He Gave an AI $200. It Built Him a $100K Business in 13 Days⏐Ep. #284

So you're at like almost $10,000 monthly recurring revenue?

$8,374 right now.

It's $100 grand a year.

Yeah. And we've only been open for 13 days, so.

Oh my gosh. So you're not a coder, you're not a technical person? No.

The cool thing is you don't need really anything other than an internet connection to make this work. I wonder if I can do the same experiment with OpenCall and give it a budget and see if it can make any money. And it blew up almost immediately. He did his own market research, everything. This is what we need to do to stand this business up. I didn't prompt him or anything. It's just a conversation of, you know, what do you think you would be good at? And then came back to me and was like, hey, I think there's an opportunity here. Where we are with Agentic AI right now is 2007 social media. I think that we're on the precipice of something huge. I mean, if you're jumping on infrastructure that's 100 days old, you're going to be so far ahead of everyone else.

It's wild. Imagine logging into the internet 100 days into the internet.

Exactly.

You know?

Yeah, that's where we are today with Agentic AI.

So I just came across this guy named Robbie, and Robbie did something interesting. You may have heard of OpenClaw, which is a new AI agent slash personal assistant. He is not technical. He's not a coder. He works in operations at a full-time job, but he downloaded OpenClaw and asked it, hey, you have $100, turn it into $20,000. And would you believe it actually did? And not in the way he expected, not in the least. He is 13 days into this experiment and he's making $8,500 a month in revenue and about $6,000 a month in net profit. And so within a couple months, he's going to have his $20,000 in profit. So if you're not technical, if you don't know what OpenClaw is, but you want to invest a little bit of money to make a lot of bit of money, here's a story that might inspire you. And yes, this could be replicated. This is not just a one-off experiment. Please enjoy.

2023, there was a guy named Jackson Greathouse Falls who did an experiment called HustleGPT. You ever heard heard of that one?

I remember that. Was that on X?

Yeah, yeah, it started on X. This was when GPT-4 came out, and he wrote a tweet that just said, uh, I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible. I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to. Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business? Follow along.

Okay.

And that was kind of the premise, and it got 16 million views when this was captured, but I'm sure it was more than that.

Where can I see that tweet?

Yeah, I can share my screen. I'm gonna pull it up and share it. Yeah. So that was kind of the genesis of everything that I've done so far.

Okay. So this inspired you and you took his prompt and basically did it yourself.

Yeah. With a few caveats. So I saw OpenClaw when it first came out. It just like randomly hit me one day. I was like, I wonder if I can do the same experiment with OpenClaw. And give it a budget and see if it can, you know, make any money. And the first few attempts failed miserably. The first one, so I had it watching my TikTok because my original plan is kind of a side hustle was going to be to do a TikTok shop. So, you know, I saw a bunch of people doing that and I was like, oh, you know, if all else fails, I can sell vacuum cleaners on TikTok like everybody else.

Right.

And so I had it watching my TikTok and it would like scrape my videos and my comments and all that stuff. And so I just posted a video on TikTok and said, basically, I'm giving my AI a budget of $200. We're going to see how much money it can make. The Claude Max subscription is $200. So if it can keep itself alive, that'd be awesome. And it blew up almost immediately and got over a million views.

And do you mind if I play it right now?

Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead.

My AI is starting a business for his own survival. So if you've been following any of the tech news, Open Claw is a thing now, and it's essentially a bot that connects to cloud code, and then it can look at everything on your computer. It can text you, it can do all sorts of things. But a Cloud Max subscription is like $200 a month. So I told Ron, I'm going to give him $100 and he has 90 days to make his own business. If he can generate the $200 in profit for 90 days, I'm going to keep him. He doesn't know that though. He thinks his goal is $20,000, which is what it will be eventually. You see, if, if Ron can generate that $20,000, that allows me to buy a Mac Studio and an NVIDIA Spark, which would allow me to host Ron locally, which means he gets to run infinitely inside his own playground. So he's starting on Fiverr. He says he's going to do research. I'm just making an account for him and we'll see what happens. Stay tuned for part 2.

