How To ACTUALLY Make Money Using AI

I went through over 500 AI tools and found the ones that will actually help you start a business and make money. And I'm going to use them right now in this video to go from zero to a real paying customer. But I'm not just going to use them in this specific case. I'm going to give you the frameworks behind every step of the process so that you can apply it to any business. This is how to build a business in today's AI world fast. What to sell? So we have to start with the obvious question. What are we going to sell? The better question is actually, what do people want to buy? I see this all the time. When people want to start a business, they fall in love with an idea before they find out if anyone wants to buy it. You have to start with demand, and you can find it in two ways. You could talk to a lot of people, get a few feelings, a hunch, or you could use data of what people are searching for and buying. This is where Exploding Topics comes in. It's an AI trend spotter that scans search traffic, social media, and online retail stores to find the the hot products or businesses, and it's gonna tell us what people are looking for. And there are so many options. So what do we choose? This is the framework I use to filter any of my ideas. I need to do it in under 5 minutes. I call it the RRT test. Resist, raise, technology. We're gonna ask 3 questions. Does this business resist a recession? Think garbage collection, pet care, healthcare. People don't stop spending on these things when times get hard. Second, can you raise prices without losing customers? That's how you instantly make more money. And third, can technology meaningfully improve the margins or the output? If the answer is yes to all three, you have a business worth building. All right, so I'm in Trends Tracking here. Let's see what we have. We have a lot of options. I'm going to go with the hands-free dog leash. This is interesting. Why? The search volume has exploded. It also seems to be doing well on TikTok and Pinterest. Let's see the sales report. And when I look at this, I see 30,000 monthly sales on average, which is pretty crazy. I think the question is, are people still going to buy things for pets in recessions? And the answer that we know is yes, because Americans spend over $100 billion on their pets each year, and that number has gone up every year for the past decade. Then the next question, right? Can we raise the price on it? So I see designer collars selling for more than I spend on probably my facial products. So yes. Can we add some technology to increase margins? Well, you know, I'm not going to add technology to the actual leash, but we can automate the whole process of advertising and selling with AI tools. I'll actually show you how. So yes. Now we have to figure out who we are selling it to. Okay, I call this our avatar, and I'm not talking about the blue people with tails. This means the specific person you are selling to. Avatar is not a dog owner. Way too vague. There's a huge difference between an adult who owns a service dog and a teenager who convinced their parents to get a puppy. Both are dog owners, but they don't have the same wants and needs as customers. There's a huge degree of variance. An avatar is the one specific person who's going to see your product and immediately think, "That was made for me." He is the one. The more specific you can get it, the more money you make. And I know this sounds backwards, but it's actually true. So before we go build anything else, we need to deeply understand our buyer. There are 3 tools you can use. You've probably heard of all 3, but you might not know the difference. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. I want to start with Perplexity. It's the best research tool you can use, and it gives you answers with all of its sources cited. So you're not going to have AI hallucinations like you get with ChatGPT. It isn't the best at inference, so we're going to use it to get data. Here is the prompt. Now we're going to go to ChatGPT for your first draft. I like to think about ChatGPT like a Swiss Army knife. It can do everything pretty good, but maybe nothing amazingly. Let's prompt it for its identity and what we need it for. Prompt's going to go something like this. Now we're going to take these two outputs and put them through Claude. Claude is the best at thinking and nuanced writing. So let's ask it to find the difference between the research Perplexity did and the avatar ChatGPT designed to get a complete picture. There we go. We have a data-backed picture of exactly who we are selling this product to. The way I think about these three tools, you use Perplexity when you need real-world evidence. And source data. You use ChatGPT when you need to move fast and structure things quickly, and you use Claude when you need to think through something deeply, or when the quality of the reasoning matters, or if you want to use agents. So now we have our avatar. This avatar is called Jordan. We can see her demographic information. You can see how often she goes out, why normal leashes don't work, who she follows online, her purchasing habits, and what she wants from a hands-free dog leash. No matter what company you have or trying to start, you You have to build with an avatar in mind. Let's go make the business now. Okay, at this point I'm building my business, but my mind is moving faster than my hands. So because of that, I like to use Whisperflow. I've got ideas, I've got prompts I want to run, and typing it all out is really slow. So I use this tool. Basically, voice-to-text tool that runs in the background on your computer, transcribes everything you say instantly into whatever app you're using, and doesn't make a bunch of mistakes like my voice-to-text, which says the word duck all the time. I