“I make $4.5 million implementing AI”

0:00How much money are you making? We're sitting at about 4 and 1/2 million in annual recurring. [music] I started this business with just $400. As a one-man band, I was able to take it by myself with all of my AI tools to a million bucks. Let me just tell you exactly how to do this, right? Everyone's looking for Well, what do I

0:15do? How do I do it? Here's my process. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. John, do you remember when you'd reached a million dollars in revenue? I was like, man, I am I I took this to a million dollars by myself. And it was at that moment, actually, I was like, okay, actually I I I have enough budget to bring some people on and so I'm going to do that make my life a little bit easier. And it kind of snuck up on me. When I first started the company, there were um uh some pathways that I kind of went down that didn't work as well as others,

0:43and I eventually found out, okay, companies really need not just some training and education and show them what to do. They need somebody that is embedded into their company, that is following up regularly and becoming part of that company. And so I built this fractional chief AI officer model. And the cool thing about that and then I knew as an entrepreneur was super valuable was this recurring revenue element, right? And so um at one point we hit the million dollars, and by we I

1:09mean me, I hit this million dollars. And uh and it was fun. It was fun. It was, you know, that was about 80,000, 90,000 a month. Um and it was actually I got to 110,000 a month. So it's a little bit over that million dollars. I took my family when I hit a million dollars to

1:23get ice cream sundaes. I remember that. You do anything like that to celebrate? You know what I started doing is I started buying myself a pair of shoes every time I landed a new contract. I was like, these are 100,000-plus dollar contracts each one. I can afford $200 shoes or whatever. And so I I I filled my closet and I I I actually stopped doing that because I was like, I have enough shoes at this point. Like I love I love shoes, but you

1:44know, I don't need to have 400 pairs. And by the way, for anyone who wants to follow along and build this type of business, we'll have a playbook in the comments along with all the tools and apps and software that John recommends. See it below. It all started because you said, you know what? I have an idea for a social network. I'm going to go and hire this agency in the Ukraine. What

2:02was the price they quoted you? $105,000. Okay. And then you discovered that you could do this yourself using AI tools, specifically Replit. How did you discover Replit? I discovered Replit because I don't even remember who it was. I wish I could give them credit, but somebody posted about it on LinkedIn. It was some VC. And they said, I just watched a founder, you know, put together this website and this new thing in like 10 minutes, something that would have taken months before. And, you know, using Replit. I was like, what does that mean? And it was literally the same day I'd received this proposal from this dev shop in the

2:32Ukraine for $105,000. They had actually sent over We'd already done some architecture discussions and they'd sent over a PDF with a proposal about, here's how we're going to build the whole thing. And so I was like, I wonder if I could just drop this PDF into Replit. So I just drag it in and said, build this. And 10 minutes later I had, you know, at least the first version at preview. When you're talking about a social network, you just gave it the the same request that you had to the developers and the whole thing It wasn't a one-shot thing. You're sitting down and you're massaging it and adjusting

3:00it, right? Yeah, yeah. The the very first thing, at least back then. Today, if I gave it to Replit, I think it could actually one-shot it. But back then, this was, you know, probably about 18 months ago, maybe even a little bit longer than that. I would say I want to say September of a couple years ago, whatever that comes out to. So probably a little longer than 18 months, but bottom line is um they um it it was able to bring up and say, hey, here's here's your world map. And my my idea was I wanted to I I love to travel, right? And I wanted to just have a better way to

3:31share where I've traveled. And so I wanted kind of a digital pinboard, a map of the world where I could then just drop a pin and then I could record everything I did and have pictures and video and share and I could see where other people have been and just have that visual interface. And so that was

3:42the idea. And um and yeah, it took me it took me, you know, a few minutes to get to the first like, hey, I've got a screen. Well, that's cool. Well, can I make login work? Yep, let me build that. And then login worked. I was like, I've never done that before. This is my first experience Vibe coding. And and all of a sudden, you know, 12 hours later, probably, I had something that actually worked. That's one of the amazing things about it. Like, unlike I love Cloud Code and all these other tools, but unlike that, you just get to see it immediately on your screen as

4:10you're asking for it with Replit and tools like that. Um the thing that I wonder though is, why didn't you say, okay, I know how to build this thing. I'm going to continue with the idea. Why'd you decide, I'm going to help other people learn these tools instead of using it yourself? It was so transformational for me as an

4:24entrepreneur. I had to raise money to start my first startup back in 2016. And I hated that process. I raised $13 million. I got good at it, right? And I hated having, you know, 50 people breathing down my neck saying, hey, how's it going, right? Or I don't like that you made that decision. Or some people, you know, some it's not all bad, right? For sure. But I loved that all of a sudden I was enabled to bring to life

4:49any idea I could with almost no risk. But I I still don't understand then why not build this social network thing that you had in mind instead of building this for other people? I went down this Vibe coding kind of rabbit hole after I built this first thing called Echoes. Is what I called the app was the, you know, memories of the past, right? Um so anyway, this Echoes app was cool, but then I said, oh, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could do this. And so I ended up I, you know, a a few months later I built 20 apps and

5:15and uh and then people started asking me, hey, could you help me do stuff or whatever? And I said, hey, have you tried this? And, you know, I was able to do things for them so much faster. And I realized that there was an opportunity there and then it just kind of this just kind of happened. How did you figure out the first thing to sell

5:30though? You know, I had a conversation with AI about it. [laughter] Seriously? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that's what I That's what I do. A lot of people they'll go directly to Replit and just say, I have an idea, I'm going to start building it. That's a great way to waste a lot of tokens that are more

5:46expensive, right? Go to ChatGPT first. Go to Claude, whatever you want. Pick your Pick your LLM of choice. And say, I've got this idea. I want you to work through it with me, okay? Ask me questions. Interview me about it. You ask the AI to interview you about it, right? And and then, you know, I I spent two or three hours just talking to it. And and I said, you know what? I think I think this is the direction I want to go. Um you know, help me put together a big business plan and, you know, plan to do all this. And so then I take a

