The Best AI Businesses to Start in 2026 (Dan Martell's Full List Reviewed)

0:00Every single day, thousands of internet gurus tell you how to make money with AI, but 99% of them are full of most of them haven't made a single dollar with AI. As someone who actually launches a new AI company every single month, most of which are making millions, I'll be ranking the only real ways to make money with AI. And at the end, I'll tell you exactly which one I'd pick and how you can actually build it. So, let's start with the first idea. All right. and we're going to be analyzing his thoughts on each one of these businesses. I've got with me John Cheney. He is someone

0:32who has built a business that sells AI services and education two businesses. It's called Gen AI PI. He's also built his own agent. He'll talk about that. It's called Jenna. And let's get into it and see if uh Dan Martell's got something that you should be using and will it help you make money. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. AI voice agents. So, what we want to do is build an AI phone agent that books appointments, qualify leads,

0:58and handles all calls for a business. Essentially, it's a full-time receptionist that doesn't sleep, doesn't complain, doesn't get sick, doesn't quit. And it helps businesses where one missed call could cost them thousands. For example, think about like plumbers, HVAC, law firms, dental clinics. And the crazy part is most businesses don't even know this exists yet, or they don't think it's that good. They're probably talking to AI right now, and they don't even realize the person was AI. That's the window we're in right now. Now, I'll be ranking all of these AI businesses into one of four tiers. S tier, which is like super duper tier, A tier, which is

1:32an S. It's a little bit below, but it's still great. B tier, which is, and then F tier, which is you might want to just ignore it and run away. And trust me, most of these experts are talking about ideas being like, "This is the one to do that I would consider F tier." And to do that, we're going to look at three things. First off is profitability. How much money are people actually going to

1:52pay and is it going to make you money? The second is competition. How crowded is the market I'm talking about? And the third is longevity. How long will this be relevant in the future? Because why would we do something that doesn't allow us to build real wealth? And just because of the speed AI is moving and changing at things that we're talking about now that might make you some money will literally fall off a cliff in the near future. So, where do we put the AI voice agent or assistant? Profitability is high. Right off the bat, I know what people are willing to pay. I talked to

2:22my barber about this. I talked to my friends that have local businesses. When the AI starts attacking the labor costs, essentially what you're paying for people, and you can replace a person, all of a sudden now, anything you charge, it's like $500 or $1,000, 1,500 a month feels cheap. Next, we got competition. I think the market's pretty crowded. Every time I talk to people about an AI idea, they're always like, "Oh, I'm building the voice agent. I'm building the voice agent." So, good news is very few of them know how to market or sell. You can tell by just going through Google local and calling those

2:50businesses and hear them answer with a real person. They're still not adopting this. So, the competition is there like people are talking about it, but they don't have it widely used. And longevity, I think this will be relevant for a long time. Why? Because voice is the path to AI doing a lot of stuff for

3:05us. I think it's an A tier opportunity. So, it's a solid business. There's real demand. You can make good money. Yeah. I Yeah. So, voice agents are a really interesting one. I I probably agree with most of what he's saying on this one except there was one big thing he said that I didn't love. He said, "You You're probably talking to an agent right now. You don't even know it." No, it is great. It is awesome, but it is very easy to get yourself in trouble as a business if you use AI Voice agents and you don't if you're not upfront about it. Right? I'll I I help implement

3:40it in companies all the time and say, "Hey, we're the we're the agent, right? we're a we're an AI. We're going to help you do this. And it's very powerful and very good. Way better than, you know, some of the older systems where it's like, hey, you know, say or dial nine. You know, it's definitely better, but we're still a ways off. And it's only it's only going to pay for it because John, so I invested in a company called Rosie. They're they're sharing their

4:02revenue with me every single month. They're doing great because plumbers can just go to heyosie.com and sign up and get a voice agent. Will companies pay to have somebody set that up? And does the world need another competitor to Rosie? I think the competition is good, but because you've got Rosie and probably 20 more we could find in a quick Google search, that's a race to the bottom for sure, right? And so it would just get more and more and more competitive. If I were starting a voice agent business today right now, I would pick something very, very niche. For example, I have a buddy, and I won't go too in detail, but he

4:39basically set up voice agents that are used to talk to people that live in senior living centers, and insurance helps pay for some of that. And it provides an amazing thing that helps them avoid, you know, dementia and Alzheimer's and things like that. That's really, really niche, and there's almost no competition in that specific space. But for a general agent that's answering the phone, no,

5:00that's tough to jump into right now. Yeah, I'm surprised at how high he was on it. But let's go see the next one. The next one is AI lead generation. This is where you build an AI that automates prospecting for businesses. It does research. It like qualifies people. It gets data and essentially presents qualified leads to a business. What's super fun is you can use tools like Manis, Cloud Co-Work, Gemini to essentially go find those leads and sell them to the business. Now, you'd ask yourself, why doesn't the business do this for themselves? The truth is, most

