Why Engineers Should Consider AI Consulting (And How to Start)

All right, Jason, I'm really excited to talk to you today because I feel like, you know, like I spent a lot of time learning about LLMs, machine learning, like how to be a better programmer, all kinds of technical stuff my whole life. And, you know, and I feel like nobody talks about other things that are high leverage and are really important. Like we don't talk about that enough. We just, I just thought, And that's what I teach about. I don't really— and I feel like a lot of this other stuff has been really impactful in my life. So I'm really excited to talk to you to help talk about these other things that we should talk about more.

Yeah, totally. I feel like, you know, unless you go through the issue of like losing your hands or whatever, you just want to think, okay, if I just learn more CUDA, if I get better at LeetCode, like this is how I can become more effective. And that's, that's just definitely not the case.

And so let's talk about that. So, uh, we got introduced because we're both doing AI consulting. And can you tell me a little bit about AI consulting? Like, first of all, like, who should and shouldn't do AI consulting?

So for the most part, both of us, we have been pretty senior engineers before this new, like, ChatGPT wave of doing things. And so What we've done is we've really tried to transition our existing knowledge to sort of, at least I think in my perspective, help software engineers become better, you know, machine learning engineers or AI engineers, right? And I think if you already had that experience of helping other people minimize regret, how do you think about doing experimentation or measurement and observability? Those are sort of great skills that you can leverage for all these new companies that have never been exposed to these kind of skills. I think if you're just a new grad or, you know, playing around, maybe the style of AI consulting that we do is very different. But I still think there's a world where you can just still try to, you know, charge for your expertise. Maybe that's doing automations or something else. But, um, I think in general, if you can help someone else, it's probably a good chance that you could be a consultant.

So let's cut right to the heart of it. What is the income potential? I mean, consulting, like, why should you care? Why should you pay attention? Like, what is the income potential? What, just like, be like, you've been consulting for how many years? 1, 1 or 2 years?

What are these? What's your business? My first Stripe check, like, I created my first like Stripe account in July of, uh, 2023. And at that point I was kind of like sheepishly asking for like $170 an hour. You know, I slowly got my way up to to $250 an hour. But the real breakthrough in terms of how much you can make really just depends on what kind of customers you have. And now as I go closer towards, you know, value-based pricing, now, you know, I think for the past like 4 or 5 months I've been able to cross about $100,000 a month in revenue, not profit. Now that I have a team and there's different ways of finding leverage, but it is, you know, about $100,000 of, you know, revenue. And I think that's, that's pretty surprising for a lot of folks.

And what do you think your net income, like, is it, do you think it's very, you know, plausible to pass like a net income of like a million dollars a year?

I think so. I think especially if you have a team, it makes it a lot easier, right? Not only should you have a team, if you have a small team that can support you, and then also you can, you know, go out and figure out how to use these different AI tools to write better or be more productive, whether it's like email or contracts or search or whatever. I think it's very tractable to do that through having a blended mix of products, right? You have your high-ticket consulting, but there's also other sort of revenue streams you can think about, whether that's, you know, going down the route of like info products or building SaaS. You know, there's been a ton of different consulting firms that have been doing consulting for 1 or 2 years. They figure out what the core problem is that they've been solving, and then they go productize that in whatever way that might look like, whether it's software or courses, or maybe they just write a book or something. No, I think someone even just started a YouTube channel.

I mean, I've, uh, you know, just to be transparent, I— my net income has crossed $1 million from consulting as well. Um, and I think, I think yours is close to that as well. And like, um, you know, a lot of it has been— we've been learning together. But like, let's linger on this, um, topic of, of like, should you do consulting or not? So a lot of people that are watching this are like engineers at tech companies, and they're like, you know, they want trying to go from level 3 to level 4, level 4 to level 5, or whatever these levels that, you know, fictitious ladders that people throw in your face. Like, in your— how would you say, like, does it— does doing consulting beat working at FAANG, like, at your stage, at your experience? Like, You know what?

