I Used AI To Build A Brand New Business

In this video, I'm going to use AI to build a completely new business. This video is actually sponsored by Shopify, which is perfect because Shopify now actually has AI features built in as well. Now, almost every single Friday, I do these Twitter spaces with a amazing group of other AI enthusiasts where we talk about the latest news, we answer questions, and we share insights into where we think the world of AI is going. Well, recently on the last handful of Twitter spaces, people have made comments about how I should have some shirts or some swag or some merch of some sort. So I figured that'd be a fun video to make. Let's build an online store and try to use AI for as much of the building process as possible. So to start, let's get some ideas from our old friend chatgpt. Now, I am putting one sort of constraint on myself for what I'm actually going to put into the store for this specific video. I'm going to avoid selling shirts. And there's one major reason I'm avoiding selling shirts in this specific store. And that reason is when I do sell shirts, I I want them to be the highest quality possible. Now, there are print on demand sites like Printful and Printify that do a pretty decent job of print on demand shirts. However, in my experience in the past, I've never been a huge fan of the quality of these print on demand shirts. So I am working with a company who's actually sourcing some really, really high quality shirts for me and I really want to wait until they're all set up to start selling those shirts in this store. Now, for the sake of this demonstration, I could just use Printful or Printify or of these print on demand services. That makes selling shirts really, really easy and that wouldn't be a bad idea. However, I don't want to essentially punish the people who buy the shirts the earliest, right? If you're watching this video and you go and order one of those shirts and a month from now I have much better, much higher quality shirts. The people that ordered the earliest and wanted to support this new store the quickest are the ones that end up with the worst quality product. So I'm going to avoid the shirt route. Plus, it puts some extra fun constraints on the process where we can use ChatG to get some other ideas while taking the most obvious idea out of the equation. I am building an online merch store for my brand. My YouTube channel is simply my name, Matt Wolf and my website is called Future Tools. Both the channel and the website focus on the latest news, advancements, tools and tutorials in the world of artificial intelligence. I need some ideas for merch that my audience would enjoy. I won't be selling shirts to start, so that isn't an option at the moment. What are some ideas for both the types of merch I can sell and the designs or text that could go on the merch? AI notebooks. Physical notebooks for jotting down IDE ideas, plans and thoughts. They can have interesting covers like neural network illustrations, a representation of AI tools or even AI themed jokes or quotes. Examples. I speak fluent Python, AI in progress or training my neural networks. Not bad. I can see solid AI notebooks. That's not too bad. Mugs. Mugs are very popular merchandise. You could have designs that are fun and related to AI phrases like caffeine and AI brewing ideas with AI or an image of a robot enjoying a cup of coffee. I like those ideas. You could sell posters featuring inspiring quotes about the future of AI. Not too sold on the posters. Stickers that can feature a range of things from simple logos to catchy AI related phrases or iconic AI images. Caps embroidered or printed with AI themed icons or phrases. The caps kind of fall into that same category as the T shirts where I want to make sure if I am selling something like hats, they are just that highest quality possible. So I think I'm going to skip out on caps until the company I'm working with to source some of the other clothing stuff is ready to go with that merch. Webcam covers. I didn't even know that was a thing that people buy. I mean, I know some webcams come with covers. I didn't know that was like an aftermarket thing that people did. Designs or text could be a mix of serious and playful, reflecting the innovative but approachable personality of your brand. Oh well, thank you. You could use AI related puns, famous quotes about AI or the future, or create your own catchphrases. So there's some decent ideas in here. I think I like the idea of AI notebooks, mugs, maybe mouse pads and maybe phone cases is. Let's open up a notepad here and start jotting down some of these ideas. There's also some decent slogans in here. So the AI notebooks I really like training my neural networks. That's a good one. Pop this into our notepad here for the mug. I really like this. Brewing ideas with AI. That's a good one. All right, so I'm going to feed ChatGPT some more context here. I'm going to Start with notebooks and mugs. What are some additional slogans or catchy AI puns that I can include? Keep calm and let AI handle it. I like that one. This one's kind of cool. Machine learning. Coffee in, code out. I really, really like this one. Artificial intelligence. Natural creativity that almost perfectly represents almost everything I stand for with the channel and what I do. The ideas are creative ideas, and then artificial intelligence brings them into reality. One thing that I say a lot on my YouTube videos is thanks for nerding out with me today. What are some