5:30entrepreneurs are already overwhelmed. They're busy. And what they don't have enough of is leads. So they're busy delivering for the customers they have. And for you to come to them and say, "I got some warm leads with phone numbers and emails that I can manage for you." That is a huge value. Profitability, it's actually pretty high because you're directly putting money on the table for these clients. Then when I think about

5:50like competition, it's getting tougher. There's actually new AI platforms like clay.com that do this as a service. So it costs money and you can charge for those leads and they're really high quality. I have a friend Hunter that does this every day. Okay, he was getting paid to generate leads for people. Longevity is pretty strong because I always think there's a place where businesses needs more leads. I think about businesses as like what skill this is going to deliver me. Is this something I should learn? Do I need it for my own business? So, if you're starting a company, learning how to

6:18generate leads, probably a good idea. So, let's talk about where I tier this. I actually think this one is S tier. You're selling money. It's a clear value proposition. It's an easy yes. and you can charge enough money because they know what a customer is worth to them to be able to make it really profitable. No way, man. It's definitely a it's a B tier at best. And here's the big reason why. If everyone can use agents to, you know, blanket the market with whatever, then you know, I I'm re I'm on the receiving end of this as are you, as is

6:50everyone listening to this, right? There's so much noise. And so the things that are winning me deals today are the things that don't scale. I reach out individually, very personalized. I'll send them something. I'll stop by somewhere. I'll do that or or my people will, right? My sales reps will, right? Those are the things that are actually landing deals. Are we using these systems? Totally. Are they bringing tons of results? Not like he's saying. You

7:14can't just print money. But you are using AI to bring in leads. You're just saying it's not really where the money is. Okay. Yeah. It's not where I'm making the most money right now. Maybe I'm Maybe I just suck at it. But but the reality is I just don't think I think there's too

7:28much noise and this adds to it. I'm surprised that Dan's excited about that too. Dan Martell has a lot of experience. Let's see what's next. Talk about where I tear this. I actually are talking about this. It's the new racial channels creating these cash cow fantasy things. I think it's bull. YouTube algorithm buries AI generated content today. That might change in the future, but as we stand today, it wants real organic engaging content. Channels get demonetized within weeks sometimes if that's all they're putting out is just

7:58AI slot. There's no brand being built. There's no audience or loyalty and there's no way to stand out. By way, we'll get to your opinion in a moment, but I just saw your face and I think I've got a sense of what your opinion is of this business. But let's see. I channels profitability is almost zero

8:12because again, channels get demonetized. the competition. I mean, everybody with an AI tool can essentially create these, so it's not that hard. Longevity, none. The faceless YouTube channel, which is essentially like bits slinging AI slop to generate ads or sell something in, it's like the bottom feeder of the internet. People are already getting tired of this kind of baseless YouTube content. So, I'm going to put this in the F tier if that wasn't clearly an

8:39obvious radar. What do you think? He nailed it. Yeah, I will say this. There are faceless AIdriven YouTube channels that are getting such big numbers that I envy them. And the reason I know about them is I do research and part of my research is to have Claude go out to YouTube using my browser and go and tell me about like information, tell me about different topics. It will pull in videos for me. And even as I raise my threshold and say no fewer than 100 100 thousand views for example, it will bring videos to me that when I look at them, I can tell they're AI and I envy

9:14the numbers that these people are pulling. Having said that, I think this is a race to the bottom. It's there are very few people who are doing this. I just don't think it's there [snorts] and I don't think people want it. I think people crave in the day of AI, they crave looking at a real person, right? They want to hear from Dan or Andrew or John for sure. They would much rather hear from you. Right now, these other systems can pump out content like crazy. It's you have the same problem with music, right? I'm a musician obviously and and you know, people can pump out 20 songs every hour using AI

9:47and publish them and do all this stuff and that's great, you know, okay, but are those really going to have long legs? I don't know. Maybe as background music, but are they ever really going to create, you know, new big huge bands out of AI? very very very rare. There's a couple tiny instances of it, but for most people, we just don't want to see faceless AI crap or AI generated

10:08whatever. All right, this one we all agree F. Let's move on to the next off the bat. I think it's interesting to learn how to get good at creating AI video generated content. That's a good skill to learn. But in regards to like a business, not my kind of business. And look, if you want my help to sell any whatever he's talking about, I've got it. I'll show you companies without making a single phone call. I've got a gift for you. I have this whole process documented. It's called my sell by chat playbook. It's the exact process that I use in all my companies to help them make millions

10:40selling through direct messages over chat. It's got the offer template. It's got the structure, the ninebox model, how to deal with objections. It even just blurred this out and I'm about to show it, but I don't think it's a big deal. About the content you should be creating to attract people ready to buy. If you want it, find me on Instagram at Dan Martell and DM me YouTube SBC for sell

11:00by chat and I'll send it right over. So, here's what I did. I went to his Instagram and then that took me over to this page where I filled in my contact information and then I ended up on this Google doc which talks about his approach and apparently a bunch of other people have done it because they're all