I think there are worlds where they're like almost comparable, right? Like, but I think the question is like, do— would I want to fight the fight of learning the promotion game, right? It's a different game. Like if I learn the promotion game, it's not a skill I can really take outside of work that much. Whereas now through consulting, the game I'm playing is, is, is less about how do I get a promotion and how do I demonstrate these sort of skills instead, or how do I like play the game, the skills I'm developing are, you know, sales and writing proposals and, you know, writing content and being persuasive. And even if the, if the cash compensation is almost comparable, the skills I develop afterwards are going to be the skills I can, you know, push into being a like startup founder or running a different business. I think those things are definitely going to be very valuable. Whereas if I become an L6 and I develop the skills of protecting my team against directors It's just like a different set of skills that might not be as fun.

Doesn't it seem really important to build skills that are going to be very robust, especially when everything is changing with, you know, like things are coming, you know, like AI, whatever, like we're at the heart of it. But like, don't you think, I mean, like you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. Like you could get injured, you could lose your hands, you could— anything can happen, right?

I mean, now I'm in a place where I— maybe this is a little arrogant, but I feel like I can— at least now that I know that I can sell things, my confidence in my ability to make money regardless of whether or not it's tech has like skyrocketed, you know? Like, I feel like there's a world where if you said, Jason, like, I'm gonna take all your money and you have to start a like landscaping business, I now somewhat feel pretty good that I could do that. And I feel like that's That in a way is the thing I gain a lot of my confidence from now, right? It just so happened that the product, which is me, is available at this time. But if that wasn't the case, I can still be an entrepreneur, I can still be in business. And that is— it's hard to describe like how, uh, calming that is in certain ways.

Yeah, it is extremely calming. It's actually It's actually given me a lot of, uh, peace and just like excited about the many different things I can try.

Yeah, like I'm now like a little bit of an investor, a little bit of advisor. Maybe I can like buy a company and work with that, you know. I can probably be pretty productive on like a board of directors. The, the world really opens up once you start becoming an entrepreneur and really thinking about sort of like business as a skill to develop.

So you talked about, um, you know, marketing, writing proposals, communication, all of these things, but pricing and all of these kind of, you know, other things that are not coding. But you know what we are told if you're working in tech and if you like open social media is like you should keep coding, like you should become a better engineer That is the path to, you know, success, ultimate success is like you just become a 10x programmer. Do you, is that good advice?

Like, I know how I feel about it, but now it's better advice because if I want, I also want to hire that person, right?

Sure.

But like, I want to fire that person because, hire that person because they are the better point of leverage for me. Like, of course the real estate developer wants people who like lays bricks. As quickly as possible and works weekends, but it's not necessarily the best thing for the bricklayer, right? Like, and obviously if you, if you see the people who are successful, it's always, you know, I ran my own like garbage truck and then eventually at some point I became the owner of the business. But at that point, if the problem you're solving is a hiring problem, then what you're looking for is just like someone else who just, you know, works very quickly and works long hours. And again, like, you know, it's almost like a, auto-exploitation, right? You yourself want to be able to exploit your, your own body and your own mind to like create capital. But the issue is you are still trying to make someone else more money. And I think the fun thing about with consulting is you're at least recognizing that and asking for a piece of the pot. I think that's just like—

so people telling you to like double down on coding, become a 10x, to move from like, let's say, the, the median programmer to like the 10x programmer. And even to, from 10x, from like, let's say the top quartile programmer to like the top 1% programmer. Um, the reason why we get that advice is I think it's in the interests of the people who are allocating capital to— of course, like you said, I think you had an analogy about a horse, a racehorse.

Oh yeah, you know, it's like, uh, when you breed racehorses to be as, uh strong as possible, there's always some kind of like resource constraint. And so what happens is like the racehorse that is very fast also has just bones that are less dense, right? Which is great for the person making the bets, but it's also not that great for the horse, right? Turns out this is why you like put down horses when they get— when they, you know, roll their ankles. Um, it just depends on like the fact that what the resource for the horse is its own body, but the resource for like the the stable or like the owners, like that entire thing is just a single resource to allocate somewhere else and make bets against. Right. And seeing both sides of it, it's like, yeah, I would love to hire someone that I can pay a flat salary and then works as much as possible. Right. I would say more leverage.

