Start a 1 Person Business with Claude

One person with a laptop can now build what used to take an entire company. I think it is probably possible now to start a company that is a one-person company that will go on to be worth like more than $1 billion. And more importantly than that, deliver an amazing product and service to the world. For the first time in over 50 years, more than 1 in 3 new startups are being built by a single founder with no co-founder at all, up from fewer than 1 in 4 back in 2019. And the startup data firm Carta credits the jump to AI tools that let one person do the work of a whole team. So the question for you isn't whether a one-person business is possible anymore. That's proven. It's whether you're going to be one of the people who finally builds a thing that you've been putting off, or whether you'll sit and watch other regular people do it first. Let me tell you about a guy named Mark Liu. Back in 2021, Mark hit rock bottom. He was broke, he was depressed, and he was living in his parents' house with no income and no clear way out. He didn't have a co-founder, he didn't have a team, he didn't have investors lining up to rescue him. What he decided what he decided to do instead was teach himself to build small software products and then ship them over and over again on a single laptop. Now, most of them flopped pretty hard, and that's the part that people love to skip over. He built more than 20 projects that went absolutely nowhere before one of them, a simple tool that helps other builders launch their products faster, finally caught fire. Now, today, Mark runs about 15 little products entirely by himself, and together they bring in roughly $85,000 every single month with almost no expenses because the whole team is just him. He never hired a single employee, he never raised a dollar from anyone, and he built the entire thing out in the open, posting his real revenue and his ugly failures for the whole world to watch. He went from his parents' spare room to millions of dollars in sales, one small product at a time, and he never once asked anyone for permission to start. Now, the common objection that I often hear that stops almost everyone before they take that first step is, that's great for Mark, But he's a developer who can write code and you can't. I get it. And listen, this is, I wanna be honest because all progress begins with telling the truth. For most of history, that objection was actually completely fair. Building software meant you either spent years learning the code or you raised a giant pile of money to hire engineers. And if you couldn't do either one, your idea just kind of died in your head. That wall though now is completely gone. It came down recently. It's come down quietly and a lot of people haven't realized it yet. With Claude, you can describe what you want in plain normal English and have it write the actual working code right alongside you, step by step, explaining as it goes. The skill that matters now isn't typing code, it's knowing which problem is worth solving and being willing to start before you feel ready. So think about what that actually means for you. The thing that used to cost $50,000 or team of engineers or 6 months of waiting, you can now sit down and build yourself in an afternoon for the price of a subscription. That barrier that kept regular people kind of locked out of building software for the past 30 years, it disappeared. And the people who move on it early are going to look back at this exact window the way people wish that they had bought into the early internet. You're not too late, you're almost too early, which is the best place in the world to be. So let me walk you through exactly how you'd build your own one-person business with Claude starting from absolutely nothing. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation. The only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. Pick a problem you already know. So let's start with this. You pick one painful, specific problem that you already understand better than almost anyone. This is where you have an unfair advantage and you probably don't even realize that you're sitting on a goldmine. Every job you've ever worked, every industry you've ever been around, every hobby you've ever gone deep on. Has handed you a private list of annoying problems that people inside those worlds would gladly pay to make disappear. So the builders that are winning right now, you're not— they're not just chasing some giant trendy idea that they read about. They're taking one small pain that they personally know inside out, and they're solving just that one thing. So take Danny Postma. He'd already built and sold one company in the AI space, so he knew that world cold. And when he noticed people were paying hundreds of dollars for a professional headshot, he built an AI tool called Headshot Shot Pro that does it for a few bucks. He solved the problem he understood deeply for people he understood deeply. So get killer at one thing. Don't try to build the everything app that does 50 things badly. Build the single thing that you would happily have paid for back when you were stuck doing it the slow, painful way. Your purpose here usually comes from your own pain, from the precise frustration that you live through and never wanna touch again. And the range of what you can build is wider than most people think. So people are building small software tools that businesses pay a monthly fee for, simple apps that solve one annoying task, systems that watch a company's online reviews and draft replies, dashboards that track numbers about a specific industry cares about, and automated services that run a piece of someone's business for them every day. Every one of those started as one person