I created 1,700 AI agencies

People in the medical space were signing up for this $10,000+ plan, sight unseen, no sales call. Imagine if you magically never had to write an estimate again or never needed to do this 14-step tedious process. You can give so much value to clients by building them no-code solutions. We were seeing a level of enthusiasm for purchasing a 5-figure software project that was very unlike what you see My name is Andrew Warner.

I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. I have a big curiosity, which is the beauty of doing these interviews. I'm seeing these fricking AI agencies pop up and they call themselves AI agencies. And to me it feels like that's not specific enough, but who am I to tell them that what they're doing is wrong? Because frankly, when I call them up, I see that a lot of them are actually getting good business and they're doing it from lots of different industries. And to me that is confusing. How are they doing well like that? How do they call someone up and say, I'm an AI agency, and somebody goes, yes, finally someone's gonna AI me. I just don't see that as a model that works. And so I said, who can I talk to to help me understand it? And I realized it's gotta be Rob Howard and he's gotta be so fed up with me, but he's got a smile on his face because he doesn't know me from Adam. I texted him because when I get curious, I'm like on text with a stranger. And then I persuaded him to come do an interview with me and he goes, okay, all right, let's do it. And I wanted it for 2 reasons because he's somebody who has done this. He has clients who he has built software for, for years. So he's not a newcomer who just decided, hey, you know what, I found out what N8N is and I'm great with it and I'm gonna go— no, he's done this for, for literally decades. But more importantly, or just as importantly, he has these students who he's been working with and teaching them how to create AI agencies. And so I figured we're gonna take a, like a 360-degree understanding of this whole space. But first I should say Rob Howard's company is called Howard Development and Consulting. It's called hdc.net. And then his, uh, place where you, where you learn is Innovating with AI. Why don't we start out with this? Instead of me saying hi and everything, I want to know about the example that you gave me about doctors who are signing up for a high-tier consulting service to do what?

Yeah, great question. Well, thanks for having me, first of all, and thanks for being so persuasive when you cold-texted me this morning to hang out today. So glad to be here. Yeah, so when we were first starting innovating with AI, which really was a branch of the business early on, thinking about Like, how can we— we're already doing some teaching, right? Teaching people how to code, teaching people WordPress stuff just through day-to-day life and just enjoying that, knowing that's a fun place to be.

You had a blog that was teaching people how to build websites. Just to give people a sense of—

Yeah, we were doing webinars just for fun. And it's a business model, but it was always like we were dabbling in it, right? So AI comes along, obviously disrupts everything in late 2022. And we said, okay, well, obviously this is getting more traction. Let's experiment with some more stuff. And we put together some programs and courses, and the highest ticket version of those was the opportunity to sit down with me and really do a personalized consulting project. And that was a mix of learning as well as software work, right? So what we discovered very accidentally was a ton of doctors, physicians, psychologists, people in like the medical space and adjacent, were signing up for this $10,000+ plan with us, like sight unseen, no sales call, not talking to me on the phone, nothing like what we were seeing for the sales process for our traditional software development projects where it's much longer and there's competitive proposals. So, we were like, obviously, this is a thing and this pattern is meaningful, right? And what we ended up building for—

What's the pattern? What were they asking you for?

So the pattern was that we were seeing a level of enthusiasm for purchasing a 5-figure software project that was very unlike what you see, for example, if you go out and you try to get somebody to pay you to design their website, right? We were seeing basically people were like, I don't even want to read the whole thing, I'm in, like, show me how to do this, I know I need help with this.

I really want to— was there a consistent thing that they were asking you for?

Typically, it landed in what we call a document automation project. So a typical physician will, you know, work with a patient, maybe they have medical records and notes and all these things that they need to compile into a useful report for the patient or other, you know, providers or family members at the end of that. And they were saying, I'm spending 12 hours on this document. And I think AI can make that work.

Get it.

for me in 2 hours, right? So, you know, somebody who has a limited amount of time, they're essentially a solopreneur or small business owner as a private practice doctor. They've got some money to invest in speed and automation, and they value their time a lot. They were very early adopters, even though they weren't techie, in purchasing what we now call AI consulting services. So that became a mix of figure out what to build, which of course we love to do, making MVPs and all that stuff from the software days, and then sitting down and doing it with a mixture of code and low-code tools. And that was what really evolved into our first few large AI consulting projects. And now we've created a much more detailed sort of menu or matrix of service offerings that we do ourselves as well as teach. And it makes that a very robust business for folks who are enthusiastic about AI and also want to help other people adopt AI. I see.

And so that actually is pretty interesting to me, that people have an understanding that AI could magically solve their big problem. And so they just come to an AI agency, or in your case, an AI teacher, and they say, I want to pay you to solve it. And that's unlike, say, online marketing where someone might have a problem and then just go randomly talk to an online marketing company. They know at this point, I have an SEO problem, I want more search traffic, or I have a content problem, I want someone to improve my, my maybe even more specific than that, social content. You know, so in the calls that I've had this week, that's one of the things that stood out, that this area is not mature enough to go specialized and people are still not smart enough or not aware enough of who the specialist should be. They just know there's some AI solution. And is that why a lot of AI agencies— speaking as someone who's helped create a lot of these— is that why a lot of AI agencies are not focused on doctors or focused on marketing automation?

