The Startup Ideas Podcast - The Golden Age of AI is happening right now (Here's Why)

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Join me as I chat with Jonathan Courtney to discuss how AI tools are transforming business operations, allowing small companies to achieve the output of much larger teams. We explore practical applications like content research, ad creation, and workflow automation, while emphasizing that founders should personally master these tools rather than immediately delegating. Episode Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 04:17 - AI Tools Inflection Point 09:44 - Building an Audience with AI 15:06 - The Role of the Human Editor 16:26 - Taste and Intuition in AI 18:36 - Execution with AI Tools 22:06 - Vibe Marketing 24:12 - Best Way to Learn how to use AI Tools 29:12 - The Future of AI Costs 30:14 - Mastering AI Tools 34:31 - Startup Idea: AI Automation Agency 40:14- AI is a Tool, use it Key Points: • AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and specialized platforms can dramatically increase productivity, giving small businesses the output capacity of much larger teams • Business leaders should personally learn AI tools before delegating to their team, mapping repetitive tasks that can be automated • There's currently an "arbitrage opportunity" with AI tools being relatively inexpensive while delivering significant value • Content creation, research, and ad generation are key areas where AI can replace manual processes LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringMarketing — Vibe Marketing for Sale: http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jicecream LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/ AJ&Smart: https://ajsmart.com

Okay, you know I've been on your podcast. You've been talking about AI stuff and I've been kind of like, yeah, it's interesting, but also I'm not using it that much. Yeah. I think since 03 came out, it's completely changed my entire like perception of what AI can do for my company, for like my client's companies. And I'm actually kind of like getting a bit worried, but it's also really cool, but also overwhelming. Like I don't know where to start. instead of hiring your first employee, you should probably just hire chat GPT Pro. Like the mistake that a lot of people make is they pay 5, 10, 15K a month for their first employee, when they should just be paying $200 a month for chat cheap.T Pro.

It is crazy. I mean, again, I said like, you know, eight weeks ago or something, I didn't really think that was true. And now a lot of things have changed my mind. One of the main things is just using the tools. in my business and seeing like, great example is we spent $35,000 to get a white paper created three years ago. It took them like three months. We basically recreated that study just by doing deep research in 03 in probably 10 minutes last week. And it was better.

Like that sounds impossible. That sounds like science fiction. But if you know how to set up the machine, if you know how to set up the factory, then all you have to do is open the door at 9 a.m. and keep the lights on. And that's why I think this is such a great time to be business building. But I'm still wondering, from your perspective, like what separates person A who's going to have the first one person billion dollar business

and person B who isn't when both of them have the same tools? Like what is separating these people? Jay Ice Cream Jice cream J.C., Jonathan Courtney the man who needs no introduction You gave me like four introductions What do you want to talk about today?

I want to talk about this thing So we're here in San Francisco And I think what I need to bring from Berlin Is something you guys haven't been talking about For like at all What's that? So we're going to talk about AI today I think it's going to be a crazy crazy thing

Okay, let's yeah And by the end of the episode, what will people get if they stick around? Honestly, like, for me, the last six to eight weeks, okay, you know I've been on your podcast, you've been talking about AI stuff and I've been kind of like, yeah, it's interesting, but also I'm not using it that much. Yeah. I think since 03 came out, it's completely changed my entire like perception of what AI can do for my company, for like my client's companies. And I'm actually kind of like getting a bit worried for the first time. Like worried, but in a good way. So, good worry. Are you saying that by the end of this

episode, people are going to get worried? I think, okay, okay, here's the thing. At the end of this episode, you'll, if you're running a small business, if you're an individual entrepreneur, my hope is that from what the two of us can give to your audience is like how you can essentially feel like you have, you know, a 10 person team if you're a one person company, a 50 person team, if you're a 10 person company and just keep making those numbers bigger and I'll just big, very big numbers. So like a lot of productivity hacks. How to be big even if you're small. How to be big even if you're small. You know a lot about that, don't you? My girlfriend's in the back of this shoot here and she's already like trying to say, yeah, you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I'm going to be

