He Started a $15K/Month AI Side Hustle for $20 - Ep. #325

How much did it cost you to start an AI implementation business in total?

$20.

So you're 26 years old. What will you make this month from implementing AI into small businesses?

$15,000 this month.

Profit?

Profit.

Amazing. And you're telling me that a shy introvert can make 6 figures a year implementing AI in a small business? Yes.

You could make more for sure.

Everyone is saying that AI will kill small businesses. You say the opposite. Why?

This is the best time you can compete with the enterprises because you have access to the technology that allows you to do so.

You have the same access that they've always had now.

Yeah. And theoretically, you have even better tools than them because they're limited to what they could use based on—

they're slow—

policies and governance that they have in those organizations. You move much faster than them.

What on average do you charge for an implementation build?

It, it could be anywhere between $1,000 and $20,000. It just depends on the project.

No sales experience?

Zero.

Never gone door to door? Never like been in a boiler room doing—

No, this was the most terrifying stuff I've ever done.

Okay. That's encouraging. Is there any hope for shy introverts like me that don't want to talk to people?

Yes.

In fact, there's a guy in Ryan, Cincinnati, 24 years old, very shy introvert. You're about to meet him who makes $15,000 a month solving problems using simple tools that he taught himself on. He doesn't know how to code. He's never learned how to sell, and he was working a dead-end job making $52,000 a year, a year and a half ago. Today he's making $15,000 a month working for himself. So I had to ask him today, Ryan, who are you? How do you do what you do? How do you sell? How do you price this? And what is the DASA framework, which he claims is the key to his success? Let's meet Ryan. So if you were to explain to a 5-year-old how you make money, what would you say?

I made a lot of friends. Made a lot of friends in the space and helped them solve their biggest problems.

Business owners?

Yes.

Okay. So you make money solving problems for business owners using technology.

Yep.

Accurate?

That's pretty accurate. Yeah.

What does an average customer look like? What type of person, what type of business owner, what are you charging them for what?

Yeah, the clients I work with right now are all over the place, but it's currently founders that are very much in the business and understand the power of AI, yet their teams are not really implementing it the way that they could be. So that's my ideal avatar that I typically go after.

A startup founder?

Startup founder.

Younger-ish?

Could be young. I've, you know, I've worked with every age group, especially in Cincinnati. That's not the most tech-forward place in the world. There's a lot of people that are kind of getting, you know, dabbling in AI. There's a lot of people that absolutely don't understand it. Okay. So I think my, my reach is quite large.

What is the average revenue of one of your customers?

Yeah, it could be anywhere between pre-revenue all the way up to $20 million is probably the range I've worked with so far. But it, it is usually sub $10 million for how I've been getting started so far.

So you're 24 going on 25, AI happens, you start playing around with it. You like nerding out over software and technology. You feel like that's a skill of yours and something that you enjoy. And so for whatever reason, you say, I'm gonna make a list of 100 people that I know. And most 24-year-olds don't know a ton of people, right? Which bodes well for anyone watching this if they're young or don't have a big network. We're talking about friends and family at church, neighborhood, teachers, people you went to school with. Is that what we're saying?

Co—

previous coworkers?

All the above. Yeah, certainly a lot, um, through just the contacts list on my phone. I was literally going through and seeing who might find interest in getting help with AI.

Yeah.

I was hitting up, you know, friends, like friends' parents of mine all over the place. And a lot of the, a lot of the start I have is also through some business mastermind groups that I joined along the way. K groups that I entered because—

Online groups?

Yeah, online groups, in-person groups. There's local AI groups I'm a part of and business groups here in Cincinnati, but also there's some business mastermind groups that I'm a part of that I met people like myself, other founders in different spaces. And A lot of people have opposite skill sets as myself. Yeah. So naturally I try to help them in any way I can.

Okay. So would you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert?

Very introverted.

Okay. So is calling 100 people, meeting with 100 people, is that intimidating to you?

Yeah, but it's way easier if you're not trying to sell. I was just trying to get on the phone and provide value in any way I can. I'm not trying to pitch anything. I wasn't even, I wasn't even going after a paid offer. I told myself I would have 100 free free calls with people and then look into charging for some of my services. But up until then, um, it was very low pressure on me because if, you know, people don't want to jump on the phone with me, it's totally fine. I'm just trying to provide value.

Because they say that happiness equals expectations minus reality. Yeah. All right, so if you go in there with like, all right, I'm gonna have 100 conversations, close 30% of them, my monthly recurring revenue will be $1,000 per— $30,000 per month by month 3, you're like I'm literally not trying to sell. That's not like a wink wink. I have nothing to sell you. Wink wink. Right? I literally want to learn and ask how I can add value to your life and/or your business. And hopefully, maybe, no pressure. I don't even have a sales pitch for it. I don't even have anything to sell yet if I wanted to, but maybe hopefully you'll find something about me intelligent or smart or helpful. And you'll say, hey, I like that idea. I don't want to do it. Can you do it?

Yeah.

For a fee, how much? Is that kind of what you're thinking?

Yeah. And I think the first 10 people or so that hopped on the phone with me probably could tell I really did not know what I was doing, but I think they would get little pieces of value along the way. And from the pieces I really felt like I was contributing to people, as well as from their feedback, I was starting to, starting to able to get traction with what can I actually charge for or what sort of education I could kind of provide people.

Okay. So of these 100 people, give me a rough breakdown. What percentage church? What percentage extended family? What percentage friends? What percentage— give me just a rough breakdown.

I would say 60% from the business groups I'm loosely associated with. Maybe we could split that half and half with local versus online groups that I met along the way.

How many groups are we talking?

I'm very involved with 2 local groups here. There's a business group I'm a part of, AI group I'm a part of, and then there's two online masterminds that I'm also pretty heavily engaged with. And I was engaged with them for about a year leading up to this point because, like I said, I had other entrepreneurial ventures leading up to this, which eventually led me down this path.

How many people were in each of those four groups, give or take?

So the local ones are probably about 100 or so people each, and then the Online ones are much larger, probably about 500 people each at the time.

Less engaged because there's more people.

Less engaged.

Like per person, it's less engagement. Online, there's less engagement, but there's more people. What about the local ones?

Are you— Yeah. Yeah. There's a local group called Cincinnati that I love attending.

Is it like a meetup group or how do you find it?

Yeah. They meet monthly and I forget how I met Kendra and Helen who are the ones running it, but now I'm friends with them from attending their meetups and just trying to talk to them and provide any sort of value I could along the way to them, which included, you know, hopping on the phone with them. They're talking about launching an online version of their group, things like that. Just trying to provide my insights and being engaged with their communities is very important because they could see that and they could understand that I really enjoyed being a part of it.