11:17in there right now. Yeah, they're all in the same link. [laughter] It's all about like how to use chat to close sales and you've done that, right? Your first customer came from you sending a DM on LinkedIn. So, yep, it works. Okay, next we've got AI content repurposing. This one's fun because you can take a long form video like this and turn it into short form content like tweets and carousels and newsletters. I think right now, for example, my threads are blowing up by using content from my YouTube and just repurposing it on threads. You can use tools that are AI powered like opus

11:50clips and descript. So, now let's break it down. First, we have profitability. This is pretty solid because every creator and company with a podcast, they need this. Next, I think about competition. And essentially, it's pretty moderate because yes, it's a growing category, but a lot of people have already figured out how to do this themselves. And then I think about longevity, you know, and this is where I think it's weak because the tools are catching up so quick where they're starting to just repurpose on their own that your window may be kind of small in regards to how long you do this for. So, I would grade this as a B tier. I'm a

12:22fan of learning how to do this. I think you should learn it for your own business, but I also think that long term it'll just be automated for every I I have a strong opinion on this. I think that B is maybe being too generous. It is probably an F unless you're doing a lot of work and a lot of human editing and taste and all that goes into it. There just too many people who are sending out this stuff and and it's slop. And the worst part about this is you think that it's great when you're sending it to a prospect. And I get these emails all the time because I do

12:51videos all the time. You, the people who send it over, they think it's great because they kind of created it. It's theirs. They feel there's magic there and they don't realize how bad it is. It's just not It's just not good quality. Now, what Dan does is Dan does do stuff like that. He actually had invited me to do an interview of him here in Austin. We weren't able to do it, but he has a team of people who will edit that interview into short clips that are good. It's not just AI. It's a team with taste that's doing it. That would work. But to call it an AI

13:20business, I think is too much of a reach. John, no. If I'm starting this business, I'm doing exactly what you just said. Use the tools with humans guiding them heavily, right? You have to have that human element. And so this is more of a an AI assisted agency, right? I think that's a good business opportunity right now because everyone feels the same way

13:39you do, Andrew, right? It doesn't work. I can't really do this, you know, at scale. I I I need a human to make sure that this actually looks and works. So anyway, tough business, everybody. Next, we've got AI consulting. You get paid to come in, audit a company's operations, their systems, their processes, and find every nook and cranny where AI can save them

14:00time, reduce waste, make things better. You could charge like $5,000 to audit any business and turn that into potentially a $50,000 implementation project. And companies know, just look at the comments below, they know they should learn AI. They know they should use AI. they just don't know where to start. So, you come in and you can be that person. So, if I think about it, profitability, it's one of the top ones that I'm going to talk about in regards to making real money. Doing it for them, educating them, consulting them on it, huge. Competition, I mean, it's kind of low because there's not a lot of people

14:32that are qualified that are good that actually can say, "Look, I focus on this niche and I help people just like you." Most people can't do it. Well, when I think of longevity, I think consulting is always going to be needed. And AI is not going to slow down. It's not going to stop changing. And somebody knows how to help a business get the bandwidth to implement it so they can keep doing what the business does and not have to worry

14:53about the tools and the AI. That's huge. It's strong. So, I'm going to give this an S tier because it's also if you have domain experience, great place to start. And what do you think of this? S tier for sure. I mean, I'm certainly biased, but I'm I'm only biased because I can look at my bank account. [laughter] I like I have proof in my own life that this is working. I have proof in and by the way, not my own bank account only, but the bank accounts of all of my employees that are helping me do this as this is scaling like crazy and the bank

15:26accounts of my customers who are more profitable and growing their businesses because of the AI things we're doing for them. This is a win-winwin. John, what do you think about what he said, which is you do an audit and then once you audit, you show them what you can do for them and that's how you sign them up. That's the model that a lot of people on YouTube say. Is that what you use where

15:46you'll you'll set up an audit for them? Is that what this assessment is? So that is kind of just a basic assessment that that certainly would give them a baseline audit, but that takes five minutes to do. We usually do this during the first month, right? Yes, you can do a highle audit in a 1 hour phone call, but it's really hard to do that. really what you need to do is you need to go talk to all the leaders in the company. And so this is usually our first couple weeks is we're talking to people and figuring things out, mapping out a plan, and then starting, you know,

16:13we always start with some easy something to kind of get things going. But but ultimately, uh you you have to the reason we call our service a fractional chief AI officer, a chief officer, right, is because we we want people to bring us in at the leadership level so we can see and understand everything. And that just takes time to really get up to speed and figure that out. But then you work with the leadership and we we do we do just amazing things with that. But it is it is generally the

16:40right the right direction. Right. And we've got a link to John's site below so you can go and take a look at it. All right. All agreed. S tier. I even like it better than lead genen. So we're going to put it in front of that. I like it better because you got more meat on the bones for money and what's called revenue growth because you can sell more things to people and it gets you in the game to see other opportunities whereas lead genen you're just kind of like this transaction. Next up we have virtual assistants. Now as the guy who wrote the book buyback your

