This $200/Month AI "COO" Runs My Entire 6-Figure Business

0:00He is a $20,000 a month employee that I'm paying $200 a month for, right? And 3 months ago he didn't exist. Wait, you hired a 3-month-old? [music] He is doing SEO for my businesses. He is helping me manage my email inboxes. He gives me a morning brief every morning. He helps me with customer support for Piano No, Jacques isn't talking about a human hire. Instead, he's talking about Rocky, his new open cloud-powered AI operator that's not only helped inject a new sense of fun and excitement into Piano in 21 Days, his long-running online course business, but actually helped him

0:39become more profitable as well. March 2026 was my highest profit month [music] in the business since COVID times. In this video we're breaking down how you can set up your own 24/7 AI-powered virtual chief of staff or chief operating officer, how you can just stay secure, and how to set yourself and your bot up for success.

0:59Ready? Let's do it. He He is my like my employee and like I said, he's better at customer support than me because he is instantly has access to everything. He is my like my employee and like I said, he's better at customer support than me because he is instantly has access to everything. So, he has taken my course, right? He has all the contacts behind my Piano in 21 Days course instantly. He has gone through all my YouTube videos, but the reason he's better than me is because I last made my course like 4 or 5 years

1:30ago. So, I don't remember like instantly exactly what happened halfway through lesson 14, right? But he does. And so if somebody is somebody's asking about, you know, day 14 in the course, he can draft just an unbelievable reply. And then my customer support human actually reviews those and sends them out. So, that's just That's a few of many, many things that he's doing for me today. Yeah, and theoretically it could be trained on the last 10, 12, 13 years of your own customer support emails to kind of get a sense for the the tone and the voice and what what would make sense to even draft

2:05in the first place. Yes, he has process gone through all of my email history as well. Piano in 21 Days is a 13-year-old business and so he's able to draft replies not only with the right context and information, but in my voice, too. Yeah. Okay, I am getting the gears turning here cuz I'm looking at this inbox with hundreds and hundreds of unread emails from subscribers and listeners and I think I I want to do my best to reply, but also the rest of the business would not move forward if I did all that. So, that's a thing. SEO is definitely a thing. Building some kind of daily

2:39report dashboard, like how did you do yesterday? I think that would be really cool. Now, I think you have this, you know, kind of four levels of AI use case and I'm probably on maybe level two, maybe level three. Level one is just um uh chat GPT, you know, using Gemini, using Claude, you know, kind of question and response. Say, I have this question,

2:59it kind of spits back something out. Level two is going a step further in building automations using Zapier, using Make. And this is kind of where I've been playing around with some assistance from Claude Code to build out these automations. If this happens, then this happens and that's been kind of fun. That's actually been really interesting. Like, okay, after the podcast recording uh transcript hits this, then this Make automation fires, it gives me editing suggestions, it tells me what were the most exciting parts, I can put that in the video intro. That's all been super helpful stuff. But then there's a couple levels beyond that. You want to talk to

3:32those? Absolutely, yes. So, you you nailed it so far. I think most people that are using AI are at level one and that's where I was 3 months ago, which is the chat level. We use AI from a chat perspective. We ask it questions. Maybe we get it to help us write an email or revise an email so that the one we've drafted ourselves sounds better or

3:51smarter. Uh level two automations. Level three is where things really start to get interesting and it's AI agents. And this is like the big buzz right now and this is really going to shape the future of of work in general and that's when AI can actually do work for you. It can do work on a computer kind of like a human can do. And I remember when agent stuff started to come out a year or two ago and it I was just it was just so overwhelming and I just kind of like AI has overwhelmed me for so long and because it overwhelmed me and kind of

4:26scared me a little bit, I just kind of stayed in my little chat GPT bubble in level one until about three three months ago and I jumped all the way from level one up to level four. And so I think level level four takes this concept of AI agent a step further and I call level four a personal AI operator. So it's it's an AI agent but it's your AI agent that is is only yours and you don't have to kind of start over every time. It continues to grow, it continues to learn and the the more you use it and the longer you use it, the better it is at

5:01doing the things for you in particular. Yeah, so it can be proactive rather than just kind of call and response. It has longer context window, right? If you have these long conversations with chat GPT, sometimes it'll forget what you were talking about at the beginning. So it has more memory in that sense. What are some of the first steps to start to set this up? So Open Claw is

5:25currently free, open source. Um but then there's all these questions around security of like well what what do I give it access to? I don't want it to like start running rampant on my machine or on the internet or especially in the case of yours and mine, it's like kind of a personally branded business. Like we can't have it going out and

5:42saying stuff that isn't true. Yeah, so Open Claw really changed the game and now there are competitors as well, but Open Claw is the free open source software that allows you to create this level four personal AI operator. And it is a fairly technical setup, okay? But I have a solution for anybody that's not technical. When you go to set it up, you use an AI like Claude, a chat, a level one chat Yeah. to help you set it up so that if you get stuck at any point of the way, it will be there to advise you. And that's actually how I use my Open Claw, you know, to this day

6:21is I have my like Claude advisor. So anytime I get stuck, like he it's so much smarter than me and helps me interact with Rocky. I'm not I'm not always interacting with Rocky through it, but that is one of my big tips is because it is a fairly technical setup and even to maintain is to have Claude sitting there ready to help you along

6:40the way. And you went with the Mac Mini setup, so it's kind of a completely stand-alone computer. And my initial thought was even Bluehost has like a virtual private server or these different you can put this on in the cloud for like 10 bucks a month or something. Like do you need dedicated hardware for this? You don't need to, but one of the big concerns, probably the biggest concern with with Open Claw is security uh from from various different perspectives. And so I try to make mine as secure as possible. And I think one of the things we can do to make it as secure as

7:15possible is to run it on our own hardware in our own physical location. All right? And so yes, this can run on a virtual private server in the cloud, but I think the more secure way to do it is have it run locally. Got it. Got it. And ideally not on your primary laptop.

