A Guide to Becoming a Solopreneur w/ Claude in 2027

0:00Lovable makes 400 million with 146 employees. If you do the math, it's about 2.7 million dollars per employee. And they're not the only ones. Gamma is at around 2 million per employee. Base 44 was built in 4 months by one person and sold for 80 million dollars. People are getting progressively more effective because of AI tools like Claude. So, why not make some money with it? This is a guide to help you pick a problem, learn how to solve it with Claude, and then get paid money to do so. This is not a guide on how to build a really big business or how to hire a bunch of

0:30people. It is specifically about becoming a solopreneur with Claude and related technologies. I've scaled two agencies to a combined revenue of over six figures. I've also made many millions of dollars using technologies like these in the many businesses that I run and operate. Right now is the time to do this. On jobs platforms like Indeed, Upwork, Fiverr, and so on, AI demand has skyrocketed, especially over the course of the last three or four months. The environment is essentially on their hands and knees begging for somebody with knowledge in these tools and technologies to come into their business and then renovate them, modernize them, build systems that play

1:05nicely with all of their tools, and more. And you can get paid a lot of money. I know many people personally that get paid upwards of 20,000 dollars per month to do exactly that. So, three skills we're going to learn about in today's video. The first is how to use Claude to build something that a customer or client might want. The second skill is how to get good enough at sales to be able to explain to the

1:25customer or client why they need that. And the third skill is how to build enough consistency that you can stay in the arena or the ring long enough for both of these benefits to materialize. Luckily, all three of these things are far easier than you might think. Let's start with the first one, which is how to learn enough about Claude to actually build something a client or customer might want. Here's a really short guide on Claude. Claude is an AI model made by Anthropic. Claude Code is the version or wrapper around Claude that works on your computer and allows it to read your files, write code for you, fix what

1:57breaks, and ultimately be a knowledge work partner. If you're going to run a solopreneur business with Claude, I would highly recommend that you pick Claude Code as your preferred plan. Costs about $20 a month right now. Believe it or not, that's all you need. Once you have it, you could start building things that solve problems for business owners. For example, here's me doing exactly that. I'm going to open Claude Code here. I'm going to hover around new, and then I'm going to paste in a big prompt that says, "Build me a one-page web app for a home cleaning company. Make it 3D. A visitor will enter their square footage, floors, and

2:33number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the type of cleaning, standard, deep, or move-out. The page should show an instant price estimator and build a mini model of their house as they insert the info. It should be dynamic and interactive. Then a big book this cleaning button should open a booking form." And then you just sit around and wait. It's been 45 seconds or so. We can clean up the design here for it to be easier to see, and now we have a three-dimensional system that can actually show us the square footage of the unit as it scales, the number of floors, the number of bedrooms and

3:06bathrooms, and after going through the cleaning form, we can actually go as far as literally booking the standard cleaning, sending it into the team, maybe with a calendar or something like that. As I'm sure you could tell, far more efficient than what most cleaning companies do, which is usually some super laborious and annoying WhatsApp or book a call funnel. So, it's stuff like that people like for, things that make it easier for their business to grow and get customers. You can also build lead generation systems, customer relationship management systems, marketing systems, sales systems, like things that generate assets. And the crazy thing is, all of this is really

3:41just one prompt or even just voice dictation session away. The reason why this is accessible to you, and maybe not the people that you are selling to, is simply knowledge arbitrage. Basically, there's a gap between what you know, having been on YouTube recently and watching videos from channels like mine, versus what a busy business owner who knows who might be running a cleaning business and have their head so far down the sand because all they're really worrying about right now is keeping their company alive. You get paid based off of that gap, and that's why this business model works so well. Now, in addition to YouTube, I run a community

4:12called Maker School where I guarantee people's first customers in 90 days or I give them all of their money back. And so, I actually see a ton of different products and services that people sell for exactly this. And I wanted to give you some examples right here just to spark your imagination a little more. One of our members, Joe, closed $1,200 on his 10th day for a cleaning business that kept missing bookings. Basically, the owner wanted some sort of way to receive new inquiries with like an AI receptionist. They wanted that connected to a Google calendar with some sort of Cal booking on their website, you know,