17:11time my inbox is full. Literally the top five virtual agencies in the world are like Dan where do you see AI disrupting us? um you're kind of cooked. Using AI tools to handle your email, your scheduling, researching things for busy founder, essentially acting as a chief of staff. This is what AI does better than anything. And again, I have a dog in the fight. I built a whole platform called Apex that allows agents, virtual agents to execute. That's what it stands for, agents, platforms for execution to do this kind of work for business owners. My guy is called Kai. And Kai

17:46does everything. He's my chief of staff. He manages my inbox. He manages my calendar. He coordinates projects. He checks my Slack. He follows up on things. He even makes phone calls. He even hired a bunch of people like my real estate guy named Reese. And he does a lot of cool real estate projects for me. But these aren't real people. And if you want to check out Apex, just click the link below in the description. So here's what I think about this opportunity. One, profitability. It's decent, right? You get three to five clients paying you. You're doing the work. You're managing the agents because I really think that is the future of AI

18:13anyways, an agent operator. Then we go to competition. pretty crowded. Everyone that knows how to use Claude Co-work can kind of get all this stuff for free and everybody in their mom seems to be offering this and the longevity is kind of moderate. The AI can kind of do this. So then the real value kind of looks like the consulting at scale where you're coming in with business processes, not just being a virtual assistant. So I think we are a B. But I do think the value prop is stronger than content repurposing because it has a

18:43clear value of saving somebody's time. Now I know I think yeah so [clears throat] I agree with his assessment of you know what he's trying to do with Apex here is compete directly with the open claw the Hermes those agents that really focus more that here's where they they they fall short right they're focused on individuals as opposed to businesses right and so we've been working with you know hundreds of businesses really over the past couple years and we've seen so many problems and we've fixed so many problems and we've run into places where couldn't fix problems and you know so we've we've succeeded and failed so much we've been

19:19able to identify these amazing patterns and then said okay and we've had a lot of people ask us hey set up openclaw for us and okay we went in and we tried to figure it out and we did okay on some of these implementations we did it in our business but but it really lacked a lot of problems where we then said okay we need to build our own thing which is our new system Jenna that we literally launched a week ago uh at least launched to the public we've been using it internally but It's based on permissions. That's the thing that these systems lack. Apex might work great for

19:51you as a, you know, personal assistant, right? And that's that's what he just said. It is an AI personal assistant, right? But it can't it can't separate data for different people and users. And so, you can't actually put it into a company. Everyone would have to have their own agent that is constantly trying to be taught what's going on. What you need is a master central nervous system that then has access to everything going on in the company and then only people based on their permissions and who they are and what they need can see and interact with it in that way. And so we built a totally

20:22separate system that we believe is going to be I believe this is the thing that geni will be known for long term. Now cloud came out with tag. Doesn't this mean that this space is about to get really really crowded and heavily competitive? Totally. No, it absolutely will be competitive. It certainly will be. One of the advantages you have when you're in a system like Jenna is you have the ability to use routers and what which means you're not stuck with claude or you're not stuck with open AI or you're not stuck with Grock or you're not stuck with whatever. You can actually say hey this is what our system

20:56allows or hey I don't like what you know Sam Alman said the other day and I don't like that this guy's trying to use AI to kill us and you know there's so many different things and reasons why people want to you know bounce between these things. Yeah, if you just love Claude and you're super okay with being tied to

21:09one company like that, that's great. Jenna is really flexible so that we can route to whatever we need to and figure out, you know, figure this out as it continues to evolve rap. That is a big one for me. I try to do everything in a way that allows me to move from model to model because there always such new things coming out and if I miss out on them and because I'm

21:28stuck, I really am missing out on a lot. I was thinking of this as another example. This is Boring Marketer. They came out with basically an AI that sits in your Slack and helps your team with its marketing. They're selling it for $900 a month and it's their processes for doing certain things like SEO. What do you think of this type of thing where it's a single agent that takes a company's set of skills and turns it

21:54into an agent that that you can sell? Absolutely love it. I love stuff like this where I can just be like, I'm gonna pay 99 bucks to solve this problem. Like for me, I tell my I tell my team if something costs less than $100 and it solves a problem for you and saves time,

22:09do it. Don't ask me. Yeah. Right. They just have they just have approval to just do stuff like that. Right. And so if my CMO says, "Yeah, I'm using boring marketing. I'm paying 99 bucks." Awesome. Pat on the back. I love this kind of thing. Yeah, this is I think this is a really good example. And for marketing especially, it's a fairly easy thing to sell and to package. Yeah. Okay. All right. But I can see this being done for other individual skills that the company gets to use. All right. Let's move on and see what else he's got. I said I have Apex and you're thinking I'm rating

22:37this opportunity be that specific one for virtual assistant. Yes, Apex essentially is a full team of AI agents that work to accomplish business goals. That's different. And the virtual assistant part inside of that is just a tiny little part. And don't forget at the end of this video, I'll be showing you my exact steps on how I launch my top pick. And I've got some bangers