noticing one specific pain. So right now you can write down 5 problems that you personally understand, the ones that usually make you sigh at your old job, and circle the ones that make you the angriest. That's your business. Let Claude build it with you. So now you start the conversation with Claude and let it carry all of the technical details and weight that like you don't have. So here's how it actually feels when you sit down to do it. You open Claude and you describe your idea in regular words the way you, you would explain it to a friend over coffee. You say, I want a simple tool that does this specific thing for these specific people. Claude asks you smart questions that you hadn't thought of. It helps you lay out a clear plan and then it starts writing the real code while explaining what each piece does and why. When something breaks, and it's absolutely gonna break, you copy the error message, you paste it back in, and Claude fixes it with you and tells you what went wrong. So you're never expected to know any of this in advance. Claude code can live right on your computer and build the whole thing right beside you, file by file, like a patient senior software engineer who doesn't get tired, who doesn't roll their eyes at you, doesn't make you feel stupid for asking those basic questions. Being leads to doing here, I think in the most literal way, the moment you start acting like a builder, even a slow and clumsy one, you actually start becoming one. And the speed comes shockingly fast after the first week. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Ship the ugly first version. So now we want the smallest possible version live and in front of real people fast before you feel ready. This is where you separate yourself from the 99% who tinker forever in private and never ship a single thing. You are not trying to build the perfect product. You are trying to build the slightly embarrassing first version that does one useful thing well, and then put it in front of a handful of people who actually have the problem. So builders are doing this in days now, not years. Go back to Danny Postma. He built the very first version of the Headshot Tool in about 30 hours, put it straight out into the world, and it made $100,000 in its first 2 weeks. He didn't sit around polishing it from private for a year. He shipped the rough version and let real customers tell him what to fix. So ready isn't real. So stop waiting to feel it. Ship the rough version. Watch closely how real people use it. Listen to what they complain about and let their reactions tell you exactly what to build next. A scrappy thing that exists and earns beats a beautiful thing that is still trapped in your imagination. So getting it live is a good start, and from there you make it 10 times better using real feedback instead of your guesses. The market will teach you more in one week of being live than one year of planning ever could. Charge real money. Aim high. So now we want to charge real money from day one and aim higher instead of low. This is a mistake I watch kill one-person businesses before they even get a chance to breathe. People build something decent, then price it at a couple dollars, which means they suddenly need thousands and thousands of customers just to put food on the table. And that requires a giant marketing machine that they don't have and can't afford yet. So we want to flip the whole thing around. As a solo builder, you're Your sweet spot is usually a smaller number of people paying you a meaningful amount each. So we can look at some simple math. If you find just 4 clients paying you $2,000 a month, that's $96,000 a year. And that is a one-person, almost six-figure business that you can run from your kitchen table with no office and no staff if you want to. The same logic works for software. Some solo builders charge businesses around $1,000 a month for a single tool, and just a handful of clients like that changes your entire life. The whole point is to charge enough that a few good customers carry you instead of chasing 1,000 cheap ones. And look at how big this can get with just one person. Danny Postman's AI headshot tool brings in around $300,000 a month, run entirely by him, and his whole solo portfolio of products clears roughly $3.6 million a year with no co-founder and no investors. Tony Dinh left his big tech job, built his own software tool on his own, and crossed more than $1 million a year all by himself. You don't need a million customers. You need a real product, a fair and confident price, and the courage to charge what is you're genuinely worth. Let Claude run the business. Next, we can use Claude to run the parts of the business that aren't building. So you can stay a team of one without drowning in all the busywork. The real reason one person can pull this off now is that AI doesn't just write your code, it can handle the work that used to force you to hire people. So you can have it draft your sales emails, write articles, answer the common questions, sort and prioritize your inbox, and turn one long video into 10 short clips to promote what you built. So this is how I like to use eliminate, automate, delegate, except now you get to delegate to AI instead of people. You can eliminate the busywork that keeps you broke and keeps you tired. You automate the repeatable stuff that drains your hours, and you let Claude handle a huge chunk of the rest. Not everything, but a huge chunk, so that the only thing left on your plate is the high-value work that actually grows the business and makes the money. That is precisely how a single person runs an operation that looks from the outside like it must have a whole team and an office behind it. Guard your hours. Every task you hand to AI is an hour