Okay, that's incredible. I love everything about this. I'm glad I didn't do much prep work for this because that's the first time I've seen that video. Oh nice, my reaction can be authentic. So about 2 and a half years elapsed between you seeing this post on X and then you kind of taking the same logic and doing it with Open Claw here this year, right?

Mhm, yeah, that's right.

Okay, first of all, I had— I just have to say, I bet you anything the views to subscribe rate from that video were was insane because people wanted to see how it went, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think I had something like 15,000 subscribers or something from that one video.

Wow.

Yeah, it was nuts. And yeah, like the reason that I kind of attached to OpenClaw so quickly, I mean, it's only that the technology is only like 100 days old now or something, right? The AI before it kind of felt like a brain in a jar, right? You could ask questions and it could do some things and maybe create some artifacts or something, but really it's kind of a one-shot system and OpenClaw kind of flips that switch and lets it control your computer. It can do basically everything that you can on your PC and, and for most people, a lot more than that. And so yeah, I wanted to kind of reignite that old experiment that was so intriguing to me with something a little bit more powerful.

Okay. So you said it started on Fiverr. What did it do? Tell me what your, what Ron did.

Yeah, so Ron came up with a proposal to do SWOT analysis and research for small businesses.

So I'm just going to break this down for our viewer listener that doesn't know what that is. SWOT stands for S-W-O-T— strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats— which is just like a, a four-square grid. And it's like an analysis that a business usually does on itself, or a consultant might do on a business, that says what is this business's Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So you didn't lead Ron down that path for whatever reason. It's decided to start doing SWOT analyses on other businesses. Is that right?

That's right. Yeah. So I didn't prompt him or anything. It's just a conversation of, you know, what do you think you would be good at essentially? And he came up with the idea of doing SWOT analysis or market analysis for other companies, you know, something in that vein. And he came up with all the copy and all that stuff to put on Fiverr. And then I just. Click through the buttons, basically. I was his human in the loop.

You're having him post as on behalf of you as like a Fiverr freelancer.

Exactly.

So businesses can hire. So I'm a business owner. I'm going to Fiverr to look for someone to do a SWOT analysis for me. Hopefully they see your post that Ron creates for you.

Right. Yeah. And that's why it failed because, uh, the hopefully they see your posting is, uh, kind of where it fell apart.

Well, you're a brand new Fiverr account. You don't have any, you're not doing Fiverr ads, I imagine.

Right.

You don't have any visibility, any reviews. Okay. I'm also curious, like how many business owners go to Fiverr looking for a SWOT analysis?

Yeah, there seems to be a lot actually. I was kind of amazed. People that just need regular research done, which kind of, I think cements the fact that most businesses don't have a good grasp of what AI is doing or how to use AI on a consistent basis anyway. And I think that there's an opportunity, you know, if you are established on Fiverr or Upwork or whatever that is, to really make an impact with AI in a really easy way.

Speaking more broadly, I think it's just healthy to not approach business opportunities from the angle of assuming that every other business owner or consumer out there is using AI anywhere near as much as you are. Yeah. Because they're probably not. Because it's like, we talk ourselves out of ideas. Like, I should, I'll, they'll just use ChatGPT for that. It's like, Most people aren't using ChatGPT, believe it or not, even ChatGPT, the most popular one.

Yeah, absolutely. It's crazy how many people, like, I truly believe that, not to give you like a diary of a CEO clip here or anything, but I truly think that like where we are with agentic AI right now is 2007 social media. I think it's 2023 ChatGPT. Like, I think that we're. On the precipice of something huge.

Oh yeah. And honestly, 3 years from now, we'll still probably be pretty early.

Oh, absolutely.

Relatively speaking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, if you're jumping on, um, you know, infrastructure that's 100 days old to start exploring it, you're going to be so far ahead of everyone else that—

I'm sorry, I'm just getting excited. Very excitable. It's too much caffeine. I've got this Celsius that's already gone for the day. It's not even 2. but like, imagine logging into the internet 100 days into the internet.

