# The EASIEST AI Side Hustle To Start Today (Copy This)

Channel: The Diary Of A CEO Clips
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhqSuQPPvbg
Duration: 16 min
Language: English
Words: 3254
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/NhqSuQPPvbg

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[0:00] So, in these uh three suitcases in front of me, I have different amounts of money. Mhm. And all I want you to do is to let me know if I was giving you this amount of money, what business you would start. Okay. So, the first one has $500. Yeah. Awesome. So, most people would look at this and think, "What am I going to do with $500?" This is a lot of money, right? In in the age of today with 30-day free trials and uh a lot of Silicon Valley funded companies willing to give you a lot of money to test your product, this goes a long way. So, the

[0:42] first thing to come to mind that comes to mind is probably my favorite business idea of all right now. Thankfully, you can start it with even less than this. And that would be a business that helps implement AI into small businesses, small to mediumsiz businesses. So, some facts for you. There's 400 million small businesses on the planet. They've surveyed some of these business owners um and 77% of them have admitted that like AI would be transformational to

[1:10] their business, right? They need AI. It's not a fad. It's not going away. 5% of them have claimed they're using AI in a meaningful way, right? Right? And define that as you will. So basically, we have this knowledge gap, right? We know it's like a it's like a business cognitive dissonance, if you will. We know we need to do something and we're not doing it. Doesn't matter how easy the tools are. Doesn't matter how much you can create a new website or an app with one prompt. Um, they need someone to do it, right? I know how to vacuum my floor. I know how to clean my house. I

[1:40] still would rather just pay someone to do it. Okay? And so with a fifth of the money, call it a $100, I would start learning some vibe coding tools. Um, Replet, Lindy, there's a ton of them out there. What is vibe coding for anyone that doesn't? Vibe coding is the non-technical person, the non-coder such as myself, using their natural language to just say, "Hey, build me an app that manages customers for dog trainers." You'll have

[2:06] an app, right? Is it fully functional? Is workable yet? Not quite. But 10 to 20 more prompts and you're good to go. And for anyone that doesn't know, I I would suggest I'm an investor in both lovable and replet. So disclaimer, but I would recommend going on Replet or Lovable and um typing in any website ID you have just to have that sort of Eureka moment of watching it be made in front of you. I think that Eureka moment is the moment your mind expands to the possibilities that are currently right

[2:32] in front of all of us. Yes. You know, we think of building websites or apps as exclusive to those that have spent 5 years learning to code. Mhm. That has now changed. Yeah, we can all do it. Yeah. And everyone should, like you said, one prompt, develop an app. Oh, what do I prompt? What do I build? Ask Chad GBT what to build. Copy paste one of those. Ask Chad to prompt it. Take it over to repletter lovable, paste it, and see what it builds. So, I would use this as my education and also to build a website, right? Chris's automations.com, whatever, anything. And then I would

[3:03] take the rest of the money and I would put it into ads, right? um preferably meta ads, Facebook ads, and I would target local businesses. Even though this is a global thing, if I live in Omaha, Nebraska, I could sell this to people in Tokyo. Doesn't matter. I'm going to put Radius around Omaha, and my ads are going to say, "I'm Chris and I can help put AI into your business. I'm going to use fifth grade words. I'm not going to use LLM. I'm not even going to say Chad GPT." I'm just going to say, "I will make your business more money or save your business money with AI." just

[3:36] a service business. And then I'll get on discovery calls with these business owners and I'll just start peppering them with questions about their business. And over time, I'm going to learn based on their answers what their problems are, what they're struggling with. Is it hiring? Is it payroll? Is it sales? Usually, it's going to be sales, right? And then I'm going to take this money over here, this $100, and go back to those apps and start building solutions for them for free just to kind of implement myself as an expert. And what are you going to charge them? I'm going to charge them between $500 and

[4:06] $5,000 upfront one time to implement it. And then I'm going to charge them 20% of that amount in an ongoing basis to maintain it and fix it as it breaks. Let's say there's a gutter cleaning business in Omaha, Nebraska that doesn't want to take calls after hours. He's with his wife watching Netflix and he knows that's a $3,000 job. He doesn't want to take it. So, it's going to voicemail and they're calling someone else that is taking it, right? So, I'm gonna build an AI voice agent for him, which sounds really intimidating. It feels like we have to have all these skills. You don't. You just need to

[4:40] prompt a couple tools a couple times. I'm going to build a voice agent for him. And then I'm going to tell him to call that agent as if he were a customer and say, "Hey, pretend you're a customer that needs gutter cleaning. You're calling at 9:30 p.m. and just see how it reacts." He's expecting there to be a delay. There's really not. He's