that you get back to build the next thing. Build it out in the open. So a very cool idea is to build a whole thing out in the open because for a one-person business, attention becomes oxygen for you. The biggest fear solo builders carry is that they'll pour months into something great and nobody will ever find it. So how we fix that, and it costs you nothing, just a little bit of courage. You share the journey publicly while you build it. Mark Liu became known to a huge audience not by running expensive ads at that he couldn't afford, but by posting his progress, his real revenue numbers, his wins, and his embarrassing, in quotes, embarrassing failures out loud for anyone to follow along. People don't just buy a product, they buy the story and the person behind it, and they root for someone that they've watched struggle and keep shipping anyway. So pick one place online, post what you're building this week, show the ugly first version with no shame, ask people what they'd actually want, and let a small audience grow around your work before the product is even finished. By the time you launch for real, You're not just yelling, you know, to an empty room. You've got a group of people already waiting, already trusting you, already half sold. Your distribution and your product end up getting built at the very same time by the same one person for free. That's a form of leverage almost nobody uses, and it's sitting right there waiting for you to pick it up. Then stack another one. So then you keep stacking because once you build one product, the second one is far easier. And this is the part that turns a side project into real wealth. The first product is always the hard one. It's the one one where you learn how to talk to Claude, how to ship before you're ready, how to charge with more confidence, how to find and keep your clients. But every single skill you build on that first one carries straight into the next product and the next and the next one after that. That's exactly how Mark Liu did it. He didn't build one giant company and bet everything on it. He built a long series of small products, one after another, most of them failing, each new one a little easier and faster than the last one, until the winners stacked up into something most most funded startups with big teams never reach. You can run the same play, build one, get it earning real money, then use the exact same playbook to build the next one and let them compound on each other, right? Brick by brick, product by product, a single determined person— you— builds a portfolio that becomes lasting, life-changing wealth. If you have the ability to build this, then you have the responsibility to do it. If you can, then you must. The tools finally caught up. So here's where all of this lands. You are alive at the exact moment where the tools finally caught up to the dream that you have been carrying here. The paper airplane here that should never be able to break the sound barrier is doing it right now because impossible has always just meant nobody's done it yet. You have a problem you understand deeply. You have Claude sitting there ready to build it with you, and you have the whole world reachable from the same laptop already open right in front of you. You don't need permission. You don't need a team and you don't need to be technical. You only need to start. And the best time to start is now. How about right now? Open Claude tonight, type out that one problem you can't stop thinking about and let it build the first rough piece with you before you go to bed. That's it. That's the whole beginning. Most of the people who'll be running real one-person businesses a year from now are going to start with exactly that small a step this week. So go build the thing only you can build and let the world see what one determined person is truly capable of. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. I analyzed 50 failed businesses. Now let's learn what killed every one of them. You don't need a huge team or fancy office to make money. In starting the company, I had nothing. I had no income source. You can do it with one of 9 simple machines. Right now, the U.S. Census Bureau counts 30.4 million one-person businesses in America with zero employees, and together they pull in over $1.8 trillion a year. So while everyone is fighting for the same crowded online hustles, a small group of people are quietly buying simple machines nobody is talking about and turning them into a paycheck that never calls in sick. Let me tell you about a college kid named Zach Downey. So while he was studying at James Madison University, he got fed up that there was nowhere to grab a late-night snack, so he decided to fix it himself. His very first idea was a pizza vending machine, and honestly, it flopped. He ran into regulatory roadblocks and dead ends, and most people would have quit right there. But Zach, he didn't quit. He just changed his machine. He noticed that people lose their minds over cotton candy at amusement parks and fairs and resorts, the kind of places packed with families already in a spending mood. So he bought automated cotton candy machines, the exact kind of robotic kiosk that lands number 1 on this list, and he parked them right where the crowds already were. Here is what makes it work. It costs him about 30 cents in sugar to spin a cotton candy that sells for $5 to $10, and the little robot making it becomes a show that pulls people in all by itself. He didn't need a storefront or staff or a fancy business degree. He needed one machine and the right spot. Today, Zach is just 22 years old. He runs a around 10 of these machines under his company, Distinctive Vending, and he's on track to pull in over half a million dollars in revenue. A college experiment