Joe Apfelbaum built his company to Inc. 500 #178 through self-education, not formal schooling. He tested an online course idea with a Facebook post that got 50 interested buyers before he even built it. His pitch: a connections dashboard with AI that researches your network to generate $100,000 annual profit.
Formal education will make you a living, but self-education will make you a fortune. You can only grow your business as much as you grow yourself. Mm-hmm. And so I started doing a lot of skill development. After a while, my business got to the Inc. 500. We were number 178. We were doing millions of dollars in revenue. When I wanted to start creating courses, I posted a thing on Facebook and I said, who's interested in this? And then all of a sudden I had 50 people that said they were interested. Mm-hmm. And I messaged all of them a checkout page. I didn't even have the idea of what I was gonna teach. The ability to give people something called a connections dashboard to help them be able to figure out who they're connected to, and then use an AI agent to automatically research their connections away. Cool. That's really cool. Like, that's so much more valuable to people. I was like, oh, everyone generates content, okay? We don't need that. We need your systems and processes and strategies, which nobody has. And there's like 10,000 AI tools out there that lack strategy. Like, if I can give you a strategy to generate $100,000 in profit every single year, that's what people want. That's the most valuable part.
How to Beat the Algorithm: Remove Hidden Watermarks & Scale Content with evyAI
AEO & GEO: SEO's Future Explained! Master Answer & Generative Engines! #shorts