So would you say, yeah. And then like, yeah. And then you're just like totally expendable. Like you said, like the moment, yeah. You know, your legs break. We just find another horse.

Exactly, exactly.

And that, I think that, that, uh, that's true of programmers as well. That's, that's true of like, uh, on the ground.

Yeah. And obviously there's a difference if you're just like passionate about the craft. Like, I'm not saying like, don't love the thing that you're doing, but I think there's another world where when you look at like all the layoffs happening and, and sort of how people are thinking about their career, many people who are great programmers don't care that they're great programmers. This is just like a job that pays the bills, you know? And. Recognizing that is, is very enlightening, right? It's like there is a case where like you get laid off and the next day the business is operating as usual, right? And we have 30% layoffs like all over the place in the past couple of years, especially during COVID Yeah.

And so like, okay, you know, I've had this experience, this like amazing experience, you know, like You know, to be honest, it's taken me a long time to realize that. I'm, you know, 44 years old. I only discovered this consulting, this idea you can do independent consulting.

Yeah.

And you can start your own business, such high leverage, maybe like 2 or 3 years ago. If someone— I wish someone had told me, like, showed me, uh, you know, giving me some information when I was like much younger, uh, maybe like even 5 or 6 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, it would have been really powerful.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is just the fact that because our circles is sort of Silicon Valley, there's always this like high status allure of being a founder, right? And there's different reasons you might want— like one might want to be a founder, you know, if you do think you're going to change the world, that's great. But between this and making a new weather app, like I'd rather just like sell that weather app and build a cash flow business, and that's totally fine. But in the Silicon Valley world, like that becomes a lifestyle business.

That's true, because like that's been the whole like sort of status treadmill that's been built around me is like, you know, before I discovered consulting, it was like, hey, let's climb the ladder of whatever engineering success and then like ultimately become a founder. Do you think like being a founder also is like a form of oppression, just like the racehorse? Like you're just being leveraged by capital in ways that many times don't make sense for you?

I think there are a lot of businesses that have raised venture money that don't need to raise venture money. I think investors know that for sure, right? But yeah, I think, I think, you know, from my understanding, after The Social Network came out, there's a lot more young people that wanted to be founders because they see sort of the, the maximum upside. Right, whereas I'm friends with tons of founders and all their stories is just like running out of money and like co-founder breakups and like calling back equity, which is also part of the, the social network, but they just forgot about that part.

Exactly, yeah. I almost feel like the expected value of like doing an indie business is way higher, uh, you know, than I, I would— a lot of other things to pull in, like the machine learning terminology.

I think the— it really is about the bias-variance trade-off, you know. Like, I can really easily become like a comfortable millionaire doing independent consulting, but there is no chance I become like a billionaire. I mean, there's not even a chance that I see myself making $10 or $20 million doing consulting, but that is possible if you raise money and you can raise money at multiples that are very compelling and also be able to sell secondaries and then, you know, create a lot of FOMO around that to sort of get access at a higher leverage. Well, that's just not really the game I want to play, and most people still fail.

So a lot of people watching this are going to be like, oh, that's great, Hamel Husain, they're both talking about doing consulting, talking about how successful it is. But I'm not Hamel Husain, I'm not Jason Husain, I don't have lots of social media followers, no one knows who I am. Do you need to like have tons of social media followers and have a big following to be like, to get started in consulting?

Um, so, you know, you know, I would say the answer is like both yes and no because it does definitely makes it easier, but this has also been something we've been investing in, right? So I started Twitter last year with 500 followers and now I have 30,000. Like I think when, when I started Twitter, you had like 20,000 followers and I've been kind of like watching your profile grow as well. But I think what Alex Hormozi says best is, you know, there's 4 ways you can get customers, right? There's warm outbound, cold outbound, free content, and paid ads. And really what we've done, both of us, is we've gone the route of investing in free content. And likely, you know, I've spent about a year doing this. I'm, you've probably spent like many, many years doing this, which is also why you're, you're still ahead of me. But then there's also like warm outbound and cold outbound. And I think I've seen a lot of companies succeed in both those worlds, right? If you have a lot of connections, like if you left a Facebook, for example, you can use your directors or your, you know, managers to reach out to other companies and make warm referrals. I know that in Merge House, Andy Walters, he does a lot of cold outbound, with like bottles of whiskey and email, right? There's many different ways of getting customers and it just so happens that our method, free content, is the one we chose to invest in. But there's many others.