7:32Ideally not on your primary workstation. Is there like some reason why people don't do that? Yeah, not not only not ideally, but like that is a that is a hard no. Like everybody that's using Open Claw completely agrees this needs to run on its own computer, right? So think of it like think of it like hiring a new employee, right? You're not when you hire a new employee, you're not going to just let them share your computer with you, right? You're going to have a computer and your employee's going to have a computer because if you all of a sudden give your brand new employee access to your computer, they

8:00have access to all of your files, all of your sensitive information and that's just that's a security risk right off the bat. And so the best practice is have it running on its own machine. It is its computer just like hiring your a new employee. Got it. Got it. So I've got an old laptop that I could probably set up for this. It's got decent enough hardware specs that it could probably do this. Is that okay? Or does it need to be like this dedicated

8:26Mac Mini box that everybody talks about? A Mac Mini is really the perfect hardware to run it on because it's small, it's relatively inexpensive, and Open Claw works really well on on Mac OS. It doesn't have to be on Mac, but that is better. Um but it's it's also like it's not super resource intensive. So you don't need crazy hardware specs to run it. So if you've got an old Mac laptop right lying around, that's a great place to get started with it. But a Mac Mini is just like the best the best overall solution for something like this. Does it have to be an Apple

8:57product? Doesn't have to be. No, it can run on Windows, it can run on Linux, but it was built it was designed to work best on a Mac. Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah, so the the setup itself, the hardware setup and the software setup can get kind of technical. So Jach actually has a really good video kind of step-by-step how to get that done. So I will link that up in the show notes. I kind of want to skip ahead a couple steps to the maybe the training process or the you know, it it says give me a soul and like you propped it up and it's like hey, you

9:30know, what do you what do you want me to be? You know, I'm kind of an open book. Train me and let's talk about what kind of information you fed it to kind of give it that name and soul. When I when you're setting up your own, I there's two there's two things that I ask people to have ready when they're setting this up. One is a name. That's really fun like picking out the name for

9:52your for your new employee basically. You get to you get to name it. And I can talk later about where mine mine's name comes from if it's not obvious to to some. And secondly Is this is this a boxing reference or is this a Hail Mary No, not not Rocky the boxer. No, it's from So the movie just came out Project Hail Mary. I don't know I guess you haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen it yet, but

10:15I read the book. It was good. wildly popular book and and the the engineer alien guy is is probably he's probably my favorite fictional character of all time and it was just a perfect fit. But you also need to have what I call your operator brief. And this is just a brain dump of everything that you would want it to know about you. So feed I mean there's no limit to how much information you would you could give it at this point, but you want to you want to give it all of your business history, you know, as much personal history as you're willing to to give it, you know,

10:48I gave it you know, my my kids' names, their birthdays, where they go to school. But of course all the business history of of Piano in 21 Days, the online course guy. But then also like what I want it to help me with and what some of my goals are. And that's one of the cool things you can do with it is is not just give it specific tasks, but you can also just get kind of give it goals that you're trying to accomplish and let it figure out some of the ways that it

11:11can help you accomplish those goals. Okay, so this is at this point you're not feeding in like I I was thinking I like I could upload my book. So I could upload decades of transcripts. It's like not not quite yet. Just kind of a higher level overview. This is me. This is what I'm about. This is a little bit about my family, here's kind of the direction of the business and what I'm thinking you might be able to help with. Yes, exactly. That's And so, what I'm talking about is is part of what you're setting up in the onboarding wizard, is that

11:43initial brief that you're giving to it. That's not a That's not a one-shot thing. We can always add to it. And so, for example, at this point, Rocky is intimately familiar with every podcast episode I've ever done, every YouTube video I've ever done, every every online course I've ever made. He's got all my content, but I didn't feed that to him on day one. Okay, got it. And that's honestly like my biggest tip having done this for 3 months and starting to show other people how to do it is try not to go too fast because your your agent is really good at setting things up,

12:16building them, but sometimes, you know, you you set it up, but things start to break down over the next days and weeks because we try to do too many things at once. And so, what I really recommend people do is really focusing on one thing, one system, one automation, one thing at a time, and really get that nailed down, dialed in before you move on to the next

12:37thing. Got it. What did you start with? Okay. So, I think that asking where I started is maybe not the best most valuable question, and maybe more like where should people start maybe a little more appropriate. And so, if if that's where we're going, then I would say probably like business dashboards, right? I'm sure a lot of listeners maybe have side hustles or or full-time businesses already, and one thing I struggled with before was just like data visibility because it would be in all kinds of different places. I don't know about you, Nick, but like I use a lot of tools, right? I'm using Kajabi and

13:16ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel, and I've got WordPress websites. I've got data coming in from all kinds of different places. And being able to kind of aggregate that into one like business dashboard, which like I've got spreadsheets set up and I've got a virtual assistant that tries to do some of that for me, but now Rocky's got dashboards that are updated like real-time. I can see instantly where things are instead of waiting for a human to do it and it's all in one