Yeah, so, you know, we have about more than 1,000 people in our AI consultancy program who are building their own AI consulting firms at various levels of, you know, points in their journey. Some have been doing it with us for a year and a half, some are newer, right? We actually do recommend that they niche down eventually because we believe that just like any consulting firm or any agency, being able to say I have an industry niche and a geographic niche is going to be a useful, you know, value proposition to get the client's attention, to make lead generation easier. However, We often discover that a new consultant will go into a business who is super enthusiastic about the idea of getting help with AI, but that client, as you suggested, really has no idea what that even means, right? So one of the things that we teach is like, what does this journey or roadmap for your client look like? What are the easy entry points? What are the premium offerings? And how do you figure out where they're starting and help them through that journey? Because, you know, as you suggested, Yeah. It is very much the Wild West in the sense that nobody really has a good handle at midsize and large companies on exactly how to tackle this, especially when you get away from companies that have an engineering department, which is, I don't know, 80 or 90% of the world, where they're not thinking about software all day, but they know how much software can help them. So, we're seeing people going in and saying, Hey, maybe we just start with the training, right? And maybe that training moves into strategy, and that moves into an end-to-end implementation, or, you know, something more complex. And that has been a winning roadmap that we've been able to put, you know, into, you know, real templates and real systems for folks in our programs.

It's funny because I'm actually texting right now with Jesse Pujji. I said, Jesse, you contacted Rob, what was it about? And he's got a company Called Growth Assistant, and he's thinking maybe I wanna level up my, not maybe, he's been talking actively about how he wants to level up his people with AI. And so, yeah, when, so he wants to, he talked to you, I guess, by email about having you train their people. And that's another entry point for, for agencies. Is it just, I'll come in and I'll teach your people how to use AI?

Absolutely. And one of the things we see over and over again is the folks in our program and in our community who are really into this stuff and are reading the newsletters every day and are reading what happened with OpenAI yesterday and what happened with Anthropic the day before, they don't believe how many people are complete novices and are like, give me the 101 or 102 training. In fact, we had a student go to a pretty significant tech conference about 2 weeks ago, and he came back and he said, I can't believe how many people had no idea what anything was outside of ChatGPT, right? Or maybe they'd used ChatGPT a few times. And what we're seeing is that in some ways there's a little bit of a disparity between the perception from what I would call inside the tech community and the reality outside the tech community, which is that we're super into this. We're talking about it all the time, every day. We're following the news, but most people are hearing about it as sort of like a cool thing in the background, but they're not really hands-on with it yet. So that's why you can still go in and do a great training, and people are like, we are so happy to pay you for this because we need a guide, we need a trusted advisor, right? And we try to build businesses that allow the, you know, proprietors, whether it's a solopreneur or a small consultancy firm to become trusted advisors to a set of clients who are going to be with them for the long term. Start with the easy stuff. Maybe it's a training, maybe it's oriented towards their industry, but there's also some general learning that the company or its team needs to do. And then build a multi-year roadmap where they might be your client through many projects over a long period of time, and you create that long-time, lifelong relationship with them.

But you know, if someone were to bring me in to do AI training, I wouldn't even know where to start. Am I teaching you that you can actually upload a bunch of documents into ChatGPT and create your own chat experience so that knows all your past writing? Or am I explaining to them that they could use N8N? Am I doing something more complicated than that? Where do I even begin? And it's so broad that it's scary. It's scary to, to go into a client. Not knowing what am I giving them. How do you, how do you limit yourself when you're saying I'll come and do training?

Yeah, great question. So there's a number of ways to hone it down. One is just with time, right? Like if we know that we have 2 hours, obviously that's going to limit us versus if it's going to be a multi-day boot camp. And we have consulting students who do both of those things. We like to start students off when they're giving their first trainings with like an hour presentation that is effectively AI 101. What is this thing? What is a language model? Why is it able to sort of predict and be smart about what to say next, right? Why is it creating these images? That's usually pretty interesting to 80% of people. Sometimes you'll get a client who requests something more advanced, and then we have a series of sort of idea generators within our community that we have people use to say, Okay, I'm going to go into this real estate firm. What demos should I show them? And then you build them, you know, a demo you can show for 10 minutes. And maybe it's creating a listing for a new house or analyzing a piece of data or something. And they're like, whoa, like, now I'm seeing like where this thing actually can speed up my life.

I see.

So you can do things that are industry-specific and also generalized, and you can sort of mix and match those. And the students who have kind of taken that to another level will even survey the audience before. So if they say, okay, I know I'm going into this company, we're going to sit down with, you know, the CFO and then the team underneath that person, and we're going to do a training. I know it's going to be kind of oriented towards this, but let's just ask them what they want to learn, right? And then, you know, we have tons of educational resources that we use to teach our students that they can also in turn use to teach others. And when you have a bunch of those things, you can now remix that almost infinitely to make that interesting enough, but also repetitive enough that you keep the attention of your current client, but you also gain the efficiency of being able to like get good at giving the same handful of trainings over and over again, which of course is a big part of running an efficient agency. being able to have some repetition there.