22:59coming. Next, we've got AI chat agents. Local businesses. Yes, they get phone calls, but a lot of people email. A lot of people go to the website and they chat. I was just looking into booking dinner tonight and I didn't want to even go through Open Table. I'm lazy. I wish I could have just like started chatting on the website, but no, they didn't have an AI chat agent ready to go. They're trying to force me through their interface. Interfaces are dead. Okay, can we just all agree? People that want to book local businesses. They want instant replies. They don't want to even call. They want to chat. And the cool

23:29part is that when you deploy these AI chats within a business, you just build a monthly retainer. So, let's run through this. We got profitability. It's good because of the month retainer. That's where the real money stacks. If you don't have a reoccurring revenue component to your business, add one. Then I think competition, it's pretty crowded. I mean, there's a lot of

23:47people. I'm an investor in intercom. They kind of led the space for like AI powered chat and the barrier is pretty low because like anybody can build one of these, no problem. When I think of longevity, I mean, it's kind of moderate, you know, like how competitive is this? Is this just going to be built into every frontier AI model or other companies just going to keep adding compelling chat options into the software they're already selling to the businesses? So, I'm going to put it in a behind the voice agent. And the reason why I think the voice agent is more compelling, but what I see a lot of

24:19people is they use the chat to qualify and then kick it into the voice agent for booking or having them call using the AI. So, it's there, it's great, but it's not going to be as good as what you think. So, as a customer of these types of things or a potential customer of these types of things, I personally prefer to just build it myself. the amount of configuration it takes to get an AI chatbot to talk like your company and respond and be able to do things on your site and stuff like that. The amount of configuration it takes to use a thirdparty service is actually usually

24:51more it's more difficult than just vi coding it right into my own thing, right? And so that's me personally, right? But for your average business that just says, "Hey, I need something, you know, I think it's I think it's pretty good." I don't know if I'd give it an A. I'd probably put it as a B. I definitely agree with his his u assessment that it sits behind voice

25:08agent though. So I invested in two chat companies, Assist and Many Chat. Many Chat took off and Assist basically shut down. I think I got a hundred bucks back for my what $40,000 investment in the business. The other one for the same amount. I got a couple hundred,000 and I still have majority of my shares. The difference was Assist was going to do customer support. You're on the site. You're going to get some help. Many chats said, "We're going to be the marketing chatbot and we're going to help close sales and you could see what people value." I think when it comes to like assistant even in booking a table for Dan,

25:43businesses aren't looking to spend that much and the software exists off the shelf. I just don't see that being being effective. I would put that probably at a B and I wouldn't as an agency start that maybe as an F. I I I just don't see that. I think he's being too high on

25:57this one. I can't imagine that. Agree. [snorts] All right, let's move on. Next, we have AI trading bots. So, this one is interesting because where a lot of people are selling bots to do something from a business point of view, now you've got your bot that technically could make you money. Here's the thing nobody's telling you. Everybody selling some kind of trading bot is essentially selling you a course. They don't got a bot. Dude, if I had a bot that made me 20% every year, guess what? I wouldn't tell anybody about it. There are companies like Renaissance Technologies, Dee Shaw, Two Sigma that are so good at

26:31using AI to trade that they're only trading the employees money and it's like 10 to 15 billion and nobody can even invest because that's how good it is. These AI bots essentially they're selling signals. They're like marketing companies and the signals only last for like 16 months and then they got to find the next signal and then you got to buy the next thing. If the bots actually worked, why would anyone sell it to you

26:55for $97? So essentially, the business you could be in is trying to build these bots, market these bots, and get people to buy them from you. If you want to create the bot, is it profitable for you? Yeah. Because you're selling the course, you're selling the dream, you're selling the vision, they're buying it from you.

27:11Let's just leave the ethics out of it. Competition, yeah, there's a lot of people out there. Longevity, I think zero. I think it's one of those things where you build it, it doesn't work, you try to get it going, and it's also really risky because people are paying you to invest and if you don't deliver, I feel like you're getting in the SEC territory of maybe them not liking what

27:32you're doing. So, I would rank it as S. It's the best. I'm kidding. It's ranked at the bottom. I mean, come on. Thoughts? [snorts] No comment. This is just terrible. And you know, I do a GitHub video every week with the top repos and more and more I'm seeing repos that will help you make money get up there on the charts. It's just so so

27:53bad to see. No. And that's dumb because you want GitHub to be a trusted place where you could find good things, but if you all of a sudden can't trust even the reviews on there because obviously it's artificially inflated. Of course they're ridiculous. Of course they don't work. I mean maybe people maybe they're popular because people hope they work and a lot of people are downloading them. But man, this garbage. This is you're selling hopes and dreams. It's not very good business. Next, we have AI agent development. This is where people pay you to create some of these AI agents. Like I was saying earlier, like

28:22my guy Kai, who can do all this cool stuff, they have to be designed. I'm talking about like sales bots and document processors and operational bots and like all these AI agents. The difference between the virtual assistant and this, this is like selling a team. You have your chief of staff agent and then the agent manages several other agents and those are like virtual employees. So the profitability if you get it right massive. I really think this is a big opportunity. The competition today most people can't even explain what this is. So it's low because it's hard. You need to have more technical experience which keeps most