13:44place. It looks pretty. Yeah, it saves and it saves your assistant the time and trouble of having to log into all these different places, too. Yeah, saves time and money. I'm thinking, yeah, could it pull in yesterday's affiliate earnings, yesterday's traffic numbers, number of email sign-ups from Kit, number uh you know, Mediavine earnings, YouTube earnings, like there's this cool dashboard that I kind of have in my mind of of what it might be able to build if

14:13if it had access to all this stuff. Absolutely. Yeah, and then I mean this is not where I'd suggest you start, but one thing I'm working on right now is I'm seeing if it can replace my bookkeeper. Cuz one thing I struggle with the with the financials is I'm not getting my books for the previous month until about halfway through the next month. And by by that point it's like almost worthless. And so by by getting up-to-date books in real-time at any at any time I want, that's really valuable for my business and so that's that's a

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16:50payroll at gusto.com/sidehustle. One more time, it's gusto.com/sidehustle. What's it doing for you on the SEO side of things? Cuz this has historically been an important driver, uh, both on the YouTube side and the organic side, like, you know, how to learn piano type of keywords is important for you. So, I used to pay a guy a lot of money

17:14every month to do SEO. Uh, like $3,500 a month. He did great work. He got us on the front page for awesome search terms like how to play piano, right? And it was great because we did all that work pre-COVID, and when COVID hit, everybody and their mother was searching Google for how to play piano, and we were showing up on the

17:34first page for search terms like that. Yeah. Um, but eventually I was like, well, you know, we're in a pretty good place. I don't really want to pay him this anymore, let's just let it ride. And the problem is that I let it ride without doing anything to it for like 4 years. And so now that I have Rocky, I was like, hey, you know, and this is this is another like tip for how to use something like this is don't just tell it what to do. Do something called reverse prompting. Like don't don't say, hey, go work on my SEO, say, hey, how

18:05can you best help me with SEO, right? And get it to think about how it could be most effective for something like that. So that's certainly how I started. And so what it what it first did was a full audit. And so we connected it into Google Search Console co- Google Search Console via API access, and it could see all the data, and it could see um, what pages are um, doing really well, what pages are getting zero traffic, which pages are um, too similar and really should be combined. It found a bunch bunch of broken links. And so it just did a full site audit with recommendations. And so

18:42on the first couple of days it was just like fixing a bunch of things that it found. And now it's actively um, monitoring and uh, helping me rank for new things. It built a new SEO dashboard that we can watch, and it's writing new relevant articles in my voice, right? And so the guy that I hired several years ago to do SEO, he's amazing. He still he still runs an SEO agency. As you can imagine, he uses AI in his AI uh, in his SEO agency now. He came and did a workshop for my clients a few months ago and it's like a 2-hour long

19:16masterclass on AI SEO. Well, guess what? I could take that 2-hour video and say, "Hey Rocky, watch this training and follow it." And so basically what he's doing is he didn't he didn't try to reinvent the wheel on how to do SEO. He's following proven methods from this guy that I trust on how to best do it. You got it cuz there's some risk involved like if he starts doing some weird black hat stuff that ends up getting you in trouble. Um but not just kind of generating the audit audit report, but actually fixing the broken links, actually making updates to the pages in your voice, actually creating you

19:54finding relevant keywords and then writing the content there. That's really cool. I mean that's like a little virtual employee in a box. Exactly. Yeah, and look, I you know, we talked about the security already. Most of the things that I've given Rocky access to is read-only. The vast majority. This is one small example where where I have played with giving him right access. So he does have right access to certain areas of my WordPress site. So when I'm saying he's fixing the broken links and he's writing articles and he's updating articles, like he's

20:26actually doing that. Yeah. But I am very careful again. Um well, no, it's not it's not exactly like that because he's you know, he doesn't use things like humans do, right? So he's got back-end API access to these things. He's not just logging in on a browser and navigating WordPress like we would. Okay. So did to peel it back one step, so Open Claw is the kind of operating system for Rocky, but then he's got to go out into the internet and he's got to call other the AI of your choice. In this case, it sounds like it's Claude. Um so having the Claude paid version plan allows him

21:04to you know, do stuff and think, right? Is that kind of how how it works? Essentially, yes. Let me clarify a couple of things, okay? So, Open Claw is free. It's open source. That is the main engine or brain behind this. I don't know what the right metaphor is, but because you really are plugging in a

21:24brain into it. You've got to you've got to tie in some AI, some large language model into it for for the smarts, right? So, no, I don't have Claude tied into mine because as of April 4th Claude actually banned their models, people using Open Claw using their models. Okay? Okay. Um so, but last month Open AI, who makes ChatGPT, actually for lack of a better word, acquired Open Claw. What they really did is they hired the creator of it. And so, Open Claw now is under the umbrella of Open AI. So, my my understanding is they're going to continue to more and more optimize ChatGPT, GPT 5.4,

22:11um and and newer models to run really well with Open Claw. So, the way I've got mine set up today is I'm on the $200 a month ChatGPT plan. Okay. And Rocky is running on the latest and greatest ChatGPT model, which at the time of this recording is GPT 5.4. Okay, got it. So, you do need a paid plan with one of these other tools to be able to you know, go out into the internet and

22:38and have him do your bidding. Yeah, or to to to do anything, right? He's worthless without being tied into an AI model. Now, you can tie him into cheaper AI models, and that's another mistake I made at the beginning. I was like, well, I don't want to spend $200 a month on an AI model, so I tried some of the cheaper models first, and they just