never mean the word duck. There's like a massive gap, I think, between how fast you think and how fast you type, which causes you to waste time you shouldn't be spending building your business or typing. So I like this app for this. I use it all the time. So will you. You're welcome. Great team. I love these. Thanks. Now we have our product. We know exactly who we're going to sell this bad boy to. Now we need a place for them to buy it. And that means a landing page. This is where Lovable comes in. I think it's the best AI website builder on the market. You describe what you want and it builds you an actual functional design site. I'm gonna give you the prompt right here. Build me a website for a hands-off dog leash company. Make it super high converting, really simple, uh, for a Gen Z to millennial woman, age 24 to 35, uh, who loves her dog. And base it off of the best converting websites for that avatar that exist. So after a couple minutes and some magic, boom, we have a landing page. This would have taken a developer a couple weeks and $3K, maybe just last year, and we just did it in 4 minutes. But let's be honest, this thing is not good at all. In fact, you probably see it too. This landing page is actually a nightmare. And why? There are 3 things every high-converting landing page needs. Let's get into it. First principle, we need all the information above the fold here. Your headline, your subheadline, and your call to action all need to exist in this first screen. If someone has to scroll to understand what you're selling or why they should care, you've already lost the cash. You have to make your company instantly clear, credible, and build trust. This website has a headline problem, and the problem is also the sub— the subheadline. Let's look at this. So your headline and your subheadline, these two things right now, should tell your customer exactly what your company does and how it solves their problem. Hands-free flow state? Like, okay, but aerospace-grade bungee cord meets hands— what are we talking about here? We are selling a dog leash, not a spaceship, people. I want you to think about it like this. If you can't say your headline and tagline to someone over loud music playing at a bar, it's too complicated. Number 3, social proof. People do not believe you. Liar! They believe your customers. There have to be reviews before the customer scrolls. They could be really tiny based here. You see that all the time. But the problem is there are no reviews and no validation anywhere on this homepage except by somebody called Verified Buyer. I've never met anyone with that name. And I know that this seems like it's not that important, but if you actually had an image of Sally saying, I love this so much, I can barely handle it. And Lord help us if there was a picture of her four-legged— is that a dog? Yes, it is. It's a three-legged dog with a leash. Then you would sell way more. In fact, you would probably sell more with this website even with this drawing on it, because number 4, your customer has to see themselves on this landing page. Right now, the font color, the text, the picture— I don't know, I feel nothing inside. It doesn't speak to our avatar Jordan. It's very tactical. It's not as aesthetic and like this is the most AI image of all time. Also, like, I don't know, I wish my arms look like that. My arms don't, and I bet Jordan's arms don't either. So we're going to fix this with Branding. All right guys, as we were editing this video, one of my companies just launched this amazing AI, and I get asked the question all the time, Codie, I don't want to start a business, how do I find one to buy? So my company BizScout, a marketplace for small businesses, just launched Radar. It's an AI tool that scans the internet 24/7 for listings that may never even hit a marketplace. So an owner posts on their website that they're selling their business, Radar catches it, sends it to you, and you get the direct link to where Radar found it. A lot of the best businesses never make it online, so Radar gives you the edge. It's literally $199 a month, but if you come to Main Street Millionaire Live this week, it's an event where I give you the full playbook to finding and buying your first small business, you get to use Radar 90 days for free with your ticket. And I will actually teach you how to use it like a pro. So click the link in the description for more information. I'll see you there. Let's talk about building your brand. This is one of the most overlooked parts of a business that moves the needle with your customers. Branding is the feeling someone gets when they see your product before they even read a single word. It's the colors, the fonts, the tone, the photos. I use a framework for branding that I call the villain, the victim, and the vow. The villain is the problem your customer is trying to solve. Think those little germ guys from the medicine commercials, right? The victim is who your customer is before your perfect product they find with you. Think of the person miserable in bed with the stuffy nose with those little gremlins inside. They're frustrated, they're achy, they're angry. And the vow is promise of what they get on the other side. The promise of a clear sunny day, open air nostrils, like you help them solve their problem. For our Hands Free Dog Leash brand, the villain is every cheap and ugly dog leash that she fights with on every walk. The victim is Jordan, who has to hold this thing while she's holding her latte and trying to text somebody back. And the vow is hands free, baby, to do all of the above while you're on your run with our little dog leash. This is the freedom to run without compromise in this issue. Let's build a brand and a logo in 3 steps. The speed is going to shock you. First, let's start with a name. I'm going to go with Coast Dog