that started as a complete flop turned into a half a million dollar a year business, all because he was willing to buy one simple machine and let it do the work for him. This is the entire promise of this video, and it's a lot less rare than you think. Now, here's what you might be thinking. You're thinking, these sound like weird little gimmicks or that you need a fortune and some kind of degree or engineering just to understand and run one of them. You don't. Most of the machines that I'm going to show you cost less than a used car. Several are under $5,000, and they're built to run with almost no staff and almost no skill. The whole game here is owning an asset that keeps working whether you show up or not. And I want you to run your business as if you were to get hit by a bus tomorrow. The machine keeps making money without you even being there. Don't get hit by a bus. So that's the difference between a real job and real wealth. So let me show you 9 machines that are quietly making regular people rich this year, counting down to my personal number 1 favorite. Business number 9: the Fleet Saver. First up is the biggest one, a mobile tire retreading unit. This is a self-contained little factory that lives inside a commercial van or a shipping container It cleans up old commercial truck tire casings, lays on fresh layers of rubber, and heat cures a brand new tread right there on site. So instead of a trucking company hauling worn-out tires across the state to some central plant and losing days of expensive downtime, you drive the machine straight to them and fix it in their own yard. Now, yes, this one has the highest barrier on the list, starting around $25,000 to get started. So it's not the first thing you go and buy on day one. Probably. But here's why it's worth knowing about anyway and why nobody's talking about it. It runs on high-ticket business-to-business contracts with trucking fleets and city transit agencies, the kind of clients who pay on time and stick around for years because you are saving them serious money and serious headaches. One machine, a handful of fleet contracts, and you built a recession-proof income that has absolutely nothing to do with chasing strangers on the internet, right? There are millions of commercial trucks on the road and barely anyone serving them this way. So the demand is enormous and the field is wide open. Being leads to doing here. So even if this machine isn't for you, let it stretch what you believe a business is even allowed to look like. Business number 8: the Micro Packager. Next up is the vertical form fill seal machine, what I call the Micro Packager. So for about $4,500, this machine takes a roll of film, forms it into a tube, tube, fills it with a precise amount of liquid or powder, and heat seals it shut all on its own. It basically brings real industrial contract packaging into your garage. Now think about every small brand out there selling coffee samples, single-serve protein, soy sauce packets, or supplement powders. They cannot afford a giant factory with massive minimum orders, so they get stuck and stay small. You can become their answer. You charge them a simple fee per unit to package their product. And because brands need this done over and over again every single month, you build a predictable high-volume income stream that just keeps repeating like clockwork. One single supplement brand can keep your machine running for weeks. And once you have 5 of those brands, you have a real factory income from a corner of your garage. Nobody is dreaming about a sachet machine, and that is exactly why there is so much room inside of it. Remember this pattern because it shows up on every machine in this video. The boring ones nobody brags about having and almost no competition., and that is where the quiet money lives. Number 7, the nut butter mill. This next one is part machine and part show. So commercial fresh nut butter grinder takes cheap peanuts or cashews and turns them into premium made-to-order nut butter right in front of the customer. The raw nuts don't cost that much, but the second people watch it and smell it being ground fresh, you can sell specialty flavors like honey cinnamon or spicy chili at a massive multiple of what those nuts cost you. The live grinding The marketing— you don't need to pay for ads. The machine itself is the ad, pulling a crowd everywhere you set it up. You can run it at farmers markets and weekend pop-ups for fast cash flow now, and then you take those exact same flavors and turn them into an online brand that you can ship nationwide later if you want to. The big jarred brands on the grocery shelves can't compete with fresh, and they can't compete with a story. And now you have both. This is how a simple $5 jar of fresh butter quietly grows into a real food company with a real following, all starting from one grinder on a folding table. So don't overthink the fancy version. Get the machine, set up one at a market this weekend, and let the people lining up tell you what to make more of. Number 6, the On Demand Branding Box. Number 6 is a compact flatbed printer that prints full-color logos directly onto craft paper bags, fabric totes, and shipping boxes. It runs between $4,000 and $6,000. Here's a painful problem that it quietly solves. Every local bakery, boutique, week, uh, online shop desperately wants their own branded packaging, but the big print factories force them to order 10,000 units at a time, which a small shop simply cannot afford. So you step in with no minimum order at all. A blank bag costs around 5 cents, and you sell it printed for 20 to 50 cents each. That tiny little gap multiplied across thousands of bags a month quietly turns into a $2,000 to $4,000 profit. And the best part is you're not