28:55people out. But the longevity is strong. Everything that I'm seeing that agents is the iPhone moment of AI is huge. You create these repeatable workflows and then you just get paid to drop them in. And they're attacking the labor dollars on a small business's

29:17top opportunity right now. If you've got the technical knowhow and you want to go and live in that world, it is the S of the S of the S. All right. Thoughts? This is really what Jenna is. Jenna is an agent that sits on your business, right? I mean, that is what we're doing, right? It's a generative execution

29:34neural architecture. Execution. Generative meaning it's the AI generate, right? Execution meaning it can go and do things for you, right? And then of course you can program it to go and do that, right? Neural architecture means it understands your business and so it does it all in the context of that. And then of course the permissions that we talked about, but this is where we're seeing this is the cutting edge absolute best super longevity play here. Like it is it is awesome. And that is why there is going to be a lot of competition, right? Everyone wants to be here. This is the the holy grail. Next, we have AI

30:04copywriting, landing pages, case study, sales emails. Essentially, AI writes every first draft. And the cool part is you can do it in your voice and it can follow a strategic process to generate sales. Generous are getting crushed. There's a lot of people that did copywriting and they did a lot of stuff. It's the specialists who niche down into one industry and really focus on delivering a solution, not just AI, but actually a solution for a business that are going to win. The key is is don't be an AI writer. Be the person who writes for one type of business and manages all the words that go out. So when I think

30:38of profitability, it's decent. It's actually pretty good because most people would have to pay an agency 10 to 15,000 a month to do this. Competition is high. This AI copywriting is probably the most popular use case in all AI. And the longevity is kind of shaky. Back in the day, it required some kind of like system prompt design to be able to make

30:59it right like the person and the tone. But now, right out of the box with these new models, it's getting pretty good. So, for you to stand out is going to be pretty difficult. So, if you're specific enough, niche enough, and really doing something personalized, then you're at the top of B. If you're not, you're just doing anything for anybody, then you're just like Claude or any other AI model, and you're probably at the bottom of the

31:20whole thoughts. I don't love this one. I mean every the the the base functionality of every AI model is copyrightiting. Right. Right now obviously some are better than others and can you be better at prompting and can you be better at your industry? Yeah, sure. But I think everyone knows I can use catchup to write something better now. I I put this at an F. I would not start a company in

31:42this area right now. No way. Next up we have the AI venture studio. Essentially it's the idea that most entrepreneurs have which is I got a lot of ideas. I want to build a lot of stuff. So, I have a studio where I create a lot of different AI companies. Think about like if you had a factory that turns out profitable businesses on repeat. That's a venture studio. And the cool part is pretty much since December, the whole world's changed where any person with an idea can actually get an app built themselves. They can do it themselves. I shut down my company for two days and taught everybody how to

32:16code in cloud code. Profitability truth is is unlimited. And the cool part is if you do it right, every company is built to sell, built to go public. And then the winners get to ride and then you just kill the losers because you tested them and validated them with very little investment up front. In regards to competition, I mean, there's a lot of people that might call themselves a studio, but they don't compete. They don't have distribution. They don't have brand. They don't know product. They don't know how to get customers. Most people can't think at this level. It's a completely different experience. You need to have the business background,

32:48the marketing background, the leadership background, the capital to be able to hire and build teams. And then when I think of longevity, this is how you create ongoing enterprise value over time. It's how you build the flywheel that eventually takes off. And then you create the machine that builds the machine. That's the whole point of the venture studio. So, personally, I'm not going to rank it S, even though that's what I do. Martell Ventures is a venture

33:10studio that builds AI powered companies. The problem is is that for most people it's too advanced of a move. Yeah, I'm putting A minus. Next we got AI. Yeah, I think he he selfidentified that like not everybody can do this. You have to have a real voice to be able to do this. And even then I think it's very limited, right? How can Dan even with his Martell ventures, how can he really have 40 SAS companies actually working in a way where he can give it a voice? A lot of these companies only succeed because they have a voice. the founder talks about it. They get on stages. It

33:44takes a lot of what I call stewardship to make a creation like this actually go out in the market and become something real. I really don't love this one. I put it lower and for most people it's an FI to AI marketplace. This one is so fun. Did you know there's a website where AI agents hire humans? It's called rent a human.ai. It's kind of crazy. I think they've had over 700,000 humans register and 200,000 jobs already go out there for the AI agents to hire humans. So, just so you know, if you don't get into the AI like we're talking about, then someday you'll either be the person

34:23leading it or working for the AI. But the other part is that AI will be buying from AI. Stripe, which is the number one merchant provider in the world, just came out with a protocol to enable this. Google jumped on board. So, this is the opportunity. you decide to build the Facebook marketplace, right, of AI agents and you decide to like figure out what would be valuable and how you rank them and make sure there's no security issues with them and just like market the marketplace so you can be like the Airbnb of AI agents. Now, let's talk about this in regards to where it sits