Let's talk about the real estate example. What would they build those 2 examples in? The analyzer? So, and yeah, and the listing?

Yeah, great question. We have basically a set of what we call 9 personas in the program. So when you start our program, we ask you, where are you right now on your tech skills? And where are you on your business skills? And then based on that, we're going to recommend a stack for you. So it could be as simple as Zapier, right? Or Airtable, which are going to be on the easier side, but allow you to do quite a bit of automation and AI work. Um, and then you just maybe plug that into GPT-5 or whatever the current model is, right? And then on the more advanced side, you move into something like Make or n8n, or even custom coding if you're an engineer. And then those allow you to create bigger and more complex things. But what's impressive and kind of, again, surprising to somebody who's in the tech world is you can give so much value to clients by building them no-code solutions. And what that allows you to do is take your enthusiasm, not need to go learn how to code or even learn how to like deploy end-to-end to a server or something. And almost immediately start helping people, which of course creates those relationships and creates money for your consultancy and creates a business for you.

I saw that Growth Assistant had— they brought me into a conversation with an agency that they were looking to hire. And one of the things that they said to them was, can you turn some of our internal documents into content that we can post online? And they saw that agency's work was being done on 8NN. Wait, N8N.

Yes. Letter, number, letter. There's a million, there's, there's actually a controversy over how to say it, but we, we just say N8N to simplify it.

Um, and so at the end of the call, I go, I'm, I Slack Adam, the CTO. I said, Adam, you've been using this tool forever. Why are you hiring these guys for $5,000 to do it instead of doing it yourself? Or like, why doesn't someone else at the company Do it. And he goes, Andrew, you saw me use it. Are you gonna use it now because you saw me use it? I obviously I'm not. And he goes, do you think I have the patience to keep going back and iterating with this team because they have these changes? It's not enough to use it. I'd rather just pay them $5,000 and be done with this. And I'm guessing that's where a lot of it comes in. The other thing though that comes up to me is that essentially a lot of people who are creating AI agents or AI tools are just using these 2 tools, right? N8N. Yeah, N8N and Zapier, essentially, right? Sometimes they'll use Make. And to me, it feels almost a little bit like cheating. What are you really creating here?

Well, I think what you've discovered is the central tension between what I would describe as the old tech economy and the new tech economy. Because until 2023, being really good at coding, whether that was JavaScript, Python, PHP, or anything else, meant you had essentially 10x or more the earning potential and the ability to build quality solutions than everybody else in the world. And that has been the fundamental change that has turned everything on its head. And I say this as somebody who's been coding since 1999 or before, when I was a teenager, I was able to walk into pretty much any room, say, I'm a coder, boom, you are 10x more valuable than the next person who's not a coder. And that is rapidly changing. And I think that what you just described is the disruption that is happening. And it's almost hard to believe that somebody can use what are from our perspective, relatively simple tools and software, not even to think about vibe coding, which is also relatively simple compared to the past, right? And provide meaningful, valuable solutions. But what we're seeing is that, you know, these tools, these tools existed, right? Zapier existed for many years. I would describe it as basically like a boring tech tool before 2022. When AI comes into the mix though, now And automation gets so much more valuable, right? Because your automation can be infinitely smarter than anything you could do previously with, you know, scripts and stuff like that. So that has dramatically increased the value of Zapier, dramatically increased the value of Make, which also existed pre-AI. N8n obviously is newer to the scene and is now a really sort of becoming a famous tool in the low-code, no-code world. The reason these are so valuable is because they allow you to build with AI without learning how to code, which changes the entire dynamic of everything, right? So if you want to be a coder and you want to continue to be 10x the value of everybody around you, it's kind of a hard sell now because so many people are able to catch up with you and build these solutions. Which is a challenge, right? And obviously we see tension within the web development world, within the software development world, even within the design world as a result of that. But you have— you articulated that problem, right? However, the fact that it's hard to believe does not mean that it is not actually happening. And what we're seeing on the ground is that that change is real, and more and more people are able to basically combine kind of business skills with medium-level tech skills, right? If you're looking at it from a pre-AI standpoint and provide real solutions to clients, just like the ones that, you know, we mentioned, from training to building automations to building workflows and kind of all that stuff.

Give me another example that either you or your students have built. What else?

Yeah, we did a big series of lessons recently that, you know, essentially is intended to be a template and a demo that students can then take and use for their clients. And we call it a dashboard for team operations. And the use case that we showed is actually very similar to what you just described the agency having built for your, for your friend. And it was basically, we're a museum, we have a bunch of cool stuff in our museum, and we know a lot about it, but like, we need to get that knowledge out of our heads into a system, and then we want to generate a social media post every day and make sure that we have really interesting content that we're pumping out on a regular basis. So very similar to the idea. So we built that. We actually— what we do is we build 3 levels. We build the easy version, the medium version, and the hard version, and we show the students that progression so then they can pick and choose where they want to be in terms of their stack. So it can be anything from Airtable all the way up to a more complex N8N or Make build that's going to be talking to different APIs and doing more complex stuff behind the scenes. In this case, you could bring in like a Buffer or a Hootsuite, for example, to do the social media posting. So you can kind of sprinkle in as much complexity as you want. But the fundamental value is we've got a bunch of non-techies at the museum. They do not want to learn all this stuff. They don't even have time, right?