really selling bags, you're selling small business owners is the ability to finally look professional and proud when they hand their product to a customer. And people will pay for that feeling all day long. Better still, a bakery doesn't order packaging once, they order it again and again forever. So a handful of local shops become steady, repeatable income that you can count on. You become the quiet brand behind all the brands in your town. Number 5, the Lott Stripper. Right in the middle of the list is one of the simplest machines here, a high-precision line striping machine for parking lots. It's a wheeled battery or gas-powered sprayer that lays down crisp, clean parking stalls, fire lanes, and the accessibility markings that businesses are legally required to keep fresh and visible. The equipment starts around $3,000, and a single striping job can pay $300 or more. So you knock out a few contracts a week, and now you're looking at $2,000 to $4,000 a month. Now look around your own city for a second. Every shopping center, church, school, gym, um, apartment complex has a parking lot that slowly fades and legally has to be repainted on a schedule. The work never dries up. The competition is pretty sleepy and aging out, and you can start this part-time on weekends while you keep your day job to protect your runway until the machine clearly pays for itself. Even better, lines fade on a schedule, so one parking lot you stripe this year becomes a repeat customer next year without you doing anything new. Land 10 of those and you've built a route of recurring income that practically reorders itself. Number 4: The Smart Swag Station. Now it gets a little fun. This is a small 3D printer setup that fabricates custom keychains and accessories with a programmable NFC chip baked right inside. The same tap-to-share tech that's already in your smartphones. Someone taps a keychain on a phone and it instantly pulls up a social profile, a digital business card, or a ChipLink. The setup ranges from $500 on the low end all the way up to $10,000 as you scale it up. The raw plastic and the chip costs under $0.25 per unit, and you sell each one to realtors, content creators, service workers for $5 to $10. That spread is exactly why operators are quietly netting $1,000 to $6,000 a month from a machine sitting in a spare bedroom. You're selling people a tiny piece of the future, something they have never seen before, and most of your competition does do not even know this product exists yet. So a realtor can hand one to every client and their home pops up with a tap. A creator sells it to their fans who can tap to follow. A restaurant pulls one up on every table that leads to a tip page or their menu. One machine, a dozen different markets, and you're the only person in town offering it. When you're early to something like this, you do not have to be the best. You just have to be there first. Number 3, the Ice Oasis. Number 3 is a 24/7 ice and water vending kiosk. And it might be the most boring genius idea on this entire list. The machine filters the water, makes the ice, bags it, and dispenses it completely on its own with no staff to manage and nothing that ever spoils. You can place it at a marina, campground, busy gas station, anywhere where people need ice and there is nobody around to sell it to them. A single bag costs around $0.20 to $0.40 to produce and sells for $2 to $3.50, which is an 84 to 90% profit margin on something people grab without thinking twice. A high-capacity unit runs $15,000 to $25,000 goes up front, and then it quietly throws off $1,200 to $2,400 in profit every month while you're having dinner with your family at home. Stack 2 or 3 of these at different high-traffic spots, and you have replaced a full-time salary with something that doesn't need you to clock in. This is what owning a real asset actually feels like. The machine does the work, the location brings the customers, and you collect the money. Nobody posts about an ice machine online, which is exactly why the people who own them are quiet winning. Number 2, the custom case printer. Almost at the top now. This is an automated phone case vending machine that you drop into a mall, an airport, college campus. The customer designs their very own case right on a touchscreen, and the machine prints it for them in minutes with no employee standing there at all. A machine like this runs around $6,500. A blank case plus the ink costs around you $1.35, and that finished custom case sells for $15 to $20. A good high-traffic location pulls 30 to 50 sales a day. And I want you to actually do the math because it is staggering for a box that runs itself. Think about it. So almost everyone walking past that machine has a phone. Almost anyone wants it to feel like it's theirs. And almost nobody is offering it to them right where they're standing. People will always pay a premium to make something truly theirs, to feel like they have something that nobody else has. And this machine machine sells them that exact feeling 24 hours a day while costing you almost nothing to deliver it. You find one busy spot, you set it, and it quietly works the crowds for you all day and all night. And number 1, the automated sugar artist. Now my number 1, the one almost nobody is talking about, is the robotic cotton candy kiosk. Behind a pane of glass, a little robot spins detailed geometric cotton candy designs in about 60 to 90 seconds, and people stop dead and film the entire thing because it's honestly pretty mesmerizing to watch. The entertainment is what sells it. The show is the product. A unit runs between $5,000 to $12,000. Now here's the number that should make you sit up straight or stand up straight like me on the trampoline. It costs about 31 cents in sugar and a