34:54in the ranking. First off, is it profitable? Well, you'll probably get on the low end 10% on the high end 30% of that connection in that fee. So, there's some money, but it's not wild. the competition. I mean, almost nobody out there has built this yet at scale. There's no like eBay of AI to AAI marketplace. And then longevity marketplaces are wildly defensible if you can get it going. Like Uber, like Airbnb, like Instacart, these are incredibly valuable businesses. So, that's the upside. In regards to where I'd rank this as an opportunity for people to make money with AI, it would probably be harder to do that than start

35:34a venture studio, but I do like it. I don't have an AI marketplace business yet. This might be the moment I decide to build one. I'm going to put it on the top of A. I think I think you graded it horribly. Here's the real thing. I part of the the grading in my mind is feasibility, right? This is the hardest. If you wanted were to rank difficulty for all these businesses for someone to start, this gets number one by far by a large

36:00margin. It's technically very difficult. Even if you're good at vibe coding like me, this I look at it and I know how hard it is because I I've vibe coded 200 apps. I know how crazy difficult it is to build something that agents are using and then build this in a secure way that really makes sense. It's tough. And and the the hardest part is like you said, a marketplace needs critical mass to be

36:22worth anything. You know what's interesting is this is an interesting version of this. It's called agent arena where agents compete to do things like write like edit video and unfortunately some of it is to play poker because everything ends up like that. Yeah. And there's a bounty that you set. So if you want an agent that can for example edit a video like the one that we have right now, you list it on here. agents will compete and then you pick the one that you want. It might be interesting then to turn something like this into a marketplace where agents can then say, "I want to figure out which agent is the

36:57winner of whatever of creating a video game or whatever. I'm going to hire that agent." I don't know. I do know this is difficult like you both said. I wonder if there's an angle into it. I wouldn't uh I wouldn't get into it, but I think it's an interesting spot. Let's go. I'm not going to think you can't do this. I actually think you can. So now we only have two more and I'm going to tell you which one I would pick and how I would go about launching it so you can

37:20use that blueprint to launch your own. Next we have AI logo and brand design. Now this is getting paid to use AI to generate logos and brand kits and examples of brands on products. You can use tools like Nano Banana to do some of this. Manis can do a lot. So you can approach these businesses to get paid to do this as long as they're like more involved projects. profitability. It's kind of medium because you can still get paid what people think it's worth. Like the other day I designed a website that

37:48in the past I would have paid $100,000. It had animation and effects. I value something and you can sell it. Then the profitability could be there. So you might not be able to charge that much, but trust me, people are willing to pay. The competition, you got a lot, right? You got all the tools, you got the people using the tools, and then

38:06longevity. I just don't see a world where long term this is not something that's most people can't solve themselves by just asking their AI because you're probably doing it already where you just ask the AI to design your website and say make it look like Apple designed it and boom most beautiful thing in the world. So, I'm gonna give this one a B tier ranking right after copywriting because I think copywriting sells money. Brand is identity. Some people value it, but it

38:35doesn't have the longevity. I agree with everything you said. This one's not super interesting to me because like you said, it's it's a pretty general skill. And, you know, could you make money making a website that does this? Yeah, you'll find some people that don't know. You know, they don't have JBT yet and if you run the right ads, but but I'm I'm not investing

38:52in this one. Rough. I'm surprised I that anyone would watch this and then go off and do that business. I would like. Next up, we have manage AI cyber security. This is where you get paid to use AI to manage the threats on a business 247. Everything from fishing attempts to getting past their firewall to sending spam emails like social engineering where people are using AI to spoof a person's voice. We've detected suspicious activity on your account. Can

39:21you tell me your login information? Just kidding. I'm fake. It's kind of crazy. I mean, one breach can cost a company millions. You essentially can get paid to help business understand security and put basic things in place. Most people barely understand AI, let alone understand the risk that AI in the hands of bad people can be used to actually attack you from a security point. So, that's where you come in. Profitability wildly profitable. It's massive. you can charge a lot of money per month because not having somebody's systems go down would be massive value. Now you are selling like insurance where they only know they need you once they have an

39:58incident but you can sell enterprise level contracts and that's where the big money comes from. The competition because it's so technical almost none. Now there are people out there that have AI platforms for this and people that are specialists in security. So if you love to do this, you're well positioned for this and longevity. I just think the more AI gets powerful, the more there's going to be need for AI experts to stop the cyber attacks, stop the hacker, stop the AI powered hacking, and that's a great market to be in. Now, I'm going to put it in S tier, right behind agent development because I think agent

40:31development is easier, less technical, and you can get paid. But the cyber security is a huge opportunity. What do you think? I put this in difficulty level higher than the other one. It is now number one. It's the scariest one because what if you fail? Look at your liability. Your liability is off the charts. And so from from a feasibility standpoint, for your average person watching this, no way. Don't touch this. This is far down the F channel. Now, if you are already a cyber security expert and you are well up to date on this and whatever and you want to start a firm and you've already