6:112,000-word business plan that has important things in it that a lot of people forget. Monetization strategy. Marketing plan. Growth plan. See, things like that. AI can do incredible things, but a lot of times it has to fill in the gaps that you need, right? So if you say, hey, I want to build a social network for, you know, moms that, you know, single moms that, whatever. Okay, cool. They want to connect with each other and figure out

6:36how to be a better mom. Well, that's where people go and then they don't they don't worry about all those other things until they've built the platform. But the reality is, if you're going to be a subscription model or if you're going to be a referral model or if you're going to have some other thing, you actually would build the app totally differently if you understood how things, you know, you might place a button differently. You might emphasize, hey, sign up here. Sign up now. Do this, you know? Or you might limit capabilities until you sign up. There's all kinds of decisions that you might make later on that are way better to do

7:05from the very beginning. And so making that full plan first before you drop it into Replit, that's where magic happens. Okay. And so you went back to it to ChatGPT and you started asking it, what should I do? What's the model that you came up with as V1? What what My original model, actually, the the goal was to be totally self-sustained. I wasn't This was going to be a side thing that just printed money for me, right? I was going to be able to sleep and it just makes money. And it didn't turn out that way, but the idea was, you know, have you ever taken an IQ test online,

7:35Andrew? I'm not one of these lover of tests. I I can see that you are and there are other people are, but talk to me about this. So IQ test, I don't know, maybe I'm just conceited and I want to see how smart I am. I don't know what it is. But but when I see IQ tests online, I want to see, hey, I wonder how smart I am. So I click on it and you go through it and you'll spend 10 minutes or 20 minutes or 5 minutes, you know, doing the test. And invariably, at the end of each of these, they say, hey, you did great. To see

8:00your score, pay $3.99, you know, or pay this. Sign up for our service, whatever. Anyway, so that's how they kind of pull you in, right? And you've already put in the effort. You want to know. You think you did pretty good. And so you want to see what your score is. And so I said,

8:13I'm going to follow that kind of model. I'm going to do an AI IQ test. I called it an AIQ test. And so uh so they would they would land on the site. They would they would take this free test. And instead of charging them $3.99 or something, I just said, all you got to do is put your email address in and I'll tell you your score, okay? And then, depending on their score, it would the system would then go one of two directions. One, it if you did well, hey, great. Take our official test. It's $39 or $59. I don't remember what I charged. Uh and and then you'll get an

8:41official certification from the General AI Proficiency Institute, right? I have a very official name, you know? And and that was part of the strategy that I worked out. I said, hey, I want this to feel like a standard. Like we're the new SAT. We're the new ACT. We're the new whatever, right? So and then if they did poorly, there were going to be courses that they could take. So whether they did poor or or, you know, or or they did great, I had a monetization plan for them. And

9:06this was going to be totally automated. It was going to deliver the certificates automatically if they were great. The courses were all set up in a way that could be self-administered. You could do it on your own pace. And and I was just going to sit back and rake in the cash. That was And you know what? And to some degree, this is still on your site. I see on your site that for I think it's like $59 I can purchase a certification that I can put on my LinkedIn account. You still have courses. The courses, from what I could tell, are either live or or

9:31pre-recorded, right? Yes. So this part worked. Is that where you got your first dollar? It wasn't. It wasn't. So I I spent So when I did this, I actually I wasn't even planning on doing this. This business was an accident. So one thing that I do a lot is I post on LinkedIn and I post on things, but LinkedIn's kind of my main platform. And every single day for years and years and

9:53years, I have not missed a day. And I post. And but but I don't have AI help me with this. This is something that I just What am I thinking about today? I want to talk about it. And I'll post about all kinds of stuff. I've seen you There's like a post about ducks on there. There is a post about ducks on there from last Saturday. Yeah, Saturday I step away from AI and I live on my farm. But um but I I got up that Thursday morning. It was February 27th. I remember it. And I've gone back and looked at the dates in the post, whatever. And I said, "Hey, you

10:19know what? I've got an idea. I I've gotten pretty good at vibe coding. I wonder if I could start a business today, come up with the idea." I didn't have this idea yet. I hadn't had that conversation with ChatGPT yet. I I knew that I had this kind of hey, I can help with AI stuff, but I didn't I didn't have a business model or anything around it. But I said, "Can I start it today and get my first paying customer by

10:37tomorrow?" That was the goal, right? Mhm. Yeah, two-day business, right? Which which normally which used to be a a very long process, especially if it involved software. I just said, "I wonder if I can do it." And so I posted I said, "I'll keep you guys in the loop." And so I kept posting throughout the day. Here's where I am, so I'm doing. Took me 3 days. Took me 3 days to do it. So it took me a little bit longer than the 2 days as I wanted, but just barely. But I spent about 12 hours a day Thursday,

10:58Friday, Saturday. Saturday at 3:00 a.m. I'm done. I'm like, "Okay, I think I can do this." And in all the time where I'm waiting for my vibe code Replit to do whatever, I'm setting up the LLC. I set up the bank account. I threw money in it. I set up my Facebook and X page and Instagram page and all the socials. And I made it look like General AI Proficiency Institute is a trusted place to buy something from. I wanted a complete picture. What I tell people in my course when I teach people about stuff like this and is I wanted to make sure that my potential customers didn't get

11:30any paper cuts, right? Just that oh, that link doesn't work or oh, they don't have a social page. They don't have a presence or something doesn't work, you know. I wanted to make sure everything worked. That they weren't ever going to be like, "Ah, this feels like a scam, you know?" I don't I didn't want that. I wanted to feel very, very official and I wanted to

11:46do it well. But I launched Facebook ads 3:00 a.m. Saturday night. I had all this stuff I had set up. I had built used AI to build all these ads and everything. I had it all ready to go. Push go. Went to sleep. Got up Sunday. I don't work Sundays and you know, went to