I do agree with free content. You made a comment to me that I thought was really profound a couple of weeks ago, and that comment was, I posted a blog post about LLM as a, LLM as a judge. It was on the front page of Hacker News. Your first reaction was, Oh, that's so easy. And I 100% agree with that. 100%. I know exactly what you're thinking. And it's so right. Can you— and nope, everyone else looking at it is probably like, damn, Jason's just like, you know, Jason's like whatever, uh, you know, teasing Hamel or whatever. But no, that's not the case. It actually is easy. In a lot of respects. Can you talk about why that is?

I just think too many people don't write. So if you already publish something, you're, you're already winning. Like, it's so easy to beat most people cuz most people have not entered the door. Most people have like never opened the notepad and most people don't never publish. Right. And usually when I hear people say like, oh, but like the, my writing's not good. It's like, man, I was, Through all of high school, I was getting like C's in English. Like, I hate writing. I think I'm a terrible writer. It doesn't matter. I just gotta publish, right? And I think, you know, this year I had like 7 posts get on the front page of Hacker News, right? And I just think not enough people publish, right? Everyone is like too perfectionist. But the line I challenge everyone else who's listening is like, if you're such a perfectionist, name one thing you've done perfect.

I can almost tell if something is gonna be on the front page of Hacker News now. Before I very briefly share it.

Only took like some—

You just get that— Yeah, I mean, you just get a feeling inside. But I think that goes to the earlier question, like, do you need lots of followers? And, you know, potential— like, I don't think you do.

Yeah. I mean, I remember when your article went out, I was like, you know, people on Twitter are not— like, we are not leveraging Twitter to get more Hacker News upvotes. Like, I don't know if you, you do this, but I have never really gone like DMing people telling them to like, hey, I've done a launch, please. Like, it just happens. And it just happens because most people don't write about their expertise because most people are not incentivized to write about their expertise. If you're an L7 engineer at Google, like why do you care about writing a blog post, right? It doesn't benefit them a little bit, right? But it benefits us because we're incentivized to do so. And when we do, we have like, a 20% hit rate.

That's really interesting. And like, um, you know, I found that getting your first client and starting to get that first like check allows you to think completely differently about your time. And like, it makes sense to invest in writing content. It makes sense to hire an EA. It makes sense to take that course. It makes sense to do whatever because like there's a direct path between that and you making more money. It's not some like ephemeral, like, you know, thing. Can you talk a little bit more about like how all this starts a flywheel?

Yeah, I mean, I'll say this one thing that has really changed my mind on how I like run a business. You know, there's this TikTok that's like, this is the rich mentality and this is the poor mentality. And the question was like, here's a bag. I'm going to ask you, this bag is $500. You want to buy this bag? And the joke was that the poor mentality will always go like, fuck you, I'm not buying a $500 bag. Whereas the rich mentality is, oh, what's in the bag?

Right?

And I think the moment I stop thinking about what do things cost me versus what do things get me, right? What is the return on the investment I'm going to put in? Like, okay, If you— if I buy this bag for $500 and inside is like a PS5, then the bag is free, right? Um, it's having that mindset has something that has been really, really helpful, right? It's like I spent maybe like $2,000 on reading about books on pricing, but it's like $2,000 and months of my time.

Absolutely.

Really, what I realized, oh, I should have just gotten a coach. They would probably yell at me for like 2 hours and I would have just been making more money way earlier.

And not to mention, the entire tax code and tax system is geared towards business owners. So like, if you're on a W-2, a lot of this stuff you can't write off at all. And there's some amount you can, but you largely can't. And so like, you can actually— all these investments in yourself and these things around you and stuff like that, the expenses you know, associated with that, you can write all of it off. Um, it's just, yeah, I found it to be very freeing in that way.