paper stick to make one, and it sells for $5 to $10. That's a profit margin of over 93%, and operators are netting $2,500 to $3,500 every month from a single machine that needs no staff and literally creates its own crowd everywhere it goes. And here's the hidden bonus: every customer who films that little robot spinning their candy is posting free advertising for you to their followers too. So the machine markets itself while it sells. Drop it at a mall, a fair, theme park, busy boardwalk, and the line forms on its own. It is fun, it's automated, it's almost pure profit, and hardly anyone is doing it yet. That right there is a definition of a machine making people rich rich this year while the rest of the world is looking the other way. The real machine is a decision to start. So there they are, 9 machines quietly building real wealth while everyone else is fighting over the same loud, crowded ideas. Notice a pattern running through all of them. No one needs a big team, a degree, or a ton of permission. You just need to pick one, buy the asset, and let it go to work for you. There's a saying: the best time to start was years ago, then the second best time to start is when? Right now. Today. So if you see the opportunity sitting there right in front of then you have the responsibility to go act on it. If you can, then you must. Now let's learn why you're smart but not successful. If I lost everything tomorrow and had to start a brand new business this year with no audience and no savings, I wouldn't panic because starting a business has never been simpler or cheaper than it is right now. There's never been a better time to be an inventor and a pioneer than right now because the world is on fire with new ideas and with AI and space opportunities. We're in the middle of multiple golden ages right now. This is the best time ever in the history of technology, ever, period, to start a company. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort. Americans filed a record 5.67 million business applications in 2025, the most in history, according to the the US Census Bureau. So while everyone online keeps telling you the dream is dead and the economy is rigged, more people are quietly betting on themselves than at any point ever. The US is marking Small Business Week, and new data finds more Americans are jumping on the small business bandwagon. Data is showing us that last year, a record number of people applied to be small business owners. This isn't just about business. It's about taking back control of your time, your income, your life. And I'm going to walk you through the exact steps I'd follow in order to do it from scratch. Where are you going to spend your time? Your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. I am in control of everything that happens to me. Everything, everything that will happen in my life, I will be the master of. One of the most important things you have in your life is time. It's one of your greatest assets, or it's your liability. When I was 20 years old, I had a little software company, and I was making $300 a month. I was so broke and so ashamed of it that I lied to my own friends and pretended I was living the hustle lifestyle when the truth is I couldn't even afford $20 for a night out and beer. One night I was sitting there crying, ready to quit, completely convinced that I just wasn't smart enough to pull this off. And then something hit me that changed the whole direction of my life and my company. Somebody had already figured this out. I don't have to be a genius. I don't have to have the skills or information yet and I can model someone who has already done it. So I went and studied how Bill Gates built Microsoft. He had a software company, I had a software company. Everyone assumes Microsoft blew up because of some genius piece of code, but it didn't. It blew up because Gates made a deal with IBM, the number one computer maker in the entire world at the time, so that every single computer they shipped came with Microsoft software already loaded on it. But here's the part that almost nobody talks about: Microsoft was already a $7 million company before that famous IBM deal ever happened. And when I dug into how Gates got from zero to that first $7 million, the answer was the exact same word: partnerships. He did not work everyone, although he worked very hard. He partnered with people who already had what he needed. So I went back to work the very next morning, copied that one single idea, stopped trying to do everything alone, and closed my first deal for $13,500. Bill Gates kept me in business, and I never once transmit them in. Right now you're probably thinking, it's easy for me to say all this because I have a big audience today. But if you took every single follower away from me tomorrow, I promise you I would not start by trying to go viral on YouTube. Building an audience from scratch, it takes 3, 5 more years, and most people run out of motivation and money and quit long before it ever pays them anything. So forget about followers at the start, forget about the perfect logo, forget about waiting until you feel ready ready because ready is not the truth. And so here's exactly what I would do instead, starting from absolute zero, step by step. Get to $96,000 with just 4 clients. So the first thing I do is ignore almost everything you think a business needs. I would not build a website. I've personally helped launch multi-million dollar companies that didn't even have a website when they signed their first clients. So website is not the thing standing between you and your money. It's just a comfortable thing to hide behind, feeling like you have to get this thing done. Instead, I'd lock onto one piece of dead simple math and let it run my entire life. I need to get 4 people paying me $2,000 a month. That is the whole goal. Not 400 customers, not some giant viral launch, not a warehouse full of inventory. Just 4 people who get enough value for you that they will pay you $2,000 every single month. 