How a Non-Coder Made $2.5M in One Year Using AI⏐Ep. #286

You can be a hairdresser at Supercuts making $12 an hour and you can afford everything you need. It levels the playing field. It opens it up to anyone. I just woke up and I said, you know what? I wonder if I could vibe code a piece of software, start today and have my first customer by the next day. And I ended up getting my first customer by the following Tuesday and it was a $15,000 customer. And then from there it blew up.

And you're not technical, you're not a coder?

Not at all.

Stop assuming that other people know more about AI than they actually do. If you're listening to this right now, you are in like the 5% just because you're in this sphere. How could someone get their first customer, whether it's $1,000 one time or $10,000 one time?

It's pretty simple. I just said, I'm just going to start calling businesses. And so I did. And over the next 6 weeks or so, I ended up with about $180,000. We're going to be close to about $8 million in recurring revenue by the end of the year.

After one year of being in business?

After one year.

And you started this business with $4,000. $400, give or take.

$400. But the big thing here is that I don't have anybody to answer to. I can do whatever I want. I am literally getting on a plane in 4 hours to go to Paris with my daughter for 5 days. And it's okay because I'm the boss.

Meet John Cheney. About a year ago, he started a business that helped other business owners save and make more money using tools and skills that basically all of us know how to do. And within a year, He had made over $2.5 million in revenue and over $1 million in net profit, and he didn't have any employees for most of that time. This year, 2026, he's on pace to do over $7 million of revenue, most of that being profit. This is an incredible story, and you already know I'm going to say, John, how did you do it? How can we copy you? Without further ado, let's chat with John. Well, John, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do?

Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I'm the founder of a company called the General AI Proficiency Institute, or GenAIPI, a little bit easier to say. But that's really what I'm focused on these days is helping companies learn AI, learn how to implement it, and really try to, to not miss the boat, right?

How long ago did you start this?

A little over a year ago, February 27th last year. I actually founded this company on accident. I'd been vibe coding a bunch, and I just woke up and I said, you know what, I've, I've got an idea. And I said, I wonder if I could vibe code a piece of software and start today, Thursday, and have my first customer by the next day. And, uh, and this is what came out of it. And, you know, it ended up taking me— instead of taking me 2 days, took me 3 days to finish it. I ended up getting my our first customer by the following Tuesday, and it was a $15,000 customer. It wasn't just like a little tiny— whoa, it was like an enterprise customer. And then from there, it blew up.

And you're not technical? You're not a coder?

Not at all. No, I couldn't write a line. If you said, John, I will give you $1 million right now if you write me one line of code, I would be like, I would miss out on that million dollars. I can't do it.

Now, surely, as you were building your last company, you probably had ideas of what you're going to do once you sold it, once you exited it. You're an ideas guy like I of all the things you could have done on February 27th, why did you choose this one?

You know, I think it was just because it was on my mind. You know, when I first, when I first sold my company, uh, I dove in, you know, I kind of took a break for just a minute, right? And then, and then started diving into some of the next things. I was working on this ticketing company, but then maybe I would say, I'd say maybe 6 months before I started this one, I had this idea in my mind. I wanted to start a, a, a, like a travel social network that was really just like a, a travel log. Like I have on, on my wall in the other room, I've got a map of all the places I've visited in the world, like a pinboard. It's like a pinboard, right? And so I've got a pin in every place, you know, I or my wife, we've been, whatever. And, and I wanted to kind of just make a digital version of that so I could, you know, land on Chris Koerner's thing, be like, hey, I wonder where he's been. Oh, he looks like he's been in New Zealand. I'm traveling there. Hey Chris, what do I do? Right? And so I could, I could have friends and, you know, trust people a little bit different. So I had this idea and I, and I contacted a dev shop in Ukraine that I had used before in my previous company. And I said, hey, what would it take to put this together? And they gave me a quote and said it's going to be $105,000. And I was like, okay, cool. And that's going to give me iOS, Android, web. I was going to launch this cool app and that was my idea. And I literally hung up with those guys after they showed me their proposal. And I jumped on LinkedIn and I saw this post of somebody. Somebody said it was like a VC or somebody. I don't even remember who it was, but somebody said, I just watched a founder build something, some software in like 10 minutes in front of me. With this thing called Replit. And I was like, what's a Replit? I had no idea what that was. And I immediately jumped on and I was like, whoa, it says I just have to describe this thing and I can build something. So I tried something really quick and I was like, whoa, it just built a website. And I was like, I wonder. And so I took this $105,000 plan that they had delivered it to me in like a proposal format. I was like, build this. I just dragged it into Replit and said, build this. And like 20 minutes later it was built. And I was like, Okay, what is going on here? And so I started working on that and I kind of got addicted to playing with that and figuring it out. And then, you know, I just being out here, I think in West Mountain where there's a bunch of, I would say less techie people out here, you know, they're like, they're making $20, $30 million a year in their businesses, but they're like construction companies, cattle, you know, herders, all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Lots of blue collar and they knew nothing about AI. I would talk to them, you know, whether I was at church or out to dinner or just in the neighborhood talking to someone and they just knew nothing. I was like, man, they are going to miss out and I need to do something about it. So that's really what, what led me to start this one is I just was, I wanted to help people see this amazing technology and what it was doing for me and see if I could help them be able to improve their own.

So you have this idea for this travel social media business. You get a $105,000 quote, which I will say, if you go to a dev shop in the Ukraine, like that's going to be the cheaper quote. That's probably why you went to them, right? So it could have been a lot more expensive. You take the proposal, you drag it into Replit, which you'd never heard of. You learn about the magic of vibe coding. And then you think, man, forget that travel idea. Like the vibe coding is the idea, like vibe coding plus business owners plus solving problems with AI for business owners. That is the idea. And that kind of led you down this rabbit hole. Is that accurate?