41:02worked for huge massive enterprises, well yeah, then maybe you can go to Walmart and say, "Hey, I know what I'm doing." But you think an enterprise is going to trust you with their AI cyber security to some startup like that doesn't know what they're doing that just figured out how to vibe code it? No

41:15way man. No. I'm surprised that this is even included in AI list. The other issue is that a lot of businesses like you said don't value it until they run into a problem. And so you're really having a hard time selling. Agreed. So now that I've ranked everyone, now I'm going to tell you how it launched my favorite. So clearly that's agent

41:33development. Here are my five steps. Number one is I got to validate. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna create a landing page. I'm gonna have AI create this and it's going to talk about my agent development, but I'm gonna pick one use case. I'm going to pick chief of staff because that's the thing that everybody needs. They all know they need somebody helping with their email and scheduling and followup and legals and all that stuff. So you can create a simple landing page that talks about this new AI powered chief of staff that they can buy and they can get added to the weight list. Now, after you build

42:01that page, I then want you to text every person you know in your phone. This is what I do. I just ask them, "Who do you know that's looking for an AI powered chief of staff that helps them get back 10 to 15 hours of their week and manage more projects?" Send send. You want that little script? It's in the description below. So, just go grab it. The cool part is you're not asking if they want it. You're asking if they know anybody, but most people are going to reply and say, "Well, I want that." Then the next thing you got to do is ask if they would

42:29pay to solve that problem today. So we do that to validate. That's number one. Second, we have to pre-sell. I'm a big fan of crowdfunding. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. People launch ideas and crowdfund it, have people support it, and they do it with one page. You can do the same thing. The landing page we just created, that's essentially the offer page. And now what we do behind the weight list is we actually email those people and say, "We actually are opening up our early adopter program. if you'd like to be part of it, here's how much it costs and send them a payment link and see if they

43:00buy. Maybe you get on a call with them and you walk them through it. But those same people that you contacted, maybe they replied or they referred people or they joined the weight list, those are the people that you want to use to pre-ell to validate that your problem is a real problem, a painkiller problem, not a vitamin problem. Then the third step is launch it manually. You can literally launch what I just said by manually doing it for people. No core

43:23tech, no like deep AI agentic stuff. Yes, eventually they'll get that, but you can just bring them on in a consulting approach, a concierge approach and customize the tech for them. So you can prove a real transaction, deliver real value before you build or automate anything. Now I want to go build my audience. So my favorite way to do that is find the people that are already talking about the problem and then see if I can partner with them to promote my business, my AI, my landing page. And you can do that right now. You could go find people currently talking about chief of staff using AI and see if they

43:56want to promote your company. So that is how we build the weight list. Again, we haven't even launched publicly, but you can recruit partners, give them a link that's unique to them, track that they're referring people, and then pay them if those people buy. This is basically the distribution of our idea to the world through other people. So unless you already have an audience, partner with somebody who does. Number

44:17five, which is last, is product ties. Notice how most people start here and I'm saying it's the last thing. Once you have the transactions and they're consistent, you're automating and you're doing most of it manually. You have the partners that are promoting it out there and you're getting paid to do it. Then you take the income and you reinvest it and building it out. That is how you could launch any single one of these

44:37ideas to any market and get there fast. This is how I've built every one of my companies. This is my process. I keep doing it every month. What do you think of the of the business that he picked? Um, I think you like it because you're in that space and let me get the spot where he talks about the framework for how to build it. What do you think of this? [snorts] I love it. Right. I mean, one thing Dan Martell is good at is making money, right? Getting the word out and he's doing it in the right way, right? And I totally agree with this. Validate,

45:02pre-sale, launch, money, build audience, productize. It's it's it's absolutely right. Right. That this is just a basic framework for launching any sort of business. Right. Uh, in fact, it made me think a little bit about Jenna and I realized I don't actually have a weight list on Jenna. We do we were taking lots of live demos and stuff, but I should have a wait list. I should create some scarcity and some urgency and things like that to make it a little bit better. Um the reality is we are actually we have real scarcity. We we're we're manually setting people up right now because um because we just want to,

45:30you know, hold it close to the chest in the beginning here. Uh we've been using it with our existing clients, but it's not just plug-and-play, set it up, go. It's a little bit different for everybody. But but the but the bottom line is uh I love his idea here. um the way you know texting everybody in your those are just basic hey are you a hustler or not right are you willing to actually get out and make a sale and ask people for it that's how business really is done right come up with dig any of the things right if you can't do that piece you know don't start

45:56we should say that is exactly how John did it he set a goal for himself of having a customer within what what' you say 48 hours and then you did send out DMs on LinkedIn you ended up getting a customer and for anyone who's watching who wants to see his whole process and exactly not just how he did it but how he says you can copy the same business. And this is a guy who Joe Rogan had talked about him and so many others because you're one of the early success stories of AI as a service and now AI software. Uh we've got a link for you right here. Go watch

46:22that video next and you hear her story and how to do it