4 clients at $2,000 a month is $96,000 a year, which means you have an almost 6-figure business built on just 4 relationships, and it gives you the survivable cash flow you need to build everything else on top of it. So the only question that matters on day 1 is simple: What can you do that's worth $2,000 a month to somebody else? And this year, that list is huge. You can set up AI systems and automations for companies that they're drowning in their busywork. You can run ads on their social media. You can consult in a skill that you already have. Have. Pick the one thing that you're best at and can start delivering this week and price it at $2,000 a month or more. So the math works fast and you're not grinding to make 100 tiny little sales. You do not need 1,000 customers, you need 4 yeses. And when you stop thinking that you need to build some massive company and you realize you just need 4 people to say yes, the whole thing stops feeling impossible and starts feeling like something you could go and to do this week. Mind the network you already have. Here's where almost everybody freezes. They think they have to go find total strangers and somehow convince them out of thin air to buy from you, right? You don't. To land those first 4 clients, I would start by auditing the resources and the people already sitting in my phone, in my contacts right now. I don't want you throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, answering fake questions in your own head about whether you're qualified or whether you're ready, I want you to go out to the people you already know. If your brother and your sister run chiropractic clinics or your friend owns a med spa, you go straight to them first. You don't reinvent the wheel. You offer to run their ads or handle the service for them, even cheap or free at the start, so you can learn the industry from the inside and walk away with your very first real testimonials and case studies to share. Those early wins are absolutely everything because proof is the thing that lets you walk into the next conversation and charge full price with total confidence. Being leads to doing here. The moment you decide that you are the person who solves this problem, you stop researching and you start reaching out to the people who already know you, already like you, and already pick up the phone when you call them. So you're not starting from zero connections right now, even if it feels that way. Your network, not your wallet, is your real startup capital. And the good news is you already have one. You just never asked it for anything. Make your first offer impossible to turn down. So when you reach out to those first few people the worst thing you can do is show up sounding desperate or trying to sell some big, vague, expensive package. Instead, I would lead with a clear result and almost no risk for them at all. So pick one specific painful problem that you already know how to fix and offer to fix just that one thing. Tell them you'll do it at a low starter rate or even tie your pay to the result that you get them. So the only way they lose is if you don't deliver. That one move, it melts their fear away because now they aren't gambling on you. They're just saying yes to an outcome that they already want anyway. So don't pitch them a long list of features and deliverables because features confuse people. And a confused person, they don't buy from you. So pitch them the after, paint a clear picture of exactly where their business will be once their problem is finally gone and let them feel it for a second, right? Then the very second you get them a real result, you ask for two simple things. You ask for a short testimonial in their own words, and you ask them who else they know that has that exact same problem. Problem. That becomes a flywheel for you. That one happy client instantly becomes both your proof and your next referral source, and you use that momentum to raise your price a little bit and go land the next one. You're not trying to close 1,000 deals or be everywhere at once. You are just trying to make your very first client so ridiculously happy that getting your second, third, and fourth starts to feel almost easy. So get that first yes this week, overdeliver like your life depends on it, and from there you let the proof do the selling for you. Build your money 50. So once you get that first bit of cash flow coming in, you stop hunting one client at a time and you start scaling through relationships instead of ads. I would build what I call my money 50 list. This is what we teach inside our Movement Makers program. Here's how it works. You pick 5 different categories of people and then you go 10 people deep in each category. So you end up with a written list of 50 names. These are people who, if they did know you, if they did like you, if they did trust you, could each be worth 6 figures or even 7 figures to your business every single year. And here's the key that most people miss. These usually are not your current customers. They're referral partners. They might be CPAs or lawyers or property managers, agency owners, the people who already have a deep trusted relationship with the exact audience that you're trying to reach. One single CPA can send you 30 clients without you even spending a dollar on advertising because their clients already do whatever they recommend. So write those 50 names down on one page. You put it where you see it every day, and you treat that list like, like it's made of gold, because getting in front