Yeah, if you think about it, like, I think I've spent maybe like $20,000, $30,000 in like self-education to be a better consultant, but the leverage was that I went from like $30,000 a month to like $100,000 a month, right? It's like, that was the return on investment. The fact that it cost $30,000 to make me half a million dollars extra is kind of the ROI, right? And it's costing you like half a million dollars a year to not know how to make a half a million dollars. So anything that you can invest in that, it's kind of the right direction.

So one of the first question I get when I tell people about, encourage them to do consulting, they're like, Hamel, um, but don't you have to spend a lot of time like finding clients, doing marketing, the administrative work, billing, so on and so forth? Like, doesn't— isn't that like really annoying? And doesn't that, you know, get in the way? And, um, I have a specific reaction to that, but before I react to it, maybe I'll let you react to it.

I mean, when I hear that, I just think of the people who are like, oh, I don't want to go to the gym because I'm going to get too jacked. You know, it's like, you haven't even started. Like, get in the door, right? You know, chances are you're not going to have that many clients, and there's not that much admin work, right? You're gonna probably create one Stripe checkout link for like $4,000 and you're gonna hope that they pay it. But ultimately the, the real thing you want to focus your energy on is how can I get as much proof as quickly as possible that I know what I'm talking about? And writing is one of those ways. Referrals is one of those ways. Having a, like, just rewriting your resume is one of those ways, right? But I think overthinking about what, like what, busyness you might run into in the future is, is probably not a good use of time.

I mean, yeah, and my reaction is it is way more painful to do the things that you are doing right now, which is A, doing perf reviews, doing lots of useless meetings, lots of politics of various kinds, um, and all kinds of other bullshit that you do in jobs. That don't, that just waste your time. And like, you, if you cut all of that out, now you have a lot of time to do, you know, the marketing and all that stuff. It's no longer bullshit. You actually, like, every time you do it, you make money. And so my answer is like, do you want to do perf review for $0? Or do you want to do some marketing for and make money off of it. And it just like, you know, this is just a perspective that it's like, I just don't think, I think it's actually harder to stay in the status quo.

Yeah. I mean, it's, again, it goes back down to like risk reward, right? You know, if being a founder is $1 billion plus or minus $1 billion, maybe being a consultant is like $1 million plus or minus half a million. $1 million, then being a salaried person is like $300,000 plus or minus $100,000. You know, they're all kind of like on the spectrum of like how much risk you're willing to take. But ultimately, I think too many people are not willing to take any risk. And if you're like 3, 4 years into your career, you know, I think it's a good time to sort of start taking those bigger bets. And it's scary, but it was scary for me to start consulting thing. It was scary for me to start courses. Payoff really came out.

So one thing I want to talk about is constraints, the magic of constraints and what you've learned from that. So what I mean by that is, look, in machine learning, we've seen time and time again that like, you know, people in labs without tons of compute, they've come up with like really amazing methods and, you know, state-of-the-art things that because of their constraints. You see it all the time in all kinds of fields, like people with constraints, they're actually very innovative. You lost your hands at some point. And I thought, I think that's like really interesting because I actually think those constraints of like your injury really like helped. Like, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about like, so surprising things you learned?

So I still actually have my physical hands. So what actually happened was I have, uh, I have tendonitis in both my wrists and that's been going on for about 4 years now. So I just, I just feel a lot of pain if I spend too much time typing. Which is counter to all the amount of writing that I've done or all the code that I've written. A lot of it has really come to the fact that if I was to— if I lost 50% of my ability to code, you know, is it actually worthwhile to try to get 20% of that back? Or if your outcome is equal to the force times the leverage that you have, why not just find a longer stick to pull? And so a lot of the process I think about now is When I write open source code, I want that to be used by many people. If, if in order for that to happen, I need to write more documentation and make sure I think about, you know, SEO optimization, you know, that is first. And then being a better library almost comes second to actually making sure that people are using it to begin with, right? In my writing, a lot of it now has to do with using things like Loom to transcribe my text and then using things like a Claude project to generate essays. That has allowed me to bring a lot of the writing time down from maybe most people might take days, but it takes me about 45 minutes to write a single blog post. And again, what that lets me do is really just improve the volume and improve the amount of practice I get doing these things. I think as a—

I really love it. Yeah.