11:58church and took a nap cuz I was tired. Slept probably for 4 hours that day and then just kind of let it let it flow. And then Monday morning get up and I go to check to see how many sales I'd made. I'm so excited, right? And I had 140 people had clicked on the link and visited the site and started the test, right? It was it was good, right? Um and I had zero sales. I was like, "What the heck, man? Like I I swear I did this right. Like there Anyway, so I went in and I figured out I had misconfigured

12:24Stripe. And so I was like, "Ah, you know." So I post I'm keeping people up to date on LinkedIn. Like, "Hey, you know, I don't have my first customer yet, but I'm going to get it today." And I'm like, "You know what? I'm a sales guy. I can do this." And so I just jumped on LinkedIn and started messaging some people and eventually, you know, that that same day had a CEO local CEO that I didn't know really well, but we kind of had crossed paths a couple times. So it was

12:44I would call it a lukewarm lead. Um and uh I said, "Hey, I want to help your company figure out, you know, all your employees figure out AI. I want to see how good they are and then make sure that you know, get them up to speed." And he said, "We need this. This is awesome." Is what he jumped on a call and by the end of the call I had a $15,000 contract. Those were my first

13:01dollars. So wasn't even somebody going through your test and then at the end signing up for the certification or anything. It was you testing his people and then teaching his people AI. Exactly. What What about AI? AI is such a big thing. Is it like how do you prompt ChatGPT with questions? Is it how do you build with Replit? It's a it's a company with multiple people. How can you teach one thing? Yeah, you know, there there are principles. There are principles that that are that are good. It's learning how to think differently. That's what I really like to focus on is, you know, how do you approach like today, there's

13:35a concept of like throwaway software. Like you can literally vibe code a solution like so you might have a task that was going to take you 6 hours. But instead, you could take 30 minutes and vibe code a tool that will do that task for you. And you may never use that piece of software again, right? But you wouldn't think like that back in 2020, right? Or before vibe coding was a thing, right? Back when I started my company in 2016, that was not an option for me. And most people have no idea that AI is capable of just whipping something up quickly. They can actually execute on things and build

14:06stuff and do incredible things like that. And so learning learning how to think a little bit differently, how to approach problems. There's principles like throwaway software or even even just a very simple thing like I mentioned earlier, have AI interview you, right? That's a great skill that a lot of people haven't thought of, right? That helps you really flesh out an idea and ensures that you stay in control and your AI doesn't go off on some tangent on its own. And so would you also teaching software or just big concepts like this and then letting them know there's software to implement it with? I don't like the big concepts teachers,

14:43right? There's plenty of them out there. I don't think they're bad. I just don't think it's very valuable. What I like to do is we'll touch on a big thing, but then we're going to go practical and into a piece of software, right? And I'll say, "Yeah, you could use this, you know, we we might use ChatGPT, but you can do this with Grok or with Claude or with, you know, DeepSeek, whatever the heck you want. There's a lot of different options out there, but these principles apply across all these things. Now, let's try it. Everybody take 5 minutes and have a conversation with your AI about this. Great. What did

15:10How did that work? What did you guys run into? You know, I I'm a I'm a practical teacher. I want people to come away knowing, "Okay, I can do this now." Not just, "Oh yeah, AI seems cool." Interesting. And so was there a specific tool that you were teaching this with? Usually ChatGPT, right? ChatGPT. Wait, so if you're telling them throwaway software, ChatGPT couldn't back then. I don't even know if now that if the chat can create software. But but I would but

15:36I'm always starting there, right? ChatGPT is the first thing that you want to learn for most people, right? And again, pick your pick your LLM if you you swap that out. But but the bottom line is you need to learn how to talk to AI before you go getting crazy with Replit or some other vibe coding software or something like that, right? And so we always start there. But yes, when I was when I was ready to, you know, dive in and and say, "All right, we're going to build throwaway software. Here's the tool that I like. Let's let's everybody pull up your account." I would make

16:03people sign up for an account, right? If I'm there, I'm like, "Sign up for an account right now. Pay 20 bucks. Get in and let's do this." You know, it's so shocking that that $20 sign-up is a barrier, but I almost feel like it's the difference between buying CDs at a record store versus just listening on Spotify. Even if it is just $2 for a CD, there's a hesitation. There's a moment of thinking versus on Spotify go, "Okay, I just heard John say that he has" and you do have music on Spotify. I can just go find his music on Spotify, hit play and sample it. And um and at this point

16:34still software to really get the right experience, you do have to pay. Replit does have a free plan. It is as generous I think as they could be, but honestly, you're not going to get enough of it until you pay. Same thing with all the other tools. All right, fair point. I like I like this. Let me see, if I'm putting together a playbook based on John's experience, here's what I'm getting. Number one, number one, um get interviewed by an AI to think through where this business can go, maybe even understand what your strengths are so that you can find a business that jobs with you and think

17:04through where it's going before you get started. Number two, um I I actually think my second thing would be go on LinkedIn or somewhere where I know people and just try to sell it directly to them. The whole Facebook ad thing, maybe it's a gift that it didn't work out for you because you got more feedback and you were able to shift the business to something that's much more profitable than if you were selling this other thing. Um number three, keep it

17:28simple, try to earn money very quickly. And then number four, I like this. Maybe this is more unique to your playbook, which is teach the big ideas, not the not the tactics today. So the big ideas are throwaway software. And then the tactics today just undergird it and that might be something like I'm going to show you how to create a throwaway plugin for Chrome using Claude code. You're going to install or Claude the the actual app

17:52itself. Okay, am I with you so far? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I I One of the things that I think is is crazy just to go back to something you said a moment ago about about the $20. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, right? Everyone's got a business idea. They watch watch Shark Tank and it's, you know, it's it's fun, right? Oh, I