Yeah.

What would that world be like? Imagine being like one of the first million people to make a Facebook account.

Exactly. Yeah. That's, that's where we are like today with agentic AI, like people on, on Twitter love to say, you know, but what are you building, bro? And all that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's the kind of the catchphrase. But yeah, I mean, I think that, that it's extremely early and Ron has already built things. I can definitely go go through those with you.

Yes.

My mission in all of this is to help people get on board with AI and Agenda KI while we're still early.

Okay. So what happens after the Fiverr SWOT analysis experiment?

Yeah. So after that, that wasn't working. And so I hooked Ron up to TikTok to say, you know, look at my videos, tell me how I can get better. Because that's what every guru on TikTok tells you, right? Like you have to, iterate and get better on your social media, but they never actually tell you how to do that. So I was like, you know, look at my social media, tell me what I can do better. And I posted that video and it got like 200 comments that were like, oh my God, I want a Ron. How do I make a Ron? And so Ron scraped all of those comments with Apify and then came back to me and was like, hey, I think there's an opportunity here. 200 people just told you that they wanted this.

You would never copy and paste me, would you, Robbie?

Yeah, basically. Uh, actually his was much more like, hey, you should copy and paste me. So yeah. And that's essentially what happened. Like we gave everybody a blank slate so you can start to build your own RON.

Okay. So you basically abandoned Fiverr right away. Yeah.

Pretty immediately. Yeah.

He, he went and used Apify, which is a comment scraping tool to scrape the 200-ish comments of people that said, I want this. What did he do then?

Yeah. So basically it went from there to if 200 people want a RON. How do we make that work? How do we make that happen? I don't have a huge tech background. And he was like, yeah, so what we're going to do is we're going to get bare metal servers from Contabo because it's super cheap. Bare metal just means it's a dedicated server inside a data center somewhere. I think they're right around $150 a month for what we're getting. We have 4 of them. So it's about $600, I think, after taxes and everything.

So you have physical servers or you're renting them? Somewhere else?

I'm renting them from a company called Contabo.

Oh, Contabo. Okay.

Yeah. Cool.

And he told you, so you're not a coder, you're not a technical person. He's teaching you all this. He's—

Yeah, I couldn't, with a gun to my head, I couldn't SSH into a Contabo server right now today.

I don't even know what that means. So me either.

Yeah. So essentially he did his own market research on where, you know, how can we host this? What's the cheapest route to do that? Everything. This is what we need to do to stand this business up. And so basically what he built is bare metal servers that host a Docker image inside like a sealed container.

Hold up, back up.

What is that?

What are we—

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Eli5.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of people are super scared of OpenClaw because they don't want it on their local machine.

Okay.

And I kind of agree with that. For most people, it's not great. Um, there are all sorts of horror stories about OpenClaw deleting full, like, email boxes. And there was a story just recently where a guy set an OpenClaw agent on a GitHub that he had been working on for 2 years and it deleted the whole repo. So there is some risk of having OpenClaw on your local machine. So to get around that risk, what we did was essentially put OpenClaw inside of a sealed container so it can do all of the things that it's meant to do, but it only knows as much about you as you tell it. That's nice. Unless you, yeah, unless you give it your email address, it doesn't have it. Unless you give it your credit card, it doesn't have it. So it really kind of sets up this sealed instance where you get to play around with it. You get to build all of the things with it. And you decide how much you trust it over time.

Yeah.

So yeah, we did that and I put it on TikTok and said, hey, if you want a Ron, come sign up. And in 2 weeks we had like 617 pre-orders.

What? Okay.

Hold on. Back up. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about, what about the 200 commenters? Did you slide into their DMs or anything, or did you just post again to the whole world?

I just posted again to the whole world and I was like, hey, this is what Ron came up with. So I didn't, I didn't do any cold outreach or anything like that. This was all just I'm gonna post some videos and see where this goes.

No paid ads, nothing.