potential slogans I can use around that? I feel like that's almost become one of my sort of unofficial catchphrases, so let's see what it comes up with. I like this one. Proud to be nerding out. Owning the fact that we're nerds when it comes to this stuff. All right, so I think we've got a good phrases here. Training my neural networks. Brewing ideas with AI. Keep calm and let the AI handle it. Machine learning. Coffee in, code out. Artificial intelligence. Natural creativity and proud to be nerding out. I'm going to go ahead and copy all of these. Feed this back into ChatGPT. These are my favorite slogans. What is some potential imagery that can complement each catchphrase? Training my neural networks. An illustration of a brain with circuits and nodes to represent a neural network brewing ideas with AI Coffee cup with an AI symbol or a robot brewing coffee. Keep calm and let the AI handle it. A classic Keep Calm style image, but with an AI or robot symbol at the top. Keep calm. Okay, so this sort of Keep Calm and Carry on logo, but maybe instead of this crown at the top, it's like a robot head or something. All right, so we've got some ideas here. Now I need a place to get these printed, and we also need to generate some potential images from it. So first of all, let's look at some potential printers so I can figure out exactly what I need in terms of text and images and. And stuff like that. Now, the two sites that I'm aware of are Printful and Printify. These are both print on demand providers that have a lot of options for things that you can sell. So we can get notebooks from them. Their Viral Notebook is $11.95. Hardcover bound notebook is $12.95. Personally, I prefer the look of the hardcover, so we'll probably go that direction. Ultimately, I think I'm going to go with Printful for a few different reasons. Number one, it's just one single manufacturer with Locations all over the world. So what you're going to get is very, very cons where Printify sort of sources different vendors all over the place. They are not themselves the actual printer. I did some research, and based on the research that I did, a lot of people seem to think that the quality that comes from what you get from Printful tends to be a little bit better than what you get out of Printify. So let's go ahead and sign up for a Printful account. All right, so I quickly created account. It took about 15 seconds. I just signed up with Google. So let's start with our notebooks. Let's search note. We'll do the hardcover bound notebook here. We have a few different color options. Let's start with the black. I think that looks real nice and clean there and create our product template. Okay, so here's our design page. I wanted to get to this page before I started actually creating anything with Mid Journey or anything like that, because I wanted to see exactly what I needed to create first. Okay, so we have a print area of 3 inches by 5 inches. So it's a little bit taller than it is wide. Let's look at our concept here. An illustration of a brain with circuits and nodes to represent a neural network. Copy that. We'll jump into Mid Journey here. I'm going to go imagine. I'm going to use that prompt. Let's just use that as a starting point. An illustration of a brain with circuits and nodes to represent a neural network. Let's just leave it at the default one to one aspect ratio because we're going to want room for text to go around it. And I'm going to do Style Raw because I just tend to think that that generates better images. These aren't actually too bad. I'm going to try it one more time. This time I'm going to do it black background just because we know the notebook's black. So we can make sure that it's going to look like decent. And here's what we got. This black and yellow one looks really good. I think it's going to be a bit difficult to remove the background on it. But let's go ahead and upscale number three here. I'm going to quickly use AI here to upscale it. I'm using Topaz Photo AI to do this. But there are plenty of free AI upscalers available on future tools as well. We can see the difference between the left and the right. When it's really zoomed in, it's really sort of cleaned up. The Edges. And then I'm going to use Adobe's free AI background remover here, and let's see if it can actually figure out how to remove the background on this image. And here's what it looks like with the background removed. Not half bad, actually. All right, so let's jump back over here. I could drop our image in, shrink it down a bit so everything fits. And then we need to add some text around it. Let's go ahead and use Printful's text editor. And our slogan was training my. Make it white here so you can actually read it. Add another text layer here and we'll put neural networks. This one white as well. Shrink it down so it actually fits. Let's see. Maybe it would all look better like this. Bring our image down. Bring our text down a little bit. That doesn't look too bad. Let's see if there's some better font choices here. So I found this font that I liked called Unica one. I mean, there's like hundreds of fonts in here, so it took me quite a while to skim through them. But I really like this Unica one. It's got a sort of digital look to it that I really like. Let's go ahead and save our product template here. I can actually view the template. This is what it'll look like. It actually shrunk it down a little bit more than I was expecting, but I actually think it looks even cleaner like that when it's