18:12could do that. That's so awesome, right? And then you won't pay 20 bucks? Like I I I paid I paid $100,000 plus times 60 engineers for my last company that I started, right? And that's why I had to go raise millions and millions of dollars. And so I have never looked at a Replit bill and even been like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe I paid I know. bucks." Like it it's like this is free to me. Like anybody can make this at Supercuts or, you know, go DoorDash for a couple days and you have your you've got your seed money. You're ready to go. It's it's truthfully it's not

18:49even that much money for people. There's just a barrier. Now I've got to put my credit card in. Maybe it's going to be a subscription. It's all that stuff. Um which is why later on I do want to go through some software that does work for you. But why don't we take a moment to actually talk about one software we both like, Zapier? I usually talk about my sponsor right now, but as somebody who has experience with this, do you want to talk about what your experience is with Zapier instead? Yeah, for those of you who don't know Zapier, it's it's it's a connector, right? It connects one thing

19:15to another thing, right? Maybe you've got an idea. Maybe you want help with your social media posting for your business, right? And you say, "Okay, we can do this." Um well, we got to just think through the process. Well, we got to get we got to get everything to, you know, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. And there's tools out there. There's great tools out there that you can you can

19:31find that that will auto post for you. But we got to send something to that, right? Okay, well, Zapier can connect those things for you, right? Maybe you want to drop things into a Google Drive and then that Google Drive connects to Zapier through a zap like they have right there. And it will automatically set that that connection up for you. You don't have to be technical. It's it's

19:50for it's for people like me, by the way. I don't know how to code, right? Um for people like me that want to get in and do some, you know, create crazy, you know, automations, right? And figure that out. And so, now we got to go the step back further, right? Oh, how how are we going to get content into Google Drive? Well, maybe you use something like Replit and Zapier together to have it use an AI to auto-generate content and then auto-create a image with Nano Banana using Google's image tool and then connect those and automatically send that to a Google Drive that's via Zapier over to the you

20:23know, Hootsuite or whatever you know, system you're using to push that out to social media. And so, boom. Now you have a business automation system you can put together in a few hours. I've talked to an entrepreneur who built his whole business very similar to yours, but largely he's using Zapier because he can he finds it with Zapier today you can also create agents. So, you tell the agent what you want it to do and it does it reliably with guardrails because they are they are an enterprise level company. Or with Zapier today you can keep it as simple as saying I'm going to use Claude, but

20:52Claude doesn't have enough connectors and the connectors it has I want to give it specific rules on what it can do and what it can't do with it. Zapier gives whatever tool you're using up to eight No, actually at this point it's almost 10,000 different apps you can connect with. All right. So, go to Zapier and let's continue on with this story. Um At that point did you shift your business completely and say I am no longer in the IQ test for AI? I am now in the business of helping enterprise, even if it's mid-size companies, um learn or teach their people AI. Is that

21:24what you did? Yes and no. And here's where my my original business plan served me well. Because I became or or I had I had built this image of I am the General AI Proficiency Institute. And not only that, I'm a dot org, right? And there's just this added level of trust to a dot org and an institute and whatever. And it enabled me to get the big deals with businesses. They said, oh, well, you obviously are an institute. I mean, yeah, we'd love to work with you. I mean, I got those kinds of things. I had governments from Australia reach out to me and say, hey,

21:56seems like you're the worldwide standard on this, you know, can you can you, you know, assess all of our people? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely I can, right? And I've never done that before for a government, but yeah, that I mean, that's part of my I've got to say this to you. Yeah. When I first heard about you, I didn't even realize that it was you that that was on that was mentioned on Joe Rogan. But when I first heard about you and understood your business, I expected to find some shiesty-looking

22:24online education site. Then I hit your site and it has such a good feel to it that it does communicate like trust and like you like you said, like a non-profit vibe to it, but at the same time I see that it's a real company. It's it's all designed. Does Replit do that do that too?

22:45Or is this your taste? that site that site is completely designed in Replit. It is hosted by Replit. Like I I'm using nothing else outside of that to make that happen. Wow. Yeah, that is such it's such a good site that elevates your brand instead of, you know, making it look like like another education site. But that still doesn't mean that people are going to come to you and say, you know what, we're we're a government agency, we're looking to hire people. How did you find

23:10them? They found me. And that is where another another place where AI can just make you an expert in things. My maybe one advantage that I have on maybe just an average person who's just getting started is I had been a CEO of a company that had raised money and been through an exit. I had been there for eight years and you know, I I've been around the block. And so, I knew things that mattered. And you know, some things that matter to to appear and to show up in search results is you got to have stuff like SEO and now GEO, right? I had Franklin Covey reach out to me the other

23:38day and they said, hey, um we'd love to work with you. We need you know, we need some help on this stuff. I was like, awesome. How'd you find us? And they said, ChatGPT. Right? ChatGPT said, you guys are you guys are one of the best out there. I was like, amazing. That means that my work on GEO and by the way, what how did

23:56I do this on Replit? I found actually the best company out there that does GEO. There's a great funded company out of Silicon Valley that just does awesome GEO. I don't remember the name of the company right now, but I I I handed that website to Grok and to ChatGPT and I said, do as much research as you can on this company. Figure out exactly what they do and report back to me. Tell me down at the technical level, what are they

24:20doing? Okay. as and then I had them and then I had chat's response and Grok's response and I gave them to each other. I said, improve each other's responses and then meld them together. And then I took that and I gave it to Replit. I said, here is a an ultimate guide to GEO. Install all

24:36of this on my website. Done. And so, what are the things that it installed on your website? Oh, it just installed all the just, you know, the meta tags and the robot text LLMs and the the FAQs and all the things that the ChatGPT all these GEO engines are looking for, right? And so, it just had the structure. It had all the data that was there and it's nothing more than just certain files and tags and things that have to be done in a way that, you know, are, you know, appropriate and optimized for that. And so, because I did all of that stuff, people were