And is the Cincy AI one, was that literally a meetup group? Like you found them on meetup.com? Or where did you find them?

I was on email lists, but—

And you know how you found them?

No, I think I was just doing Google searches to see how I could get involved locally.

Okay.

I think it— well, it served what I needed at that time in that getting started with my entrepreneurial journey and really getting connected with people doing the same thing, getting around peers that uplifted me. But I think I get the same amount of value from the local AI groups.

What about paying customers? Which groups did you get the most amount of paying customers? The local groups or the online groups?

Where did I— the online groups, because that's since I've had those relationships for such a long period of time, they finally, you know, snowballed effect into me working with them in a paid capacity.

So 100 people, 60% loosely came from these 4 groups and the other 40% came from contacts list on my phone, came from LinkedIn connections. Who am I texting with?

Who am I— came from, yeah. And you know, just trying to, if I could have a meeting with someone and rekindle that relationship, I also found that to be a privilege as well. Okay.

Were you trying to make sure these 100 people were all business owners or no?

I tried to stick to business owners whenever I could, but there was a lot of people also operating small and medium-sized businesses that I also targeted, or managers or just leaders in organizations. If I could talk to a sales leader about helping them use AI within their department, that was, that was something I also went after. Okay.

How, how many of these 100 conversations did you actually end up having?

All— well, of the ones that I got booked, because I booked way more than 100 and I ended up having the 100 conversations.

Okay, so how many did you try to book? Because you knew there'd be a funnel, right? Not everyone say yes to a call. Some people say yes and they won't show up.

I wasn't tracking it, man. I was going through, and if people weren't replying to me, I might, you know, next month go back around and try to get them again. But by the end of 3 months, I was able to hit 100. Okay. I probably kept going past 100. I probably got to 150 or so when I— I lost count after 100 because I stopped being meticulous about tracking these specific free calls. Yeah, but you know, I, I probably hit up 3 to 4 times more than people that actually hopped on the call.

So the goal was not 100 reachouts but 100 real conversations, which takes hundreds of reachouts.

Yeah.

And all, let's say it was 300, all of them were people in your sphere in some way, nothing cold?

Yeah. Okay. People underestimate how many people they actually have in their sphere. If you open up your contacts on your phone, you have a really long list of people on there, even from high school, from wherever they might have came from, and then I went out of my way to join these groups, which is not easy for me being introverted and not naturally kind of doing these things, but I force myself because I understand that's what will get me started.

But the desire for wealth has to be greater than the pain of being an introvert. As an introvert, I feel that pain. Yeah. Okay. So of these 100 conversations, how many were in person? How many were virtual?

All were virtual.

Really? Yeah. 100% of them. Wow, that's surprising. Of the virtual ones, how many were phone versus Zoom or—

I did everything on Google Meet. Okay. Did 100 calls, each an hour long on Google Meet. Wow.

Okay. The first call was an hour?

First call was an hour. Last call was an hour.

Okay. Do you have any gauge of, from those 100 conversations or 150, whatever it was, how many turned into a second conversation?

A lot did, but not necessarily to continue people down the sales funnel, more so just to keep the relationship going. A lot of these turned into third, fourth, fifth, sixth conversations, which eventually had people working with me. But then after this first call, I would give people some takeaways like, here's my recommendations for you to go implement today, and hopefully you get traction with this this week. And then, you know, maybe a month or two would go by and they say, hey Ryan, thanks for the advice. This has been working out really well for me. Do you have any ideas about this? Yeah. And then maybe we'll hop on a quick call or maybe we have a quick meeting to get people rolling with that. And then I never really have a sell for them until I see or until I started to see a very specific avenue that I could provide value with, which turned into the offers I have today.

Okay, so let me back up. When you did, when you did the reachouts to the 100 people, did your pitch change over time? What did it start with? What did it end with?

Yeah, well, I think a lot of people in the AI space, they talk about doing an audit for your business and that's the freebie. To get people on the call where then they'll start to build maybe like a vibe-coded product or a SaaS product or something that could take over a software platform for that company. And I— that's how I started too. I was like, I'm going to do an audit with all these people and then I will try to replace a product for them and try to, to tie that ROI back to the maybe the time savings or the software savings that we were having. But it was hard for— it's hard for me to explain, but I try to— I keep using the word value, and I do that intentionally because that is what I'm trying to provide. Every, like, every person that interacts with me, that's the experience I'm trying to provide, is Ryan provided a ton of value to us. And the people I was providing the most value to were the people that I was leading through educating them. And the reason that is, is because let's pretend I teach you how to do everything that I do in my implementation work. You could take that back to your company And you won't need to rely on me anymore. Theoretically, you won't need to rely on anyone else to manage these platforms for you. You could just naturally grow them on your own. You could implement different products because you understand how these fundamentals work. So what that turned into present day is doing a lot of education offers where I teach you directly and we work together directly to build these sort of platforms or these sort of tools for your team. To eventually be able to do other projects on your own.

Okay, so zooming out, you go into this saying, well, like, literally, what was your first text or DM to them? Hey, so-and-so, haven't spoken in a few years. Can I do an audit for your business? Or if not, what was it?

I never led off with like just copy and paste text like that. I much— I started with reaching out saying, just trying to rekindle in general, just saying, Hey, Chris, hope all is well with you. I want to hear about what is going on in your life, or if I know what's going on in your life, how is this new role going or how is this project going for you?

You're doing a little research going to their Facebook, their LinkedIn and referring to specific things for sure. Okay. Because I've gotten these texts before and it's usually someone that joined a pyramid scheme and then, yeah, and they want to sell me Tahitian Noni juice or something and it's like, oh geez, hey, I started a new business. I'd love to talk about how we can accomplish our goals together. Yeah, I read that and I roll my eyes.

Right. I would too.

So how do you— so give me an example of what you would say.

It has to be, it has to be so genuine. It has to be, I am here just to hear about what's going on in your life. This is what I'm doing right now and I'm helping people with AI. If you ever want help with that, let me know. Or if you want to schedule a call with me, here's my booking link. And then I also maybe give some specific examples. What I love doing is pitching with demos, having, you know, YouTube links ready to go that you could send to people to prove, hey, I've been doing this. I don't— I know what I'm doing. Yeah, my YouTube links.

It doesn't matter if the video has 30 views or 30,000.

Most have 30.

Yeah. Yeah. Good to know. Good enough. Yeah. Tell me if this is wrong, but it's like, hey, Uncle John, how's it going? How's life? Good. Just moved to Indianapolis. Awesome. I saw on LinkedIn that you just got promoted. Yeah, yeah. It's just casual like that.