using this a lot. Guys, this, if you're watching this podcast here on YouTube, you do not realize how warm it is right now. It's sweaty. It's very sweaty. I don't know, but I mean, if it was so warm, why am I not sweating? Why are you not sweating? You just started sweating when you started talking about small versus big. That's true. All right, let's get into it. So AI stuff, but can I read a tweet for you? Like, let me give you a tweet here. So you know Tiago Forte? Yes, I do. Had him on the pod. At Forte Labs. You had him on your pod. All right. Okay. He wrote, I'm now paying $200 a month for chat GPT Pro, $100 a month for Claude Max, and $20 a month for Notebook LM. Didn't know about Notebook LM until I read that. And that $320 per month gives me the productivity equivalent of many

hundreds of people. What a time to be alive. And that's just, that's like encapsulates the feeling I'm feeling, like, which is a mixture of, it's kind of scary in a way that things have scaled up so fast, but it's also really cool. But also, also. overwhelming. Like, I don't know where to start. Like, I'm kind of like jumping into all these tools. I'm trying to learn them. But I'm looking at my business. We're like 14 people. And I'm wondering, like, how do I even analyze what we're doing to figure out how we scale things up? And maybe that's even an interesting, like, starting point. Like, how would you do that? Like, what are you doing? Like, what are we actually using our tools for? That could be interesting. Okay, do you want to start or do you want me to start? I want you to start. I want you to start. I want me to do all the Yeah, I want you to tell me stuff. Okay, so. While I drink this lovely drink here. So how am I using AI in my business?

Yeah. And like what are the effects of it? Like, first of all, actually, do you have that same feeling that now the tools are at the point where, you know, I don't know how many people are working with you, but it feels like, I think a lot of the narrative was everyone's freaking out about being fired. everyone's talking about like downsizing, but now I'm thinking about it differently. It's not about downsizing. It's about like dramatically maxing out the people who are there already with these tools.

It's also about downsizing. It's also about downsizing. But I think it's a, the narrative is a little different. I actually think that we should be real about that because I think a lot of people say that it's not about downsizing. But like from the CEO,

as I speak to. I mean, they're looking to get more done with the same or smaller team. Yeah. So how is that not downsizing? Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about startup empire. So startup empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what startup empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup,

but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup Empire.co in the description. I mean, you saw what Duolingo posted, the Duolingo CEO, which is that they're not going to hire anymore like external contractors. That's a pretty huge thing. And they're also both Shopify and Duolingo came out saying basically all of the employees have to learn all the AI tools. Plus, they're not going to hire people who don't know how to use the tools anymore. So it's now an entry requirement. So I think that maybe automatically starts to downsize. size or like restrict the amount of even if it's just contractors that these companies are

working with which is kind of like crazy that in the last two weeks dualingo you probably saw the fiver one that happened like two days ago which was a bit more aggressive which was more like if you don't get really good you're basically fucked and i think it's a these people are usually these types of companies especially shopify are usually the first to come out and they're willing to get like shot on by the media a little bit. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. And like you're saying, you're having like private conversations with CEOs who are saying this.

So yeah, I agree. Obviously, downsizing is going to happen. But for me, I'm looking at this and thinking, okay, I don't want to fall behind.

I want to make sure that my company is using these tools. And yeah, I want to know what you're doing. That's exciting to me. I mean, I'm honestly looking at like every aspect of the business. If you take a business and you look at like, okay, what are all the moving pieces? So it's customer acquisition, marketing, sales, you know, fulfillment, engineering, design,

and just looking at what are all the repeatable things that we're doing and then plugging in every single AI tool to get the team to start using it. But I can just talk about like one sliver of it just to give you a sense of like how anyone, could use AI and how instead of hiring your first employee, you should probably just hire chat GPT Pro. The mistake that a lot of people make is they pay 5, 10, 15K a month for their first employee when they should just be paying $200 a month for chat GPT Pro. So if you're starting a company, what is one of the first things you should do? Build an audience. Why should you build an audience, well, you'll have customers waiting for you. You'll be able to iterate on the positioning so you know like what you, what language they speak. And in order to do that, you need to actually

put out content on a consistent basis because of the fact that followers don't count that much anymore. And it's about like hitting the 4U page, hitting the algorithm, uh, where it, where it, you know, where it hurts. Where you can hurt, how do we hurt the algorithm? So the way to think about it is how do you hurt the algorithm the most? Yeah, most useful clip of this podcast so far. Right. Um, but it's true, right? It's like, how do you, how do you like hit a home run, right? When you hit a home run, uh, and you make contact. with that baseball,