25:06finding me. I looked at my Google Analytics this morning. I sent it to my team cuz I was actually happy about it. But it said that out of the let's see, I'll just tell you the numbers. In the last week I've had 876 people visit our website from organic search. Okay. I've had 412 people go direct. So, they're finding me on a podcast or LinkedIn or something like that. 166 people found us via organic video, 105 via organic social, 44 via referral and 35 unassigned. So, we're talking 16, 1700 maybe not quite that much. 12, 1300 Yeah, maybe 15, 1600 in there of total visits in the last week. Over half of

25:46those are organic. And Oh, I love it. That means that Replit What? structured my site in a way that actually works. And you know what? I know that now they actually have built in SEO into the system and I interviewed Corey Hein who's got marketing skills that are on GitHub that basically will do SEO for you including creating pages. So, there ways now to automate it, but you did nothing off-site. You didn't go to Reddit the way that the Zapier team showed me that they were doing. You didn't go to other sites and ask them to link to you. None

26:15of that. No. No, I haven't gone and done any of these, you know, backlinking strategies, which I've done in the past with past businesses, right? I just for this one, I went out and did that. And I also one thing I'm good at is I'm good at making noise, right? And so, I called up my local news agency, you know, KUTV, you know, two channel two news. I said, hey, I built a business in a weekend and did a million dollars. You guys want to do a

26:35story on it? They're like, yep. Interesting. Awesome. Now I've got a news story. Now I've got a very verified, you know, really nice referral source that comes in. And then, you know, someone did a story based off of that. And then other things. And then obviously, you know, stuff like Joe Rogan and other things

26:48that started getting better, you know. But but bottom line is you can make yourself look really, really legit quickly if you're not afraid to just call up news anchors and people. Their their job is to go find stories. If you've got a cool story, call them up. Tell them. Maybe they'll do a story on you and you'll get business from it. You know, one thing I've been trying to get um Jad from Replit to do and his team to do is find more you your case more case studies like you. And then just introduce them to people like me so that my audience who are trying to figure out

27:15what could we build with these tools has some examples of what's possible. Otherwise, it feels like um it feels like this is a place to build an MVP before you go and build your actual business, but it's not. It's like a full business. In fact, even when he talked about you on Rogan, he said, yeah, John went over and he created an MVP and something like that. It was more than that. The business is built on Replit. If anything, he undersold what what he does. And I've been trying to get his team to introduce me to more people like that. Um okay. Let's talk a little bit about the evolution of the

27:45business. So, it started out with that with you getting a customer directly and teaching their people. At some point you said, I'm actually not just going to be the teacher who comes in. I'm going to get referral I mean, I'm going to get ongoing revenue, recurring revenue. What's the thing that allowed you to earn recurring revenue

28:05from customers? What's the service? Yeah, so I I came up and it was I remember the moment I came up with it. I was on a call with somebody and I had been selling these, you know, $15,000 AI training days, right? And people pay me 15 grand to just come in and teach their 20 employees or their 50 employees or whatever it was to

28:23you know, how how it was how it works. And we do an 8-hour kind of AI whatever. And I was talking to somebody and I happened to know this guy. He was an old neighbor and yeah, owned a pool company. And you know, good one. Doing doing about 20 million a year. You know, he's doing great. And um And he said, man, John, we need help with AI. You know, can you come in and teach us and show us? I said, yeah, absolutely. And I said, you know, I I

28:45just thought on the spot right there. Cuz he asked me the question. He said, what do you do ongoing? Like do you come in and teach us again? I said, absolutely I do. Uh-huh. [laughter] Right? And I I said, yeah, you know, we have this fractional chief AI officer model, right? And when I'm saying we at this moment, it's still just me as a solo guy, right? Plus my, you know, Claude and everybody else helping me out

29:08behind the scenes. But I said, yeah, we've got this fractional chief AI officer model. It's about the same price. It's 15 grand a month and but then you get me ongoing. And so, yeah, we'll do some trainings. You won't get as much training in this first one, but I'll help you build stuff and we'll figure out how to actually optimize and work with your people. And he's like,

29:24that's what I want. Send me a contract. I was like, okay. And I sent him a DocuSign that day. It was paid by the end of the day. Done. And I was like, that's cool. That's $180,000 a year. That's a big contract, right? All of a sudden, I'm, you know, my hockey sticking on my ARR. And I said, I wonder. And so, I called a a other people that I'd been working with and I said, "Hey, I've got this new

29:48thing." And four more businesses signed up. Meaning the existing customers, you sold them the same thing that you sold to the other one. And now, so far what we're talking about is for people who are just listening, he's nodding yes, this is enthusiastically, this is the way that he found his recurring revenue model. From what I understand, you went beyond teaching to actually become more of a CTO to having some kind of frameworks that you're

30:09installing. What is that? Yeah, you know, the the fractional chief AI officer model that I came up with, I I realized that there were three kind of buckets that that made sense. And I said this on the first call, and it has stuck, right? But it's STE is the kind of framework that I like to say it's

30:26strategy, transformation, and education. I was already doing that education piece a bunch, right? I'd been teaching people and coming in and helping them get up to speed, but I also had been doing strategy as well with a lot of these CEOs, you know, before a call or before an education seminar thing I would do with people. I would sit down with the CEO, and having I I had the benefit of

30:44again, having been a CEO for a decade. And so, I I had experience, I had ideas, I could I could actually consult at a decently high level. And so, um I was able to say, "Look, this is what I think it means for your business. This is how things are going to change. Here's technology, and this is this is what it means." And then that transformation piece in the middle there is a and I'm really good at building. I can build stuff super fast. I can vibe code. I can show you guys how to do it and work with you, work alongside you, but ultimately I want you to really start becoming an

31:12AI, you know, first company where AI is doing things. It's taking tasks away from you. It's saving you money. It's saving you time. It's giving you back time, all of those things. And so, ultimately that framework has worked really well, and we still do it to today. So, you're not implementing your own software, you're just continuing to to do what you did before, more strategy, more getting their people on boarded