Yeah.

And so there might be a half dozen text exchange before you ever mention what you're doing, right?

Right.

Okay.

Yeah. So oftentimes I would send, you know, a batch of 100 texts in the morning or emails or, you know, LinkedIn DMs, wherever. And then I would start working for the day and I'd get back to my phone and I have like 50 replies back and I have to, you know, frantically reply to all of them. But making sure that I'm keeping the conversation genuine and not trying to, again, be salesy because that's just not my personality.

Are you tracking these in CRM, in a Google Sheet? How are you keeping track of this?

Back then I didn't. I was just trying to put as much time into just focusing on sending these as possible. But now that, now that I got rolling and I have a little more traction and I'm not sending the 100 messages a day, I do have a, you know, a CRM I use.

Well, some people get so hung up, especially when it comes to intimidating stuff, they get so hung up on how do I track this? How should I tag them? Should I use Pipedrive?

Should I use HubSpot?

They really just don't want to reach out to people. Yeah, these are advanced forms of procrastination that make them feel good that they're making progress, but they're not making progress.

I've went through this myself and I still do to this day. That's probably my biggest issue, especially being the tech nerd that's like, all right, maybe if I have to optimize my, I have to optimize, optimize, optimize before I press go on these messages. There's no reason to it because you're going to learn along the way and learn more from doing that. Yeah.

I'm just trying to, so when you tell me like, oh, I was always, I'm, I'm reading that as like, all right, you're a winner. Right? Like you shouldn't worry about that stuff.

Just send some freaking texts.

Yeah. All right.

So if you have no money like you're making yet, there's no reason to be tracking like crazy.

Yeah.

There's a time and place for it. And obviously I do a lot of that work, but you don't have to worry about it when you're getting started.

Okay. So 100, 150 conversations. Do they all go an hour? Do they go 15 minutes? Um, an hour and a half?

Yeah. I, on average, they went probably an hour. Some went up to like, there was ones that we decided to keep going for a while up to like, I think the longest one probably went 3 hours or so because we were really getting into a platform they were using. We were talking about how you you can automate within this platform. That was much more of an automation sort of talk instead of AI. But again, you know, when I was getting started, I was just trying to get rolling with these calls. Other ones went, you know, 5 minutes just to talk about, oh, you should do this on ChatGPT or whatever. Yeah. Or you know what, you know, let's, let's, you know, do this another time. Or maybe, you know what, Ryan, I just wanted to like say hi. I didn't realize I was talking about this right now. They went all over the place. And you know, it does get to you after like, all right, you know, these calls today, I have 3 calls. They all didn't really go the way that I intended. But then it was like, you know, I had some really good calls along the way where I got some real aha moments out of people and I was like, how can I mimic that again? Let's try to, you know, tailor the calls in that direction versus the ones that are failing.

Okay. So 150 people, how many were a second conversation?

Probably a third or a fourth of that. Well, no, that, it was probably more of like a fourth or a fifth of them now that I'm thinking about, thinking about it. But again, the second conversation could come anywhere between that point to now. And I always am re-engaging people. I'm not just like, let's— yeah, like, like, let's finish this call and we never speak again. I'm usually reaching out and saying, hey, how is this specific thing going? Is there anything you want to talk about more? I'm happy to hop on a call in 5 minutes with you, or whenever you're available, let me know. Because at the time, I'm flexible. Yeah, I, you know, recently left the job I was working, and for the past year or so now, I was just trying to do these calls for the 3 months I was getting started.

Speaking of a job, were you working a full-time job at this point?

I was working a full-time job up until July of last year.

So while you're doing all this reach out, you were—

Yeah, the reset reach out started when I knew I was about to leave the job, probably in like May, and continued until July or August.

Okay. And what was your job and what were you making there?

Yeah, I was working in clinical research as a project manager at a local hospital, and I was making about $52,000 a year.

Okay. All right. So let's say, be conservative, we'll say a fifth turned into a second conversation. That would be 30 people max on 150. How do those conversations go in general?

Yeah, it's again, very similar. We have a very specific sort of avenue we're trying to go down, but this time I kind of understand what they're dealing with. I understand much more about their company. So I, you know, I do a little more research and maybe I even build something for them prior to the call.

These calls go so much better. You have a backstory, you know how they are, you know what they're struggling, you know their business.

Yeah.

So I'm, I'm going to try to see the future and know that your third call was much more than a fifth, right? But we'll get there in a minute. All right. So you're doing research, you're, you're prepping more than you could before.

Yep.

Hey, look what I built for you. Hey, show me what you ended up doing based on my suggestions.

Yeah.

Okay. How do those calls go?

I mean, if, uh, I'm truly providing value to them, usually a lot of them ended with like, hey, how can we find a way to work together? We don't really know what exactly that looks like, especially I was getting started. I didn't really have an offer ready to go like, oh, this is what it looks like. It'll be this amount a month or we'll build this. I didn't have any of that. But what we did have following a lot of these second or third conversations was let's find a way to work together because we obviously mesh well. There's a reason you came back and talked to me. There's obviously value I can provide, which is tied to some sort of tangible ROI. So why not try to make this work?

Did you close anyone from that first call?

I don't think I closed a single— well, I didn't try to close people on the first call.

Right. But no one was like, dude, I know you're not even— but like, can I just pay you to do this? That didn't happen in the first?

I don't think so.

That's encouraging to me because you could have been bummed out and just— and stop, right? But you're like, no, we're going to play the long game. Long game, long game, long game, right? All right. So 30 conversations, how many turn into a third? Conversations?

I would say probably about half or more of those, again, over whatever time period you like.

Yeah, months are lapsing. Weeks, months, it takes time.

Yeah. And a lot of these people, you know, I'm coming back a year later and people are starting to forget that first conversation. I try to bring it back up the moment they start to forget about me. I try to say, hey, here's another little tidbit of value. Or sometimes I'm not even trying to just get on these calls with people. Sometimes I'm I made a YouTube video specifically addressing this audience or maybe this sort of real estate niche. And I send them the YouTube video saying, hey, made this, thought of you when I made this. Let me know if this resonates.

You know, I hate to draw comparisons to multilevel marketing because this is absolutely not that. The reason I draw a comparison to it is because if you were to go to a multilevel marketing seminar, they would say, make a list of 1,000 people that you know. That's what they do because it works, right? They know what they're doing. Call every single one of them and say, how was— how's life been since high school? I haven't spoken in 20 years. And the reason I— so I have a lot of friends that have done MLM schemes, right? And some of them burned, burned their relationships. And some of them— and they— but they made a lot of money. Some of them burned their relationships and didn't make a lot of money. Total waste. Some of them made a lot of money and did not burn their relationships, right? They're great. They're doing great. And the difference between those two parties is if they burn their relationships, it's because the price of what they sold did not match the value of what they were selling.