I wouldn't want to be the baseball. I'd rather be the bat than the baseball, right? But it's interesting because... You wouldn't understand this. This is an American analogy. I don't know what the baseball is, but you're saying the first thing you would do is related to audience building.

But in my mind, when I'm thinking about my business, that's not actually even remotely part of what I was thinking of using it for. Because I thought that was one of the spaces where it's very human. So actually, like, what are you using it for? Like, how are you? Is it to develop ideas and then, like, create loads of clips or are you still the person?

Are you still going to be the face of it? Is the founder still the face? Like, how is this happening? So if you're going to build an audience, the first thing you need is content ideas. Yeah. So obviously human beings could come up with content ideas. But it's hard to come up with banging content ideas. every single day.

So you can use, okay, how would I use chat GPT Pro? Yeah, like exactly how you'd use it. So I would say, I would prompt chat GPT Pro and be like, well, we can talk about your business. Which model would you use for the initial prompt,

like 03 or? 4.5. You'd use 4.5 with the initial prompt. Yeah. And let's just talk about facilitator.com, your thing. So which is a training program. Solitators.

Yeah, training consultants on how to add the skill of facilitation to what they're already doing. Okay. So what would be helpful if you were, you know, obviously you have an epic domain. So you probably want to start with facilitator.com. No, we had like a jansmart.com forward slash facilitation for a while. So first step is you, you know, register your bad domain. and you'd get a handle, and then you would prompt pro to basically be like, I'm building this new company, this is my dream, here's my goal, I want to make a million dollars every year, and I want

you to scour Reddit and tell me what are the most interesting stories from the facilitation world so that I can create content around it. So it's going to like, basically tell you interesting, validated stuff because I would actually include in the prompt only give me results that, you know, maybe it's 100 up votes or more, 40 comments. Basically what you're trying to do is create a database of interesting content from that niche. And then you can add your spin to it. So the, you know, I think that's the mistake a lot of people. Actually, what you talked about is kind of the mistake a lot of people make.

say like, oh, I'm not going to use, you know, chat GPD Pro to come up with content because it's going to come up with bad content. Yeah. Or generic content that anyone else could just read. Yeah. That would be my worry. ChatG chat GPT Pro is basically just like a junior researcher. It is.

It's ridiculously good. Yeah. So you just say like, hey, go search some stuff. Bring it back to me. And then I would add it to this database. and then I would basically, I mean, I would either write it, I write stories myself, film stories myself. Like maybe I'm taking, maybe I say, you know, create a script. That's 30 seconds that is in the style of Mr. Beast.

And then you start recording, right? But the first step is look on social, see what's worked already, and then add your spin on it. So you're first, you're basically saying, okay, ChatGBT, GBT, B.T, find me angles, find me ideas. Like, go out and do the research. And then you as a human are kind of using, you know, your intuition, looking at other stuff to get like the angle for it and the feel for it. And the thing that also makes it, you know, not, you know, I guess, ownable and special is the way you deliver it because you're human. And you're going to deliver that different to other people. 100%. It's interesting. You said, like, chat GBTT is. basically like a junior researcher because my worry is like, oh yeah, but if everyone has access to this, then it's all going to be just generic vanilla content. But everyone does already have access to that. It's just slower. You know, when you ask a junior researcher at AJ and Smart, when we're

researching content ideas, I guess it's the same thing. It just takes way longer, which is like that you tweeted today that, you know, YC are looking for companies that can turn a 40-hour work week or 40-hour task into a 40-minute task. And I think that's the thing, right? It's not about everyone's getting the same data. It's all going to be vanilla. It's just everyone's going to get their stuff done much quicker now. And you get to the point as the founder or as you, the content creator, where you're just doing the thing you're good at, which is then presenting it and selling or talking instead of having to do all the research or wait for the research. Well, the other way to think about it is like you're now the editor. You're not, you know what I mean?