shrunk down. Let's see. Let's download our mockups. Here's one mockup that it generated for us. Here's just a real basic mock up. And here's one sitting on a computer desk. Nice. All right, now let's make a coffee mug. Let's go mug it. Found the mug design maker here. So let's pick from these mugs. Let's go ahead and do a black glossy mug. Looks like I can have both size options, 11 ounces and 15 ounces. So it might as well give both options. Now, I know one of the mugs I'm going to do is just going to have the Future Tools logo on it, because that'll probably be the mug that I use. So if I ever drink coffee on camera, it's got the Future Tools logo nicely placed on it. But go ahead and drop that logo in, because that'll just be a real quick and easy one to make. Go ahead and generate the files here. We'll generate a few mockups, and here are the mockup images it generated that's obviously with the handle on the other side. Here's one on a desk. Another one without the background with the handle flipped. And then I believe this is the 15 ounce, the larger one. The mockups look pretty much the same on the larger one and the smaller one, just a bigger coffee mug. So now I've got my notebook and I've got my Future Tools mug. I want to add another mug but. But let's do another AI designed one here. Let's do Brewing ideas with AI. A robot brewing coffee, black background style raw. Got a few options here. Not really a fan of any of them. You know what, let's try something else. A vector logo image of a robot brewing coffee, black background. Let's see if we can get it to look something more like a, you know, a vector flat image. All right, I ran it again. I actually really like this one. I mean, the fingers are a little funky and his mug is. I don't know what's going on with the handle here, but it's so very representative of AI. I also like this one where it almost looks like there's steam, but it also could be like a mohawk on the robot. I'm not quite sure, but I think I really like this bottom left one. So let's go ahead and work with that one. I'm going to upscale it once again. I'm going to pull it into Topaz and upscale it even larger. This is basically going to enhance it by 3.4x. I'm going to use Adobe's background remover one more time. So it took that black background out there. Go ahead and download this version of it. Jump back over to Printful and let's bring our new image in. Going to shrin this one down a little bit because I want some room for text around it. We're going to use brewing ideas with AI Actually, I like this sort of round text here, so maybe we can use that. Let's see, we'll shrink this down a little bit. Let's bring this text in and we'll have it circle our robot a little bit. Going to bring it over just slightly so it fits on our mug. So our top one needs to say brewing ideas and our bottom one should say with AI. And then let's stretch this out a little bit and we can edit the arc here. So let's make it a little bit cleaner on the arc. Let's find a N orange in here. I think I like that. Yellowy, orangey. And then let's try some different fonts and See what we get. Once again, I'm back to this Unica one font. I really like it. And there's what I came up with. Our little robot with a coffee. And it says brewing ideas with AI. I'm gonna go ahead and save our product template here. Let's go to download mockups on this one. And here's our mock up. Got our little logo with the text only on one side. For this specific one, I might tweak the arc a little bit more to get it more dialed in, but. But looking pretty good. All right, so I got my first three products that I can add to my store. Now I do have some other ideas. I like this. Keep calm and let AI handle it. Machine learning. Coffee in, code out. That actually might be another good one to do a mug on. Artificial intelligence. Natural creativity. Proud to be nerding out. Those are some that I think might actually do better when I start making shirts and hats and things like that. So I'm gonna save some of those for later. But let's move on to actually building this store. And for this one, I'm gonna build the store with Shopify. Shopify is the sponsor of this video. And if you're not familiar with Shopify, they're a commerce platform that makes it easy for anyone to start selling. They recently added in an AI powered feature that will actually write your product sales copy for you. And since this channel is all about AI and using automation to make our lives more simple, Shopify is the perfect platform to build this new store on. If you go to shopify.com Matt Wolf, you can get started with a free trial and build your own store. So let's go ahead and start our own free trial. Now. It's asking for a store name and I'm not totally sure what to name it. So let's go to ChatGPT. What should I name my stor store? Yeah, let's go with the future store. We can edit the name here. Let's edit it to mreflow.myshopify.com that way if I change this store name, the URL still represents my brand. So let's go ahead and click Next and we get a nice little checklist to start building out our store. So browse product sourcing apps and look at that. Printful is one of the options. Let's go ahead and select that and let's add the app. All right, we'll install the app and just like that, we are now connected to Printful and Shopify. Let's go click on Our product templates. Over here we have our hardcover bound notebook. Let's go ahead and click add to store. It asks for some options. Let's go ahead and make