Yeah. You know, I'll share something that's a little bit personal that I haven't shared a ton. I've talked about it a little bit, but I raised $13 million for my, my company. Raising money isn't you know, all fun and games like, you know, it might look like on Shark Tank or something. When you raise $13 million from— and it was about 50 different people. There was some family offices and lots of angels, some $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, but it added up about 50 people. Man, that was stressful. I had a lot of people unhappy with me at any given time, no matter what I did. Half the people were happy, half the people were mad. Like, hey, why didn't you sell? Why'd you do this? Why'd you spend this? Hey, we ran out of money. Why'd you do that? You know, anyway, long story short, we ended up selling the company, so it was okay, but I just hated it. And when I discovered this Replit thing and, you know, I had the money to be able to go and, you know, pay this dev shop, but all of a sudden I needed zero money. I was able to— well, not zero, but I needed like $30 to be able to see if my idea could come to life. And that change was so different. $100,000 to $30 or whatever, right? When I, when I launched GenAIPI, my current business, it took me about 3 days. Like I said, it took me maybe about 35 hours of live coding. It's a pretty intense 3 days, 10 to 12 hours a day. And the total cost was about $400. That includes buying the domain, you know, setting up my email system, setting up Stripe, using credits, all those different things. Right. But all in about $400. And because I had previously raised a bunch of capital, you know, for this other business, I knew kind of what it would take to build, to get a business to the point that it took me 3 days to get it to. Right. You would have had to pay tons of developers for a long time writing all that code. You'd have to pay a CEO. You'd have a marketing person. You have a salesperson trying to figure out who's going to buy this. And it would have taken— I did all the, all the kind of calculations. It would have taken about 18 months to build that thing. And the salaries and everything that I would have done the way I did it last time would have cost me about $3.2 million. And so this time I did it in 3 days and it cost me $400. And that just lit me up, man. I was so excited.

It broke your frame. It's like a frame-breaking moment.

100%. I was like, anybody can do this.

So that story reminded me of an email I sent just yesterday. And I want to read just a snippet of that real quickly. If you don't mind. So the backstory behind this is this gentleman was emailing me about an app that he vibe-coded, and he quickly got it to $22,000 in monthly recurring revenue, which was mostly profit. So then he sends me this excited email, and I've sent these emails before over the last 20 years. I've received these, I've sent these, I've been on both ends of it. And it was basically like, dude, I think we're on to something much bigger than this. I think if we go raise VC, if we do this, this can be— and I don't want to reveal any details of his business but sure, this could be the de facto solution for this AI solution in the United States. And so I hate like pouring water on people's fire because I'm an optimist. Like, people have poured water on my fire and it makes me mad. It fires me up. So this is like a snippet of what I said. I said, love the idea, but ask yourself this: what is the percentage probability that your current biz nets you 5 figures per month for this foreseeable future? I'd say 95% because you're already there. 6 figures per month, maybe a 30% chance after some more growth and time. Now, what would the statistical chance be of this new idea making you life-changing money? One that you consider once you consider raising funds, hiring, growing, competing with others, etc.? I would say 1 to 6%. Considering all that, knowing everything I've learned about starting all these businesses, most self-funded, some venture, I would take the quote-unquote sure thing bet every time. More cash flow, less headache or friction, more certainty of amazing money. Even if the newest idea pans out, sometimes with big exits don't come with big money to the founders because of liquidity preferences and down rounds. And for those listening or watching, liquidity preference is when the investor gets all their money back first. So if you raise $13 million and you sell the business for $12 million, you get nothing. The investors get all of it, right? And then I said, sorry to throw water on your fire. I just think you have an amazing thing right now in its current state, and it could net you $7 figures per year without a ton of extra work or iteration. Would love to discuss working something out, yada, yada, yada. So that what you just said just reminded me of that email. I completely agree with you. It's just, most venture-funded things don't work out.

They don't. They really don't. And ours did. And it wasn't like a crazy grand slam, you know, $100 million in my pocket. It was good. And people made a return and that's fine. But the big thing here is that I don't at this point have anybody to answer to. I can do whatever I want. I am literally getting on a plane in 4 hours to go to Paris with my daughter for 5 days. And it's okay because I'm the boss, I'm the CEO, I'm self-funded, right? And I was the CEO of the last one, but I still, anytime I did anything, some investor would be like, dude, like you should be working, right? Go, go. I haven't gotten my money back yet. Go keep working, right? And you just always have that. It's like you're in debt, right? I mean, and it's not actually debt. Right? Venture funding is a little bit different, but at least me, I, I, I don't want to just take people's money and run off with it, right? I want to deliver a return. And so I feel that obligation. With the new world of AI, you just don't have to do that. Anybody, you can be a hairdresser at Supercuts making $12 an hour with plus tips, and you can afford everything you need to build that travel social network idea that I had. That's amazing. It levels the playing field. It opens it up to anyone.

Yeah. So I want to get into how you got that first $15,000 customer. But before we do, after a year of being in business with no experience in this industry, what do your numbers look like today?

Yeah. So we're— our goal for this year is probably to hit— I would say I think we're going to be close to about $8 million in recurring revenue by the end of the year because of how we're growing. At this point right now, we're more like $2.5. Of annual recurring revenue.

So after 1 year of being in business, after 1 year.

Yeah. And I started this business with $400, give or take, $400 total cash flow positive, literally from day 5. Right. I mean, I had to invest those few hundred dollars and then by that Tuesday had my first contract and that was a good feeling, man. So it's such a great feeling. And you know, it's crazy. I've actually almost made as much money in this business in 1 year than I did in 7 or 8 years raising $13 million. Yeah, right.

With all that headache and stress and accountability and oversight.

Yeah. And the, you know, the business today, it's not a SaaS business quite in the same way. There's some SaaS, and so it's a little bit, but I wouldn't give it like a 10 or 15 or 20x multiple. I'd give it maybe a 6 or 7 or so. And so I already have a $15 million business sitting on my hands here, right? And, you know, if someone were to come and acquire this, I would already have personally a bigger exit than I had back then.

Yeah. Life-changing money.