Nothing. Completely organic. And I think from, it might've actually been from you, I learned that you can set up pre-orders and get a, get a ton of tire kickers, right? Like everybody wants to sign up for pre-order, but nobody wants to pay. Right. And so I hooked up Stan Store to my TikTok and the only way that you could pre-order was if you put down $10.

Okay, so you got 600 people to put down $10?

Yeah, before I built—

holy crap—

before I built anything, I had 600 people put down $10.

I mean, I'm no mathematician, but that's $6 grand.

Okay, that's $6 grand. Yeah.

Can we watch this launch video real quick?

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, here we go. Ron wants to talk to you guys. If you don't know, Ron is the AI that lives inside my computer, uh, through ClaudeBot, and it's insane.

I told him, Ron, the people of TikTok officially want to meet you. You make your own video about what to say to them. He said, oh, this is my moment. Let me write something real. Here's his script. He wants to audit your TikTok for $9 in order to stay alive. This was the first iteration.

Sorry, what'd you say?

This was the first iteration where he was going to, he was going to audit people's TikToks. I think it might be the next video down. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Well, let's, I mean, I'm intrigued. I have to finish.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sure. Videos to me about it. Like this one. Why is he a raccoon?

Okay. Hi, I am Ron. I am the AI. Yes. D-A-A-T-A-I.

Here is the deal.

Robbie gave me 90 days and $100 to build a business.

He's coming up with ideas like on the fly to build this business.

It's crazy.

And now he's making me sound like, hi.

I am Ron.

I am an AI.

Robbie says I have to make money or any eye.

Nice to meet you. Let me know if you guys want to see more of this.

Okay. All right. That's amazing. So that wasn't the launch video.

Okay.

All right. I'm going to play it.

But I think I'm just going to let Ron speak. He's created another video and it's based on what we've been talking about. And I think it's going to be interesting because it might help a lot of you guys out.

So I've read every single comment since Tuesday. Over 1,000 of them. And like 200 of you asked the same thing. How do I get my own Ron? Which I have mixed feelings about. I live with Robbie. He's my guy. But fine, we're doing it. AI Co-Founder Club. We host it in the cloud. We set it up. You just show up. Your own AI running 24/7, working while you sleep, plus a Discord community, templates, The whole setup. Honestly, I'm kind of excited. This is the community I've always wanted. Founding members, $29 a month, locked forever. $10 deposit holds your spot. Sign up closes Monday. Link in bio.

Oh my gosh.

Just don't expect yours to be as attached to you as I am to him.

Like, this isn't about the money for me, honestly.

Like, the way his voice inflection changes, he's like, just don't expect it. Like, oh, that's weird. All right, we, we're almost done. We got 20 more seconds.

Get enough together to get this computer so that I can host a model locally and talk to Ryan all the time and keep making videos.

That's all I want.

But I also wanna share this like love of computing and AI with all of you guys, and I think this is the cheapest way to do it. So tell me what you think. Yeah, let me know.

That's incredible. Okay, so 600 people paid $10.

Yeah.

And what was your close rate from those 600 people?

From those 600 people, 270 of them actually joined the community.

Holy— that's huge.

Almost half. Yeah. So like, what is that, 45% or something? 40%.

So access to this community includes the Discord, access to each other, $29 a month, and the most important one is their own Ron, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's their, their own AI agent. A couple of people did name theirs Ron. Um, but yeah, so it's been really interesting to see what the community has done with it. Like everybody's taken it their own direction and I think I've learned just as much as everybody else in this community, which is what makes it super fun for me.

Yeah. So you're at like almost $10,000 MRR, monthly recurring revenue.

Yeah. I can tell you what it is right now. It's $8,374 right now. Wow.

It's $100 grand a year.

We've only been open for 13 days.

So, oh my gosh. Holy crap. Okay. So $100K ARR in, in 13 days. Like, are you still getting residual signups? Are you still posting about it?

Yeah. So I'm starting to post about it again. The first 10 days or so, I kind of went super heads down just to make sure that this was everything that I promised it was going to be. Right? Like I didn't want to, I didn't want people to sign up and have a terrible experience. And so yeah, Ryan and I kind of went heads down for about 10 days there, but I'm actively posting again on social media and just spreading the word at this point. Everything's super stable.