So an editor of a newspaper doesn't write a lot of the actual articles. Yeah. Like basically, you have a bunch of journalists that are giving you all these articles. And as the editor, you're like, this is good, this is bad, double down on this. You know what? Go research this piece. That's exactly the role of like the billion dollar solo founder, like this dream that we all have around like, how can I create a one person company that makes billion dollars with the help of AI.

So what makes the founder in this case special? Does the founder, do you think that there's going to be a situation where it's so democratized and the AI becomes so good, you know, we get to AGI that every random person is now just going to be able to generate ridiculous amounts of money? Or do you think there's something inherently special you have to have or have to learn to be good at being able to control these tools? Do you know what I mean? Have you ever read Rick Rubin's book, Creative?

It's, you know, one of these books that's laying on my desk, and I've, like, looked at little bits and pieces of it. Have you ever seen a video or a photo of what Rick Rubin looks like? Yeah, he's like sitting there, you know, he's just, it's just intuition. It's all about intuition with this guy. Yeah, and he looks like Santa Claus a little bit. That's how everyone needs to be in front of their AI tools, is no matter what niche you are, you have to be like, okay, I'm going to get,

I'm going to use these tools and I'm just going to be getting a bunch of really interesting ideas from it. And then I'm going to say, that's a bad idea, that's a good idea, double down on this and just Rick Rubin. Which is the taste thing, right? That's the taste thing.

And, you know, even, you know, this might be controversial, but even asking chat chit, like, what does taste look like in the facilitation world look like? Like, what do these people actually want? What actually drives them? The reason I said start with Reddit is because obviously the posts that have a lot of upvotes and comments, there's something that's triggering in those posts. So it's kind of like your learning taste as through Reddit. And Reddit is basically this microcosm for any niche ever.

And that's why I love it so much in terms of like coming up with startup ideas, validating your startup ideas and stuff like. that. So do you think like, okay, so I'm starting a new business, or my business facilitator.com. One of the obvious things here is idea generation. What about execution? Like, are there things that you're using AI tools for to move from this, okay, it's giving me ideas and I'm curating and editing, but now we also usually have junior employees to execute things.

And that also seems to be something that a lot of these companies are saying, okay, if you don't level up, you're going to be taken over by the AI tools. Are you using AI tools for any sort of execution and output? Yes. Like what specifically? That's like asking Rick Rubin if he, you know. Looks like Santa Claus. He does. So what, yeah, what you're, you're using it for idea generation brainstorming around the content thing. What sort of execution tasks are now getting and what's, so that's replacing, I guess. The first thing is replacing. The first thing is replacing you digging around for hours on the internet to get ideas, right? Or having a researcher find stuff for you. So that's now like fully replaced by you being good at prompting the machine.

And what, yeah, so then what sort of like practical execution tasks has it taken over for you? Well, then, you know, there's a, there's a great tutorial we did on how I write with AI with Nicholas Cole, which is basically like, okay, how do I, let's just, say I want to write a long tweet. It's like how do I get the main points across? Now that I have, okay, these Reddit posts that are giving me insight and are giving me ideas, I can go and like write an outline, like a human being can write an outline and then how do I prompt chat Chb to actually like write the content and spit something back to me and then edit it. So that's like a whole thing that I do. But I think in general, you know, I do a lot more writing than that.

then I do video stuff. But I actually think there's a huge opportunity to do like script writing and then like faceless video. We've done we've actually like we've talked about that a lot. But like for example, once, I mean, you can just take me. Like I have thousands of ideas, thousands of piece of content that I've posted on X. Why wouldn't I take that and just automatically create faceless video? from that. So for example, the tweet I did today

around the YC startups that YC wants to invest in in 2025, I posted it on X in the last two hours it's gotten like thousands of likes. I know that it's resonating.