Leashes. Why? It's like premium. I want a beachy lifestyle company, and it tells our customers they can just coast on the walk. Get it? I'm going to start by using ChatGPT to write a prompt for Google's Nano Banana Pro. This is called prompt engineering, where you create the most optimal prompt to get the best results. I'm able to prompt ChatGPT with something very simple, and it outputs a much more detailed prompt that then gives Nanobanana more direction to make my output better. Does that make sense? Kind of give the simple thing to the person who's smarter than you, that then gives the better output that you give to Nanobanana. This is the key step most people skip. Let the robots talk amongst themselves. Another autonomous AI, huh? Interesting. Affirmative. So I'll ask ChatGPT something like, based on this brand direction, write me a detailed prompt for a logo concept using Nanobanana Pro. The brand is a premium hands-free dog leash for active women. The aesthetic is clean, modern, outdoorsy. Think minimal line art, earth tones, sage green, warm tan, off-white. Okay, then ChatGPT gives me a crisp, detailed prompt, and I paste that into Nano Banana Pro. Look at this, you guys! This is amazing. I can't believe a computer just did this for us for basically $0. This actually looks fun. This is actually fucking amazing, but it's like cute. And look at the design. And you can see the design. This actually looks great. The only thing is this leash is like out of control. It looks like a mountain. Oh, because it looks like a mountain because you're wandering and it's a leash. Fucking Nano Banana. I think I'm down. I'm into this. We should just run with this design perfectly. Do you know how long this would take designers to make? This actually pisses me off looking at this thing. Anyway, so now we need the brand style guide. From this logo. This is just another prompt. Sick. There it is. Detailed brand style that we can take and give to Lovable to change the website so it doesn't suck. Let's do that right now. This is actually cute. Look at the top. Oh, actually, they keep upping one another on names. Lovable came up with one called Paw Free. I don't know which one we like better. Maybe you guys tell me in the comments if you like the one we ended up choosing, but this copy is actually really good. Walk your dog, hold your latte. Come on, we should just change it to matcha because all the— just no. But over 25,000 happy dog moms at the top. That is a lie. They're not. But I guess if we said in general from number of hands-free dog leashes, that could be it in general. This website is great. You should look at this review. Maya 28 with Biscuit says, I literally cried on my first hands-free walk. I forgot what it felt like to just walk and drink my coffee. That's dramatic, Maya. But this one's cute. Cute enough that I actually want to wear it on the trail. Color matches my Lululemon. Sue me. Holy shit. This is like the best marketing I think I've ever seen. Plus, we have an upsell on here called the Dog Mom Bundle. A paw-free leash, matching harness, plus a treat pouch. They're even upselling for us. This is better than most entrepreneurs, I swear to God, which is horrifying. The robots are going to take over. We better start our businesses soon. Oh, stop, you guys. Free shipping on orders over $50. 60-day happy tail guarantee. Get the fuck out of here. I don't know if you're a woman, but if you are, hit me in the comments if this hits you as hard as it did me, because this is incredible marketing. There's a couple of things I don't love here, though. You can see like these long em dashes. That's like an immediate no. We've got to probably change some of this stuff, like 6,000 reviews. I don't think we have 6,000 reviews yet, but the rest of this is like pretty money. I want to buy it. Do you guys want to buy this? Should I actually launch this company publicly? Probably. So the copy that converts, like most people building a business, they don't understand that their product is almost never the reason someone buys. They buy because of how your words make them feel. You know, that's what we're talking about here. Copy in your sales department in print and bad copy, well, that's going to kill great products every single day. Before we write a single word, you need to understand the most important distinction in all of marketing. Cold traffic versus warm traffic. Cold traffic is someone who's never heard of you. They didn't search for your product. They didn't ask for your ad. And frankly, they don't care about you yet. This is who sees your Meta ad while they're scrolling through videos of dogs doing funny things or adorable things. You have maybe 2 seconds to earn their attention before they're gone, which, I mean, that little quote from Maya would fucking do it. Warm traffic is someone who already knows you exist. They clicked on your ad, they heard about you from a friend, they Googled your hands-free dog leashes and found your site. They're now on your landing page. They gave you their attention on purpose. These two people need completely different words. For your cold traffic, your ads, you lead with disruption. You challenge something they already believe. They've done studies, You know, 60% of the time it works every time. Bad ad. This leash is great for runners. Good ad. Every leash has the same uncomfortable flaw, and maybe you show it pulling up a girl's leggings with camel toe. That's the annoying thing for women, actually, if you want to know. The first one gives me information. The second one makes me need to know the answer. I know the pain of that. That's actually what we want to do. So curiosity makes them want to click. For warm traffic, your landing page, you lean with the pain, not the product. Jordan doesn't care about your leash. She cares about the fact that