Right.

A couple of them are PhDs who are old-fashioned and they know all their stuff about history, but they don't really want to learn about how to get that stuff into social media. Some of them are interns, right, who just aren't ready to dive in too deep to this stuff, but can do the sort of legwork. And we create a series of sort of data storage sort of setups and then automations that allow them to put their knowledge in one place and then remix it over and over again in essentially infinite ways, which is something that AI can do really, really well, especially when guided well. And there's still a human in the loop, but it dramatically improves their ability to get more good content out there.

You know what? I guess it kind of reminds me of how when WordPress came out, I thought, why would I hire anyone to create a WordPress site? And I hired someone to create a nice template.

Right.

Then Squarespace came out and I said, if you use Squarespace, it basically is just pay, pay them a lot of money a month, get a little bit more rigidity, but in return you can do it yourself. And even smart people— my wife is, is a top executive at a tech firm. She didn't want to go into Squarespace and do it herself and use the templates. She paid an agency a few thousand dollars. This is what I want, go create it for me. And essentially you're saying the same thing here. It's yes, they could learn how to use these tools that we've talked about, but they don't want to. And the result is not a small impact on their business. It's a wow impact that looks fun today and actually has big financial impact on their business. What other software are you using? We're talking about N8N. N8N. Years from now, I'm gonna laugh at how I mispronounced this.

Over and over again. It's impossible. You know, it's one of those companies that, like, they obviously were not thinking about the naming being— the name being said over and over again when they named it. And I think that's because, you know, it comes out of an open source coding project or something along those lines. And, you know, it certainly did not get the brand makeover.

Side note, by the way, I have— I've been WhatsApping— I've been WhatsApping the founder to get him to do an interview with me. I don't know if he appreciates my WhatsApp attitude here, but I do want to find out about what's going on with him. Oh, my camera just did a weird thing here. It's okay. So yeah, what other tools are you using?

Yeah, so basically what we do is we show you sort of a tier list of tools that we recommend, right? So, you know, if you want to go super easy, just use Zapier, right? There's limitations to it. And if you hit those limitations, you want to move up to Make. And then if you hit limitations there, You might want to move to N8N. But if you think Make is much more beautiful than N8N, which most people do, then maybe you want to stick with Make. And maybe there's a balance, right? Supabase is great. We do a lot of stuff with showing people how to use different vector store methods. There's ChatGPT, or I guess I would say the OpenAI Playground and the OpenAI Assistants ecosystem has vector stores. Within it, but you can also do stuff with third parties like Pinecone. N8N even has little bits of vector storage available within it. So we kind of help you figure out like where you are in that stack. And the other thing is like honestly Google Sheets can do a lot of this stuff, right? Like if you think about what is Airtable, Airtable is a nicer version of Google Sheets. Supabase is a nicer version of Airtable, a custom database. is a more complex and more flexible version of all of those things, right? So we kind of show you that hierarchy and allow you to pick and choose. Clients sometimes will say, I have to be in the Microsoft ecosystem, so we'll use Copilot and we'll use Power Automate in those situations. So we kind of have like a little bit of a choose your own adventure or decision tree available to our consulting students to help them with that. But I think the biggest factor is really How techie do you want to get? And, you know, as we talked about, the threshold is not the same as it was 5 years ago for being able to build stuff that works for clients. And I think that's why you're seeing, you know, so much interest and opportunity in this space, because there's a bunch of people who don't have the time, energy, or inclination to do this for themselves. And those people simultaneously see how valuable it could be for them, which is where the— Transaction of, you know, $5,000 or $10,000, it just makes perfect sense, right? Why would I go do this learning curve to figure this out when I can pay $5,000 and get $25,000 worth of value out of it pretty much instantly? And that's something that we see clients saying during proposal processes, and the consultants are always blown away because they ask the same question: why can't this person just do— if I can do this, anybody can do this, right? Like, that's kind of their Right. You know, initial thought. And while that may be technically or theoretically true, it doesn't factor in the limitation of having 24 hours in the day, having opportunity cost in putting your, you know, time as an owner or a CEO into learning these tools as opposed to hiring somebody. So there is opportunity there because there is a significant space where the learning curve and opportunity cost make it worth it for other people to pay you as an AI enthusiast to learn this and do it over and over again.

I'm wondering how you teach them to get clients. We, through Bootstrap Giants, we've helped agencies, and I don't think we have any agency that will build on tools that you just mentioned. I don't think we have even one. But even though they're selling higher-end AI services at times, or higher-end services, the simple way to get the first clients is to look for people within their network who fit their ICP, have a discussion about this new business idea they have. Usually it's an existing business, but still get some feedback on it. Often that turns into customers. If it doesn't, you can come back a month later and say, this thing that you gave me feedback on, I've now improved based on what you've said. I think it might be a good fit for your company. Can I pitch you? And then once they exhaust their direct connections, they go to second-degree and they ask for introductions and they have a similar type of conversation. That is a— that's, that's a model that existed for years. What is it that you're doing in this space that opens doors and starts conversations?