22:55wasn't very effective. Got it, got it. Okay. So, building dashboards, helping with the SEO stuff, talk to me a little bit about the customer support or whatever was next on your wish list here. Yeah. Yeah, I think customer support what was a good one because I've got I have a customer support person, but her process before was okay, we get an email from somebody. Well, before I just draft a reply, I need to look at the the context history of our communication with this person. Is this the first time we've communicated with them? What have we discussed before? I need to log into Active Campaign or Go High Level and

23:33figure, you know, is this a customer? Is this a prospect? Where are they in the funnel? Um and then okay, now that I've got all the context, let me think about a good reply, right? So, she's spending 10 minutes per email, right? So, now Rocky does all those things for her and what he does is he puts in the email so he he draft This is a This is another area where Rocky he he does not have the ability to hit send, right? He has read-only access to my email, but he also has access to be able to create drafts. So, in the draft, he's putting

24:05context for my assistant to look at. Hey, this is a prospect or a customer. This is where they're at in the funnel. This is the conversation history. And then he drafts his reply. And so now all she has to do is go in, see the context, vet the reply, make sure she approves it, maybe she tweaks it a little bit if

24:23necessary. And it's sent. So, instead of 10 minutes per email, she's spending probably less than 1 minute per email. Got it. Yeah, that I'm similar like Teresa has does an an awesome job on email support, but then there's always those that fall through the cracks on it requires some level of decision-making and it's just I don't know. Yeah, so yeah, bringing in context history, bringing in you know, this other data plus years and years of content and support and being able to make a draft would uh definitely ease

24:59some of the mental burden for me. Yeah. And look, I I'm certainly not looking at him to replace me, right? I mean, there are tools out there to where you can have your own AI persona be on video. Like, I'm not looking for him to replace me, and I'm not looking for him to replace my team. You know, the the word I like to use is is amplify. I want him to amplify me and my team and my

25:17brand and not not replace us. So, is it at that point when you're asking So, you kind of start off this prompt of like, "Hey, I could really use some help with with customer support. You know, what questions or context would you need to know from me to be able to do this job well?" Is kind of a

25:37conversation? Exactly. I mean, that's a great example of reverse prompting, right? You don't have to be the brains behind designing the whole system. You just need to go to it with your struggle. Like, here's what I'm struggling with. How can you best help me solve this? Help me design the system to where you can help me solve

25:52this problem that I currently have.

26:01Now that you've kind of seen the power of this, what else do you is on your on your wish list of like, "Well, shoot, now we could probably build this or we could expand our reach here." Like, are you having it mess around with paid traffic and managing Google campaigns or anything like that? It is absolutely tied into my meta ads dashboard and making recommendations to me for for ads. Um it's it's helping me with health and wellness, right? It is it is now my personal trainer, right? It's helping me with my workout plans um and nutrition and just tracking those things and keeping and helping to keep

26:37me accountable. That That's something that I'm working on right now is um a better overall system for prioritization, because that's something historically I've struggled with a lot. And that's an example of me going to Rocky and saying, "Hey, I'm really struggling with this. Like, how can you best help me?" So, he's got a pretty good understanding of my priorities in general and the things that I'm working

27:00on and the goals I'm working toward. He's not the best at like, "Hey, here are the three things you absolutely need to do today." Right? He can give me three good things to work on, but I want him to be like so good at like, "Jacques, to reach your goals and everything I know like you've got to do these three things today." And so, that's the system we're trying to build out right now because I want to be able to go to him at any time and him fully understand and advise me on exactly what I should be working on because that's that's a weakness in myself that I've

27:28I've always had that it would be great if he could be really good at at help helping to raise up that weakness in me. Has it come back with any proactive suggestions on well, I know that you're doing this, this, and this, but it seems like people who want to learn piano also need XYZ or like something, you know,

27:48proactive? No, it's you really have to prompt him for that. And you could, right? You could like, "Hey, what am I not thinking of? Like, you know everything about piano in 21 days. Like, what are some ideas or things I'm not thinking of that can help me to grow even more?" He's not going to just like like call you in the middle of the night and be like, "Hey Jacques, I have this really great idea." Like, it's not it's not like that. It's still a computer

28:12program, right? Yeah. Um and it's still running just code and it's got uh scheduled tasks and it's got a heartbeat, but it's it's not a human. Um and so, the answer unfortunately to what you what you're saying is is no, not exactly like that, but we can get fairly close. This is what I found is, you know, I always have more ideas than there are hours in the day, which on on the one hand is a good

28:34problem to have. But, I end up being kind of the the bottleneck of like, "Okay, even if I'm using AI to build out some of these projects, like inevitably it comes back where it's like now there's this human review process, which is probably good, but it's still like now I got to carve out the time to like figure out the next step and the next step and that. It's like yes, it probably makes me go farther faster than I could, but it's still find myself being being the bottleneck where it's like if I could just let the robots run free, they could probably do better than better than [laughter] they

29:06could if I was wasn't stopping them all the time. Do you have a specific example that we could talk through? Well, I've been trying to build out a couple smartphone apps. One we talked about on a recent episode was inspired by this guy who was selling these watches that don't tell time. And the headline was like I make two to $10,000 a month selling this watch that just says now on it. I was like, "Oh, that'd be cool. I wonder if I could build a smartphone version of that or an Apple Watch version of that." And the apps are built and semi-functional to the limited degree that I've been able to test them,