black available. Let's make Navy available and we'll proceed to mockups. Go ahead and use our standard mockup. I like this mockup next to the keyboard here. And maybe let's use the blue mockup on the bed or whatever that was. So we've got a few mockups here. Let's click Continue for the title. Let's call it Training My Neural Networks Notebook. We'll go ahead and leave everything here as the default. And let's click Continue. So the price is 12.95. Let's set set the price to 20 bucks and click Submit to store. Now if I jump back over here to Shopify and I click on products, you can see my training My Neural Networks notebook is now in my store. Let's go ahead and click into this and check this out. They have this little generate text button where you can just add features of the product and it will write the description and you can choose a tone of voice like expert, custom, daring, playful, sophisticated, persuasive, supportive. Me, I'm probably gonna go playful. So check this out. If I copy all of this text here, come up to this little generate edits, I can click rephrase and let's change the tone of voice here. Playful. And then let's click try again. And it now says whether crafting a genius work of art or hatching an ingenious plan, this notebook will get your word slinging juices flowing. It comes with a hearty ultra hide cover dimensions weight. You'll find 80 cream colored pages plus an elastic closure and ribbon marker to keep your work safe. Better yet, a pocket inside is great for safeguarding. Stay cards and notes. No data left behind. Let's add some details about what's on the front. Text on the front says training My Neural Networks with an image of a brain and neural networks. This notebook is geared towards AI enthusiasts. Let's go ahead and give it that additional context here and tell it to try again. And now it should add that additional information into our AI generated text. Whether coding up a comet, teaching machines to think, or just doodling away, this notebook has it all instantly recognizable by its Training My Neural Networks cover and neural network image. It's perfect for those passionate about AI. This hardcover piece of art includes 80 cream colored pages, a built in elastic closure, plus a coordinating ribbon page marker with an expandable inner pocket, important notes and Business cards won't go astray. Get it today. I'd buy it. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and keep that new description that it just generated for me. Under product type, let's put notebook under tags. Let's also add notebook and let's click save. Now if we preview it here, would you look at that. I mean the store is still pretty basic. I need to dial it in with some graphics. Graphics and things like that. But I got a product for sale now. Training my neural networks notebook. You can see a basic picture of the notebook, some alternate images of the notebook, my copy that Shopify's AI wrote for me. I can check it out in black or navy. I can either buy it now or add to cart. Now that was super easy. Let's go ahead and add our other two mugs real quick. If I jump back over to printful, let's add our brewing ideas with AI mug. Go ahead and pick our mock up here. And let's click continue Brewing ideas with AI mug. We'll add a mug tag here. Go ahead and click continue. Let's see, the cost is 9.95. So let's set the price to 15 bucks and submit it to the store. Do that one last time with our Future Tools mug add to store. Let's make our 15 ounce mug 15 bucks like the other one. Since this one's a buck cheaper, let's make our 11 ounce mug 14 bucks and we'll submit it to our store. All right, let's pop back over to our store here, look at our products and there you go. We got three products inside of our store now. I actually forgot to give a name to this one. So let's go into our black glossy mug here and let's change this to Future Tools logo mug. Let's select our entire text that it gave us here. Once again, let's go ahead and type rephrase. Tone of voice, playful. And then down at the bottom I'm going to add a little bit more details. This mug contains the logo for the Future Tools website. We'll click try again to get it to generate a new one with this additional context in it. This cupboard essential is a sturdy, sleek must have for your morning coffee or afternoon tea. It's got the Future Tools logo front and center so you can show the world your unique style. Then it's got the measurements, glossy finish, microwave and dishwasher safe. Oh, and don't forget it's made just for you. When you place an order, reduce overproduction while you Enjoy your one of a kind mug. So we'll go ahead and keep that because the AIs write and copy better than I can write it. And then under product type let's do mug and let's go ahead and click save. We've got one more product in our store here. The brewing ideas with AI Mug product type. I'm going to go ahead and select Mug. Let's go ahead and come up to our generate text button. Click, rephrase. I want my normal playful tone of voice. And then let's add some additional context. This mug has an image of a robot brewing coffee and has text that says brewing ideas with AI. Go ahead and try again. Let it generate some new text for this one. This cool coffee companion. Sturdy and sleek, ready for your morning joe or afternoon cuppa. You know what, I'm not a huge fan of the way it wrote this one so let's go ahead and and give it another spin. This one of a kind cupboard staple is sturdy, smooth and great for