4:45a simple and easy way to book a slot. That's really easy to build with Claude code. You could literally just copy the section of the transcript that I just said all of this, and it would do it for you. James is another person in Maker School. Their client said they just wanted some landing pages. Back in the day, you would have had to design these pages manually, either by dragging and dropping using a page builder like Elementor or Wix or some other laborious slow coding approach. Today, you can do all of that with Claude. So, James literally just built two new landing pages for the client before the client

5:16even asked them specifically for it. Took him about 2 hours, and he got paid over $800. These seem like pretty small, straightforward jobs, right? But, in that case, Joe made $1,200 in a few hours, probably an hourly rate of over 150 to 200 bucks. James here made $800 in 2 hours. That's an hourly rate of 400 bucks. The important thing here is not to diligently track your hourly rate because that is sort of a trap in and of itself, but more broadly to understand

5:44that there are opportunities everywhere. The economy is really spiky, and right now, especially small businesses lack a lot of the power and capability that tools like Cloud Code allow them to get. You can be the thing that smooths out their business by offering them this function, and they're more than happy to pay you for it. Now, the main tools that tend to show up over and over and over again are as follows, and I know this because every month people in Maker School will scrape all jobs platforms like Indeed and Upwork and publish reports showing how differences in

6:16demand have evolved over the years. Cloud Code, very popular. N8N, far less popular, but popular because a lot of people run their businesses on this tool and need help with maintenance or new builds. GoHighLevel, very popular. HubSpot, extremely popular. Calendly or cal.com, fantastic. Instantly, ClickUp, Trello, Asana, Pipedrive, QuickBooks, Ramp, Mercury, Zapier, and of course, all of the other agenda coding platforms. People will create jobs with these keywords specifically looking to see whether there are anybody, freelancers, solopreneurs, people like

6:54yourself that can help them with this. And believe it or not, it doesn't take a lot of time to learn. Everything you need to learn, you can learn in approximately 3 to maybe 5 hours using free resources like mine, including courses and more. In general, the most in-demand services all have to do with growth. That is getting a customer more eyes on their business or more sales or conversions directly. And these seem like two related problems, and they are,

7:20but they're also a little bit different. One is marketing, which is just generating interest. The second is sales, which is generation of intent. The crazy thing is, for every hour that you spend on, say, sales or marketing versus some other aspect of business, maybe human resources, you tend to receive between 5 to 10 times the value back. Especially with tools like Cloud Code, most of the time it makes sense to focus on growth, aka sales and marketing, because that's ultimately what pays the business the most, and the business is going to pay you based off the value that you make them. That's because a growth system inherently has

7:55no ceiling. If you build systems with Claude Code to save people money, they can logically only save 100% of all of the money that they make. But what if they don't make that much money to begin with? However, you can grow a business essentially infinitely. If they make $100,000 a month right now, you can grow them to $200,000 per month. Because you're responsible for about $100,000 a month in delta, the company would be happy to pay you a fraction of that, say 10 or 20,000 dollars a month for continued value. Claude Code and other technologies have really solved the problem of how do we build this and can

8:28we build this? Instead, the problem now is what do we build? And ultimately, which of all of the things that we could build is actually helpful to our bottom line. So, nowadays, learning Claude Code and other agentic coding tools is less so about knowing how to code and even really how to prompt. It's more so just realizing that most of the time, the only problems that really matter are the ones that make a business grow. And once you've learned this, the next thing to do is learn how to explain it to real clients and customers. So, here's a short guide on sales. First, you have to

9:01understand the business funnel left to right. We talked a little bit about growth a moment ago, but let's make that really concrete. Every business moves customers through the exact same pipeline. They start with marketing on the left side. This produces opportunities, which are people that might buy. Then you have sales, which converts these