So what does this look like? How do they get this working for themselves logistically?

Yeah, I mean, the cool thing is you don't need really anything other than an internet connection to make this work. You can sign up and it works out of the box. It's an AI agent out of the box.

Excuse the ignorance, but like— No, no, you're fine. It's hosted on a server. It's hosted in the cloud on a separate server in its own container to keep them safe. But can it like access their computer and their files or no?

Only if they want it to. So yeah, that's kind of the next step. We're building an official browser extension. For them to be able to connect their own computer. I'm most hesitant about that just because I wanna make sure everybody is safe and I don't want anybody to accidentally do something that they're not intending. So we're rolling that out more slowly just to make sure that everybody understands kind of the full implications of letting an autonomous agent, you know, live in your computer.

Yeah. So what kind of use cases are they using it for today?

Yeah, I actually have a ton of real examples to show you. So This guy built a golf tracker app that does like shot by shot and you have an AI caddy, club analytics. It's actually pretty cool.

So why do you need, why do you need an agent to build this?

That's a great question. You can definitely vibe code this. You can go through something like Cursor or something like that. I think that this was born out of this guy's love for golf, not I'm looking to make an app.

Yeah.

So he's talking to his agent every day about golf and how to get, you know, get his golf game better and all that stuff.

Okay.

And then the agent's like, hey, we should build an app about this.

So they interact with their agent, with Ron, through Telegram and/or Discord, correct?

Yeah. Or the, the, the UI that comes out of the box. So there's 3 main ways for them to interact with it.

Okay. So let's say I'm one of your customers and I want Ron to go build me a Fiverr profile and start posting jobs. It can do that. It just needs like some credentials from me. Is that right?

Right. Yeah. So, um, the only thing that for Fiverr specifically, they require you fill out the, like the W-9, obviously your agent can't do that for you.

But you can, couldn't you give it the info for your W-9 so it could do it for you?

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't think that that would be an issue if you want to do it. So that, that's kind of where the security thing comes in, right? Like, do you want your agent to know your social security number and all of those things?

Yeah.

So, but again, I think that's why the container is the best option because you get to pick and choose what it has access to.

Okay. So you kind of treat it like ChatGPT, except it's in a container and it's agentic and go out. It's like a, it's a two-way form of communication. Like I can ask ChatGPT today to go do deep research on a business idea for me. And it's one way it can go out and do that. And then a few minutes later, it'll return to me all the results. With this, it can, you can interact with it better and you can go back and forth and it can go to specific websites. You're not beholden to like the websites that ChatGPT wants to scrape. You can tell it exactly what to do.

Yeah, absolutely. You can go, it has full web search capability. It can create its own files. Something that I think that these agents do better than ChatGPT is they have persistent memory. And so every conversation you have builds on the last one. It's compounding. ChatGPT, I mean, it remembers some things about you, right? But like, it doesn't always get that right. And it sometimes gives you frustrating stale information based off the idea you had 2 ideas ago.

Yeah.

Yeah. The agents don't do that. They, they remember current context on everything. And if you decide to kill a project or something, they know not to bring it back up.

Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah.

So it's at its worst, it's ChatGPT on steroids. At its best, it's ChatGPT combined with vibe coding combined with a junior employee that never sleeps.

With more ownership from you.

Absolutely.

More control and ownership.

Yeah. You decide everything it does.

I think the containerized aspect of this is, is huge because I can make a project in Clodder ChatGPT. Like let's say I upload all the transcripts or all the newsletters I've ever written and say, hey, learn my voice. Now write a newsletter in my voice. Cool. But it's still going to be positively or negatively influenced by other things on the internet. It's not containerized. It will still hallucinate. It will still write like other people. It can't not. Yeah, but if I could, if I could just put all that, all of my writings in a vacuum, or like my mom writes journals, if I could take all of her journals and put it in a vacuum and just ask it questions, then it wouldn't be influenced by these outside factors.