perking up your morning coffee or evening tea. Dimensions. Microwave and dishwasher friendly. Created just for you the moment you place the order. Thank you for being an eco conscious consumer by opting for products made on demand. This mug has a robotic brewer with brewing ideas with AI written on it. No coffee making robot required. I like that one. Go ahead and keep it. Preview our storefront here. And there you go. That's what it looks like. There's our mock up. You can order it for 15 bucks. Here we click on our catalog. Here you can see all of the products that are currently available. Our training, my neural networks notebook, our future tools logo mug and our brewing ideas with AI mug. Let's jump over to Shopify real quick, come back to our homepage and let's finish filling out these steps real quick. Let's customize our theme. Let's change out this banner image. Let's go ahead and generate an image with AI. A colorful store front desk with a robot for a store clerk. Aspect ratio 3, 2 just because if you look on Shopify right here it says for best results use an image with a 3, 2 aspect ratio. So let's just follow their instructions. Here's some of the options options it gave us. I think I'm going to roll with this bottom right one here. This is probably the type of thing I'll swap out every once in a while and just constantly have different images up in there. Go ahead and drag it up here into our first image. I also think that this takes up way too much space above the fold. So let's go ahead and make our banner height small and let's change this text real quick to welcome to the Future Store. We'll go ahead and save our page and let's go ahead and join the Shopify basic plan because it's only $1 for for three months to get going. So ideally, when the normal 29 bucks a month starts to kick in, you're already generating sales through your store. So let's go ahead and sign up now. I've got a couple quick things that I need to set up that I'm just going to kind of run through real quick. For example, setting up how I actually get paid if somebody orders through my store. So I'm just going to do some of that stuff real quick and. And there we go. I finished setting it up. It took two or three minutes and I can now start accepting payments. So let's take a peek at my store. MrEflow.myShopify.com the Future Store. I got my robot welcome to the Future Store. And I've got my VAR products for sale. So if I want to order Brewing with AI mug, here it is. I can add it to my cart, go back to my home. I want this notebook. Go ahead and add that to cart like checkout. And I've got various options to pay right now and people can start buying these items right now. Now I am going to further dial in and optimize this website, this store over time because I am going to add shirts and hats and other cool stuff like that as I work closer with this new company that's going to help me source shirts and things like that. But I mean, using the power of AI, I use ChatGPT for ideas for the products. I use ChatGPT ideas for the slogans. I used ChatGPT for ideas for the images. I then used Midjourney to generate the images that are being sold on these various items. I used Topaz AI to upscale them to make sure that the quality was going to be high on the products. I used Adobe's AI background remover to remove the background. I used Printful to quickly bring all the pieces together and actually put these images and text onto the merch itself. And then I built the whole store with Shopify using their AI to write write the product descriptions. And I did the whole process in less than an hour. And I have a whole new online business that I can start generating revenue with. And that's the true power that AI brings to the table. Anybody can go and Create a business really, really quickly now online. Even if you don't have an idea yet, you can use these various AI tools to help you get these ideas and then these various platforms like Printful and Shopify to get these ideas to life. Life in a matter of minutes. So I'm super excited to have a brand new business worked into my existing business that took me practically no time at all to build. I'm excited to further optimize it and add more products and start building a brand that the AI community can get behind with me. And literally anybody can do this kind of stuff. AI is making it easy for everyone. So hopefully you found this tutorial helpful. I love to see some of the new stores that you go set up. I'd love to see some of the new product ideas that AI helps you generate. Rate. If you want to check out my new store, at the moment it's set up@mreflow.myshopify.com all of these products are legitimately available to purchase right now, with more products coming soon. If you enjoyed this tutorial and you want to see more tutorials like it in the future around AI, or if you want to keep in the loop with the latest AI news, make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure more videos like this keep on showing up in your YouTube feed. And once again, thank you so much to Shopify for sponsoring this video. They're truly allowing me to go deeper and deeper down this AI rabbit hole and spend all of my time researching and providing better and better content. So I really, really appreciate Shopify for supporting me in that effort and I really appreciate you for tuning into these videos and continuing to come back for more. So thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you. See you guys in the next video. Bye.

Sam.