Yeah.

So 2.5 million the first year. What is your profit on that?

So this is kind of fun. I'm glad you asked this. So basically I really call March 1st of last year my start of the business. When I first started, the idea was to build something that was completely automated. It was going to be kind of structured like an IQ test. That was actually my idea, was an AI IQ test. How AI ready are you? And then if you score bad, I'm going to sell you courses to do this, but they're all automated courses. You just get on and you take them and you learn it yourself and retake the test, whatever. If you did well on this kind of free test, this IQ test, I would then push you towards an official longer certification test that you could then use and say, hey, I have a certification from the General AI Proficiency Institute. You could put it on your LinkedIn, on your resume, whatever.

This is for business owners specifically or for anyone that wants to take it?

It was really for anyone when I first started. Like that first weekend, that was the idea was test. If they do bad, I sell them courses. If they do well, I sell them a certification. So technically I can sell anybody that lands on the site, right? Because people want to know like, hey, how smart am I? I don't— I do, right? When I see an IQ test, yeah, everyone does.

It's—

I'm gonna try that, right? And so, so that was the idea. And then, you know, there was a little bit of a pivot there even in just the first few days when I ended up selling directly to a business instead of a bunch of individuals, which I was expecting to do. But, but anyway, long story short, I ended up, you know, pivoting and working through all this. And I got to my first million by about 6 months in. It took me about 6 months and I did it completely solo. No employees, only me and my little AI team, my Replit developer and my ChatGPT project manager.

A couple contractors here and there, like agencies and stuff?

Nothing. No, only my— only I'm saying AI team. You're like my AI team, literally. Like my, my, my ChatGPT was my team member and Grok was my team member and all these people, right? And so I was just like, I want to see how far I can go. And then I started getting some bigger clients Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi hired me actually to come do some big stuff with them. And then another company hired me and then another one. I was like, okay, it's time to bring on a team member. And I had some people that had taken some of my courses and things like that. But anyway, so my profit on that first million was, I mean, almost 100%. I mean, the only cost was my time, right? And so there are real costs. And of course, some tokens, although, yeah, because I talked about it a lot and people started picking me up. The Joe Rogan Show talked about me. Just kind of. Yeah, they just mentioned me and talked to me. The CEO of Replit went on Joe Rogan. It was like, yeah, there's this guy John Cheney. It is. And built it. And that's how Tony was on Rogan.

I know he talked about you.

That's crazy. Talked about me, which is cool, right? So anyway, I've gotten a lot of free Replit credit, so I haven't even had that cost just because they've— because I haven't asked for any of that and I haven't asked them to pay me, but I'm just like, hey man, just give me credit. So keep talking about you guys. Right. So anyway, so my costs were almost zero at this point. I now have 5 full-time employees besides myself. that all are on benefits and good salaries and we're delivering for clients and we'll probably be to, I would say, 15 employees by the end of the year would be my guess. So, wow.

So over 50% net profit on the $2.5 million?

Definitely.

Incredible. Okay. So it's been a year. You're tracking for $7 mil this year based on what you have in the pipeline. What type of work are you doing for what types of business owners? Are these small, medium, large size businesses? And like what's the 80/20 of the services that you're offering?

Yeah, totally. This is a good time to talk about my pivot right in the very beginning. So again, I had this IQ test idea and I, my idea was, hey, I'm just going to run ads and like, hey, what's your IQ, right? And, you know, I got a lot of people to click on it that first weekend when I launched. I launched it at like 3 a.m. Saturday night, like Sunday morning, right? I finished it really, really late. I was, I just kind of pushed all the way through until it was done. And then Sunday I just rested because I was tired and I'd been working for 3 days straight. Monday, got up, checked my numbers, and I had had about 150 people or so click on the link and nobody had bought. And I was like, what the heck, man? What's wrong?

Had they, had they taken the test though?

They had. Yeah, they'd gotten the test.

How many of the 150 clickers took the test?

Um, I don't think I looked at that number specifically. I think what I saw, I think what I saw was there were actually 150 people who had, had entered their email address. And so I guess 150 people actually took the test because the way I did it was, you know, you take an IQ test and they're like, okay, great job.

To see the results, give me all your info.

So, but so what I did is on mine, I just said, I'm not going to put that dumb, you know, I don't want to, I don't want a huge barrier, but I'll put an email barrier, right? To see your score, give me your email, you know, that'll unlock you and help you create an account, right? And so, so I had 150 of those, but nobody had purchased. And that was surprising to me. I was like, there's no way I got 0% conversion, right?

And before you proceed, tell me what, what were you charging? And then what were you charging? Yeah. What were you charging?

The IQ test was free. Totally free. The only barrier I put was—

What were they not purchasing?

So yeah. So the thing that they would have purchased, right, was courses. And the courses, there was one for $19. There was another one for $29. And then the test, the official certification test, I think at the time was $39 or $49. It's $59 now. That's actually become a bigger product than I expected. But anyway, nobody purchased. And I went in, I went through the funnel, and I found out that, you know, I'm a vibe coder, and I was a young vibe coder, and I had messed something up with my Stripe configuration. I couldn't make a purchase.

I couldn't purchase.

It took me like 5 minutes. Took me 5 minutes to fix it. And I tested it like, okay, now I'm good. But I'm a sales guy. I'm an entrepreneur. I know how to do it. I'm like, okay, I'm still— and by the way, I was doing this very publicly. I was talking about all my progress on LinkedIn, like, okay, here I am. I don't have any customers yet. That's what I'm doing. I was like, but I got this. I'm going to figure this out. So I just kind of started reaching out to some people. It wasn't exactly like really good friends or anybody. It was people I knew that owned companies. And I was like, oh yeah, he probably has a good company. I just started messaging him like, hey, I've got this new thing. I'm measuring, you know, I can measure all your employees, see how good they are at AI. And, you know, then kind of build a plan so you guys can really kind of get on board because I know you guys probably wanted to not miss the boat here. You know, that was kind of my pitch, kind of a kind of a FOMO pitch a little bit, right? And after about 6 messages, I had one guy say, hey, this is interesting. I was thinking about this. We were talking about this as a team. He's like, can you jump on a call? I was like, yep. We jumped on a call and he had, you know, a few hundred employees. And I said, great, we'll, we'll take him through the test and start helping him out.