Yeah.

This writing style that you have adopted, you was like very early on from all the people I know that has been doing this because of the constraints. And I have adopted it. We like it. I like it so much that in Answer AI, we have adopted it. So like when we do, when you like do a blog post, like, you know, Jeremy and I will do a recorded video.

Nice.

We'll go through a Claude project and we'll translate it down into a blog post.

That's awesome.

And it's really like, I can draw a straight line between that and, and you doing it. So, um, I think that's really good. Um, So can you tell us a little bit about, like, why did you decide to teach this course on consulting? So we've been talking about consulting, and, you know, a lot of people ask me questions about consulting, but I just don't have the time to tell them everything I know. I tell you everything I know, but it's just— I'm, you know, can you tell me a little bit about, okay, like, why you decide to do this?

So I think the main reason is because This is just a way I like to learn. One of the ways I like to learn is to be able to only be like a couple years ahead of other folks and then, and teach that back. That's kind of my method of learning. And when I started out, I just couldn't really find that many resources and actually figuring out what it means to just charge more for your expertise, right? The first 6 months I was like, man, I'm charging like $170. I don't know what you do. And then one of your friends will say, you should charge $1,000 an hour. And I was like, what the fuck? I can't do that. Like, I know these people. You're gonna like make me like, all my friends are gonna hate me, right? Like my first few customers, they shouldn't do that, right? I'm just losing all my friends. And you know, all these people give advice on the outside and just none of it really makes sense. Although they also say, oh, you should look in the mirror and like just keep doubling the number until you start like, you know, laughing at yourself. And it's like, this makes no sense. And so just through my own like suffering, I've been able to figure out what it means to be able to charge more for myself. And through my friends that I've helped, you know, I've seen many of them like increase their income by like 50 to 100 to 200%. And so that's like, wow, okay. Like I think I figured out something that is useful. I'm still fresh in that perspective.

I'm like, for example, if McKinsey gave a course on how to charge more as a consultant, I don't know if I would take So I think like to your point, you want to take a course from someone that's 1 or 2 years ahead of you and not more because like the person that is like 7 years ahead of you, they're going to be talking about how to scale a large organization, how to sell your consulting company. They would have forgot how to start.

Yeah, half the books on consulting are like, yeah, how do you do an exit and how do you hire contractors? Right? And this is not really what makes sense now, especially when AI allows you to do a lot of this automation as well, right? And like no course or no, no consulting book I've seen really captures this idea of now that LLMs are out, your expertise is even more valuable. And now that LLMs are out, your, your need to hire to scale has changed dramatically. And so now I think there is a world where like you can make a million dollars if you just sort of you know, take some Zoom calls, take transcripts, convert them into information, and build out this like information product that is yourself.

Can you give us a high-level overview of the kinds of things you're going to teach in the course?

Yeah, so the course is 3 days, and, and really it goes like this, you know. Number 1, be famous. Number 2, change your mindset on how— what price means. And 3, learn to ask for more, right? And obviously these are sort of some cheeky titles, but ideally the The general message I wanna send day one is that the content you write is the sawdust of expertise-based consulting, right? I think when lumberyards first brought in people to figure out how to make lumberyards more productive, one of the biggest things they realized was if you just took the sawdust, turn them into particle board, you can basically increase the value of this entire facility by 50% because particle board industry now is like a multi-billion dollar industry. And then in that same sense, you know, when you're doing interviews or doing podcasts or giving advice to companies, even if it's like a free call, there's information that you can write down, turn into content, and have that content both market yourself to generate leads, but also show evidence that you know what you're talking about and converts leads into sales, right? The second day, we're mostly gonna focus on the mindset shift it takes to go from these like hourly-based consulting to you know, project and value-based consulting. And this is when you really change from having a sort of business where you're just sort of talking for money to really understanding that you need to find the customer in the most pain and, and helping just overcome these beliefs on what it means to sort of exchange value and money. And that to me, I think that will be like the most important lesson for me, 'cause that is something again that took me a long time. If you look at how I'm billing now, If we brought it down to hourly, like there are customers that are doing like $3,000 an hour and it doesn't make sense if you say $3,000 an hour. But really, if I told you that these companies expect to make $100 million a year, then you realize, okay, the value of the problem has nothing to do with me and what my value is. I'm just a vessel to help them get to that final goal and what I deserve in exchange is a small percentage of that pie. And so that's kind of one of the big things to think about. And the last section is really just the systems that I use to write proposals, right? The first two lessons are mostly about how do you think about these things, how can you get these customers? And at the very end, it's really just about how do you demonstrate that you know what they want, how can you be responsible for what they want, and how can you be paid as if you're responsible for what they want to get? And by doing that, you actually are able to build a business where you have more free time. Earlier on in the year, I was working like 90 hours a week and now I take like Mondays and Fridays off.