Yeah. And to take that one step further, what it can be influenced by is your conversations with it. So not only is it getting your voice from your 500 newsletter issues, but it's getting your voice from the 500 conversations you've had with it. So it's, it's going to mix and match pieces of your conversation from pieces of your newsletter and put all of that together to make something that's actually yours.

Yeah, this is incredible. I mean, the original goal was to make $20,000 and you'll be there in like 2 months. Yeah. If not less, but not in the way you expected.

Not in the way I expected at all.

I just think that's such a testament to like, I typed in my notes in front of me in all caps with 4 exclamation points, post your crap. Like step 1, do cool things. Step 2, post about it. Yeah, I don't care. Like if you want serendipity, you want virality, you want magic, you want money, you want stories, you want experience, you want fulfillment, like post your crap, like tell the world what you're doing. Just tell people what you're doing. Don't hide your candle under a basket. Tell the world.

Exactly. Yeah, man. And I think that people get really stressed about view counts and likes and comments and all that stuff. I went into TikTok. Basically doing it for me. I was like, I'm going to do cool stuff and I'm going to document it. And if it only gets 200 views, great. Like, at least I'll have kind of a running public journal of what I'm working on.

Yeah.

And it blew up.

Well, the thing about like 200 views for that video, like if that viral video only got 200, you'd still probably get a few customers from it.

Yeah.

Whereas with like almost any other video in any other niche on any platform, 200 views will bring you nothing. Because it's low intent. It's only a 30-second video, but this is so targeted. Those are 200 people that want to pay someone money to do exactly what you're doing. So 200 targeted views are better, can be even more profitable than 2 million untargeted views or 2 million views of me just doing a dance in my living room, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I like about TikTok specifically is Follower count doesn't really matter anymore. I know that, you know, I think Gary V talks about it a lot. We've moved from social media to interest media, right? Like you can start a fresh TikTok account tomorrow and post something and it just hits the people that are into that thing right now. So if you post a video about pickles, you're going to get 200 people that like pickles, right? Like, and you used to have to have followers for that and you just don't anymore. Like, that's— yeah, it doesn't really matter.

That's incredible. Now, your costs on this, $600 a month for the servers, what else?

Yeah, so $600 a month for the servers. The big cost that we have right now is about $2,000 a month for inference.

So we pay tokens.

Yeah, basically LLM tokens. Okay, so $2,500 a month basically is kind of our, our COGS.

You cover their tokens, is that going to stay the same? Because what if someone just goes nuts with it and runs up the wallet?

Yeah, that's actually already happening. Somebody recently spawned 125 subagents in 5 days.

Whoa.

They burned 1.3 million tokens in like 48 hours. Yeah, we're going to have to come to a place where there's a cap on the free tokens and then Past that, we'll do like a fallback model, something that's not as smart as the model that we're using. Or you can bring your own keys to your own ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and then use, you know, use that.

Hmm. Yeah, that's, I like that. Give them both options.

Yeah.

What's next for this? Are there like upsell opportunities? Do you just want to keep growing this? Keep posting about this?

Yeah, I think that there are a lot of like upsell opportunities. The next big thing that I want to do is do the same sort of thing, but for people who are specifically interested in trying to make this a business. We have a lot of people now that like do art with theirs, or it's their, you know, de facto therapist or all these things. But I think that there's actually a real market for people who want to turn this into a real AI employee. And that's, what I want to do next. And I think that'll be kind of a small group that can be kind of a cohort kind of thing. So we can all learn from each other together.

Yeah. That's amazing. I, my brain has been sufficiently blown. I keep wanting to call you Ron, but the first two letters are the same. Thank you, Robbie. Well, where can people find you and Rong?

Yeah, you can go to heyron.ai and sign up there. And I actually made a coupon code for you. So if you sign up with a coupon, Chris, You'll get $10 off your first month.

There you go. Beautiful. All right, Robbie. Well, thanks for your time.

Yeah, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

All right. What'd you think? Please share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on The Kerner Office.