Correct.

Right. It's, it's like they, if you, if I sold my grandma a lemon car, she's not gonna like me anymore.

Yeah.

If I sell my grandma a Corolla at fair market value and it works and it serves her life better, she still loves me. Okay. So over here, whatever MLM they were selling, If it matched the value that they were expecting, then they did a service to their friend. Yes, they sold to 'em, but they needed that thing in their life, or at least they think they did, which is what's important. So you could have burned your audience, you could have burned your relationships if your service sucked and it wasn't worth the price. I'm guessing it wasn't. We haven't gotten there yet.

Yeah.

But okay, 30 conversations, 30 second conversations, and then give or take 15 third conversations. Did you close any on the second conversation?

Yeah, I probably did close one or two on some very low-end projects just to get the ball rolling. I was charging probably between $500 and $1,000 for those sort of projects, but I was just trying to get foot in the door one time sort of thing.

Yeah.

And with the vision of having something to follow after.

Yeah. With that.

But correct. It was just to get in the door.

So let's say give or take 150 conversations, 150 hours on average, not including all the time texting. Let's say 300 hours of work.

Yeah.

Okay. For all the reach out. Then you get, you add, you know, you got to do some follow-ups, a few hours, 30. Did the second conversations last about an hour as well?

Yeah.

Okay. So we're like 350 hours. We're being conservative. Probably wasn't that much because it doesn't take that much. Like you could text 20 people in 15 minutes.

Yeah. I got pretty fast at texting.

I'm sure. We're being really conservative. 350 hours to get your first, call it $1,500 in revenue. Let's say 2 people at $750 each. Accurate?

Yeah.

Okay. So your hourly rate is terrible at this point. You're looking at $2 an hour.

For sure.

Okay. But you're building something for yourself.

Yeah.

And that's the whole point. And you're willing to play the long game.

Yep.

Okay. So 15, so of the 30 conversations, you closed 2 people, then you have 15 more conversations on round 3. How do those go?

I probably closed the majority of them.

Really?

This time. And not on the phone call. Um, again, at this point I'm like scared to close on the phone. I'm like, oh, I don't want to like give you a price right here and now. That's terrifying. But we did come up with some sort of arrangement where we would move forward or work together in an educational sense or build a certain project together. A lot of those third conversations ended up being successful for me.

Are you still doing 100% of these on Google Meet?

Yeah.

Okay. And see, that's— I'm assuming that a lot of these you could have done in person, right?

You've got—

you're in the Cincy AI group. Some of these people are within an hour, right?

And I did, I did have some like coffee chats with people. Along the way, but I would say, you know, above 90% of my meetings are just Google Meets.

Is that a personal preference?

I love just being able to share my screen.

Yeah.

And you share your screen. I'm going to do the laser pointer on your screen about what we should do. And we could, you know, share tabs and do a lot of that. I think it was just the fact that I was, A, probably nervous to get in person, to be completely frank.

Yeah.

And I was used to working in this online environment. Sure. So these days. There are way more in-person interactions, especially over this last couple of months or so.

Yeah.

But when I was getting started, I think it was just, let's just do what's working for me right now. And let's just call out on these Google Meets.

Now I know that probably most of these people were not within an hour of you, but in a, in a perfect world, if all 150 were in person and you, you had a 20% follow-up rate or whatever, I bet you anything it's closer to a 40% follow-up rate if they're in person. Yeah, just because the data on this is very, very clear and you know that and I know that, but you're like me and I want, I don't want to go anywhere. A, B, I don't like meeting people in person. So I would have done what you did, but just for those watching or listening, if you're willing to do in-person, your close rate will absolutely be higher.

Yeah.

Like maybe twice as high.

And I was going to say, this is probably my largest piece of advice for anyone getting started is go all out on in-person when you can, because like you said, it makes a whole lot of difference about how, A, you connect with people, but B, if people will work with you in the future, you got that in-person relationship finally. And it just makes it a much more friendly, much more engaging conversation whenever you have them.

So as the value of AI continues to do this, which will— this will happen for a while, the value of in-person continues to do this.

Oh my God, yes.

And the value of a Google Meet continues to go up. Yeah. Um, okay. So 30— sorry, We were 30 conversations, 15 third conversations. You closed literally all of them, almost all of them.

A good amount of them. I would say maybe 10.

10. And you had already closed 2 from the second conversation.

Yeah.

So you've got 12 paying customers, some recurring, we haven't gotten there yet, some one-time from 150 reachouts. So 8, 9% close rate. Yeah. Which if you did a cold email campaign to 150 people, you're going to have probably a 0% close rate legitimately because, oh my gosh, yeah, the numbers aren't big enough. You might need to email 1,000 to 5,000 people to get one close, right? And so people watch those and they're like, 8% close rate from all those out? 8% is amazing. And let me guess, no sales experience?

Zero.

You didn't serve a mission for your church like I did for 2 years? Never gone door to door? Never like been in a boiler room doing—

No, that was the most terrifying stuff I've ever done.

That's encouraging. Yeah. Introvert, no sales experience, no formal tech experience other than playing around with tools. And yeah, you're not a software engineer.

I'm an ops guy at the end of the day. I'm not a— I did not come from an engineering background.

Okay, 12 closes. Tell me, or you said 10 out of the 15 you closed, right? And plus the other 2. Yeah, give or take.

Give or take.

What did you charge those 10? Like, what did the pricing structures look like, give or take?

Yeah. So eventually this is what my offer turned into. Starting at the top of funnel, obviously we have everywhere that I'm potentially meeting people along the way. We have business masterminds.

You're looking at this here.

I'm looking at that. Okay. We have business masterminds, local meetups, social media, and previous relationships. That's literally everyone that I reached out to. Again, I did attempt to do the, you know, mass email outreach. Nothing happened with it.

Zero. That's the introvert's dream if that works.

Yeah.

Yeah. And again, A lot of times I talk to people that make a lot of money from their network and they're a pastor, they're an extrovert, they're a super connector. You're none of those things. You're 24 at the time.

Yeah.

Okay.

That eventually moves to being in the middle of the sales funnel here with free resources and guides, long-form content workshops, and essentially all of these being lead magnets. And by lead magnet, it means what is a, you know, freebie that does provide value that gets people in the door to want to work with me in a longer extent. It's almost like a teaser. Yeah. What a full offer would look like.