31:33into this new world. So, I guess this is as good a place as any to announce our new our new direction here. So, obviously, you know, the open claw of the world and every agent system, you know, opened everybody's eyes up and like, "Woah, this is the future. This is really what we need to do." And obviously open claw was really scary to

31:51touch in the beginning. Um but, you know, we we set up Nemo claw, right? Which is Nvidia's secure infrastructure sitting on top of open claw, and we started using it in our own company. And we used open claw in a sandbox environment, and we we tried a bunch of things, right? But now, Jarvis runs my company, right? And and it's incredible. Jarvis is a staff Jarvis is your AI That's the name that you gave your AI. That's our AI, and we're not going to sell it as Jarvis because, you know, Disney likes to sue people. So, we're calling it Jenna for GenAI APIs. So, Jenna, um we're

32:23launching it in about, I don't know, 10 days or so here. And um but basically, it is an agent that can run your business, and it is incredible. It allows you to talk to your business. And uh and so, basically, the way that this happened is, you know, fractional a fractional chief AI officer operates a lot like a consultant, right? And so, you're really trading a lot of time for money. Mhm. And and that, you know, has

32:43a very linear growth pathway. Right? I don't like that. I'm a SaaS guy. That's what my previous startup was. So, I want I want it I want to turn that curve up a little bit and add some parabolic momentum. And so, I said, "Hey, you know, guys, we need to turn the things that we're doing with these companies into systems and processes that we can then systematize and turn into marketing engines and growth engines and operations engines and things that sit inside of Jenna, right? The Jenna then has access to all kinds of tools and things that it can then, you know, plug into a company. So, now,

33:13we've already been doing this with our current clients, and we've been using it internally, and it's just it saves us so much time. It is amazing. Our clients love it. It's it's incredible. But we're turning we so we've we've turned the corner of saying, "Okay, yes, this STE model still is there, but now it is assisted by software." So, now we we really believe that Jenna becomes uh the AI infrastructure for our clients, right? And that becomes also much

33:37stickier. No one wants to turn that off. And essentially, what that is is Neo claw with your twist on it, customized for what you've seen your customers need over and over. Exactly. So, so Nvidia, you know, builds this nice this nice structure, this harness, right? That that makes it safer and more enterprise ready, okay?

33:57And so then we spin these things up. There's there's you know, look, it doesn't matter if you're selling, you know, oil rigs or, you know, paint or, you know, if you're a a a one-man band uh maybe actually have a one-woman band um you know, doctor that works with us, and she's a she does, you know, facial you know, all kinds of skin things, dermatologist, and anyway, um they all have invoices that they hate sending out, and they all have customers that need to communicate with, and they have, you know, new customer requests come in, and they have people send requests for information, and the people

34:29want to buy things, and there's just so many similarities between all of these businesses, right? They all need their website redone. They all need SEO and GEO set up. And, you know, so we just have all these tools and and things that that that work across all of these different businesses. Now, we do then work part of the part of why we don't just charge, I don't know, five grand a month and go sell it as a software alone is we still do bring the fractional chief AI officer with it to help set it up. It takes time to get it integrated into the systems and to work with, you

34:58know, NetSuite versus QuickBooks versus this system and HubSpot versus Salesforce. And you have to do some connections and things like that. But then every business has their own stuff, their own custom things that need to be done. And so, we then train Jenna, their instance of Jenna, to work within their framework and their systems. And and by the time it's up and running, and it usually takes a few weeks to get it up and running, their CEO is sitting there and just talking like, "Tell me about this. Oh my gosh, you just identified this pattern we have never seen before, and we've never been able to even ask this

35:25question." And they can correlate things in ways that just hasn't been possible until you can connect a central nervous system into the middle of it. That's interesting. My business partner, Jesse Fuji, had sent me all these different companies that basically supported other software to show how big this this type of business can get. Mhm. And I think that we're finally seeing an opportunity to do one of these types of companies here in AI, and it's probably around open claw. Open claw has tremendous power, but it's also a blank sheet that needs to be connected and configured, and I could totally see a humongous business being built around

36:04just implementing this in businesses with customization and maintenance and and everything else. That that seems like a huge business. This is our billion-dollar idea. That's exactly it. Yeah, I mean, honestly, you can see businesses that are built to billion-dollar ideas with with this in other areas. All right, uh we're going to go into software, but let me see if I understand the framework, fill in the gaps wherever I wherever I'm missing, and we'll we'll give people this whole playbook um in the comments if they want it. All right, number one, interview with AI, we talked about this before. Two, have a business plan that doesn't just take into account

36:35where you are today, but also what's the future. You mentioned earlier, if you're going to sell it one way or another, you need to think about it in the beginning, or if you're going to implement features, you need to know about them in the beginning. Now, next, forget about these Facebook ads, just go and reach out to customers on LinkedIn. Keep it simple. Then um start selling uh recur look for revenue recurring revenue opportunities. For you was the the

36:56$1,500 ongoing training. 15,000? 15,000 Oh, I had a I'm missing a zero. 15,000. I love that you stopped me to say that. Okay. Um actually, let's pause on that. Thinking Well, we'll come back to it. I'm curious about this thinking big thing cuz it's very easy to say, "I'm just teaching. I should sell for less." You're always selling for more than I

37:15expect you to. Um when you're selling, sell this a framework. For you was the strategy, education, transformation. Then ultimately, look for that bigger opportunity. And the big thing that you saw was sell software to assist the service that you just sold. So, essentially, you see people what people want, create the software. Am I missing

37:31anything in there? Yeah, no, you you you nailed it. The one thing I'll point out on the software piece is the software is what makes it sticky, right? What we you know, we had a few early clients that were like, "Hey, great. Thanks for building all this stuff, but you know, we're good." And we're trying, we're like, "Okay,