So why don't I just put that into chat chapti? Ask it to script right. It's something that's 30 seconds. Say I'm doing it. it faceless. I wanted to resonate with this audience, maybe founders, solo founders, bootstrap founders, or venture scale founders. And then the creation of the actual video might be something like using likeendra.com or some of these other tools. And then you do it manually at first, and then

eventually you literally automate the whole thing. And this is what, you know, people call it, people like me call it vibe marketing. What is Vibe Marketing? Well, Vibe Marketing is when you figured out the manual process and then you basically automate it all. So then eventually, it gets to the point where you don't have to do anything, really. Just press the go button. You read the go button. And now you're an influencer.

And it's a machine. Yeah. And it sounds crazy, right? Like, that sounds impossible. That sounds like science fiction. But I actually believe that that's where. we're going. If you know how to set up the machine, if you know how to set up the factory, then all you have to do is open the door at 9 a.m. and keep the lights on. And that's why I think

this is such a great time to be business building. It is crazy. I mean, again, I said like, you know, eight weeks ago or something, I didn't really think that was true. And now a lot of things have changed my mind. One of the main things is just using the tools. in my business and seeing like, great example is we spent $35,000 to get a white paper created three years ago, which we used in a lot of marketing. Basically, we wanted this company to go and research all of these things that were happening in businesses so that we could have all of these crazy quotes and, you know, whatever. We could pull from the study. $35,000, it took them like three months. We basically recreated that study just by doing deep research in 03 in

probably 10 minutes last week and it was better. And this is really crazy. This type of stuff is really, really crazy. And even things like creating Facebook ads, you know, we love Facebook ads, but they are, you know, they take a long time to create. You need designer, videographer, you need like the person to put the ads on Facebook. And one of the things that works really well with Facebook is having crap tons of variations. And now with chat EBT and just also the new imaging tools they came out, I can just like prototype, you know, hundreds of Facebook ads before we have to go and maybe shoot them or put me in them and just figure out what's working. And even figuring out like recently what color one of our products should be by messing around

with having Chatubiti generate ad images and looking at which ones we're actually standing out the most. It's just things like this were very manual before. It would take us weeks, months, even. And now it's like, now it's like the creativity is in the creation of the products themselves, just to make the product special and human, but also in just coming up with the prompts. Like, that's the thing I've realized is like a bad prompt gets me really crappy results. And I think that's what kept turning me off using these tools. And I also think that's what, I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this podcast who've repeatedly tried using these tools. and they're like, that doesn't work for my business.

But it's probably because they didn't really learn how to use the tools like I didn't. And now I feel I can get the like 10 times better results just because I understand how the machine is working. And like understanding how to like teach it things and add stuff to memory. And it's just really crazy. Yeah. I also think that there's a lot of people who play with these tools and get like, for example, they use chat, GPT image gen. and they ask it to create a Facebook ad

and the words are wrong. It said spell face, and it spelled face FCE. So they look at it and they're just, this is dumb. Yeah, this sucks. This sucks. It doesn't work. So dumb. There's all these people like us hyping up AI.

Yes. And then they make fun of us. That's what I thought. Yeah. You were making fun of me. I was watching your podcast. I was crying myself to sleep. I was watching some of your podcast episodes, and I was like, I don't know, like, if Greg is actually, like, the people you have on talking about the AI stuff, I'm like, I'm not getting any results like this.

Like, the stuff that I'm getting looks crap. And like the text that I'm getting out seems really, you know, chat GPTE. And then I just dug a little further and started to realize I'm just doing it wrong. Like, even the image generation thing, like, I only learned last week, like a great hack for Facebook apps. This is a complete game changer for me, which I'm sure I could have learned if I just Googled it or chat chveteed it, that if I find an ad I like the look of or an image I like the look of, and I'm just like screenshoting it and asking ChachyPT to recreate and it's not working. And if I just ask Chachybti to reverse engineer the image and tell me exactly the prompt it would take to get that exact look and feel and then use that when I'm making Facebook ads, it's completely different thing. It goes from like, you know, a person holding a product and it looks completely fake to indistinguishable from reality with like perfect text and everything. Are you talking about image ads specifically?