And he's like, how much is that?

I was like, $15 grand. He's like, done. So I just kind of made it all up as I went. I just kind of figured it out. And, you know, I was I had a contract and I had realized that I didn't do a full test on, you know, hey, will people actually go through my IQ test funnel? I still think that's a good idea, but I literally haven't put another dollar of advertising behind that idea because I just immediately pivoted my— I just said, I'm just going to start calling businesses. And so I did. And over the next 6 weeks or so, I ended up with, you know, I was up to about $180,000 in 6 weeks. And then just move from there. Right. But, but I knew I had something with that kind of perception.

So with this business owner at $15,000, what exactly was he getting for that?

Yeah. So it started out really as just kind of measurement. We were going to do measurement and then I would come in and I would actually do training. I'd say, okay, we're going to get everybody together, we're going to do this, we're going to train on some different things. And I would train them on, you know, ChatGPT, more advanced usage than just like using it for Google. And of course, I would show off Replit and show off Groq and show how to use multiple systems together and different AIs to check each other because back then, I mean, even this is only just a year ago, but even back then there was more hallucination and more things like you have to double-check your work and figure out how to use multiple models to make sure you get good answers, those types of things. And so it was really just assessment and then I would go in and train. That's what it was.

Okay. So they were going to take your, your quiz basically, and you were going to take the output of that and give them an in-person training based on the output?

That's correct. Yeah.

Or you're going to have to fly to them or were they local?

All of them were local. The ones I sold were local. But I did start doing some that were out and I did, I did a bunch of, you know, Zoom-type trainings with like 50, 60 employees days at a time on there and really effective ones, and they would just love it. They would just have a great time. Um, the only problem with this model was it was a one-time, you know, I got $15 grand and then I'm done, right? And so I had, I had one client about, about, I don't know, maybe 4 months in, they said, hey, you know, I don't like the idea of you just coming in and teaching us and then being gone. Like, do you have a model where you kind of stick around? And I was like, sure, absolutely I do.

Sounds like recurring revenue to me.

Exactly. And so I said, yeah, yeah, we have a— and I just, you know, I'm making this up on the spot, right? I'm like, yeah, we've got a chief AI officer service, you know, a fractional chief AI officer. You just pay me $15,000 a month and I'll come in and, you know, we'll do all the same stuff. We'll get you going, but then we'll follow up and make sure that you're actually, you know, it's actually impacting your business. And I mean, think about it. You're doing $20 million a year right now. What if I could increase that by 10%? That's an extra $2 million. You paying me $180,000 a year is nothing, right? And so, and he's like, done, I want that. And he bought it really fast. And I was like, okay, that was cool. And then I called up 6 or 7 other businesses over the next couple of weeks and closed half of them with, you know, $10,000 package, $15,000. I had one of them sign up for a $25,000 package because they're a bigger company and they needed more help. And I was like, this is crazy. And that's when I started to say, okay, I need some more people.

Yeah. And how did you price this? Was it based on headcount?

Yeah, initially it was. Then I started pricing it based on what we were going to be, our packages were, hey, for $10,000, you'll get, you know, 12 to 15 hours a month from us. And for $25,000, you'd get 50 to 60 hours a month, right? That's kind of how it was. So it kind of became an hourly thing. And then I changed that actually fairly recently to be more system-driven where it's like, look, we're going to be building it because what that does is it puts me in this kind of consultant kind of place where it's really easy to get rid of us. And, and I didn't like that. And so we've, we've now shifted to, to where it's, hey, we're going to install our system. We use AI for marketing. We use AI for operations. We've got OpenClaw running. We've got Replit over here. We're doing this. And this is how we run our company. We have systems. We're going to install and manage those systems for you at your company ongoing forever. Right. I mean, so really trying to build because recurring revenue is the holy grail. That's what you, that's what you want.

Yeah. Okay. And is there a pattern to the size of the businesses that you serve or the industries?

Yeah, it's interesting. Most of my first businesses, it's expanded beyond this, but most of the first businesses that I closed were all businesses that did not have a CTO. So it was like a painting company, a pool construction company, masonry company. I mean, heck, you know, Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, they don't necessarily have, I mean, they kind of have some tech people. They don't have like someone driving tech at their company, you know? And so it was a lot of companies that just didn't have that piece in place. And so they didn't have a lot of automations and processes anyway. And AI. You know, that's, that's one of the big wins with the big fast wins with AI is where you can just come in and say, hey, this person used to have to do this manually. Now we've built a process and AI takes care of it. Right. And so that frees up that person to go do something else. And so, so that was kind of the process.

So is it kind of these businesses that are in the messy middle of a business that like they're maybe just almost barely big enough to warrant a CTO, but they don't know that they need it yet, or they don't know that they can afford it yet? Is that accurate? But a business that's big enough to be able to afford a 5, figure check to you?

Yeah. Yeah. So, so ultimately we really don't work with businesses under $10 million a year. That's really kind of where it, where it starts. We have a couple and it's not that I'll say no, right? It's just that usually it's hard, harder to sell to someone who's only making $2 million, right? You just can't get enough bang for your buck there. But, but yeah, so most of our businesses are in that. I would say really it's actually a little higher than that. I would say probably the average revenue for our business is $30 million. For our customers. And then we have some that are, you know, much, much higher than that and some that are probably a little under 10. But most of them are going to be right in that 30, 20 to 30 range.

Okay. Now, when you, when you say you're, you're like providing solutions, you're implementing your system into these businesses, what are some common like automations or systems that you're implementing? Like, is it mostly finance related, sales and marketing related, you know, administrative assistant type stuff or what?