37:47cool. We made 60 grand. That's good." But we were good, and in four months, we transformed their company, right? And so, we said, "Okay, what can we do to start building in, you know, something that's going to make us stay around for years and years and years, right?" And uh you know, selling annual contracts as opposed to these, you know, 30-day by 30-day, whatever, you know. And we of course I I I put a you know, I got rid of barriers like, "Hey, we're not going

38:10to make you sign an annual contract. There's not going to be a certain project length. You want to fire me like any other employee, that's fine." Cuz that's about the price we're charging, about a an employee, right? 10 to 15 grand a month. Our average our average customer at this point is 17,000. But uh monthly. With some of them being, you know, obviously higher. So, um the the real big thing that it that has turned that, and and the Jenna obviously is going to open up even more, but all of our clients now we've installed a Jenna for, they're they're never going anywhere. We've changed their lives forever. We're a

38:40we're a core piece of their business now. I totally I totally understand that. Usually, as a consultant, you turn that over to somebody else, right? You might install HubSpot. Now, HubSpot's a core piece of their business. Here, you've got it yourself. Okay, um and then the other thing that I kind of missed and brushed past Actually, no, let's talk about pricing. How do you think about pricing? Why do you charge more than others who are doing the same type of AI

39:03transformation? You know, I really just looked at what would what would they have to pay if they were bringing someone internal, right? You know, I believe that every company every single company should have somebody in charge of AI. I don't care if it's, you know, director of AI implementation or a chief AI officer. Mhm. Somebody needs to be in charge of AI, and their job is to go around and keep people accountable. Hey, we have these tools, what are you doing? You know, are you trained on this? Do we need to do

39:28training on that? Do we need to do this? Why are you still doing this manually over here? You could AI can do that easily. You got to have somebody that's in charge of this, and I also was bringing a level of uh sophistication in terms of I I I'm not a 22-year-old out of college. I had I've been around the block. I built companies, I've sold them. I know how to run a business. And so, I just said, "You know what? In order for me to provide ongoing support." And really

39:53this is what drove it in the beginning. In order for me to actually provide ongoing support, it's got to be worth my time. So, I'm going to charge it kind of at a, you know, a good good employee, 15k a month to start, and um and then we'll we'll go from there. And and you know, it's kind of like, you know, once someone runs the 4-minute mile, like, it's easy to run the 4-minute mile for people that are at that level, right? And I have never I have never felt like, oh man, I I really want this client. I'm just going to charge him 4,000 cuz I

40:20think that's all I can get. I'm like, look, there's so many companies out there that are willing to work at this level, and you know, they might be a little bit bigger. That's okay. Those are the companies I'm going to work with. For it to be worth it for us, we need enough resources. And honestly, I've even said, "Man, I don't want any clients under 20 grand now." Like, I've I've I've said that because it does take a lot. I've got a team now that's working and delivering, and to really make an impact, you know, we're not we're not selling, you know, snake oil here. This

40:45we are really making an impact on these companies. And so, it's you got to have the resources. You got to have enough money that you can put other people on it and bring software and and do everything and have the time to actually make an impact. And that that number is why I landed there. The anchor for this was a human being. I think every company

41:03needs this human, this role. Instead of hiring somebody full-time internally, hire me part-time. I'm going to be stronger than a full-time person because I've got all this experience. Okay, the anchor was a really big one. Brand seems like a really important part of everything you do. Even the way that you talk about your experience, I had a funded company. I am somebody whose time is valuable. All of that. The website has this feel to it. You chose

41:26a.org. What's your philosophy on brand? Well, let me answer this in a different way. Software is almost useless. It's almost worthless now. Because anybody can create it. My 8-year-old made his own version of Roblox. And built 20 games inside of it. Mhm. And he did that in a day with Replit. You know, I just said, you know, he said, "I want to play the computer, Dad." I said, "No, but you can use this Replit tool." And he spent like $400 of credits [laughter] just building crazy stuff all day. But I was like, whatever. It's I'd be way cheaper for me to let him go play Roblox

41:58or Minecraft or whatever. But I wanted him to learn. And and so, I love that. But but anyone can do it now. Anyone can build that software. And so, because of that, well, what's the moat? Distribution. Right? And how do you get distributed? Well, people need to know about you, right? Very simple principles here,

42:15right? Gary V talks about all the time. Right? His his new book, Day Trading Attention. Just You don't even have to read the book. Just think about that concept of day trading attention. And by the way, read the book. It's good. But if people don't know about you, they're not going to buy from you. Simple. If they know about you, they might buy from you. So, now you're at least in the conversation. And so, your brand has to be something that's memorable, that's easy. It has to it has to make sense. It also has to be trustworthy. That's a big thing. Stay away from the paper cuts,

42:42right? Death by a thousand paper cuts happens to a lot of companies. I'll land on their site and I'll say, "These guys don't even have their pricing, you know, figured out. And and they don't, you know, their buttons don't work. And their their Instagram button at the bottom, I click on it and it doesn't go anywhere. It goes to the

42:55top of the page." And I'm like, okay. So, these guys, you know, they might be big. They might have It's possible they've been around for 10 years. But they never took time to get their website right. And so, if that's how they do their work there, then what's the rest of their work like? I do notice that, by the way, about

43:09distribution. You being on social every single day is part of your distribution. You feeling comfortable in saying, "This is what I'm selling." You even being comfortable with some of your social posts really not not getting a lot of likes is part of your philosophy. Okay, I got the playbook, and by the way, we'll have a link for it below to anyone who wants to get it. We'll just obviously we're doing

43:28it for free. Let's talk about software. Few tools that you use. Replit, we talked about. Zapier, another tool. What else are you using that you like? You know, we've mentioned it a couple times, but I actually love Grok for market research. Why? Because Grok is plugged into X. And X has all kinds of people on there from every age range and every political persuasion and just about every industry. Um there's it's not everybody, but but it's pretty dang good cross-section. And Grok has access to be able to say, "What are people thinking about this?" right? So, you can take that business plan that you make in ChatGPT and drop it into Grok