29:42but now it's like, "Well, now you need app screenshots and now you need you got to go through this whole approval process with the app stores." And it's like, "Okay, I'll I'll I'll get to that when I get to it." And it ends up kind of sitting on the to-do list for days and days before I get to it. So, first question would be did you I'm assuming you programmed the

30:04app using Claude code? Yes. Amazing. So, what I you know, I mentioned in the setup it's nice to use I use like my Claude advisor, right? And so what's really cool is you know, you could you could do you could run your open Claude on ChatGPT and you could start on the $20 a month plan. You definitely need a paid plan, but I use mine so much that I had to upgrade to their $200 a

30:27month plan. And then if you also have say the $20 a month Claude plan, like really getting the the best of both worlds on those two top models in the world right now. And so I use my Claude advisor not only to help me set up Rocky to begin with, but on a day-to-day basis as a continual adviser. So, let's say for example, um I'm you and I use Rocky to program um this app, which he could have done for you instead of Claude code, then I could have Claude come in and be help me with reviews, right? And I do that those exact things all the time. Like, I

31:03haven't done a mobile app yet, but Rocky will make me landing pages, he'll make me sales pages, he'll make me websites, things like that. And the first thing I do when he makes something is I give it to Claude to do the review. And so, I'm getting both Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 to put their brains together and make it the best possible thing first before I do my

31:25human review. Okay. Any other mistakes that come to mind over the last few months, um either security-wise or just, you know, spending days on something that ended up being a dead end? Make sure you're doing like one main thing at a time. Don't try to do too many things at a time. That That really burned me.

31:43And make sure you're using good models. Um because it can be expensive. Like, maybe you're turned off by the fact that I'm saying $200 a month for ChatGPT. Okay, well, I would pay probably $20,000 a month for an employee that that is this good. Like, that's how much Like, that that's what he is. Like, he is a $20,000 a month employee that I'm paying $200 a month for, right? And so, I'd recommend starting out I mean, you start with the $20 a month plan, but if you use it and you get value out of it,

32:14you're going to quickly want to upgrade. And you look at it as as an investment, and hopefully you get that much or more out of it that you're putting in. Look, March 2026 was was my highest profit month in the business since COVID times. Yeah. And I I mean, I've I've come on the podcast and told you how well Piano in 21 Days did during COVID because everybody wanted to learn piano. Like, it was wild

32:37numbers. Um, but business is going really well um, for this $200 a month employee, that's what I would say is more like a $20,000 a month employee. Yeah, even in the context of the $3,500 a month SEO agency to be to be able to place that plus this other role plus this other role plus this other yeah, it's it may seem intimidating and sure start with the $20 a month plan see where it gets you. Maybe you don't need it on 24/7 or doing stuff all the time. The other interesting use case I wanted to ask you about was building kind of your virtual mastermind around these different

33:09personas like the you know, the skeptic person, the engineer person, the data person. It was like, oh, this is kind of an interesting model where now you have but a different different personalities within Rocky to ask for feedback on certain ideas. I'm glad you brought that up Nick. There's I mean there's just so many cool things that he's doing that it's hard for me to remember all of them. But what you just mentioned is the AI council that he that he helped me build build. And look, I'm following a lot of like AI influencers, a lot of open claw users and a lot of these ideas

33:38are coming that that I get from them and then I can just like I can literally say, hey Rocky, go watch this YouTube video and tell me if there's anything useful we could be implementing. And this is one of those cases where a guy was talking about his AI council system and we took that and then we ran with it and made it made it work for our our situation. Like we didn't copy it one for one. We optimized it as much as we could. What we did was we took seven different models and assigned them kind of a role like the strategist, the engineer, um,

34:11the devil's advocate so that big strategic questions we can input it into this council and they can kind of talk about it and debate about it and give us their recommendations. So Rocky's not one of the seven, right? He's the one that hands it off to the seven roles. Okay. And they take a few minutes to analyze the situation and and spit it back out to me. So, you want me to give you an example of of something running running

34:38through the council? Sure. Yeah, so like I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my business, right? Online courses, right? The online course guy. I've I have wrestled with that pre-AI in terms of like, well, I also help people with memberships and coaching programs and things like that. Like I really help people with any kind of digital product. But now with AI, it's like, well, you know, AI's not going to make online courses completely irrelevant, but depending on the niche, like you can just go to AI and it can help you learn something. So, I'm just trying to understand if I should be pivoting my business. I'm also really really pumped

35:11about this AI stuff and the AI operator stuff. And so the question is basically like, hey, given all of this history and information, like what should I do with my brand going forward, right? And so I gave that to the AI council and it's it's a better output than just rocking because there's seven powerful AI models analyzing the situation from different all different perspectives. Yeah. And ultimately what they suggested is and I think this is the direction I'm going is not like not completely getting away from digital products or anything like that, but go ahead and slowly transition to a personal brand, right? Instead of maybe

35:50the online course guy, just start using my name and maybe that's what I should have done uh seven nine years ago when I started when I started this. And be kind of the AI guy for digital product creators. And so the tagline that they came up with was helping digital product creators scale with AI.