It, it's all of those, but it's really, it's the busy work that we're automating. Right? So for example, I hate, I'm a sales guy. I've used every Salesforce and HubSpot and, you know, whatever system out there, CRM out there. But the thing that makes those systems work is data going into it. And if your team isn't good at putting the data into it, then it's just kind of a mess and you can't really get the value out of those systems. And so, for example, we, at our company, we use Slack. A lot of people use Slack and that's a great great communication system, and we've hooked OpenClaw into it, right? We call it Jarvis, right? And now we can, based on the channels, we have a channel for every single client, and we can just say, hey, Jarvis, I did this and I did that and I did that, whatever. And it says, great, I just logged everything over here. It's in the system. And we built our own CRM and our own client dashboard just because we can. And, you know, that's what we're capable of doing. And so we've built our own dashboards and systems, and now we have AI that's constantly saying, hey, did you follow up on this and did you do that? It automatically builds tasks in, and then it will actually automatically do tasks that it can do, like getting reports out and, and, you know, queuing up emails and different things like that. And so that's the type of stuff that we do. And so sometimes it is for finance, sometimes it is for sales, or sometimes it's for, you know, marketing or just the CEO or executive assistant type stuff. But the bottom line is, and it's not all open call, right? There's a lot of different things that we do. But I would say that one thing that a lot of companies really love that we do as we come in is usually it's the CEO. The CEO is the buyer. They are the one that are saying, hey, I want I want to do this. I want to, I don't want to miss the boat. If I miss the boat, it's my fault. Right. And so we usually go in and one of the first things we'll do is we'll build them a dashboard that helps him see his business better and we'll connect into the APIs of all their systems or whatever. And then from there, we just start optimizing and automating and just kind of working out until we have this kind of little central nervous system that that CEO can turn to anytime, ask questions. We make it interactive so he can, you know, it's, it's got AI so it understands and you can ask it to make customer reports and different things like that. And that system has worked quite well for a lot of companies.

What would you say the playbook is for closing these guys when you get them on the phone?

Yeah, you know, it's pretty, it's pretty simple. You, you ask them, you know, how are you guys using AI right now? And most of the time they're like, we're not, we're not using it at all. We're, you know, I know a couple of us use ChatGPT to like help us with some email stuff and, you know, looking things up and trying to figure it out. And, you know, a couple of us are really trying to figure out, you know, how to, how to like set up some processes, but we don't really know how to do it. And that's what almost everybody says, right? They're just, they're using ChatGPT as an advanced form of Google or something like that. And you say, yeah, you know what? Look, you're right. And you're right with everybody else. You're, you're fine. The fact that you're even on a call with me right now means you're already ahead. And, you know, what we do is we come in and we really help in 3 ways, right? We want to help you with strategy, right? To figure out how your industry is going to be affected, how your business is going to be affected by AI. What are your competitors going to do? What can you do to stay ahead of your competitors? We're going to work with you and we're going to be active, actively involved in those discussions and really understand your business. So strategy is number one. Number two, we're going to help with transformation. We're going to actually help you build processes and, you know, speed up things, save money. Maybe you have to— you're looking to hire someone. And I'll usually ask them, I'll say, is there anybody that you've been wanting to hire? Right. Is there some task or something you want to hire for? And they're like, yeah, we've got this. You know, we really need some help over here. I'm like, well, what about this? That person was going to cost you, you know, $8,000 a month. What if we set up something that only costs you $25 a month to run and it can do this all automatically, right? And it never turns off and it does this and it does that. And they'd be like, oh, that's amazing, right? And so I'll give them an example, right? I'll ask for an example. Hey, what's something that you could do? Great. Here's how we would automate that and save you money. So now we're immediately showing that value. And then third is training, right? So strategy, transformation, and training. We really do want from the CEO to the secretary to know how to use AI to think differently, right? For example, and I'll share this a lot on sales calls, I'll say, look, software is now, you can build software in 10 minutes that you then use to complete a task and then throw away and never use again, right? This idea of throwaway software, you have to learn how to think a little bit differently. Once you understand how easy it is to build these tools and how to do these things, your life will change forever because you'll be able to, you know, if you had to go find 2,000, you know, scrape 2,000 pieces of data off of some system or off of some website that might've taken a secretary or some, you know, SDR or something like that, you know, a week or two to figure out all that data. And now you can literally just put an AI agent on it and you wake up tomorrow morning and it's done and it's in a dashboard and it's ready. It's automatically set up drafts to send out and it's done all these things for you. So you just have to learn how to think differently. And so that's the product, right? It's that strategy, transformation, and training that all comes together in this system that really does move the needle. Like our customers really see differences and it's cool, right? AI really does make a difference.

Yeah. So if someone is listening to this or watching this and they want to do something similar, with the benefit of hindsight, what could they do to better ensure their success that maybe you did or maybe you didn't do and you would have done differently?

Yeah. Really be careful to not, I mean, unless you want to, really be careful to not become a dev shop, especially if you're not a developer and you don't know how to architect and how to do all that. If you really put on yourself like, hey, I'm going to come in and build a bunch of processes for you, what that really means is you just sold a bunch of coding, right? And so you're going to either have to do that, someone else is going to have to do that, and then someone's going to have to maintain that long-term, right? I think it's much better to build a system around helping people on their own. Like the best customers we have, they're vibe coding their own solutions, right? They're director of operations or—

Teaching a man to fish.