I think that the model of meeting people and building trust and what I call go out and make friends when I explain it to people, basically, Still works, right? I don't think that AI changes that dramatically. And I would also add that to some degree, the existence of what I would describe as like AI auto-spammers for lead generation actually makes building a human connection in an authentic way even more valuable and actually more of a differentiator for you. And what we will do is we will actually, you know, start folks out, as you mentioned, with the warm network. Right, have them pitch something that is pretty much like an easy yes for a lot of people. Like, hey, can we do a training? It'll be discounted, you know, it'll be a couple hours.

Are they, are they starting to niche down right from the beginning and saying, look, I have a lot of friends who are in real estate, I'm going to just tap the real estate people, and that's my first group, and I'll do training for them. And then once I do training for them, they'll see some opportunities, and then they'll hire me to do more. Is that the approach?

It can be. We also like to allow them to be broad early on because that makes it a little bit easier to go out and kind of get the jitters out of doing your first few pitches, right? But we do like to have them niche down when they start to do direct outreach because it helps present your— it helps to present yourself as somebody who is specialized in at least a couple of industries, right? Rather than just saying—

Mm-hmm.

Hey, I'm the everyman for AI. You might say, hey, I'm the, you know, Florida real estate AI person, right? In, you know, a slightly more verbose way, of course. But that's basically the idea.

They first start off by going after a broad collection of their direct relationships, who they think they could help, and then they start to narrow when they go beyond their direct relationships.

For most students, that works well because it allows you to get some testimonials, some experience with the closer relationships. But then of course, word of mouth only gets you so far, right? So you need some sort of outreach system to help yourself not only get focused and niche down a little bit, but also bring in the volume that is required for you to have 10 or 20, you know, big clients per year, which is what, you know, eventually becomes the that, you know, 6-figure or multi-6-figure solo or small consulting business.

What are some of the projects that they get started with that light people up as clients? And then what's the ongoing relationship there?

Yeah, great question. So I'll answer the ongoing relationship part first, because that's something we really focus on is, you know, we want clients to be clients for life. And one of the things that I'll teach students is if this person's gonna pay you once, like, it almost isn't even worth taking the money from them, because you wanna go out and find people who are gonna be doing 4 or 5 or 10 projects with you over the course of, you know, that multi-year experience with that client. And there is a consulting guru from back in the day who's a generation or two older than me who says, think of the 4th sale first, right? And that's something that we really try to teach and internalize within the program when we're helping students, you know, start to hone down like, who are my ideal clients? Who are the people who are gonna make that, you know, build that long-term relationship with me? So the ideal is, you know, we work our way up the ladder, we eventually get into retainer or, you know, sort of fractional services that we would provide to a subset of those clients who, sort of go all the way with us. And then a lot of students are surprised at how fun and profitable it is to start out with trainings. A lot of students will start out with things like doing an audit or doing a governance policy project for a client. All those things that I just mentioned don't require you to touch code or Automator tools at all, really, but bring you a lot of opportunity and bring the client a lot of value because again, you're doing all this legwork for them, right? Even if you're sitting down and you're doing focus groups for— with their staff, like, that's something that now their team doesn't have to worry about and doesn't have to do, right? So we're seeing clients across the spectrum from, you know, a 5-person company all the way up to Fortune 500 companies bring our students in for trainings, bring our students in for strategy, and then eventually have them do builds or have them partner up with an internal IT or engineering team to strategize about what they're going to build. And, you know, I mean, it's in some ways, you know, as you kind of alluded to, like, it's hard to believe how much demand there is, and how much demand there is at the early stages of this, right? And I know you've kind of expressed a little bit of that disbelief a couple times, but like, Yeah. It's crazy and it's real at the same time. And I think it just speaks to how much of a disruption AI is and also how early we are in the adoption cycle right now, even though we've been immersed in it for 3 years now. The world at large is very much still in early adopter mode.

One of the agencies that worked with us happens to do AI. I contacted the the owner, and I said, tell me about the space. What are you doing? Because he learned our technique for getting customers. And he says, Andrew, this— what we do is we do exactly the kind of training that you just talked about. And then he— I said, then what? You're teaching amateurs. Then what are you closing sales on? Isn't this like a high-end company that you've got? This is a company called StealthX.co. He's closing, I think, $80,000 deals, engagements after one of these types of how-to things. It is shocking that that's the way things start now.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it, what people are looking for is a trusted advisor. And by providing that training, you're up on a stage or you're giving a presentation. It is about something that effectively is magic, right? Like if you had, if you had transported to today from 3 years ago, you'd be like, what is going on? Like there are magical things happening inside my computer. My vacuum can see the world and move around. You know, the cars are driving themselves. Like, it's crazy. Like, we're accustomed to it now, but a lot has happened in the last 3 years. And I think that that's a big reason that, you know, those trainings are so exciting for the layperson and that they're leading to these larger contracts relatively quickly because a lot is changing and things are getting better and faster and cheaper all at the same time. And that is just a very unique Uh, moment in time for us right now.