of those 50 people is the entire game. You don't need a million customers. You need a handful of powerful relationships. The person with the best relationships wins every single time, and relationships are completely free to build if you're simply willing to give first before you ever ask for anything. Start a biz dev show. Now, how do you actually get in front of your Money 50 list when these are busy, important, successful people? Here's the mistake most people make. If you email them and ask to grab a coffee and pick their brain, they will ignore you every time because everybody on earth wants their time and attention. So you flip the whole thing around. You start a simple interview show, what I call a biz dev show, and you invite those executives to come on as your guests. Almost nobody ever asked them for an interview before, so they say yes because everybody loves being treated like the expert. And here's the beautiful part. You don't need a fancy studio, you don't need expensive gear, you don't need a big audience because going viral is not the point. And the view count doesn't matter at all here because they're telling their story and they don't get a lot of attention typically. The only metric you care about is the relationship. You spend a full hour, you make them look great, You tell their story. You're genuinely curious about their work. And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, you ask one strategic question connected to what you do, just to quietly plant a seed in their mind. And then the moment you stop recording, you make your move. You tell them that you'd love to be their second opinion or their go-to person in case any of their clients have an issue that obviously you know how to deal with. In 1 hour, you just turn a complete stranger into a warm potential partner who wants to help you, and it costs you exactly $0. There is no faster way way on this planet to earn someone's trust than to put them in the spotlight and champion them before you ever ask for a single thing back. Trade your time for a piece of the upside. The next move is the one that truly changes everything, and it's the one that I'd be the most aggressive about this year if I'm trying to build my business. When you're first starting out, it's totally fine to charge a flat monthly fee, but the real wealth is never in trading just your hours for dollars. It's in owning a piece of what you help actually build. So the second I had proof of what I could actually get for results for people, I would stop just being, um, a hired hand. I would walk into an established business that's already making money and say, hey, give me a percentage of the company and I'll come in and be your growth person and your sales engine. If you really want to scale your upside, you take X percent of a business in exchange for driving their growth instead of just giving them a flat rate every month. I did this exact same thing with a bunch of agencies I started. I taught them everything I knew about YouTube. I took a 25% split. They had the other 75%. And today they've built up and run 7-figure businesses. I didn't need money to make that deal. I needed a skill that got results and the guts to ask for a percentage instead of just a paycheck. Most people, they're too scared to ask, so they stay employees of their own business forever. If you can deliver real results for someone, one, then you have the responsibility, I think, to ask for some real upside. If you can, then you must. Let AI be the team you can't afford yet. The last thing I do, and honestly the biggest reason there has never been a better time in human history to start a business than right now, is to lean on AI like it's an entire team working for you for free. When I started out, I couldn't afford a designer, I couldn't afford a writer, an assistant, or developer, so I did a lot of it myself. Myself badly, painfully, slowly, and it held me back for years. You don't have that excuse anymore. Do you need your offer written, your emails drafted, your brand design, your research done, a simple tool built for a client? AI can do a strong first draft of every single one of these things in minutes, and your only job is to add your judgment and your taste on top of it. That's exactly why setting up AI systems for other businesses is one of the best $2,000 a month offers you can possibly sell right now because every business owner on Earth knows they need this, and almost none of them have any idea how to actually do it. So don't use AI to replace your thinking. Use it to delete your excuses, right? Every single time you catch yourself saying, I can't afford to do that part, stop and ask whether AI can do that part for you. And, and this year, the honest answer is almost always going to be yes. The person who wins today is not the one with the biggest budget or the fanciest university degree. It's the one who's actually willing to roll up their sleeves and use the tools that are already there in your pocket. Your first move is the one that matters. So that's the entire plan. And I want you to notice that not one single step required money, a degree, or permission from anybody. It just required you deciding to start and being willing to model the people who have already done it instead of trying to be a genius all on your own. You don't have to figure it all out today. You just have to take that first step before you feel ready. If you want to get rich from zero and beat the odds, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. The stock market isn't a casino, and believing that it is might be the most expensive mistake you ever make. Stocks are not lottery tickets. There's a company behind every stock. If a company does well, the stock does well. It's not that complicated.