And it's a trust builder.

It is a trust builder.

And an expertise shower. And tell me how many YouTube subscribers you have today.

Not many. I probably have 100 or so on YouTube. I think I have—

100, not 100,000, right?

100, 1-0-0. Okay. Yeah.

And how many did you have when you first started? Maybe zero, right? Zero.

Yeah. I started this channel probably a year ago.

And the intent of this content is to show your expertise, you're not trying to go viral, but you want people to see I publish stuff on the internet. Yeah. Period. Because like—

It's immediate credibility.

Well, you're making content for these people anyway.

Right.

Why not upload it?

Yeah.

What's the downside?

If I have to do a demo twice, I just record it.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Free versus long-form content, workshops, lead magnet. And I'm guessing your content is not highly edited. It's screen recording. It's you talking.

It's one go. I don't try to put in, you know, too high-level editing into it.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, a lot of these resources and guides, for instance, are like prompt frameworks, they're SEO guides, they're how to use Claude code. It's a lot of the things people are typically asking of me and I want to have them ready to go for whenever it comes up in conversation. So hopefully from a call that I were to have with you, for instance, I wouldn't just be giving, you know, some advice or feedback on the call. I'll be giving you lead magnet number 1, maybe 2 and 3, depending on what you're looking I gotcha. Eventually, after it's not as much of a funnel as much, as much it is a loop because I'm consistently building relationships and I'm also consistently providing education to people. People kind of stay in that top and middle funnel over and over again until at some point I'm getting on a call and we have some sort of mutual agreement to move forward. And often I've eventually found what that looks like for me at the bottom here. We could talk about that more.

Okay.

Okay.

So what we just described is kind of this— we kind of skipped over the middle part. In between steps 1, 2, and 3, you're sending them stuff.

Yeah.

Right. Based on what you learned about them on the call.

Correct.

Okay. So tell me about your offers and how did you land on those?

Yeah, this came from what I learned on the free calls with people. So I figured out that what I'm really good at doing on these calls, I'm good at building tools. I'm good at helping with business operations and systems, but a lot of people found a lot of value in what I was teaching them and sort of having that framework mindset saying, this is how I would go about it in your shoes, which eventually led me to realize, why don't I just try to turn these into some sort of educational-based offer? So on the far left, you'll see the private coaching offer, and then I have cohort groups. Those are the two main offers, but obviously I also do implementation builds or just, you know, AI builds, website builds, things like that as time goes on. But I try to keep people start— gets people started by doing the private coaching in the cohort groups. Okay. What the private coaching looks like, usually it's a 3-month sort of deep dive into your business. I work directly with the founders of a leadership team to be able to implement AI and tech and tools long-term, really focusing on employee engagement with those tools, really focusing on adoption. Yeah, adoption is the best word to describe it, but obviously not everyone could afford that. That's my high-ticket offer, the one that I am most ingrained into your business. I am essentially becoming a thought leader in your business. You know, people say you're like the AI officer, fractional CIO, or whatever terminology you want to use for it. Yeah. So that's, you know, the high-ticket one. But obviously most people, especially in my immediate network, they don't— you can't afford—

what does this cost, give or take?

Yeah, give or take, it's, you know, like $5,000 to $10,000 a month. Yeah.

Okay. And that's like your ideal.

That's like, I am not, you know, most people I'm not even trying to pitch. Sure. That is here.

You know, they can't afford it.

Yeah. And also, you know, I can't afford to take on infinite clients. I want to take on 1 or 2 of those people max.

Yeah. How many hours per week does this take, give or take?

Yeah, right now I am per client. I have 1 client doing that with me in the current, you know, 3-month sprint. Probably takes 10 hours or so a week for me to focus on that.

Okay.

Okay.

All right. And then cohort groups.

Yeah. And this is what I really love to do. The cohort groups are essentially month-long sprints with me where I get groups of— the one I'm doing right now, 10 people— to build alongside each other a common goal. So for the one I'm doing right now, we're all building websites using Claude that optimizes SEO and their lead funnel. Okay. And we're all working on it together. People are coming from different backgrounds. One person, you know, comes from an accounting background, real estate background.

So you're not all matching together blue-collar business owners and white-collar. You're just like, whoever I got for this 10 weeks, if they qualify and if they need it, or 4 weeks if they need it, if they can pay, you're in this call. September, October, October.

And I have done focus-related ones as well. Like I've done real estate-specific ones in the past. I did one for acquiring businesses to make essentially acquisitions agents to help with writing letters of intent, working with brokers, underwriting deals. We had, you know, AI-specific bootcamps or cohorts for that. And now I'm doing this one that's much more general, but this has been the largest one. Yeah, I've been doing this a month.

Okay. What do you charge for this?

This is just $1,000.

That's awesome. So $10,000 for one month's worth of work. And it's how much, I mean, it might even be less work than the private coaching, right?

Yeah.

How many hours per week?

It's a lot of hours. So the way they work is every week Monday leads off with like a lesson plan. The end of week we have a call. These are both— these are with the whole group. Monday, full group lesson plan. Thursday or Friday, full group kind of breakdown. Talk about how things are going for people, discuss what problems that came up, that came through. Obviously most people are probably reaching the same sort of questions and problems by the end of the week. So it's a great time to interact and get those out of the way. And in the middle of the week, I'm having 30-minute one-on-ones with people. So with the 10 people I have going right now, you know, it certainly adds up.

But not everyone books a one-on-one every week. Correct. How many hours per week would you say it shakes out at?

Yeah. So let's say 2 hours on Monday, 2 hours on Thursday, and then 5 hours in between.

So another 10, about 10. Okay. So, um, $250 an hour, really? I mean, call it 40 hours for a month, $10,000. And how big could this be? How big are you comfortable letting it get?

Probably double that size. 20 people?

Yeah. Yeah.

I think the first one I did was literally just me working with a friend. I called it a cohort group because I tried to get more people to join. I had one person join. Great. Let's work together as much more one-on-one. That was to get the, you know, trial period out of the way.

And you're making content out of it, I imagine.

Yeah, I'm repurposing a lot of this. The second one I did, 3 people.

Now, you know, still $3,000 a month. Yeah, like, yeah, great.

It was awesome. It felt really good to have people, you know, people that weren't previously buying into work with working with me. Yeah. Being able to afford something and also me provide something that will theoretically last them for the rest of their business days.

Yeah. All right. Implementation builds. Yeah. This is something you could be getting this from these guys too, right?

Correct.

Doesn't have to be one or the other.