44:01and say, "Tear this apart for me. What are people thinking? What are people going to say about this? How will people respond?" And it's pretty dang good. So, I use that for market research. I love that. Um I also love Midjourney. I don't know why I love Midjourney. It's just a fun maybe it was an early tool that I just got enamored with. Um but I was I I try all the different platforms that are out there. And Midjourney's a fun one for for creating that. I mean, Nano Banana's amazing, and there's other great ones out there. Uh but I just have

44:25I have a good time with that one. You know, the tools that I used when I created the business um in in a weekend were, you know, ChatGPT, Grok for sure, you know, pressure testing my business plan. And then So, that's really what I do. I create it, pressure test it, and then get it into Replit, right? Get into Replit, start building things. Then when I needed images or I needed logos, then I'll go to some of these other platforms that uh that allow me to to, you know, be creative and get my images. And you need you need hero images. You need a logo. You need, you know, product

44:54images. You need, you know, just all kinds of stuff. And then and then at some point you actually do want to get real people in there. Like, if you go to my website today, you'll see you'll see my face there, and you'll see my team there. And you know, we have people now, and it's great. But um and that and that helps. That helps. Any out there tools that you're especially excited about? Anything that's a little bit weird? Tools. I mean, I would say I mean, I I would say Nemo Claw's pretty

45:17out there for a lot of people. Uh you know, a lot of people are scared scared to use it. And uh I was terrified. I have never installed it on a personal machine. Like, I just I, you know, I everything I'm doing on a virtual machine so that if I need to, you know, and I don't give it access to everything. So, you There's right ways

45:33to do it. There's right ways to do it. But I would say Nemo Claw is an out there tool that people know about, but but not a lot of people are using cuz they're afraid of it. Are you using Claude Code at all? Or are you not touching any of those tools? I I know how to use them. I Of course, I go in and I try everything. Mhm. My job now is to is to really know about what's going on out there. And so, there's a lot of tools I'll go out and I'll try the Base44s and the Lovables and the Bolts and Claude Code and CodeX and

45:58everything. I have CodeX on my machine. I do use that. I like that. Claude Code's awesome, and Claude agents are great. I I think that Claude is the best. Replit under the hood uses Claude, right? I mean, Claude 4.7 is the latest now, and it is it's excellent. It's it's amazing. But the Claude Code experience, um while it certainly is accessible to a normie like me, Uh-huh. I feel like it's a little bit more accessible to developers. And that's why I just built my processes on top of Replit. And so, I'm just so dang good with Replit. I've never run into

46:29something that Replit couldn't do. And I've never felt the need to go try other things Like, what's a what's a weird thing that you're doing on Replit that I wouldn't have anticipated? It obviously Yeah, tell me. So, I built a a video game just to see if I could like a full-on like It's

46:46called Moon Command. Mhm. Go to mooncommand.ai. It's free. I just I wanted to see if I could do it, right? I just decided to do that, and that was hard. That was hard. There were crazy things I had to because it's multiplayer, right? You and I could jump on and we could play against each other right now. And so, in order to have live real-time syncing of the game, there were all kinds of web sockets and things and communication and chats and and real-time stuff that was that took me to And Replit has their, you know, their system kind of monitors, you know, how good are you? Are you a level one

47:15developer, a level two, level three, four, and five? And before I built the game, I was a level four. I had built hundreds of apps on there. And that game took me to a level five. I do actually really like the personal projects on this. I want to encourage everyone on my team, just create a personal project on any one of these tools because for work, you tend to be more precious. For fun, you realize I could destroy this, and it's not such a big deal. I don't have to answer to anybody else. I could say, "Yes,

47:40implement the user user accounts on it." No, I don't want to do that. Whatever it is. And you get to play with it. Okay. Uh when you mentioned when you got to 100 over $100,000 uh revenue, you decided you're going to splurge. At that point, when you hit a million-dollar run rate, was it all profit? It was essentially just you,

48:00right? You plus a little bit of software? It was mostly profit. Yeah, in the beginning it was it was 99% type margins. Like, really. And and even you know, I would I would work in Replit, but what I would do is part of the contract was, "I need a company card." So, I would put all Replit charges and everything, you know, we're on the company. It's your account I'm building for you. And so, any, you know, additional cost accrued, it wasn't

48:22coming out of my pocket of that 15,000. That was That's what you're paying me to be in in the room, right? And so, yeah, that was that was basically I had, you know, six, you know, CAIO jobs at the same time. Um which is why I said, "Okay, you know, what? I'm okay to let's let's switch to 40% or 50 or 60% margins by hiring some

48:42people and building systems into that." And so, that's that's where we are today, closer to about 50, probably. What's the revenue right now? It's growing very fast. We're um we're sitting at about 4 and 1/2 million in annual recurring. Wow. And by the way, for for reference's sake, I hit a million Let's see, we're in April. So, I hit a million in September. What is that? 8 9 months? So, I went one to four in 9 months. We will absolutely be at 10 million uh we'll we'll we'll be at 1

49:09million a month by December, for sure. Do you think anyone else could do this? Or is this one of these opportunities that comes and goes? Then you were early, and so you were able to do it. I had somebody ask me the other day, "How many how many more years do you think this type of business could be launched and started?" And my answer was five. Five more years for people to be able to bring others bring other businesses on board to AI, and then it

49:31becomes what? in a big way, right? You know, to to to to have a great success There are hundreds of millions of businesses in the world that need this. If I help a thousand of them, I will be wildly successful and rich from it. Right? That means there's room for thousands more. I cannot believe how open, how generous you are with this, and I appreciate you coming on and doing this interview. For anyone who wants to go over to your

49:56website, it's genaipi.org. And of course, John's a really good follow on LinkedIn. Thank you, John. Thanks so much, Andrew. Happy to be here. Bye, everyone. Subscribe for more.