[4:56] expecting it to be dumb. There's not. He's expecting it to need to know all about his business. It doesn't, right? The AI knows about gutter cleaning businesses. Then he's sold, right? Charge him $3,000 for that. You build it. And then you charge them, call it 500 or 600 a month to maintain it over time. And then the beautiful thing is you can go to every other gutter cleaning business in Omaha or anywhere and copy and paste that same app and

[5:19] sell it to them. Gotcha. So selling AI to small business owners who are in huge demand but don't have the time or think they need some sort of incredible expensive time and resource expensive competence to understand AI when actually AI is really really simple. Yes. And we see this play out over history where there's an initial arbitrage when a new technology comes into play. M in fact one of the call center jobs that I had when I was very very broke many many years ago when I was like 18 um or 19 was calling businesses from the yellow

[5:55] pages and selling them Facebook ads. I would call a builder on a building site. I'd speak to Dave who's the owner of the building company and I'd explain Facebook ads to him over the phone and then I'd set them up for him and manage them for him on an ongoing basis and just send him the leads because he didn't understand Facebook ads. And these opportunities seem to exist for years when there's a new technology

[6:18] as as we're seeing with AI. But the thing is with that idea and with most ideas in my experience, we think there's a very limited time span. But if I were to start that business today and just start calling, it would work. Yeah, you could still do it. Yeah, I might have more competitors, but like it it doesn't matter. It would still

[6:32] work. Interestingly, the the issue back then was people didn't even know what Facebook ads were. So maybe it works to some degree better now. People have heard the word. Yeah. You were pretty early. Yeah, it was 2015 or something. So, it was it was quite rough, but it was a business nonetheless. Yeah. And there was 40 other people in the room with me in that call center doing

[6:50] it. Wow. So, that's the first idea you have. Yeah. What else? $500. What else could you do? Okay. Do you want a uh you want a physical business or an online business or does it not matter? What about a physical one? All right. For a physical one, I [snorts] would um have you heard of

[7:06] dropervicing? No. So the phrase drop shipping has kind of has a bad rap and some of it for good reason which is basically buying a product in China uh having a website for it and basically having the Chinese manufacturer or the supplier ship it directly to your customer so you don't have to take possession of the inventory right dropering is doing something similar with a service call it a let's call it a home service business right so in this case it would look like um a garage repair company that has a website that looks like they have a physical presence in a market, but is really just

[7:38] a lead genen factory, right? And so what you're doing is you're using Facebook or Google ads to generate leads, kind of like what you were doing on Facebook um for a local business, and then you're you're instead of just selling the leads for $20, you're actually doing more of the work, you're you're subcontracting out the work to a local business that actually repairs garage doors. They're

[8:01] the fulfillment arm of the business. You're the marketing arm of the business. So, in essence, you have a garage repair um business without actually having one. Like, you don't know anything about garage doors. You've never been on site. You're just drop servicing. You're you're sending all the work to a local company to do it. So, I a car repair company. I I put up a car repair website. I use Facebook ads to drive people towards it. When they click to buy my my car repair, I call a local car repair person and say, "Hey, I've got a customer here for you. Um can

[8:33] you take them?" I book the customer in. [clears throat] They handle the car repair. I take the payment and pay the garage. Yep. Great question. So, let's just say in your example, um, an oil change at at some at Bob's car repair that doesn't have a website is 40 bucks, which is a great

[8:48] price. Your website is clean. It's nice. They can pay with a few clicks and it's 80 bucks, right? So, you call Bob one day and say, "Hey, congratulations. I have a lead and I don't have a lead. I have a customer. I want to send you $40. Her name is Mary. She's going to be coming in. She has a sequoia. She needs an oil change, right? And so Mary just interacts with you. She's trusting you with the money. You don't have to trust Bob with the money. Uh you just send Bob the money. You make even more margin than Bob makes. Right? It's a higher price service, but what you're charging

[9:18] for is the better UI, the better user experience, and having a a cleaner checkout method. And is there particular types of businesses you would target with that approach? Are you targeting ones that have a shitty customer experience, bad website, etc. in the home services like take your pick. Um they pretty much all do, right? Um there are some more established industries like roofing that don't have those issues uh because they have higher margins so they can afford better websites, but um they pretty much all have a bad experience. Any others at

[9:48] that $500 level that stand out to you? Yeah, I love um directory websites. What's that? So Trave Velocity is a directory website. Yelp is a directory website. It's a website with a list of things that helps people find answers to their questions more easily. So, another example of a website could be like Wisconsin um ice suppliers.com. I don't know if that's a website, right? Where if I need to go buy ice for my party, I'm going to Google ice near me. Um some categories are so niche or so unevenly distributed that Google Maps is not a good solution for it. Right? So, you're directed to these random directory