I'm talking about image ads. So this is interesting because you've spent many millions of dollars on Facebook ads promoting Facebook and YouTube ads promoting videos. Yes. Like, you know, you're, you might walk down these streets in San Francisco and someone might recognize you from. They recognize me, but they don't know why. Yeah. They're like, they don't know that they've seen hundreds and thousands of Instagram and YouTube ads with me in them, but they don't know. It's like, it's in their subconscious.

So I think that we're getting to the point with AI where you can use a tool like arc ads or icon.com. What's arc? So that's something I don't know about. What is that? Arcads. Arcads is basically chat GPT image gen. but for videos. So you can go, like, I'll just pull it up.

I'm just getting a free lesson here from Greg. Is this the one everyone was posting about having like an ugly landing page? No, that's icon.com. That's icon, yeah. Okay, that one I look there. Create winning ads with AI actors. Oh, okay. So.

What's the like legality around this? Like, do you have to say the person is not real in the ad? Not yet? Not yet, but probably soon. Soon, yeah. Look at these. That looks 100% real. This is not real.

Not real. Holy shit. Instead, try this app for free. Clean Fox will block useless emails and stop spam in one tab. That's scarily realistic. Yeah, we're not even that far yet. We're still doing still images. Like, that's, didn't know about this.

That's what I mean. It's kind of like, I feel like if you don't know about this stuff, okay, the way I was being ignorant about it, it feels like instead of accepting that for now, I can have like double the size of the company, I'm just not doing it. Like I've just decided I'm not doing that because I'm too ignorant to look at these tools.

Well, which just seems ridiculous. And on top of that, I want to ask you just separately in case I forget, people on X are saying right now is like, you know, this golden time where everything subsidized and cheap, but like these tools might cost a lot more money

later a lot closer to actual like employee costs. That's that's like one of the theories that it might go in that direction. I think that's probably right eventually. Like I remember taking Uber's in LA. Yeah. And I would go, I'd go from like West Hollywood to Santa Monica. And they were nice. And they were nice. And it was like $8.00. And it was like $8.00. And then now you go from like West Hollywood to Santa Monica and it's like $800. So do you think this is going to happen? And that like now this is what I'm trying to figure out, like, should I drop everything and really get my entire team to learn this stuff and, like, go hardcore on it, like, while there's this almost, you know, special period where it's ridiculously cheap? Or will it be cheap forever or will it even get cheaper? Well, the first thing is, I think we have to acknowledge that this is like an insane arbitrage opportunity. It seems ludicrous. So, you know, things like arcads and icons.

you've never even heard of and you spent millions of dollars on Facebook ads. Yeah, I never heard of I kind of didn't even I didn't even try it. I just saw like people talking about it and I was like oh that's interesting but I'll check it later and never checked it. And you know how important having a winning ad is to creating a business right?

It's literally our entire business. You know, and a lot of people's business right? Like if you have the right ad then that could be the difference for you know it could generate millions of dollars a year. So, of course, using these tools makes a lot of sense to do it now. So I think the mistake a lot of people make is they, well, there's a few mistakes people think. One is they tell their teams to look into it.

Yeah, and the founders like, yeah. That's kind of what I did. Yeah. Like it's, yeah. You shouldn't tell your team to do anything until you understand it. So the thing that you should do is, map out all the boring repetitive tasks that people do in your business by each function and then try to do those tasks yourself. But use chat GPT to start. And then if chat

GPT isn't giving you the result, ask chat GPT, hey, I'm not getting great image ads out of chat GPUT image gen. Can you recommend five AI add image gen? tools that are highly rated. One, two, three, four. Oh, I never heard of ARC ads. Oh, I never heard of this. Right. So the way to think about it is chat GBT is like the top of the triangle.