I've had multiple people that go through the cohorts work with me to build something. Okay. Post-cohort. And all of that is one-off things. And I usually calculate that based on using an hourly rate I came up with for myself and also understanding how much time I think it will take because I've worked on a lot of these projects over the years.

What hourly rate?

It's $200.

Okay. And what is your— I know these are all over the map.

Yeah.

What on average do you charge for an implementation build?

It, it could be anywhere between $1,000 and I could imagine charging like $15,000 to $20,000. It just depends on the project.

Yeah. What are some examples of charges that you've given out for this?

Yeah, so a lot of— I don't know how obsessed I am with the AI agent terminology, but building AI tools that are scheduled and fit directly into your business, I do a lot of that. That's kind of the, the, the theme, including like, you know, marketing-specific tools. For instance, the most recent one I did was working with a realtor to repurpose content and I just produce a lot, large amounts of content for them, you know, sales builds to help with the outreach funnels and then newsletters and the things like that. They're all over the place. They widely vary.

Okay. Would you say $2,000 average?

Yeah.

Okay. So of the 12, for now, I know you've gotten customers since then, but of these first 12 people, how much revenue have you generated lifetime from them? Yeah.

Oh geez. That's a good question. Probably I would say the average person joins a cohort group of mine and then probably works on a project with me. So about $2,000. $1,000 maybe on average.

On average.

Okay.

So $25,000. Wow.

From the first 12. Yeah.

Yeah. So let's just say that's almost for your first like batch of customers for all the time spent. I guess it doesn't include some of the implementation time. You probably made $50 to $100 an hour. Yeah. Probably that first to start a business.

Yeah.

You got paid $50 to $100 an hour to start in a business.

Correct.

Right. To generate content, to generate testimonials, to get like a foundation of customers that could start referring people to you? Because that doesn't include all the referrals, right?

Right.

What about customers that you've acquired since those first—

Majority has come actually late this summer. I'm going to have the best month of my life, which is about to be making about $15,000 this month projected. Amazing. You know, if you would have asked me a couple of months ago, there was months I was like, I don't know if I'm going to make any money. Right. It was very up and down, especially with— I had a lot of travels over the summer. I tried to finish up a lot of projects. Going into that. And then the introvert in me stopped my sales funnel. Yeah, I know. You know, it spirals really fast, but I got to the point that this is going to be my best month yet with the $15K.

So in a year and a half, you went from making $4,000 a month at your 9-to-5, and then you had a bunch of conversations, didn't really spend any money other than a little, you know, tech tools, software tools.

$20 a month maybe when I was getting started. Yeah, I left the—

Yeah, exactly. $4,000 a month working for the man. Pre-tax to, you know, $10,000 to $15,000 a month working for yourself.

That's right.

And you're not professionally trained. You don't have sales abilities. You just like tinkering with software tools and AI tools, and you provide value to people, and then they ask how they can pay you for it.

Yeah. And I think the proof behind it is I put in the time. They see the content going out and they see the demos and they see everything that I've made for others because I've been recording it along the way. So it, I don't need a degree. To prove that I could do these things. I have all the proof in the world that I can provide people.

What percentage of your revenue today is coming from those first 12 versus people after that?

Yeah, the month I'm having right now, I probably about have 50% of the people being first engagement clients and then the other half being clients that I've been working with. Wow.

I mean, so you were able to more than replace your income solely from your personal network.

Yes.

Right. And then everything above that is coming from either referrals from that personal network or people that you found since then. And really the people you found since then are still kind of in your personal network. You're just expanding your network by joining these networking groups and actually reaching out. What tools do you use to do all these? Like, what are your favorite tools?

Yeah, it's— I'd make it whatever tools the businesses are currently using. So I make it my business to understand. Yeah, but if you know you're not using any AI tools or any platforms right now, as of August of 2026, I would just say jump into Claude and learn everything you can about Claude. Don't get distracted by all the other shiny objects out there. Based on what we know right now and what's working with people, I would just do Claude.

Okay. What, like non-AI tools or other AI tools like CRM?

Yeah. Like I've done a lot within GoHighLevel. They have a lot of— that's the CRM platforms I use a lot. I've done, you know, a lot of like naturally Salesforce and HubSpot and all these other large CRM systems. And then From the automation side, it was a lot of NAM, which is just strictly automation builds for people. If this step happens in a business workflow, then these steps of actions happen autonomously. Okay.

And how are you finding new customers today?

Yeah. When you take the time to do so, I reach out to 10 people every day doing the same thing I've been doing for the past year. I go into my contacts and I see who do I, you know, what sort of value can I provide? Maybe I think I want to run an education group based around this information or this deliverable. Who can I potentially provide that to in my network? I go in, I, you know, text 10 people, or I call 10 people who I consider my friends now. I've been doing this for a year now. Hey, you know, I'm going to be building this alongside other business owners. Are you interested in joining us?

A much easier sell.

Yeah. And, you know, I don't feel any guilt at all in doing that because I feel like I'm giving them so much value in these offers that it outweighs any sort of like, you know, salesy feeling that I've had.

So if you generate $25,000 from the first 150 customers and that $25,000 is growing, right? Just imagine if you had those same 150 conversations today and instead of your positioning as, I just think these are tools are cool. I just wanna know how I can help you.

Yeah.

You know, instead of that, it's, yeah, I make $15,000 a month solving problems with AI for business owners.

That's right.

And I can do that for you.

Yeah.

Like, your close rate will be orders of magnitude higher.

Yeah. Especially if you understand the problems they have. And that's just through genuine conversation.

Yeah. How important are networking groups? In-person stuff especially?

It's everything. It's everything, man. It's— I would not be where I am without it.

Because, I mean, let's be honest, there's a lot of AI dudes out there, right? The guys that were dropshipping dudes became crypto dudes, became Shopify dudes became, you know, and I've been that guy.

I'm not really guilty too, dude.

I'm not. I love those guys.

Yeah.

I'd rather have that guy in my corner than the guy who's been an account executive for 14 years. Yeah. Right. Because they're, they're out there, they're trying stuff. So I'm not dogging on those guys, but there's a lot of those guys.

I was flipping real estate 2 years ago.

Yeah. Amazing. Oh yeah.

Real. I did forgot that.

I've done that too. But like when you're in person, then you're in the 1%. Because the other guys are in the night.

They won't do it. They're online.

Yeah, they don't want to. They could, but they don't want to. I mean, Cincinnati is not a huge area. What other tips or tricks do you have for people to be successful at this?