36:10Okay. I think that's the direction I'm going I'm going to go. I mean, look, I've I've got courses for you. that's new on your YouTube channel, yeah? That's new on my YouTube channel. And you can see that my YouTube channel is just my name now and that's not the online course guy, right? Got it. And that's where we're starting the transition and seeing how it goes cuz I still got the website, the online course

36:29guy, still have the online course show. Yeah. Um I try not not not make big decisions like too quickly. I try to try to take it kind of slowly. So, we're starting on the YouTube channel and I'm just in general starting to talk more and more about this AI operator stuff. And I don't want to be just like a general AI uh influencer or anything. I want to I want to help digital product creators

36:50cuz that's my bread and butter. Yeah. I still do, too, with Piano in 21 Days. How that type of person can scale using AI, cuz that's exactly what I'm doing right now and what I'm loving doing right now. I don't think I've ever had this much fun in my business, ever. [laughter] It's so much fun. Yeah, I think that's kind of cool, cuz we're you know, the our businesses are similar age and so it's always like well for me I get to talk to new people every week. It's so that keeps it, you know, fun and interesting and exciting. But it's like we're like behind the scenes

37:18part of like well what are the little process improvements that you could do that are really fun and I think this would be uh absolutely one to play around with. And maybe that's the best use case is if you already have a business to apply it to, where you can look at Open Claw as your new uh virtual assistant, your new

37:33operator or chief operating officer. What's your take on and you see this a lot in the AI influencer videos of like I gave Open Claw the marching orders to go make a million dollars this year or make me a hundred thousand dollars this month and inevitably it turns into selling something AI bot related. Like it ends up being very meta, very circular and sometimes Yeah, you have to be very careful because the the goal of a lot of those people is to get views and get attention, right? And so Yeah. how real is what is it um what they're showing you? And so yeah, I see

38:05those posts all the time. Like I gave you know, I gave my Open Claw $50 and I said, "If you don't make me money, I'm going to kill you." Right? And and the next day it had $3,000. Like, okay. Like, that's a cool story, but I don't believe you. Right? Yeah, it's not repeatable is it? Like go find some edge on some polymarket bet and like, really? Exactly. And then the other the other thing that I see a lot is people like with Open Cola, you can

38:31actually create multiple agents, right? So, I've got I've got Rocky, but like some people are creating a whole team and like they have their CEO and then they have their their marketing person and their copywriter and all these different agents running on the one Mac Mini. And I just don't think I think that is and then they have these great visuals of all of them like sitting at desks and doing work. I think that works really well for getting views, but in reality, that's not the best way to use one of these cuz Rocky can literally do it all. And when you start creating the multiple agents, they don't all have all

39:02the same contacts. Right? Whereas Rocky has all the contacts and he can do all the roles. So, I think org charts are meant for humans and work really well, but when we start getting into AI agents, one agent can do so much more than one human. Yeah. Okay. Jacques, this has been fascinating. Again, definitely check out his video on how to set this up cuz it kind of just goes step-by-step through the technical process, um the hardware, the software, you know, how to communicate it with uh with it through Telegram and all this stuff. So, really helpful video. We'll link that up. The onlinecourseguy.com/rocky is where to get your AI operator starter

39:40kit. Super helpful tool over there. So, we'll link that up in the show notes as well. And we'll be right back with Jacques from the onlinecourseguy and the onlinecourseshow coming up right after this. When you're a small business, it's a right hire can be make or break. Hoping the right people see your job posting

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40:50you heard about Indeed on this podcast. indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. A lot of side hustlers suffer from this debilitating disease. I call it what if I dis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I'm picking the wrong path? But one thing 100% of our amazing Side Hustle Show guests have in common is they took their shot. They faced down those what ifs and they got their answers through taking action. Our partner Shopify helps

41:19you turn those what ifs into why nots. Shopify is the commerce platform that powers millions of businesses around the world. What if you've never built a website before? Well, with hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. What if people haven't heard about your brand? Well, everybody starts there, which is why Shopify helps you find your customers with email and scroll-stopping social media campaigns. And what if you get stuck? Shopify is always around to share their advice with their

41:46award-winning 24/7 customer support. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/sidehustle. Go to shopify.com/sidehustle. One more time, it's shopify.com/sidehustle. All right, we're back with Jacques from the onlinecourseguy.com for round two. This is the business idea donation round where this is something you might start yourself if you had more hours in the day and maybe you do now that you got your AI operator in place or something you think listeners could

42:21run with. This is to me, you know, given all the context of what we just talked about, is an absolute no-brainer. And it is just an AI consultant. There are so many people, I mean, just look look where I was 3 months ago. Like I was in my chat GPT bubble. Most people are are using chat GPT and that's it. They're at that level one and a lot of these people are business owners that have so much potential for how AI could be improving their business. And so I think there is such a need for good AI consultants and it doesn't even have to be this open call thing, right? Even if

42:57I mean even if you out there listening are a chat GPT user and you start and you switch to Claude, like the application Claude, and even the model Opus 4.6 is just so much better than chat GPT in general. Like even if you make that switch, you're a better AI user and you could help business owners make that switch or you can help them implement systems, find out what they're struggling with and use AI to help them improve things. I think that is a great business to set up today once you're once you train yourself a

43:27little bit to be an AI consultant. Yeah, you only have to be a couple steps ahead of the people that you're working with and there's probably kind of a template that you could end up following or even a especially if you go into like niche down to a specific industry or business owner type of person where it's

43:45like, "Okay, tell me about your pains. Tell me about your processes. How are you currently operating this? And let's see where there might be some opportunity for automation or some agentic help in those spaces." I don't know. Would you play the content marketing card to attract business? Would you start cold calling people? Would you have an AI start cold calling people? How would you go about uh