9:19opportunities into paying customers. After that, you have onboarding, which gets a new customer acquainted with all of the nuances and logistical things your business needs in order to fulfill your end of the deal. This is usually things like access, accounts, style preferences, and timelines. Afterwards, you have delivery, which is doing the work that they paid you for. And then finally, you have retention, which is the mechanism that keeps them paying, buying more, and coming back to your

9:45business even after the job was done. Each of the things that I just told you about can be subdivided into a variety of approaches. Think dozens, sometimes even hundreds. Marketing, for example, is divisible into cold email, cold calling, freelance platforms like Upwork, communities like mine, content like YouTube and LinkedIn, paid ads, PPC, referrals, partnerships, conferences, in-person networking, and more. Sales is generally divided into a bunch of approaches, too. You could do a one-call close, where you come on the call, and before the end of the call, the customer has told you, "Yes, I'm going to buy this." or "No, I'm not going to buy this." You could do a two-call close,

10:22where the first call is all about getting to know the customer, basically discovering their pain points and problems. And the second call is about closing the customer. That is, getting them to tell you, "Yes, I want to buy this." or "No, I don't want to buy this." You could also do a blended approach, where maybe you have a discovery call, and then you send them a proposal to confirm with their team at later. There are similarly multiple approaches to onboarding, to delivery, and to retention. The best way to get set up as a solopreneur with Claude is to focus primarily on the marketing and sales aspects of the business. Because

10:52without marketing and sales, you can't really do any of the downstream things, anyway. I recommend picking three marketing approaches and one sales approach, sticking to that approach for long enough for the market to have responded to your inputs. For example, in Maker School, we do cold email, Upwork, communities, LinkedIn DMs, manual emails, social media, and a couple of other approaches that you can check out down below. People pick three of those, pre-commit to a certain amount of volume, say, 300 cold emails a day, five Upwork applications a day, 15 LinkedIn DMs a day, and then they just stick to that for long enough for the market to eventually acknowledge their

11:31efforts. Sales and marketing, at the end of the day rely on a formula. The formula is as follows. The amount of money you make is equal to the ROI that you tell your customer you're going to make them times how much you can make them believe it divided by the friction that they would have to go through if they said yes to you. For example, if you said, "I know you're suffering from a problem that's costing you $10,000 a month right now and I'm confident I can solve it." Then your stated ROI is $10,000 a month. If afterwards you say, "I know this because I've worked with

12:02over a dozen businesses in your exact same growth stage. Here are a bunch of their names and case studies and I even get paid professionally to create videos all about how to solve the same problem." Then that's your social proof or how much you can make them believe it. Finally, if you said, "By the way, if you wanted to get started, I'd only

12:18need 5 minutes at the end of this call. I can also send you an invoice right now through Stripe via your phone and I'm entirely self-managed after onboarding to the point where the only way you'll hear from me is if I have good news for you. And if I don't make you that money in the next 30 days, I'll give it all back plus buy you a $200 Amazon gift card for your time." Then that would be the friction. And in this particular example, all three of those are very good. Your stated return on investment is super high. You can really make them believe it and you're not really asking

12:49for much friction in return for buying. An offer like this tends to do quite well in the marketplace assuming you can stay long enough in the market for those results to materialize. Obviously, there's a lot to be said about how you word your offer, how every one of these marketing platforms and approaches require slightly different tools and tactics, and how to finesse somebody into actually parting with money in their wallet. But this is more than enough to get you started. And interestingly enough, inside of Maker School, the people that tend to find the most success usually end up being the really young folk. Think 18 to maybe 21

13:21or 22 years old who start with even the less knowledge than that and win simply because they don't know enough to get in their own way. With the internet nowadays, you guys could find a sales script that you really like, look at real live call examples of people selling deals, and then just try and emulate that to get started. After your first 20 or 30 calls, you guys will be able to develop your own significantly better and more natural feeling approach to getting things done. Speaking of getting things done, let's talk about consistency. The reality is just doing well at marketing, sales, and Claude is not enough. Success in the market is