Yeah, I think trying to establish mentorship wherever you can. Get in the rooms with the people that are a step ahead of you or even 3 steps ahead of you and understanding how they got there. And a lot of it is through this genuine relationship building. You'll quickly find out. And obviously there's different strategies of doing so. The two strategies that I kind of split equally is seek to serve and pay to play. Oh, seek to serve, meaning I am going to try to provide value to this mentor in any way I can, hopefully to receive guidance, you know, in return. Pay to play being I'm going to pay to be in these rooms with these people or pay for these coaches, you know, these consultants to help me out along the way. Yeah.

Now what, what about the theory that, geez, I don't want to show this guy how to vibe code because then he's going to make his own website? Has your thinking on that evolved over time, or is that a genuine concern that people should have? Because some people say give away the secrets, sell the implementation. Do you agree with that or not?

I give every old thing away. I just, I will give away, if I, you know, I give all my trade secrets away. I follow the exact format I use to teach the cohort groups. I will tell you exactly what I do. But I think people still are looking for the partners like me who have this sort of builder mindset, have sort of operational brain to work alongside you and to be a thought leader and to be on top of the AI spin and everything that's happening these days with AI. They want to have these genuine connections with me moving forward. So in these cohort groups, I tell people exactly what I'm doing to build and I don't leave any secrets. So theoretically, you could go off and do all these things on your own. You'll never need me again. But I find over and over again that by providing all this value, people would rather continue to work with him because they said, wow, look what Ryan did with $1,000 of my, you know, $1,000 that I made and look what he created for me. So let's continue this relationship.

Well, it's like, I don't want to show this guy how to fish because I'm catching all his fish. If I show him how to fish, he doesn't need to buy from me anymore. But what happens when you show him how to fish is that then he learns how to fish. Then he comes to you and be like, hey, how do I catch bass? Oh, well, that's a whole other thing. How do I catch trout? Well, that's cold water.

That's right.

Well, can you shoot? I want to catch bass. I'm sick of eating catfish all day. Yeah, it's like it just gives them more and more opportunities to pay you money for sure. So instead of selling fish, you're selling coaching, you're selling consulting, you're selling a subscription service of lures. You know what I'm saying? Like, you just got to have faith that it will work out better if you believe in the law of abundance, as woo-woo as it sounds, and just give it all away.

Absolutely.

And it'll come back tenfold. We don't bury our talents, right? No. Tell me about the DASA framework.

Yeah, this is— I use a bunch of frameworks in my work. I like to follow the Alex Hormozi in the world who use frameworks to describe any sort of business solutions they have. But this is the framework that I use to lead up to any AI project. So whether it's in sales, marketing, this is the path I follow. And it starts with the D, which is diagnose, which essentially means finding the problem that you're looking to solve. A lot of people are trying to solve nonexistent problems using AI, and that's a waste of time. You want to actually be getting some sort of outcome. Come from what we're trying to build. So that's the D. A stands for articulate. So saying what the dream solution would look like for your business. If we built something like this, for instance, my team wouldn't have to work, you know, the full 40 hours a week on this because a lot of this is taken off their plates. It could be more time saved or more money made, whatever, you know, whatever sort of spin you want to put on it. The S stands for systemize. Which means try to bring all of the ideas together from your team, try to bring in SOPs or, you know, standard operating procedures about what is currently working. Who are people in the space that are doing this properly? Let's study them, try to make a system that would work that we could plug AI into. Because if you have a working system already with a lot of manpower and a lot of manual work, then AI would make that so much easier for you. So I think like the slogan I love to use is If you're automating chaos, you're scaling chaos. That's what I'm trying to prevent with using this sort of framework with everything I build. So then finally AI can be implemented into a project.

I like, if you're automating chaos, you're scaling chaos. It's kind of like a business. It's, do you ever, do you watch The Office?

Yeah.

In the episode where he, he starts Michael Scott Paper Company and his accountant's like, you're outta business. Like the more paper you sell, the more money you lose.

Yeah.

Because you're selling paper at a loss. And he's like crunching the numbers again. He's like, crunch. Did anything change?

No.

Yeah, it's like that's what happens when you sell something at a loss. You don't want to sell more of it, right? You automate chaos, you're scaling chaos.

Yeah. And then it puts a bad flavor in your mouth about all the tech that we're implementing. ChatGPT doesn't work or, you know, these automations don't work. You just had a really bad system to start with. Yeah. AI is using the data that you feed it. Give it the proper information, it'll work.

Yeah. I like to call it A of the DASA framework, articulate. That's like the aha moment. You articulate the problem to them that they're experiencing, but they don't have a structure around, right? You're like, oh, so you're telling me that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, yes, right? They get it. And then it's like buy-in.

Some of this is happening on the calls that I'm doing with people. Yeah, we're always— well, hey, you know, the hard part is trying to get the problem out of their mouth. But then what, you know, I could give them that aha moment on the call. And then once we start to work together in a paid fashion, we could take over with the systemized AI imitation steps together.

Now, if you— it sounds like you're, you're— it's taking 3 calls for you to close your average deal, right? Where would you place call number 1, 2, and 3 along this framework?

1 is, you know, the D and the A step.

Both of them?

Yeah, because a lot of people kind of know the problems they're currently having in their business.

Yeah.

Sometimes you have to get it out of them, right? Sometimes we're like, well, how is your, you know, this revenue track and how is this different offering going? It does sometimes, you know, first call oftentimes could be just the diagnose step, but I try to get through the first two steps on the first call and then the articulate stuff kind of snowballs into the second and third call with people typically.

Okay. And then the rest of it is post-close.

Correct.

How do you— I've talked to a lot of people that do AI implementation and some of them struggle to ask a question good enough to elicit a good enough answer about what they're struggling with in their business. Because if you're a business owner and I'm trying to solve problems with AI for you, and if I ask you something generic like, what problems are you struggling with in your business right now? Yeah, they have all kinds, but they don't know how to match their actual problems with the answer to that question.

Yeah.

So are there any like creative workarounds to bubbling that out of them?

It's still one of the most challenging things I face, but I love asking like, what is keeping you up at night? Like, what is the thing that is haunting you? Yeah. Because you're going to have to go deal with it the next day.

Yeah.

There's oftentimes I have a lot of solutions that could fix the problems that are really like haunting people. Like, you know, I'm not making enough money to pay my staff. Like, well, let's dive into that more. Or, you know, this one project is going wrong in all these different ways.

Let's—

yeah, let's dive deep into these. This is like, you know, I want to help you solve these problems with my specific expertise.

Yeah. You've heard the phrase with regards to like prompting AI, garbage in, garbage out, garbage prompt, garbage output, right?

Yes.

The quality of your question equals the quality of your answers for sure. So generically, if we go to church or hang out with people, how you doing?