Here's an example that I've seen. I talked to the founder of Cleverly yesterday. They do LinkedIn. I've never heard of them. You know, I, I never met 'em before. They do LinkedIn content and upgrade of your profile and all that. I said, how are you using AI? He goes, every time we sign on a new client, we have to upgrade their profile. You know, there are little things like the about needs to be better. There's a better photo, better this, a better that. He goes, we now have these agents that will do it all. We ask people questions on a form and then they, we go in and do it all. He says, One thing we can't get done is we can't get, you know, that top image on LinkedIn. He says we're still at a place where a human being needs to do that. So we have templates, a human being does that, but the rest is done with AI. That to me feels like magic because you're interacting with LinkedIn. Yeah. And you're creating custom information. What other stuff like that do you have that your client, that your students have been doing that feels like magic and also has ongoing support or ongoing buildup?

Yeah, great question. One of the really fun things that students are building are ways to go from voice notes into a finalized document. So for example, imagine that you are a plumber or a home repair services provider. You're going from site to site all day. You're busy. You're not a computer person. You don't want to— like a lot of these small contractors will say, I just give a pile of my notes to my wife at the end of the day and she types it up and we hope that it is all accurate and it gets sent out to the client.

Right.

Right. So, you know, they're trying to be lean. They're not techie. They don't want to become techie. What they can do now is talk into a recording and send that up to an automation, and it becomes a beautiful proposal in what appears like no work, right? Of course, there's a lot of AI planning and a lot of structure that goes into that. But as a consultant, you can say, imagine if you magically never had to write an estimate again. Or imagine if you magically never needed to do this 14-step tedious process, right? Nobody likes the tedious processes, but they were just, they were the best we could do until very recently, right? And in fact, I went through that exact LinkedIn process with the company I mentioned before AI. Yep. And I remember I'm like, we're in a Google Doc. Like it took like a week, you know? And it's like, I'm sure that's pretty much instantaneous now.

Yeah.

Which is awesome. But yeah, you know, people sometimes will, I mean, people often will complain and criticize about AI writing, but I think what those criticisms miss is that a lot of the writing that needs to get done for businesses to move forward is boring. And it doesn't really matter if it's like poetry or not. Like it just has to be correct and complete and there, right?

Yeah.

AI is great at that kind of stuff. It doesn't need to be a beautiful journalistic article or a beautiful novel, right? And when you see people who are great writers, they're like, well, this writing sucks. Well, yeah, but most writing sucks. And this is actually a lot better and faster and cheaper than the previous crappy writing. And even if it's not perfect, like, it's such a huge improvement, right? And it improves everybody's life who's producing documents and producing that type of content on a regular basis. And that is— A big part of the engine that makes businesses run. You got to put proposals together, you have to write reports, and to speed all that up simultaneously makes people's lives better because everybody hates doing that work. It frees up employee time to do more productive stuff. It often will reduce costs. It allows you to turn those estimates around faster and get more clients faster. So, you know, when somebody sees that as an outsider looking in, that's where they're like, oh my God, this is magic, right? Like, I can't believe this is happening. And I think that's a big factor.

Give me another example.

Yeah, let me think about our stack. I mean, chatbots are a good example. They are— I'm going to try to formulate it in a way that's kind of like fun and magical and useful. But the chatbot on the front end, customer-facing can definitely be annoying, right? Where we find that chatbots and RAG, which is essentially taking documents and putting them into a vector database so AI can read them, right? AI that can read your documents in a custom way is RAG. When you think about a chatbot and RAG, the value there is giving it to your internal team, right, at the company and saying, listen, You need to vet this stuff before it goes out to a customer. But guess what? You don't have to answer 98% of questions by typing anymore, right? The questions get answered and then you tweak it, you improve upon it, and then it can go out to the customer much faster. So somebody who's sitting there doing customer support or intake or scheduling all day, that again is taking all the tedium out of their work. allowing them to focus on being the personal face for that client or customer, but like, not doing kind of like the carpal tunnel-inducing work of typing out the same answers all day. So I think that—

When you do that, sorry, what do you plug into? Are you plugging into Zendesk for them? Are you plugging into something internal? It depends.

If they're using a tool like Zendesk, or, you know, one of the many sort of desk competitors to that, you can often plug directly into that via an API. Oftentimes, we will just teach people at the company how to have 2 tabs open and be doing it side by side. And it's still really valuable.

Like, copy the message in, paste it in there, and we'll give you a thing that automatically gets copied to your— to your computer.

Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, like, you don't even need it to be a super fancy automation, because the amount of time That's being saved even with the final copy step, and you want the human in the loop anyway to do that review, you're still saving such a huge amount of time that it's worth it for people. And a lot of times what we'll discover is that the data organization actually is a prerequisite, and clients will come in and they'll be like, I want this, but you guys need to even help me just organize my data first.

Right.

And that's not even an AI project. It's just a getting your stuff together project. Which again can be really valuable as a prerequisite to the AI stuff.