44:06marketing on this one? Yeah, so it I mean it depends on depends on who you are. Like if you don't have any platform yet, then just like starting content marketing might take a little a little too long. Um I think that the the easiest path for most people is just to tap into your existing network. I mean, most people know business owners, right? And and most people know people in general. And if you start just talking about this, I mean, I'm I've been I've been just like telling everybody I know about this both online and personally. And like I'm getting texts from random people. Like, "Hey,

44:37you know, your neighbor told me about what you're doing. I'm a doctor. Like, I would love to implement some of this stuff." I'm getting I'm getting random texts like that all the time just because I've started talking about it to to people that I know. So, I think if you're not a content creator already,

44:53then that's that's what I would do. Well, that was me last week. I was like, "Hey, should we do an episode about this stuff?" Cuz I just kept seeing your videos about it. Exactly. But, that's because I put content out there. I mean, look, this this stuff is wild. I One of my really good friends lives on the next street over, and I was I was telling him about this stuff, and he immediately went out and got a Mac mini, and I set it up for him because I wanted it to like make a YouTube video. Yeah. And he isn't I mean, this is great for Side Hustle

45:20Nation. Like, he is now creating and selling coloring books on Amazon with his OpenClaw. Like, that's how he is making money selling coloring books that he's not creating himself. Okay. And he's he's he's made a made a brand new business out of it. Wow. Okay. Well, there's an example of prompting, too. Like, hey, let's go out

45:41and try and start a a business here. Yeah. Okay. AI consulting for business owners, absolutely huge opportunity in this space. Tapping into the buzzword of the day. Everybody is aware of this. They know they need to be using it, or they're going to get left behind. And all of a sudden there if you can raise your hand and be that person in their network who can help them set it up, do some process improvement, build them, maybe even build them their own little open claw operator, I think you can be a hero because you like the context savings of like look it's only going to be 200

46:14bucks a month to run this versus the $3,500 agency or however much you were paying previously, this could be a big cost savings and it would be easy to pitch that way to say it well even I'll even I'll do it for free and you just pay me out of the savings over the

46:29next 2 or 3 months and we can go there. Let's move to round three, the triple threat. First here is a marketing tactic that is working right now. This could be on the course side, this could be on the piano side. What do you got for us? Yeah, let's go to the piano side. We

46:47haven't talked about that a whole lot. Nick, have you ever run a self-liquidating offer? No. They've been around for a long time, I'm sure. Not with not with any uh success or or true dedication to it. Yeah, I mean [snorts] I first heard about these a long time ago and it's it's just always been on on the back of my mind to to try out and this is this is something we've been doing finally for the in the past few months is running a self-liquidating offer for Piano in 21 Days. And so if anybody's not familiar with that concept, the idea is that you run paid ads to a low ticket

47:18offer, ours is $27 and the idea is you want to relatively break even on the ad versus this front-end offer and then any profit comes from from upgrades or upsells kind of down the road. So what we did was we took the first 5 days of the piano course and turned it into a 5-day piano challenge. It's literally

47:385daypianochallenge.com. Okay. Running ads to that and there's an order bump and an upsell to where our average cart value is around $45 and that's around what we're spending in ads to get one customer. And then over the next week or 10 days, we're trying to get people to then buy our $500 to $800 full piano in 21 days course. And when somebody does that, it's pure profit. So, that is something that is not a new concept, but it's new

48:07for us that uh that's going pretty well. Yeah, that's it's surprising. I would have expected you to have had this dialed in uh years ago, but it is there's some moving parts involved. Well, how do I create a compelling offer that people are willing to pay for coming in cold or relatively cold, I imagine, and then okay, have dialed in the the landing page and the upsells and the order bumps and then all this other stuff cuz you got the the funnel the sequence dialed in after somebody opts

48:36in. Like that's been firing for years. It's like if I can get people in in the door for free, then everything else is gravy. Do you have a sense of how that is paying off in terms of uh conversion rates uh on the full course? Yeah, so if you if you look at it in terms of like ROAS, return on ad spend, we're we're about 2x. Um so, that initial funnel is is relatively breaking even. Yeah. And then a small percentage of those people that buy will then upgrade to the full course, and ultimately, um right now, for every dollar we're putting in, we're getting about $2 out on the back end. Yeah,

49:12that's fantastic. So, now kind of is a game of scaling up that spend and trying to find more people who want to learn piano. Yeah, exactly. So, earlier when I mentioned, you know, Rocky is helping with ads, like that that's the ads that we're running. So, he's monitoring that. He's He's giving us a daily brief on what's working, what's not working, and making suggestions on um on ads. You know, I'm not a big ads guy. I think you probably know that. And one thing I've found interesting about this ads experiment is um you know, people often compare like creating free content versus ads. Well, um you know, content

49:45marketing, you just kind of have to continue to push out new content. Well, I'm discovering that's the case with ads, too. You can't just make some ads, turn them on. Like, you've got to continue to make fresh ads for them to be effective. So, in a sense, when you're running ads, you still have

49:59to be a consistent content creator. Is this YouTube? Is this Meta? Where are you posting these? Meta, yeah. We're We're doing it on Meta ads, so they're running on Facebook and Instagram. Okay. And so, still kind of do a short-form hook type of video where they get somebody in and present them with this 5-day piano challenge? Exactly. Yeah, I'm just creating a bunch and bunch of like 30-second videos, and some