13:57almost always a byproduct of how long you stay in the market. Because what you'll find as a solopreneur is that your outputs always lag relative to your inputs. So, how long you are in the arena is typically the main problem. One of my favorite books is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, and it starts off with a very simple example. Somebody comes up to you and says, "Hey, I'll give you either $3 million or I'll give you a penny that doubles every day. What would you like to pick?" Most people would pick the $3 million thinking, "Damn, that sounds pretty good." But let's look at the penny. At day 10, it's

14:30worth about five bucks. At day 20, it's worth about 5,000 bucks. On day 31, it's actually worth over $10 million or about three times what the $3 million was when it was offered to you. That's because almost all of the results from your choice don't occur in the first 25 to 26 days, they occur in the last three to four days. And in fact, it's not until day 29, day 30, and day 31 that your choice actually ends up being a net positive. It's the same thing with self-improvement. If you get 1% better every day, you are 37 times better by the end of the year. The hard part is

15:05not the end because at the end, you've already achieved everything you wanted to achieve. In our case, a thriving solopreneur style service delivered through Claude code, the hard part is always the middle. Your effort has gone up in a straight line for a long time, and your results have barely moved. That gap right there is where the vast majority of people quit. I see a lot of people join Maker School, send a few hundred emails, and then think, "Nobody's saying anything back. What's going on? This is way harder than I thought it would be." But, it's kind of like a casino. Imagine a slot machine that pays you a dollar every single time

15:40you pull the lever. You know, a dollar is not going to fundamentally change your life, will it? No. But, also, if you pull the lever, you get a damn dollar. What are you going to do? I'm probably going to sit there and just pulling the lever as quickly and as many times as possible, wouldn't you? Well, that's kind of how solopreneurship works. You just find a lever that pays you a little bit more than the effort that you put in, and then you build systems that enable you to pull it a lot. We had one member in Maker School that made $186 on their first job. She

16:08crashed out multiple times between then and the end of the year, but by the end of that journey, 10 months later, she'd passed over $100,000. And that's a good example of just how many ups and downs you're likely going to see along the way. How to actually do this? I recommend being remarkably consistent, but increasing the magnitude of the work that you ask yourself to do on a daily basis very, very little. Another good example from maybe Atomic Habits this time was somebody who wanted to pick up a running habit. Try as they might, they go running for three or four days, but eventually they'd be too tired or they'd

16:40be too sore, and on day three or day four they'd give up. The recommendation the author made was, "Rather than try and run for 30 minutes every day, why don't today you start by just putting your laces on? That's all you need to do. The second that your laces are on, you can take them off and then you're done. Tomorrow, why don't you put your

16:57laces on and walk outside of the house? Once your feet make it to the mat outside your house, that's it, you're good to go. The next day, why don't you walk down the block? By the time you made it to the block, your task is done. You're good to go." You repeat in that vein until by the end of the month, not only are you running 30 minutes, you're also doing so and enjoying it a lot more than you would have had you just started

17:17with the 30 minutes right off the bat. At the end of the day as cliche as it sounds, this really is a marathon and not a sprint. And most of the success that you are going to have in life will come from small daily actions accumulating over time. So much so that one of my favorite quotes by Earl Nightingale literally is success is the progressive realization of worthy ideals. The very fact that you are progressing towards that ideal like in example of our runner is in and of itself success. If you're consistent, you will see a lot of material quantifiable success at the end of that

17:49journey. But the journey itself is part of its own reward. So my recommendation is make that journey longer, not shorter. Hopefully you guys like that video. I had a lot of fun putting it together. AI market opportunities are increasing in both frequency and magnitude, but they're decreasing in how long they are available to you. If you want to learn how to take advantage of them and acquire your first client in 90 days for a paying AI or automation service, click the link in the description top one called Maker School and check out my 90-day accountability program. It includes 100% money-back guarantee if you don't land the client

18:20plus something like $20,000 in discounts to popular tools and software services that you would need to do this anyway. Leave a comment down below with what you'd like me to make a video on next and have a lovely rest of the day.