Totally, totally. I'm not just giving them the fish. And that gets them more excited. So I've, in my life, I do a lot of things, right? I've got a piano right here. I'm a pianist and a gymnast, and I'm a whitewater kayaker. And I've been in a lot of positions where I coach people to do things. Every time, like, for example, when I'm teaching cheerleaders how to do tumbling, and maybe like a young, like, 10 to 12-year-old girl who's kind of just starting to figure things out, she's getting round-up back handspring or whatever, right? Every time they come to a class, I would help them do something for the first time. Because that's what you go home and you tell your mom and dad at the dinner table, right? You're like, I did a backflip today. Like, the coach was spotting me, but I did a backflip and I landed it. Right? Cool. Right? Hey, let's, let's throw a double back into the pit today. You know, even if you can't do it, you're not going to use that skill. But you're seeing, you're feeling something new. And so I really believe that when you can enable people and they look like, oh, hey, John taught me that. They just like you, right? And so if you, if you unlock this director of operations or this finance person or this sales guy who's just way more productive and building cool stuff with AI, and they're just like, man, I can do anything now, thank you so much, they just want to keep you around. They just like you better, right? And so instead of just coming in and doing it for them, work with them. And not only that, have them really be the ones responsible for it. You're helping and coaching along. And yeah, you can jump in there and do a little session with them for an hour if you need to, but let them figure it out. And then you don't have to manage the actual, like, oh, I'm just going to grind away. They're grinding away because they're kind of focused on solving their problem like a little puzzle. And then they just say, hey, John, I got stuck on this piece. And then you can come and you can offer some support, or someone from your team can, or whatever, as you grow. And you can help them get over the hurdles. And then, hey, now that you've figured Replit out, let me teach you about OpenClaw, or let me teach you about this agentic framework, or let me teach you about this next thing. There's always something new to keep pushing. Like, oh yeah, I know a lot now, but John still knows so much more. And because AI is advancing so fast, it kind of takes care of itself. As long as I, you know, as the AI leader, am staying on top of what's happening every day, and I have systems that help me do that, I am always going to have something cool to share with people where they're going to be like, man, John knows so much. You know, and I'm not trying to like make myself cool. It's just, it gives me something to constantly offer them. I have, there's always a next step. And that will keep them around.

It's funny because it's like, it's like learning the piano, right? Teaching someone to play a very simple song that they love in that first month is kind of an intangible. It might not be relevant to what they're learning long term, but it's, it's more for motivation and getting them excited about it and engaged and practicing, right? That's kind of what I'm hearing, as opposed to just tactics, tactics, tactics, skill, skill, skill. Because then people, whether they're learning how to vibe code or how to tumble or how to play the piano, they just get burned out because it's not fun. So what I'm hearing is like you try to do things strategically to make it fun for them so it can be more sustainable, long-lasting, and impactful for both them and their organization.

Whenever I teach a class and, you know, there's 60 people in the room and we're going to, hey, who here is a coder, right? And a couple people maybe raise their hand. Most people have never done it before. I say, okay, great. The first thing we're going to do here is we're going to open up ChatGPT or Grok or something. And we're going to vibe code a game. You're going to make like Tetris or like some dinosaur chasing you through the woods or Flappy Bird or whatever, but you're going to actually get to code it and you get to set the colors and you can change the thing and you do this just by talking to it, right? And so the first thing they do is this really fun thing, just like you said, where you learn this cool song like, oh, I want to learn this Coldplay song, or I want to learn Jurassic Park or Pirates of the Caribbean, something that they already connect to that's not drudgery and work. It's fun. And that turns then the whole process into, okay, how do I learn more fun?

Yeah, I love it. How could someone get their first customer, whether it's $1,000 one time or $10,000 one time?

Yeah, you know, honestly, there's no Vibe coding, there's no Vibe marketing shortcut here. You just gotta reach out to people and talk to them. There's probably some, I could probably, you know, actually find some Vibe type, some AI use cases for that. Really what you can do is you can go onto something like Manus, right? Or I mean, ChatGPT is okay, but Manus is probably gonna be a little bit better, that type of a tool that can do a little bit deeper research and just say, hey, find me 20 customers, you know, that live in the, you know, this area, Utah Valley or whatever, if I'm talking about where I live, that are, you know, this kind of business. Give me the CEO's information. Give me their phone number. And then you just got to call them. You just got to call. I mean, that's, that's what happened, right? Is I landed the first one and I was like, I'm going to call more people. And I called more people and I just kept doing it. And not only that, I am a huge believer, as I know you are, Chris, in social media. In just posting and talking about what you're doing. The best way to get no customers, the best way is to make sure nobody knows what you're doing.

Yeah. And we're not talking about like becoming a creator or an influencer, just like on your personal Facebook or LinkedIn page, just telling people what you're doing, what you're building, even if you have 300 followers, doesn't matter.

I've asked people. Yeah. And think about this, right? Think about a room with 300 people in it. Like that's a party. That's a big room of people.

Well, and 10% of them are business owners. 10% of adults are business owners. So there's 30 business owners reading that you're smart about AI, smarter than they are, at least.

And that's all you have to be. That's one thing a lot of people listening to this are going to say, I just don't know it. Look, if you know more than the next guy, you know more. And trust me, if you just spend 2 weeks and just play with things and do things and try stuff and vibe code and jump in there, you become that expert. You become that thing. I taught a course, one of these cohorts of this How to Build a Business in a Weekend with AI. I taught one a few weeks ago. And one of the head kind of vice presidents over at Thanksgiving Point, which which is a big organization here in Utah. But, you know, they have about 3.5 million visitors a year. They do all kinds of fun, you know, dinosaur museums and butterfly biospheres and all kinds of stuff. She's, she's probably about, I don't know, 50-something years old or whatever, has like a 22, 23-year-old son who has a job. Anyway, she came and took this course from me, learned Replit, learned all these, you know, probably about 15 platforms. It's just kind of this process I do on how to build a business. And she just told her son about it and, you know, talked to him for like an hour and he's like, I'm gonna go try it. And he gave himself a challenge. He said, I'm gonna go see if I can, I can completely automate myself out of a job. So he has like a desk job. He works for a company. He's like, I wonder if I can automate everything that I do so I literally don't even have to like go to work.

That's a fun challenge.