[10:25] websites that are just lists of other businesses. Um, and what people are doing is they're proactively creating their own directories by scraping uh let's say every dog park in Seattle, Washington, and putting them on a website and then they don't they don't even drive traffic to it. There's no paid ads. They just wait for Google and for SEO to do its trick. And it's very much an 8020 rule. you could kind of build the architecture for a directory website with replet or lovable and then you just copy and paste it right in different markets. Uh so the play here is to have dozens of directory websites

[10:58] and some of them make $0 a month, some make a few hundred, some make a few thousand, but it's very passive. It's like one of those rare things that's passive yet also doesn't need a ton of money to get to get started. Where's the money coming from? Where's the revenue? Great question. You can either do like

[11:14] display ads. What's a display ad? just a banner ad on a website. And are you having to go and sell that ad to someone that wants to buy it? You would just take Google's like ad network and just put it on your website. So you don't have to do anything. So you can just click a button and it'll add adverts to your website which you'll

[11:29] you'll then paid for. Yep. Or you could um you could just aggregate those leads. Like if we had dog parks in Seattle and you know we see on our Google Analytics that we're driving traffic to this one dog park, then we reach out to them proactively and say, "Hey, you notice all these customers you've been getting?" That's because I put you on my website. Would you like to pay $300 a year or a month

[11:50] or whatever for priority placement? Right? So, I like to call this permissionless marketing. Um, you're just proactively adding these businesses to a website. They have nothing to lose. You have nothing to lose. And then once you see traffic, then you reach out to them and say, "Hey, I've been bringing you more business. Would you like to

[12:05] start paying for that?" Interesting. And how much money can someone hope to make if they execute that strategy well in your view? What's realistic with a directory website? It could be tens of dollars a month and it could be tens of thousands of dollars a month. But we're not talking about building another Yelp or Travel Velocity. This is a zero employee business with that cost

[12:25] almost nothing, less than $100 to start. Um, but it's just a numbers game. You're not really going to know what directory really hits until months have passed and until you have a lot of surface area for these experiments. I hear a lot of people talking about vending machines online and I've always been really curious about that. People say you can make money from vending

[12:46] machines. Yeah. Could you do that with $500? Absolutely. So, if we were doing another physical business um I would go to Facebook Marketplace and I would find an existing vending machine uh for $3 to $400, right? That could be a snack or a drink vending machine. Um often times the expensive part of a vending machine is the credit card reader. It can often cost more or as much as the whole machine itself. And then I would use a $100 to stock the machine um with Costco. Costco Sam's Club is where all of these operators buy their snacks, believe it or not. And then I just need

[13:19] one business owner to give me a chance um to allow me to put the vending machine in his lobby. Let's say it's a car repair business. I can say, "Hey, I'll pay you 100 bucks a month." Or, "Hey, I'll split the revenue with you. I'll give you 30% of the revenue." And then once I have one, that's the hardest part. Now you have a track record. Now, you can say, "Hey, Bob's Auto Repair makes $700 a month passively cuz he let

[13:39] me put uh this vending machine there." This is a business that can be passive if you have an employee to restock it. That is the active part of the business is the restocking and the selling of new locations. Um, but if you have an ATM, then that becomes even easier because you can outsource all of the restocking

[13:55] to a cash management company. How much money could one person hope to make from a vending machine business? And have you ever run this business yourself? I have. I've actually been in a different part of the vertical. I've sold vending machines. I posted a a video to Instagram that got tens of millions of views and we started just importing those vending machines that I was talking about in the video uh and then selling them to entrepreneurs. But the level of revenue is I mean it's as much as you want to scale it. I have a friend in San Diego that makes seven figures a year uh on vending machines,

[14:25] just snacks and drinks. Is there an art to good vending machine placement or the right things to sell in the vending machine or anything else? Yeah, it's funny that you asked that because he said, you know, I'm in San Diego, people are health conscious here and he tested all these healthy concepts and they all failed. Like people want

[14:42] Doritos and Coke and Diet Coke, right? So that's all they have now. That's where the demand is. But the biggest needle mover on this is the location and it's a matter of testing. Back to testing, right? Testing what types of locations he landed on. um apartment complexes, like apartment lobbies. He tried auto repair shops and they just weren't high volume. But it's the type of business kind of like directories where if you have a 100 vending machines, um you're going to have 20 of them that make $3,000 a month each and then you're going to have 80 of them that make $400 a month each. But once

[15:16] you find out what types of locations are the most profitable, then you just start directly reaching out to those types of locations. If you love the DV 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

[15:34] gets, the bigger the guests.

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