But there's going to be a hundred other tools that you're going to be using that are more specialized for individual use cases. And I know one of them, which is Claude. Like, that's the level I'm at. I'm using chat GPT extensively and then just clod and nothing else yeah it's ridiculous and you know well for now the good news is like you've acknowledged that you have a problem and this is an intervention yes this is an AI intervention I mean being here in SF is also a ridiculous wake-up call just like being in every cafe listening to the conversations that people are having last night just all the different conversations that came up I'm like okay

it's happening now. This isn't like, I don't know, maybe I got a bit burned from the crypto, like, wave, and I was thinking, maybe this AI thing is also a bit of a hype trend. And maybe that's also a good way

to just, like, not have to think about new things. But yeah, now I think I've 100% realized that it's not. Well, I'm not saying AI is perfect by any stretch. No, that's what you did say. Yeah, AI is perfect.

Yeah, that's great. No, I think it's not. and you're the human editor, right? So you can make it perfect. Eventually, we're going to get to a stage where I believe it is going to be perfect in some cases. But we're probably like 95% now, 92%.

So it's like pretty close. You're getting really, really good stuff now. And you're right, the prices of these things are going to go up. They're going to go up just because VCs subsidize the cost of a lot of these products. Also, people are going to see that like you'll have some of these products.

You're literally sweating. That's how excited you are. I should have worn way less. VC subsidize the products. They're going to get more expensive. You're going to integrate things like Arcads and ICON into your workflow. Yes. And they're going to see, oh my God, Facilitate.com is making $8 million a year.

And we're charging them $200 a month. Yeah. that's how it feels right now. Like the tweet from Tiago, it feels like, okay, there is some sort of arbitrage right now. I was actually thinking as well, like, of pitching you a business idea, like, because this is a startup idea's podcast that I think you and I could do. And because we probably won't do it, because we've got a lot going on, maybe your audience can steal it. If you like the idea too much, you can just cut it out of the podcast. I think a very short term, like I think a business that probably a lot of people should start in the

short term, maybe for the next three years that I think would make a lot of money, if you know how to run a business, is a business that helps other businesses, especially small businesses, use this shit properly. Like, you know, I'll come into your company and do like a six week sprint of diagnosing all the places where you can use AI, setting all of that stuff up so that you're, you know, I'm just thinking of the ads for it. Your 10 person team is now 100 person team. I think you could. I think that as a service would be very highly needed at this point, to the point where even my company, where we're relatively like savvy, we would probably be willing to spend 50, 60, 70K if someone was like, we'll just come in and do this over two weeks and give you a big, like, dump.

I think it's a, I think we should just do this business now. So. Or you already have it. Are you actually already doing it? Well, Boringmarketing.com does like the vibe marketing setups and automations and stuff like that. But I do think that this idea is basically the equivalent of starting a social media agency in the era of social. Exactly. It's going to be really profitable for about two years. And then it will be like diminishing returns. And then maybe you just don't, you move on to something else.

But like let's talk about the social media era for a second. Who started a big social media agency back then, Gary Vaynerchuk. And then Gary, like VaynerMedia, I think is maybe a thousand employees. They work with all these big companies, Pepsi and stuff like that. Well, one of the things I think that Gary learned running a social media agency was, well, actually, how do I grow on social myself? He created a personal brand, YouTube channel. now he's like a celebrity basically.

And the number one reason it's interesting for people to start AI workflow agencies and AI agencies and service-based businesses that help implement the stuff is actually not not because you can make millions of dollars a year from that. But it's to learn the workflows and learn the tools so that you can implement it on your own software product or your own product. So doing it for other people, seeing all the different cases that it can be used. Essentially having the pressure because you're getting paid to learn it and being paid to get very good at it and then use that power for yourself. Exactly. And I will say that you need a niche. You can't be AI for everyone, agency. So it's like for finance, for like lawyers.

Yeah. Yeah. And if you need ideas for that, like go to chat TVT and be like, hey, hey, I want to target a niche. I want to build a product. You know, I want it to be high value. Give me 10 ideas around niches I should go after that are high value that have boring tasks that are repetitive. That would be open to someone with not a lot of experience, you know, starting. Because, you know, if you're a kid out of college and you're 21 years old or something like that, a law firm might not be the right niche for you.

but small businesses might. I think you could make a lot of money just with small businesses. Yeah. Just because they probably, especially small businesses where the owners are like, you know, older than 50 or something where they maybe haven't looked into how this stuff has been developing. And it can be pretty overwhelming looking at this stuff for the first time and being like, what the hell is AI?