Yeah. Just can I automate myself out of a job? And about 2 days later, he just like got into it. It was like 10 hours a day kind of thing, kind of like I did when I first started this business. Just kind of got into it and he was just blown away by what it could do. And he comes back to his mom. He's like, I did it. I don't have to go to work anymore. And he's like, I'm kind of scared because, you know, they don't need me anymore. And I'm kind of afraid to tell my boss. And his mom's like, go tell your boss, show him what you did. And he went and told her. He went and told the boss, immediately got a promotion, immediately was tasked with teaching everybody else how to do that.

Yeah, that's what you do.

Now he's the AI guru. And how long has he been doing it? Like 4 days. He's the AI guru, right? Because he's the one that figured it out. No one else had figured it out yet. And so be the person at your company, right? If you have your own company, or if you work for someone else, be the person at your company that figures out how to automate yourself out of a job and don't be afraid. If you're the one that does it, like, it's like you're going to start to rock the boat. And if you're the one rocking the boat, you're kind of in control. You're pushing, you know where you're—

Yeah.

If you're sitting in the back and someone starts rocking the boat, you might fly out. And so be the one that rocks the boat and, and you're going to, you're going to win. I just love that story.

That's an amazing story. And I want to highlight something else is stop assuming that other people know more about, about AI than they actually do, because they don't. If you're watching to this or listening to this right now, you're in like the 5%, just because you're in this sphere. Most people have no idea. They've never heard the word Replit. They might use ChatGPT once a week to make a recipe for them. That's it. Like, it is very detrimental to assume that people know more about AI than they do. I love that so much. What— do you ever close deals without a sales call? And do you recommend that at all or do you just got to do the harder thing?

A lot of my deals at this point are coming from referrals and so they're kind of already sold by the time I get on the phone with them. And so, for those calls, I will hit on the STE, that strategy transformation education piece. But a lot of times, I just get on like, "Hey, tell me about your business." And they just tell me about it. I'm like, "Where do you think I could help?" "Here, here, here, and here." "I agree. I'm working with your buddy. That's why you're here." I'd love to work with you. And they're like, yeah, how do we sign up? I mean, go for the close, especially if you're in a referral type situation. Go for the close much, much faster. I've had a lot of one, one call closes where it's just like an intro call, and by the end of it, I'm sending them the contract for, you know, $15,000 a month or $20,000 a month or whatever. It's, it's amazing how if they're getting on the phone with you guys, if they're getting on the phone with you, they want it. Yeah, they need it. If they're on the phone, everybody hates sales calls. No one wants to sit on a sales call with a guy or a girl or whatever.

They just, they've got other things to do.

No No one has time for that. And so if they're taking time to talk to you about AI automation, they want it already. Sell it to them.

Yeah. The question is, what do you hate more, sales calls or being broke?

Yeah, totally.

I mean, honestly, do you think that the local aspect of this is important? I've been saying that it is. Like, even though it's an internet business, this AI consulting, people connect with people that are local, even if you never even meet up with them in person, like someone 10 minutes away and you've only ever Zoomed with them. I feel like that's an important distinction. What do you feel about that?

I think the most important thing is that they feel connected to you somehow. And so if that's because, yeah, you're a local, you're a local guy, or you're a friend from high school, maybe you live in Arkansas now and you used to live in Texas, you know, but you know each other because you both went to the same high school. There's that connection there. You know, we said earlier, you know, you can post to Facebook. I often ask people when I'm in big rooms and big classes, I'll say, how many of you have ever posted on your personal Facebook what you do for work. And it's crazy. 9% of people keep their hands down. 1 or 2 people raise their hand and they'll be like, yeah, I have. You know, it's like, when was the last time you did it? Yeah, I haven't in a while. Right. But most people don't do it. And then on the flip side, on LinkedIn, how many of you have posted on LinkedIn about something not related to work? Like, hey, I went kayaking. It's freaking fun. Great to relax on the weekend. Do you know how much— how many people on LinkedIn have reached out to me because they're like, dude, I saw— I love to kayak.

Yeah. Because they're connected with you through kayaking.

Now we're connected and now they're just like, oh yeah, you do AI also, right? They connected because of the kayaking and now they dig in a little bit. Oh man, you look like— I need— I own a business, right? And I'm going to do this and whatever. Or it's basketball or it's gymnastics or you connect over BYU football, right? Or whatever the heck it is. You post about anything. Just be out there. Just be out there and people will identify. They'll— your people, your tribe will come to you and you can help them.

Yeah. So, John, earlier you mentioned an STE framework for the— is it for the sales calls? Is that right?

Yeah. This, you know, you're selling to the CEO and they care about these specific, these specific things: strategy, transformation, and education. Those 3 things, if you can hit on each of those and help them understand, look, we're going to raise the level of all of your employees, we're going to train them up, we're going to, we're going to literally transform your processes and operation with transformation, and we're going to make sure you're doing it right and staying ahead of your competition with strategy. That's going to save you money, make you more money, and put you in a position to win. And you as the CEO are going to say, yeah, I'm taking care of AI like I need to be.

Okay, so in the STE framework, the S stands for strategy, and that's like big picture. You're speaking directly to the CEO. And this, we say CEO, it's not like a publicly traded company. This is like an $8 to $30 million business, right? And you're just kind of painting a picture for him on what his organization could look like once AI is implemented in it and what the industry is looking like today and where it's heading with AI at the forefront. Is that right? Exactly.

You know, again, I've been the CEO of a few companies for, you know, about a, maybe a little over a decade or so. And I, I know how hard it is, how many things just pile up on a CEO's desk. There's just so many things, right? Man, it'd be really awesome if we had, had someone we could hire someone for that. And so I really love, especially in that transformation section where I'm trying to sell that, I'm trying to help them. I'm trying to sell them something that's $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month. Like, it's not a, it's not a cheap thing. But when I can illustrate, like, look, you wanted, you have this need, you got to hire this person. It's going to cost you $8,000 here and another one that's going to cost you $5,000 here. Another one's going to cost you $15,000 here. And, and I can go through and I can make a few examples of things that they are wanting to do. And, and if I can help them understand that we can build a system, an AI system that automatically does that, they won't have to hire that person. They're going to be saving money, making more money, and then positioned to scale because systems scale better than, than people do usually. Right. Especially when you're talking about, you know, margin and profitability.