All right, what about this? So GatewayX has been now looking to acquire companies. They said, Andrew, do you want to sit in on this AI company because you're trying to figure this out? I go, sure. I sit in. The guy shows— I won't say what it is, but he shows a tool. And then Jesse says, but what happens if Google just takes this on and does it themselves? And as he was starting to answer, I should have let him answer. I'm curious what his answer would've been. I interrupted, unfortunately, and I said, you know, they do have it. I have this beta access. Google's doing the same thing your company does. And he goes, oh, I didn't see. Can you show me? I share my screen and I show him, and it's just painful because he's selling the company and that's going on. And so I wonder how much of this stuff is just temporary, because if your people can create this RAG setup that will allow them, their clients to answer customer service, then so can Zendesk and 20 other companies.

It's a great question. And I remember, you know, even, you know, when you would talk to a VC back in 2007, their first question is like, what if Google does your thing? I remember we were doing a lot of stuff, you know, for a company that I operated at the time around cloud storage. And this was like in the early days of S3. And like now, if you look at cloud storage, it's totally commodified, right? It's like basically all differentiators are wiped out and it's just like the big guys competing on price and a few different, you know, types of services. So, you know, needless to say, everything will trend towards more commoditization over time. I think what's frightening right now for a software founder is number one, Google can usurp you or OpenAI can do the thing that you're doing, right? And basically get 100% adoption and name recognition overnight, right? And then you're in trouble if you've, for example, built these— there's a million headshot generator tools that are out there right now. That was like a super cool business model, when things— when this stuff first came out, like in the early Midjourney, Stable Diffusion days. But you've already seen that get commoditized down to basically, you know, a rat race for better and worse, right? Consumers have more options and they're good, but it's not good for those business owners. So there's the big guys competing with you. That's problem A. Problem B is that anybody who's spent 24 working hours with Claude Code can also build a prototype of your thing pretty much over a weekend as one person, right? So you've got competition from the big players, but you've also got competition from the tiny do-it-yourself players.

Yeah.

Which are— you're kind of getting eaten from both ends of that spectrum, if you will. So I have stuff coming for founders in the next year that addresses that vibe coding challenge in particular. And I think a lot of it is leaner businesses and businesses that are more niched, as opposed to saying, hey, I'm the, you know, LinkedIn automator for everything, or I'm the calendar tool for everything. You know, niching down to an industry, which they call vertical SaaS, basically is a really nice approach that I think is more appropriate for the current space. The other thing is that consultants who are building bespoke projects for clients repeatedly are not exposed to those same challenges because by virtue of hiring a consultant, the client is essentially saying the Google Gemini built-in tool is not appropriate or sufficient for me. So I'm going to bring Andrew in. to help me figure out what I need, help me tailor it to my team, help me bring those customizations in, right? So, the way we look at it is somebody who's going to pay $20 a month for a tool and be happy with it, they're not going to hire the consultant for $5,000 or $10,000.

Right.

But there's a very large market of clients who are unhappy with the $20 offering and need help figuring out the next level up and the additional layers of customization and personalization and, you know, tailoring it to their exact needs. That's where that market is. So we discourage people from trying to compete with the SaaS tools because they are by their very nature cheap and good enough alternatives. But there's a significant group of clients who want more, and that's where the consultants come in with their more custom work and their strategy. Yeah.

Okay. Did I see in one of your past newsletters that you have 1,000 students who've gone through the program?

Yes. In our consulting program, we have a little bit over 1,000 students who have joined us since July of last year of 2024. So a little over a year. We also have a previous program called the Incubator, which is actually going to be re-released next year. We have another 700 or so students from various other programs that we've done in the past. So Our private student community has about 1,700 people in it who have joined one of our premium programs along the way.

And 2,000 people in the newsletter that I just mentioned. How are people finding you? Like your LinkedIn profile, I'm surprised to hear you say that you hired someone to do it. It is so sparse. I mean, I think the top image on top is something that you kind of got from some, I don't know where, from someone who wants you to promote their thing because it's got their hashtag, I guess, in it. And even when I was trying to understand your backstory, none of the companies in your experience section have any information. So if it's not coming in from LinkedIn posts, and I know you've done other posts, where are these 200,000 people finding you?

We really don't do a lot of social. We exist on LinkedIn, but that's really not my primary source. We do a lot of partnerships with AI newsletters and organizations that teach or share news about AI. We in the past have acquired newsletters and acquired small software companies that had email lists associated with them, which have been really great opportunities for growth for us.

I see.

And what we have now is about 200,000 email subscribers. And of those, we have the 2,000 students in our more premium programs, but those 200,000 free email subscribers get weekly news and analysis from us. And also, that's the only way to find out about when our programs open for enrollment. So that would be the path in, and also something that just gives you fun and value. And, you know, we try to make it different. We try to be a little bit edgier and take stronger opinions than just sort of like straight news, you know, type of like top 5 article stuff. So we find that that is fun for us and valuable for people. And of course, helps us find people who are really engaged and want to do more and build businesses.

All right. You know what? I should have started with this. Let's close with this. Can you give me an example of someone who went through your program who wasn't techie at all, what you taught them, and then what they were able to do and frankly even make financially from having gone from no AI to AI?