50:23work really well, and some don't. Did you ever test going direct to the free lead magnet with an order bump? Cuz there's a couple ways to do the self-liquidating type of thing where it's like, "Okay, if I expect to pay a lower cost per lead for, you know, the free opt-in, but then hopefully some people buy the the order bump, or maybe they sign up for the $27 challenge like

50:47on the thank you page or something." I would call that more of a tripwire, where they're opting in for the freebie, and then on the next page, they get that tripwire offer, where it's the low-ticket once they opted in for something free. I haven't tested that exact model. What I have done in the past is run ads to my free workbook opt-in, and then they just go into my normal funnel that eventually tries to sell them the big course, and that's never really worked very well for ads. But, but what you're suggesting would be

51:13something good to test at some point. My gut would say that the people who bought the $27 thing and and bought the upsells, my gut would say they would be more likely to convert down the road than just a regular freebie opt-in person. Yeah, and that's that's the theory behind it. Mine is going well so far, but if I could just snap my fingers and convert what I've created to the tripwire model that you're suggesting, I think it would be a good test. And who knows, maybe I'll put

51:43Rocky on it one of these days. We'll see. Maybe Uh will be another homework assignment. Add it to the to-do list or or have my open claw assistant try and set this up for me. Let's move to a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now. And for the sake of this episode, I'm going to cross open claw off the list and make you come up with something

52:01else. [snorts] That's fair. I You just ruined the joke that I was going to say. Look, I do have a good answer here and I don't know if you're using it. Are you familiar with Whisper Flow? This is the voice-to-text thing. I'm not using it but have heard of it. All right, like changed my life. Unbelievable. So, Whisper Flow is a is a voice-to-text but it's AI-powered. Okay? So, all I do is I hit a hot key on my keyboard and then I start talking and it will convert

52:29my voice to text. But it's AI-powered so it fixes mistakes. Like if if you say, you know, I'm going to the store today and I need to buy some milk. Actually, I mean I mean butter. It will type out, I'm going to the store today and and I'm going to buy butter, right? It fixes any

52:44mistakes. It removes ums. It will format things nicely. And so, when this is especially helpful when you're interacting with AI and prompting AI as much as I'm doing, it's so much more efficient. And so, Whisper Flow is an absolute game-changer. It's becoming very very popular. And at this point, I could not live without it and I don't really type

53:05anymore and it's amazing. [sighs] Everything going going voice to search. Cool. Whisper Flow, we'll link that up in the show notes for this episode as well. How about your favorite book from the last 12 months? I'm going to go fiction if that's okay and it's it's Project Hail Mary. It's it's my favorite book. I've read it three times and the third time was was recently to my 10-year-old daughter who

53:28loves space. It is a sci-fi space book. And the movie recently came out and we were able to go see that together. It's is a family-friendly movie. Um fortunately. And I think she loves it as much as I do and And where that's where the namesake uh for my AI operator comes from. So, if you haven't read or seen Project Hail Mary, I absolutely love it. Sweet. We'll link that up as well. Definitely a good read, fun story. So, our mutual friend Alex Barker was holding this like rejection challenge many, many years ago. And so, my rejection challenge was I'm going to invite Andy Weir on the

54:04podcast because The Martian started out as this self-publishing project and we had this connection to this place in California where he was working and living. And you know, he's like, "No, I'm working on my next book." So, that was my That was my rejection. It's my Andy Weir story. So, um what else has got you excited this year? So, you got Rocky firing, you got these ads firing. What's What's the future hold for for you this year? Maybe the rebrand on the online course guy stuff. I think the biggest thing is just like sharing this information with people. That's I I was so pumped when I

54:34got your text the other day. Like, "Hey, you want to come on the podcast to to talk about it?" Because, you know, I didn't reach out to you, which I've done in the past. Like, "Hey, I'm working on this cool online course stuff. I would love to share it with your audience." But, you saw some of my content and so, that just like made my day that it resonated with you and you wanted to share with the audience cuz I think that like whether we like it or not, this is here. Like, AI is here and AI agents are here. Um and like I said, I was so

54:57overwhelmed and scared by it that I didn't really do anything with it. But, now that I have, it's it's just unbelievable and I'm just having so much fun. And so, I'm going to continue to um work with Rocky, but then also share this information with people and help them set it up uh for themselves so that they can see all these amazing amazing benefits that I've experienced. Yeah, this is as much for the listeners as it is for me cuz I've seen this stuff for months. I know I should be doing something with it, but dedicating the time to learn it and figure out how to

55:26set it up. It's like, "Oh, do I need my own hardware?" And like, "Oh, okay." But, this has been super helpful, inspired me to to go ahead and take action on it. Again, check out the AI operator starter course. That's the online course guy. theonlinecoursesguy.com/rocky. You'll be able to download that for free, watch the setup video, and start playing around with it. I think that's probably the best way to learn is just plug it in, see what you can get it to do, and and start to get this renewed sense of energy and excitement towards your business. So, Jacques, again, really

55:56appreciate you stopping by. The online course show, of course, if you prefer podcasts, we'll link up the YouTube channel as well. And let's not forget Piano in 21 Days if you want to go learn how to play piano fast. Big thanks to Jacques for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. sidehustlenation.com/deals is where to go to find all the latest

56:17offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. Fire off that text message. Somebody who needs some open claw, needs some more AI in their life, let them know about this one. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen, and I'll catch you in the next edition of The Side

56:38Hustle Show. Hustle on.