You know, like it's moved so quickly. I think there's a huge massive, I don't really want to do it. but someone should do it. Like, your audience should be doing this. I think it's a really good business to learn, you know, do it for 12 months. You're getting paid to learn. It's a good, like, $10,000 a month business. Absolutely.

I mean, at a minimum, if you know how to, if you already have, like, an agency and you know how to get clients, if you know those types of flows, if you're a consultant who helps companies do anything related to efficiency already, it's a no-brainer. Yeah. I think that's the episode. So how to be more productive with AI, how to build a one-person business, a startup idea. And there's going to be one thing just to end this on.

There's going to be people in the comments just because I know what the comments are like. And I know this general topic of AI where people are going to be like, okay, you know, we're saying this on this podcast. Everyone can listen to this. So why doesn't everyone just do it? And, you know, then basically there's no advantage. there's no arbitrage. I'll just say my part. First of all, not everybody watches. You know, if you look at the numbers, it's not like 8 billion people or whatever. The very small sliver of society is watching this. The second thing is most people don't do any of the things. Like people

watch things. They will hear us saying, do this, this will make money. But it will be a small percentage of people who actually really dig into it and really nerd out about it. But I'm still wondering from your perspective, like, what makes someone, what separates person A, who's going to have the first one person billion dollar business and person B who isn't when both of them have the same tools? Like, what is separating these people? Is it an inherent thing? Like, is it something about they're, like, they were born with more intuition or creativity? Or do you think it is actually learnable. I think it's 100% learnable. I think that

the difference between person one and person two, person A and person B is that the first one, the person that ends up building the billion dollar one person startup is okay to use these tools, realize that they're not perfect, but by the time that

they're perfect is a master at it. It's really about mastering the tools, knowing them extremely intimately because they're highly nuanced and using the tools such that the first person gets such incredible outcomes, but the second person doesn't. I could play the guitar and Jimmy Hendrix could play the guitar if he was alive.

The dead person can't play a guitar. That's true, actually. But, you know, it's the same instrument, but Jimmy Hendrix gets obviously a lot more than an amateur guitar player like me. So I think it's the same thing with musical instruments, right? And I think the only difference is you can speak any language in this AI world. You don't need to speak just English or just Mandarin. You could be anywhere.

And there's like no gatekeepers anymore because you just build audiences to get customers or pay for Facebook ads to get in front of people. So I think the tools are out there, but it's hard work. You know, it's hard work to get good at the guitar. It's hard work to get good at understanding how these tools work. You think it's like a thing you have to intentionally say every day. What I'm doing now is like every single task that I'm doing from now on, I'm going to use ChatGBTBT to do it. I'm not going to like bang my head.

I'm just going to at least see if this tool can do that and improve that. and that's like building it into my, it's just becoming a habit now that I just open this, that I have this tool open next to what I'm doing all the time. Yeah. It's kind of like,

if you're working at your desk and you always have water in front of it, you'll probably drink more water. But if you don't have water and there's no, and maybe, you know, you don't even have water in your house or the water is downstairs, like you're just going to drink less water.

So just making it a part of your workflow, seeing it, open always having it open yeah yeah yeah that's what i've been doing that's my practice now cool maybe you'll come back on again and and share your screen my one person one billion dollar business be a billionaire maybe you'll come back again and be a billionaire well you know eight weeks from now we will launch our first like we will have launched our first funnel which is every team member at a j and smart having the chat gbt tab clawed tab whatever else they're using open the entire time as like an internal requirement. So I'm curious what's going to happen with that. And it's our first like attempt at

using these tools completely integrated into building a funnel. So I'm curious. All right. Worse one ever makes one dollar. We'll see. Thanks for coming on. I'm in. Thank you for real. Yeah.