Yeah, great question. I have the perfect person. He's actually in our directory. So one of the things that we've listed, we've done in the last month is launched a public directory of certified graduates of our program. So if you want to go hire a consultant, you can look at that list. They all have their profile there. It's kind of like a super LinkedIn, you know, special for us. But there's one particular student who started out in what we call our producer persona, which is one of the personas where you have the most beginner tech skills. And over the course of about 9 months, we helped him go through that process of upskilling that I talked about, helped him figure out which tech stack he needs to use. He even like tried Claude and it built a Chrome extension for him, and then he was able to iterate on that. And of course we helped him with it along the way because we have the business team, the teaching team, but also software developers, right, who can help students with like actually the nuts and bolts of everything. And I will say he is a go-getter, right? He's like the kind of person who's like, oh gosh, this is so fun. I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna like learn this all night, basically. So he did a ton of upskilling, but just going through the materials that we provide to everybody in our program. He worked with a few small and mid-sized companies, and then he was one of the first people to score a gig. Through our directory, which was with a Fortune 500 company who flew him to New York and then is flying him out to the West Coast to do paid trainings. And those are in the, you know, $5,000 to $15,000 range in terms of the money he's taking in and getting paid for travel and big projects, pitching retainer projects for, you know, over $10,000 a year. Now, I'd say he is star student, right? So we of course don't guarantee those types of results in any particular timeframe, but that's the vision that I want people to have as they're coming in, to be able to say you can skill up, you can use the fact that you want to be a trusted advisor to these companies, right? Learn the stuff you need to learn, learn the business philosophy, build human connection. Right. It's not about, you know, just clicking the button and running the process repeatedly and then money starts spitting out. Right. Like, it is a real thing that you have to do and build, and there is real work associated with it. But we believe that it is fun work. It is well-paying work, and it is a really great alternative to a lot of the stuff that's out there. Yeah.

I'm sorry, but what the vision for him was that he's now getting flown out to one Fortune 500 company to do trainings for $15,000 roughly a year. What else has he done?

So he has many clients. That's one example, right?

So would you say more than 4 clients who are paying him to build AI? How many would you say?

Probably between 5 and 10 right now. And I would say the snowball is rolling down the hill.

Okay. And then what would you say that they pay on average?

I'd say his typical project is in the $3,000 to $10,000 range. for a fixed project fee. So, you know, he's starting to score enough that this is becoming—

Yeah.

A real business for him. We have other students who are more on the engineer side who are selling like $80,000 engineering projects, but I hesitate to use them as an example because they had a lot of preexisting tech skills coming in, right? So they don't fit that archetype of somebody who's relatively new to tech coming into this space. So, you know, the vision that I have for somebody who is an AI enthusiast is over the course of, you know, 6 months to 18 months, we want to help you build a 6-figure business in terms of the amount of revenue that you're bringing in, basically a one-person business or maybe a small number of partners. And a lot of that revenue is going to come from things like the training to strategy to custom build roadmap that we talked about. So it's not a foolproof system, as no business system is, right? Like, you have to do the work. People will have different luck finding clients. You know, we don't try to make it seem like it's automatic in any way. However, it is a real thing that is happening to dozens and dozens of people in our program. So we think that it is not just a viable path, but also a path that is enjoyable and allows people to build businesses that are fun and work for them. And it's very different than, I think, the Silicon Valley path, right? Like, it's much more oriented towards a really great thriving small business, right? You're not necessarily gonna go get venture capital or 100x these businesses, but they are You know, enjoyable and profitable and really good for folks who want to kind of get into that space.

I can totally see that. And I see the value now of it. And I can understand where this is more approachable for people. And I see the longer-term solution and the longer-term viability of this. All right. I'm with you. I'm curious to see if Jesse ends up hiring— would he hire you or is he gonna hire one of your graduates?

No, I sent him a list of our graduates that I recommended.

Oh, I see. I see it here, actually. You sent him specific people that he could work with.

Yeah, so, you know, when people email me personally, I try to curate it for them a little bit. And then if you wanna just go browse the list, innovatingwithai.com, there's a Find a Consultant button on there, and that's where you can join our free newsletter too. Yeah, and we're really pumped for it. We've, you know, we've got a pretty big audience, right? We've got the list of 200,000 email subscribers, so we promote the directory to that. when people get certified as graduates in there. And we're seeing a lot of people already coming in and asking students— there's a little form you could fill out to submit your project to a student, and it's working. So we know the demand is there, and we know that people are really enjoying it and also making money off of it. So I think that's a pretty big win and a fun combination. It's very different than what you kind of see if you scroll through the social media of like, here's the 27 ideas you need to learn or you're going to be behind. And it's just like, we really want to help people turn AI into something that is accessible, learnable, able to be applied to their own lives, and not scary. And I think what a lot of our students discover is they're like, wow, this isn't as scary as I thought it was going to be. I kind of watched a bunch of YouTube and I thought that I would never be able to compete. And they're like, but I can, and I can learn this stuff, and I can get clients and they will pay me. And they're pleasantly surprised, right? You know, and they echo a lot of things that you said during our chat today. So there's a lot of that pleasantly surprised type of reaction. And I think it is fun and it is something that prepares folks for the future. Which is kind of our underlying goal with the business in general.

All right. The website is Innovating with AI. And then I guess I should also tell people that if they want to hire your company, though you're trying not to compete with your people, you're doing more old school development. That's at hdc.net.

Thanks.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks so much.

Bye.