I'm really excited about it because I've had the— because I talk to you often and I know what your systems are because we do, we share them and they work, they work really well because I use them.

Yeah. I mean, we have like a— we have a Git history of all of our pricing pages and our landing pages and how that's changed over time.

So it's extremely effective. And like I mentioned earlier, I wish someone would have given me this information in this format, maybe like 6 or 7 or 8 years ago, it would have been really impactful. So I'm excited that you're doing this course so that other people can get this information right now. I guess like the last question I have is, okay, this sounds like a really, like a really, like good course. Um, but like, why, why is now a good time to do like AI consulting?

Yeah, I think there's just so much. I fundamentally believe that there's just a lot of expertise that has not been written down and no one has had the incentives to write this information down. It's like you, you and me are doing this because this is part of our livelihood. Eugene really is to me the crazy one out. He's just doing, he's just doing it, right? I love the game.

Yeah. But.

Not many people are sort of financially rewarded to write all this information down. Even OpenAI is not really publishing as much as they used to. Yeah. And so I think if there are more independent consultants whose expertise is valued and they can justify writing this down, we're finally able to sort of pull this information out into the world. And I think that's an easy way of being compensated for doing that kind of work, right? Um, versus like just being like be, you know, a patron by some billionaire. That's very, very few of us will ever get that chance. On top of that, I think classically consulting really scaled through just hiring more contractors. But I think in a world where your expertise is so valuable, especially around this like AI stuff, being able to leverage LLMs again just gives you another multiplier on how much outcome you're able to drive and sort of how much output you're able to produce as a single individual, right? Which makes this business a little bit more tractable for those who also value things like work-life balance and having more free time.

Yeah, I think what you— one of the things you said are really important. It's like, okay, there's a perception in a lot of circles about consultants being leeches and parasites on businesses and just being just overall, you know, detrimental. But I think in this AI, independent AI consulting where One of the, like, byproducts is you writing about, you know, your knowledge. You get to pull upon lots of different observations you have working with lots of different companies. And when you write that, it's actually super impactful and it, like, helps everybody because it's a quite unique perspective. And like you said, like, no one else has an incentive to do that. You can't do that at a W-2 job. Number one, because you only have sample size of one, but then number two is like, you just not— you're not paid to do that, so it's going to make your life more miserable.

Yeah, like maybe it's for recruiting efforts, but then the content you write is also going to be very different. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

All right, Jason, no, it was a really good talk to you. It was fun to dive more into, uh, your background in consulting. This course that you're doing. If you're listening to this, uh, look at the notes or the, you know, the, the next reply to this or whatever it is. There'll be a link to Jason's course.

Yeah.

If you wanna check it out.

Yeah. If you think the course is a little too early, there's also like the newsletter and then you can just visit, uh, learnindyconsulting.com.

Just do the course. Don't listen to Jason. Just seriously, just do the course. Um, It's really good. I've got an inside peek into it and I don't promote any, I've never promoted anyone else's course, but this is a really special course because it goes into kind of like something really important to me, which is like gaining your freedom in, in a way that I think is accessible to a lot of people in our audience. Yeah. So I think it's really good.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, Jason.

Take care.