So is the transformation step the second step? Is that when you bring up like, who are you about to hire? Is that when you tie your cost to their ROI specifically?

Totally. Use that. So I talk about strategy and that's good. That's kind of good. Then I get to transformation and I will bring up— I'll ask them, I'll say, what are some things that you wish you could do better at your business? Business, right? Or who do— who would you like to hire, right? We start to have a conversation about— I'm having them tell me what they want me to say, right? That's all I'm doing. I'm just saying, hey, tell me what your problem is. Let me show you how I can do that with AI. Then we've covered— we've got the ROI already covered by the time I'm done with S and T, right? When I then get to E, the education and training, I say, now look, we're already making a huge impact. But what if we could get 20% more productivity out of the rest of your existing staff, your 60 employees that you have already? How much more money would you make if we freed up your time and this for all these people? How much better would the business be? How much happier would people be? What if we made 10% more revenue on your business? So now I have them thinking, okay, I don't have to hire people. That's going to save me money. I have processes that's going to automate, and then we're going to train everybody up and I'm going to make 10% more, right? Even though I'm not actually saying that, I'm just saying, what if you could do that? Now they're tying, you know, their $20 or $30 million business to $2 to $3 million of impact. And then I say, yeah, and so we'll do this for $15,000 a month, right? And they're like, yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a no-brainer.

Yeah. Now I talked to another guy who's doing something similar and he says that he's very careful. He doesn't— he has a different framework for it. But basically when he gets to this part of the call, he's very careful to not give like very specific advice, like you need to use this Zapier connection with this to solve this problem that you just told me about, because that just kind of gets them in the weeds. He likes to keep it more broad, like, all right, well, your accounting function is going to— would you agree with that? Or do you do it a little different?

Yeah, no, I would agree. I, what I'll do sometimes, actually, I actually really believe that people buy from people that they think are smart, right? And so what I'll do is I'll kind of sometimes say, yeah, you know, for that thing, you could actually set this and this up. But you know what, You know, we don't really need to get into that right now, but we can definitely do that. Right. I'll kind of start to get down that line and I'll say maybe a few words or I'm like, yeah, we can go into Replit and we can build this system and we just API that into here. We connect that. You'd have a dashboard. Yeah. Almost like I'm thinking on the fly, which I am. Right. I'm, I'm not, I'm not BSing it really, but it is a real strategy. Like the things I'm saying are real, but I kind of start and I let them kind of be like, okay. And then I'm like, yeah, but you know what? This isn't something you need to worry about. This is why you hire us. We're gonna come and we're gonna make this happen. Happen. We can do this. But then they're really confident, like, oh yeah, he's already building for me in his head, you know? And so, yeah, I agree. I don't like to go too technical, but sometimes I like to drop in a little technical kind of process just so they're like, hey, this guy knows what he's talking about. Like, I don't know what that is. I need to hire this guy so we can help.

And it kind of gets them excited about the future, right? The future with you. Well, John, this has been amazing. Is there anything that— any advice you'd like to leave us with that you—

we might have missed today? I hope you didn't miss that I'm really not anything special as compared to you listeners. You guys all have ideas like I have ideas, like Chris has ideas. And with AI, it fills in the gaps, those knowledge gaps that I have. Like, I can't code, for example, and I can't do a lot of things, but I know how to ask. I'm not afraid to ask. And obviously, you don't have to be afraid to ask AI, right? But I've always been curious, right? When I, when I raised a bunch of money and had, you know, 50 or 60 developers working for me and super smart CTOs and people, they would say things and I'd say, I don't know what that means. Will you help me understand what that means? I really want to know. And what that did is it turned me into that kind of smarter technical guy where I would get on a call with Lego, it was one of my amazing clients in my last company, or Nestlé or Meta even, right? I had great clients because I could get on a call and I could talk about things that even though I didn't know a lot, I knew enough that I knew what I was talking about and I knew that that our solution could bring, you know, benefits related to those kind of ideas. So just don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to venture into places where you're like, man, I just don't know if I can do that. You can, you absolutely can. And AI is a perfect tutor or coach that literally in a couple days, like this, like this guy that went and figured out how to replace his own job, he became the guru in a few days, right? By just diving in, do a deep dive for a weekend, put down the Call of Duty, you know, and just do this for a weekend and you will all of a sudden, you know, be in this upper echelon of knowledge related to AI and you'll just feel like you're cheating. You really will feel like you're cheating. Like I have a, I remember when I first got my Tesla X Plaid, right? That thing felt like a spaceship to me and I would zip past people and I'd barely push in the accelerator and just, I mean, just go so fast. It just made other traditional cars feel like they were from the last century. And when you learn how to just harness that technology— again, I didn't build that technology, I didn't build the Tesla, I didn't learn how to do that. I just, I learned how to use it. Again, this is a very simple example because everybody can push on an accelerator or a brake. But as soon as you're in that position of can go faster, it's amazing what happens. And you can— anyone can go faster. You just jump in and figure it Well said.

Beautiful, John. Thank you for your time. Where can we find you?

Yeah. Hey, I would love to connect with you guys. Like I said, LinkedIn is kind of my main. I mean, if you look for me on Facebook or Instagram, I don't know, TikTok, you'll find me usually @chenepiano. So @chenepiano. I'm a pianist and I'd love to do that. But I post about my farm life out here and piano and AI and entrepreneurship and I don't know. Kayaking down a waterfall or something like that. And then LinkedIn, if you just look up John Cheney, J-O-N-C-H-E-N-E-Y, you will find me and would love to connect with you. Love, love helping entrepreneurs. Reach out to me if you want, you know, link to any of these things I've talked about or whatever. I'm happy to point you in the right direction.

Okay. Thank you, John.

Really appreciate it, Chris. Thanks.