Good.

How you doing? Good. Stupid question. Stupid answer.

Yeah.

I was in on a podcast once where the first question was, what was the last thing you cried about?

Yeah.

I'm like, I just had some, like, first of all, I'm a little embarrassed to admit. Second of all, I, I need like 3 minutes to think about that.

Yeah.

You know, like it's a great question and it almost always gets a great answer. So That question in this business, in this industry, is so critically important because if you cannot diagnose the D of the DAASA framework, a.k.a. show them that there is a disease that needs curing, then there's no disease that needs curing. But we all have problems. Even a perfectly run business has problems that could be better optimized, right?

Yeah.

Any other creative ways of getting that answer other than what keeps you up at night, which is a great one? Anything else that comes to mind?

I like what your, your friend said on the podcast you jumped on, like trying to get the— oh yeah, elicit some sort of response that they weren't expecting from you. I'm trying to think what else. That's my sort of main go-to. But I love asking like why questions when people are talking about their business. They might act like all of this is going fine. Like, I don't want to— hey, I don't want to be vulnerable with this guy that I haven't talked to in years. So I'm just going to talk about, you know, yeah, the marketing portion of our business is going fine. Operations are going okay. And I, you know, trying to pinpoint maybe very specific things about them. Like, well, what about this particular offering? Right. Have you been able to get that off the ground?

Yeah.

A lot of these You know, the questions I ask go into the studying leading up to these calls.

Okay, so you're 26 years old. What will you make this month from implementing AI into small businesses?

$15,000 this month.

Profit?

Profit.

Amazing. Everyone is saying that AI will kill small businesses. You say the opposite.

Why? This is the best time you could compete with the enterprises because you have access to the technology that allows you to do so.

You have the same access that they've always had now.

Yeah. And theoretically you have even better tools than them because they're limited to what they could use based on slow policies and governance that they have in those organizations. You can move much faster than—

well, do you know how many organizations can't implement ChatGPT because they don't think it's secure enough or it's not secure enough?

Yeah. The hospital system I was looking at, they, you know, they're trying to move forward with their AI implementation, but it's a hard, you know, it's hard to get it going for them.

Yeah. What is the most a small business has ever paid you to help them with AI?

Yeah. I've been working with the same business for the past year or so now, so I've made about $15,000 working directly with them.

And what have you done for them?

It's been the advising. It's been business advisory, how we're implementing AI and the software tools into their company, making sure that they're on track to reaching their goals.

What industry and what size of a business is this?

It's a small startup. It's a tech startup.

Are they funded?

Nope.

Wow.

Pre-funding.

That's—

and that's a friend of mine.

How much did it cost you to start an AI implementation business in total?

$20.

Claude Pro or Claude?

I think at the time it was ChatGPT, but yes, back when ChatGPT was cool. Back when, yeah, that, that was the, that was the craze. Yeah.

What is an AI tool that everyone is hyped about that you find to be useless for business?

I'm not a fan of OpenClaw, to be completely honest.

Where did it go?

Yeah, there's been a lot going on in the background.

I could look at Google Trends right now and it's going to look like this. I don't even have to.

I, I think it's perfectly fine for AI users like myself who understand how to use the tools to be using OpenClaw. But I don't like the fact that people are trying to implement them into their business as fast as possible because of the access you're giving it. People just don't understand how big of a risk it is. Yeah.

Why are you doing AI implementation for small businesses here in Cincinnati? Why not move to Austin, New York, San Francisco?

Yeah, I mean, this is where I was born and raised and people really need it here. I love serving the people that, you know, I grew up around, the people that, you know, have, I don't know, have served me to this point. A lot of people in, you know, the Austin, Texas of the world or the San Francisco's, they have in-house people doing this or they, you know, their neighbors are AI experts or AI influencers already. Yeah, there's much less of us in, you know, the Midwest and particularly in Ohio. So I love being the person that people could rely on locally.

And you're telling me that a shy introvert can make six figures a year implementing AI in a small business?

Yes, you could make more for sure.

Have you ever automated someone's job away?

Nope.

Because, I mean, we're growing the pie here.

Yeah.

At the end of the day.

Yeah. No jobs have been automated away. I've just tried to make them more efficient. I think I'm all about efficiency and how you could spend the majority of your time doing what actually matters versus taking, you know, the email management stuff out of my— off my hands, things like that.

Okay. Let's say that you get a call tomorrow from a plumber with 5 crews. What is the first thing that you automate for him?

There's a lot of logistics that go into the— into the home service space in general. A lot of people really struggle with how can we optimize routes. I've been working on solutions related to that recently with home service businesses. Likewise, a lot of people in the space aren't usually the most tech-savvy individuals, so potentially they need tools that fit their lifestyle. And by that, I mean, I mean, let's try to find the right tooling or CRM system that their teams will actually use, understanding why they might not use certain tools out there, what confuses them about it, and trying to get to the root cause of those problems so they could grow and scale to the point they want because of the tools that they brought into their business.

If a 20-year-old wants to do exactly what you do, what should they do?

They should do the exact same thing I've been doing, which is trying to get in person. Don't make the mistake I made a year ago and just trying to go all out online, but meet as many people as they can in person. Try to find mentors and build, build solutions that they see problems for in their own world. You know, for instance, if you're currently in university, how can you make solutions for people in your classes or your professors? Try to take the problems that you see around you and find solutions for it. And likewise, if you've never used AI before, I love starting by making a video game because it takes all the pressure off of you and it puts your effort into something that's a lot of fun and engaging for you. And that's how I actually— that was my first AI project I ever did is I made a video.

What video again?

It's called Lift Line. It's a ski resort trivia game because I'm a big, big into skiing and snowboarding. So I took something I love and I kind of made a Wordle style game around it.

That's cool.

Yeah.

See, I'm a small business owner and I get 20 emails a day from 26-year-old AI bros. Yeah. Why should I or other small business owners hire you?

Because I'm a true go-giver. If you haven't read Bob Burg's The Go-Giver, I highly recommend you doing so. I try to just provide as much value as I possibly can with no real expectation in return. Constantly. If you need some sort of solution, I got you. I will try to make it as affordable for you as possible. And through doing so, I think people just naturally gravitate towards me.

If people want to get ahold of you or hire you or learn more, how can we find you?

Yeah, I am constantly posting on social media under my name, Ryan Schueter. That's spelled S-C-H-U-E-T-T-E-R. We'll link to that. I'm always on YouTube. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. That's where you'll find me most often. But I'm also starting a newsletter on Substack called Freedom Based Founder.

Okay. Right. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Chris.