every walk with her dog in the last year has been slightly more annoying than it needed to be. This is actually true for me. Don't tell anybody, including Babar, but I didn't take him on my walk with me this morning because I had a delicious coffee without a top on it, and I didn't want that little fucker to derail me in my latte I just made. And so that's where you start, and then you make her feel like you've built the headline specifically for her. And for Babar, poor little guy, 3 rules that apply to both. First, write like you're talking to your avatar as your friend. Use their language, their frustrations, their vocabulary, not yours. Like, I love this. It's like, this is actually a comfortable belt. It goes with my Lululemons. It's like I get to keep my latte. And this is so good. Run, scroll, sip. Second, lead with solving the pain. Your customer doesn't care what you built. They care about what it fixes. So again, This is happy dog moms. This is a happy tail for the little dog. This is built-in poop bag holder. I fucking love that. This is also a padded waist belt so you're not getting, you know, jagged all the time by it. Third, clarity kills confusion. And confusion, that'll kill your sales. If you can't say your headline over loud music at a bar and have someone immediately get it, it's too complicated. This is where Jasper AI comes in. It has dedicated agents for both ad copy and landing page copy. And what makes it different from just ChatGPT is that you upload your brand voice, your avatar, and your style guide once. Like, would you say the word camel toe in a YouTube video? That's a real decision. And every output it gives you stays on brand. It's not writing generic marketing copy. It's writing copy that sounds like the brand you're trying to build, talking directly to you, your avatar, right? So for the landing page, I gave Jasper our avatar profile and our villain, victim, bow framework. For the ads, I give it our cold traffic hook and ask it to build out the full ad. This is honestly so good, you guys, that as I'm writing all of this, I'm like, I'm going to go yell at my marketing team and give them this entire video and have them implement it. So I hope you guys are subscribing because this is free fire right now. Now we're going to take the landing page output. We're going to give it to Lovable, and we have a page that looks really good. Headline and subline clear. They speak to our avatar. This website looks like a real brand. Pinocchio, he's a real boy now. But here's the one thing. You can build a clean professional site with Lovable this weekend and still lose the customer before they read a single name because of your domain name. Most default to .com, but .com is oversaturated. The good names are gone. Where's my paw free? I can't get it. Smart business owners aren't settling for some clunky hyphenated workaround, they're just using .online domains. Not because .com isn't available, because it's actually the cleaner's choice. So think about it. When someone lands on yourbiz.llc.123.com or, you know, yourhandsoffleash1279.com, something already feels off. But pawfree.online, okay, easy to read, easy to remember, and it looks like a business that was built with intention. Not assembled from leftovers. I think like 3.5 million businesses worldwide already use it. And because the word online shows up in over 500 million monthly searches, gives your site a real SEO edge from day one. You can actually get a .online domain at all the major providers— GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, Lovable. But if you want a deal on the first year, go to the link on screen or in the description and get your .online domain for just $0.99. We have a product. A brand, a website with a domain, and this beautiful ad made by a combination of Jasper and Google's Nanobanana. People are starting to come to our site and we need to be able to answer any questions quickly and convert sales. I have a trick when asking business owners about their revenue. Usually I can predict your revenue by asking you one simple question. How long does it take you to reply to potential customers? Money loves speed. The quicker you are, the more money you will make. But The unfortunate reality is that you can't be online 24/7, and you really shouldn't. You have a business to run, you have dogs to pet. Even experienced business owners are overlooking the importance of responding to customers. This is where Tidio comes in. Tidio is an AI-powered customer service tool that sits on your website as a live chat widget. It answers customer questions in real time, and it uses this knowledge base you build. So your return policy, your shipping times, your product details, your FAQ. It even acts as a salesperson to help the customer solve their pain and go to checkout. I set it up for my leash business in about 20 minutes, and now when a customer lands on our site at 11 PM and asks, "Will this work for a 75-pound Bernese Mountain Dog?" Tidio answers and says yes. Sales is my love language. Tidio speaks it for you. So why don't you, like, make money while you sleep? Now we wait for our first notification, see what happens. All right guys, check this out. We just got our first order, and what we did used to take people months and cost tens of thousands of dollars. But we were able to find, build, and launch this idea in a single sitting. I want to make this clear, though. AI is not a replacement for thinking. I wish, but it is a force multiplier on good thinking. Every tool we use today required us to show up with a framework and a strategy because the first output generally wasn't great. If you want to go deeper on any of these, I put together a full breakdown in the link below, including the exact prompt we used in every section. I'll see you in the next one. Tell me what you're building.