fluffy, like just

16:01fluff. Yeah. Now I go, well, if everyone can do it, the reason why my LinkedIn, you'll see almost every post I post now is a human story about something I've gone through, you'll see photos of me, you'll see photos of my family. You're saying stuff that only you can say. Yeah. So, we all have to find what is the thing that only you can say. And no robot, no AI could ever say that because

16:24it hasn't lived that experience. Yeah, it's got all the data. It's got all the knowledge, but it's got no lived experience. And also from a business perspective, an AI can never stand on a stage. An AI can never host a dinner party. Uh an AI can never meet someone face to face and put their hand on their shoulder and say, "Hey, I've been through what you've been through and you're going to be okay." Right? So all of those things AI can't do. So once you discover something that only you can say

16:48it it becomes a superpower. I think my best performing post this year was actually me proposing to my fiance a prime prime example of something that is irreplaceably human. Yeah, which is getting down on one knee and telling another human being that you love them. There's no AI that has ever I mean listen

17:04never experienced it. Yeah. Exactly. So and there's something so human about that. It's relatable. It's not impressive. It's relatable. Um from first principles I ask myself which type of content am I making is creating the the strongest parasocial relationship with the person on the other end. If I post on my LinkedIn everything happens for a reason. Am I how much have I moved the needle on our our relationship my relationship with you? Probably zero. If I talk about something more human, some struggles that I'm having uh from a human perspective, if I'm more honest, authentic, and open or vulnerable about the experience I'm going through, like

17:40streamers who sit there for seven, I think, did I say this last time that I I asked a streamer a couple of questions. And I asked the streamers like, "What do you do?" And he was like, "Oh, nothing. I just sit there and sit for seven hours and watch Judge Judy with the audience and we chat." I say, and this is a prime

17:53example of parasocial. They actually talk to you. They go, "Chat, let me know if you think X, Y, or Z." Chat, drop W's in the chat. That's a friend. That's the closest thing to a friend. It's the strongest parasocial relationship. Well, you said about the football game where the loudest cheers in the audience came for those streamers who were just

18:11connecting with people. They've built friendships basically with their audience. So, of all, I think in a world of AI where justformational content, which is this thing happened or this is what the gut microbiome is, is going to become commoditized. The thing that isn't commoditized is content that creates relationships with audiences and then as you say then converts that relationship into stronger experiences

18:32like IRL events and so on and so forth. I've got a couple more ideas that I I haven't fully shared with the world yet but I'm just I'll wait for the right time about all of this stuff. So it's not one piece that is adding the value. It's the ecosystem of pieces. So it's having something to say that only you can say. Let's call that your personal playbooks. Let's call that your personal intellectual property. It's having the people or your community that

18:54you're going through life with, right? Let's call that your ideal customers, your ideal personas. If you want to make it a clinical definition of in marketing speak that that gives rise to a personal brand. When those two things touch, you then end up with a personal brand, right? As if by magic, you end up with a personal brand because you've got intellectual property and you've got an

19:12ideal customer who connects with that. And then you you are the person who embodies it. So you you give rise to that. And then the question is, well, how do you make money from that? Well, you productize it. You create products and services. And it's the product and service ecosystem that makes money. It's not one product or service. It used to be that you could just have a a product or service that you offer. And now it's the product and service ecosystem. The people that I see making the most money

19:35at the moment, they don't do one thing. You don't do one thing, right? So, if I look at uh your personal P&L, you've probably got 27 different ways that money came and hit your bank account last month. There's speaking, there's podcasting, there's AdSense revenue, there's sponsors, there's shareholdings in different companies that you've got. Um, there might be some one-to-one coaching that you might have done. There might be an appearance fee. There might be some book royalties. There's multiple books. Uh, there might be some software that you've launched. So there's all this stuff that sounds crazy and chaotic in a pre-AII world, but in a postAI world, it's not that hard to create all

20:10these different products and services and to be launching different things and to be going on a journey with people and having a product and service ecosystem. I'm the same by the way. I've probably got 20 different things that you know that I'm involved in at any given time. I was reading yesterday that the for the first time I mean I was reading a few things. One of the interesting things I read is that Spotify said their best developers haven't written a line of code since December thanks to AI, which

20:32again is a whole another conversation. Maybe we should touch on that. What are the occupations that you genuinely believe won't exist 5 years from now as we know them? People say lawyers are going to be disrupted. Well, I recently had a law legal case that I had to resolve and it was going to cost us £50,000. So, $60,000 uh as a start the process with a law firm. We took matters into our own hands and we used Claude and we actually fixed the process and resolve the process by spending 20 a month, $20 a month. And Claude gave us a coaching session on how to handle it. Gave us multiple decision

21:10tree pathways. Gave us the documents that we would need. Gave us an Excel spreadsheet of do say this, don't say this in the negotiation. And it made me realize, my goodness, what a lawyer's going to do. Uh because if all they do is charge for time for money to regurgitate contracts, I don't need that

21:27anymore. Right? Multiple reports say legacy legal tech and data firms have lost roughly 20% of their value so far in 2026. 280 billion was wiped off the value of publicly traded companies like that in the last week. Like it's wild. Um because we're not going to need that. I don't believe we're going to need these

21:46business models as they currently stand. I think they're going to have to change and adapt. I think a lawyer needs to take a completely different shape. Part business coach, part lawyer, part prompt engineer. They're going to be the key person of AI in the room who the lawyer's job will be to work with you on your AI prompting and help you get the resolution. You're probably going to need a lot less of a lawyer's time. Blue collar work has been devalued. And we've seen people who work with their hands and people who uh turn up to your house

22:14and fix your house in a devalued role. And it could be in the next, you know, uh, couple of years. These are the roles that are elevated the most and that plumbers regularly earn more than lawyers simply because the nature of the economy has changed. One thing I've learned over the last 25 years is the pendulum swings. Things that very few things stay the same. There is always this swinging pendulum. And the swinging pendulum is like, oh yeah, white collar work behind a screen is the high value thing. Oh, no, it's actually blue collar work with your hands. You talked about supply and demand. We dis the government

22:49disrupted the natural way children go out and find opportunities in the world by making university loans come along. And they said, "Oh, everyone can just take out a university loan and go to university. In fact, you must and you should go go to university. Get yourself in debt or else you'll never get a job anywhere if you don't do a university degree." And lots of young people who should have been plumbers, electricians, and concreers and brick layers went off and became a m got a master's degree in the mating habits of butterflies and you know some random degree that doesn't have a job attached and they ended up in

23:2160 70 $80,000 worth of debt to get this degree that no one was asking for. That market distortion means that we now don't have many plumbers and electricians and the blue ocean is now being a trades person. If you love the D CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor. Become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the

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