How to Build a $10M Business with AI (Zero Employees)

AI just changed how you can get rich forever. And it's not just buy this tool or try this prompt or sell this AI course. That's kiddie pool stuff. I've built and scaled AI companies past $1 million in under 6 months through Martell Ventures, and I figured out the exact formula on how you can make a lot of fucking money with AI, starting with stop using AI like a toy. I get it. AI is fun. We sit there, we're like, look, a new website, boom, a new app. Boom, built a new dashboard. That's not work. That's just using it like a toy. Rich people put AI to real work, real tasks, real outputs, real fucking problems. Big stuff. AI is selling, it's delivering, it's running their business 24/7. It's not just making them feel good about using AI because it's like outputting things that are like neat to show their friends. It's actually doing work like the work you've been avoiding, but it makes you money. That's great work to do with AI. So how should you use AI? Give AI a real target. Before you buy a single tool, figure out where to point AI towards. AI makes all the problems no longer problems. So the problem to solve is figuring out what is the problem to solve. And there's always one problem that's way bigger and way more important than the rest, and that is called the bottleneck. So we gotta point the AI to where you can get the most leverage. That's why I always say buy back your time. The more time you get back, the more time you can do things that make you more money. It could reduce waste by having better reporting so you don't make mistakes. It could help you multiply your output. If you know there's a bottleneck around some kind of process that if you unblock it, you can increase your revenue, that is a great place to use AI. So before you go out there and upgrade your ChatGPT or Claude account to the $200 a month because you've been hearing me talk about Claude Code and you're like, I'm going to go Claude Code, first start by figuring out what bottleneck you got to go solve and then find the right AI solution to solve it. So for example, YourAtlas blew up after we featured them in a video and the founder Omar was flooding in calls and bookings and couldn't stay on top of it. So what did he do? He didn't go around and buy a bunch of AI tools to like solve this problem in his development or do this other thing in customer success. He looked at the problem, he figured out what the bottleneck was, and he realized that his own tool was the best tool to solve that bottleneck. So how do you find out where you are blocked in your business? The way I think about it is that every business runs on the same chain. First, you have attention. Do people know you exist? Then you have leads. Okay, they like what you got and they give you their contact info. Then there's sales, which is a conversation to purchase. Then they buy, so you have to deliver. And then finally, it's retention. Do they stick around? So now that you understand the chain, here's what you need to do. First, look at each stage of the flow. Second, we have to ask at every stage, if I 10x this tomorrow, would my revenue actually go up or would I create another bottleneck? Essentially, in theory, that if you have perfect business, so you got leads go in, you have really happy customers on the other side. But at some point as you're going through each stage, there's probably something that's going to stop the flow of the customer, the flow of revenue. For most businesses, they don't have enough attention or they don't have enough leads. Just start there. That's your bottleneck. Not enough leads means not enough sales means not enough cash collected means not enough money to invest in the business.. And the truth is, is you probably got opportunities and leads that are just falling through the crack. So where's the money leaking? And look, I built an AI Company OS playbook that goes through the whole process in way more detail. It guides you through the audits, the workflow templates, the AI tools I actually use in all my businesses. If you want it, just DM me @YouTubeOS on Instagram and I'll send it over. So let's say leads is your biggest bottleneck. You need more revenue. How do you get AI to solve that? Get AI to generate revenue for you. Starting with leads and sales. That's where the money enters every business. AI doesn't feel rejection for trying to close a deal. AI doesn't worry about emailing somebody and the person doesn't reply. Humans get burnt out on sales because they feel the rejection. AI doesn't care. The same effort from you built on the system, AI executes it, 10x the output. AI can do everything. It can generate leads, it can automate follow-up, and way more. And all you do is is close. And that's why in Martell Ventures we have tools like GetRevio and YourAtlas that we use real AI tools that automate the lead scoring, the qualifying, booking of calls, and way more. And if you combine those tools with Claude Manus, you have a whole sales engine where you just come in and close. So how do we get AI to help us find deals and sell? Think of these different levels. Number 1, you have prospecting. AI builds you a lead list. Use tools like Manus, Claude Code, or Apex to scrape socials and find new people every week based on your criteria. And I'll link all of these up in the in the description below so you can click them and go sign up for them if that's what you want to do. Next, qualifying. AI can filter out all the tire kickers. Yesterday I was having a conversation with one of my companies because they had a bunch of leads, 20,000 leads sitting there, and they're like, I don't want to talk to everybody. I want to talk to the best people that are ready for this product. So we analyzed their lead list, did some data enrichment using AI, and found the signals that told us that these people would be perfect for our product. Like I mentioned, there's tools like YourAtlas so they can call and qualify, Revio that does this in the social DMs. And what What you do is you give it 3 must-haves for each prospect. It asks those questions to make sure you don't get on the phone with tire kickers. Next, we've got pitching. AI writes hyper-personal, very specific messages to your buyers. In many of my companies, AI will look at past messages to the buyer, look at their current situation, what they're sharing on social media, and write wildly personal messages to each one of them specific to their situation, their industry, and even their stage in the buying process. Next, we have follow-up, and AI can literally run the whole sequence. If someone doesn't respond, he messages them, email trigger, automatically hyper-personalized. How do you do that? Using AI automation. And finally, upsells. At the end of the day, it is 7 times easier to get a current customer to buy more from you than get a person that doesn't know you to buy the first time. So using AI, you can analyze your customer base and figure out who's bumping up to usage, or maybe they're up for renewal, and actually tell you and craft a message and send it to them up. That's why we build another product called Latch, who does this auto-magically for us. And look, if you want to get nerdy and get into the specifics and the prompts and the setup, I actually did a whole video going in-depth on all the things that you need to learn how to use a tool called Manus to set this all up. If you want to go deep, I'll link it up at the end of this video. So now you've got AI doing the whole sales process, but once you sell, who's doing the delivery that AI just helped you sell? Here's the cool thing. AI delivers. Most businesses can actually deliver sales, can do really well, but then they drown in delivery and humans hit capacity. And the cool part is AI doesn't have a capacity problem. It literally can keep doing it. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't get upset, it doesn't talk back. It's happy all the time. It literally wakes up and is like, I just want to see you win. Help me help you win. AI can already do at least 80% of your work. I know. Ouch. How could it possibly do this? This hurt my feelings. I'm such a creative. It's very important that I'm involved. Let me show you how. So here's a perfect example. We have an internship program called Young Guns. They hired a bunch of people. They got bottlenecked at onboarding a bunch of young guns. So our default is use AI to solve the problem. So they went to it. It created a first draft of Zero to Hero in 14 Days to teach them how to use AI, but it wasn't perfect. So they massaged it and then they implemented it. And all of a sudden the bottleneck was no longer bottleneck and it got the young guns ready to hit the ground running. To act like seasoned pros, even though they didn't have the life experience to be ready yet because they were using AI. And that all comes because we continuously train them to default to AI every time. Don't do anything without first consulting AI because I guarantee it's probably going to give you a good first draft that you wouldn't know because you don't have the life experience. Now, if you are somebody that has the talent, the knowledge, you're an artist, the deep domain experience, I'm going to show you a way to get out of it, but still feel like you have a fingerprint on the creative process. So the first 10% is what I call the ideation. This is where you open up a chat and you start talking to it about different ideas and opportunities to just even get your bearings straight. What are you trying to accomplish? What are some concepts? Work with it. You have expertise, you have ideas. Give it to the AI and have it come back with some other options. This is where you create the definition of done. What does done look like? The second part is the middle 80%. This is what's called execution. This is where the AI actually executes the plan, that 10% that you negotiated with it for it to actually help your customers onboard, support them, track them through the process, create a dashboard, create a whole automation, the whole thing. Let it figure out how and have it check its own work. That's a pro move, asking the AI to check in on itself to make sure it's moving towards the right direction based on the first 10%. The final 10%, this is integration. This is where I like to add my human touch. This is where I review the work. I add the personal calls, I add the strategic advice. I make sure that things work and feel and look the way I want them to look. In many ways, the AI is no different than a person that's helping you do the work. You just give it to the AI instead so you don't have to pay them and you don't have to wait. I mean, my favorite thing is waking up every morning to work done for me while I was sleeping. This is my favorite part. Is that 80% done by someone else or by AI is 100% freaking awesome. It's already giving you a bunch of time back. So now we've got AI selling, we have AI delivering, but there's one bottleneck left in your business, the most expensive one, and that's you. Now you want to replace yourself before AI does. This is the future that I see. There's only two scenarios: either you end up working and creating with AI, or you're going to wake up one day and you're going to be working for it. So whatever business you have today, if we don't learn how to use the AI to do the work for us, trust me, somebody's going to come in and they're going to build an AI and they're going to take your job. You're going to feel the same way the newspapers did back when the internet came. People aren't getting rich by doing more. They're getting rich by doing less. They're saying, hey, AI, you take that on. I'm going to take that time to go work on things that only I can do. A few months ago, I decided to shut down my whole company. For 2 days to do an AI hackathon where I put people into teams and encouraged them to build tools that would replace their work. And what happened is at the end of those 2 days, everybody came back 10 times more productive. They built the tooling to replace their work that they didn't want to do in the first place, following the 10/80/10 rule. And now using Claude Code CLI at the command line is now mandatory for everybody. Scaling your business is making yourself less necessary every quarter. So you know you're doing this right as the business grows and you're less needed. Now, it'll feel guilty at first. Lean into it. Allow yourself to breathe for once and have the AI continue to support you in your work. So here's how we make this brain dead simple. I have a process called the Camcorder Method that I designed originally to hand over things to team members, but today I use the same process, but I hand it over to my AI because it's doing the work. So the first thing we have to do is record ourselves doing the task. My favorite way is just get on a Zoom session by yourself, share your screen, record it while you're talking. You record the screen. See, the AI can actually take snapshots of what you're looking at so it can build context. And while you're talking, it's taking the transcript so it knows exactly how you're thinking. The whole idea is you want everything recorded or documented in every shape or form. 2, make sure there is a transcription. So most tools are doing this today. If not, guess what? The AI can do it for you. 3rd is Feed that transcription, that recording into the AI. It now has the full context to actually repeat and execute the task that you just talked about. And finally, iterate and refine until AI can do 80% of it. You'd be surprised how many very complicated steps that AI can do, especially with these multimodals where you can feed it video and images and text. Eventually it can find the pattern in your process and teach you how to do it even better. But get AI to do that middle 80%. I would suggest doing it at least 3 meaningful times to give it to the AI to see if it can figure out how you do what you do. Do this with every task until everything is replaced. I'm talking finance, I'm talking follow-up, I'm talking hiring, I'm talking all the business stuff, the bottlenecks that would make you more money if they were solved. You need to be replacing yourself. The window is open, but it's going to shut down in 18 months. It won't be there. So the people who move first won't compete with the rest. They'll literally lap them. You don't have to be an expert at any stage. You just need to be first. Right now it's time to take action and not overthink it. The best skill you can learn is how to unlearn the beliefs and relearn how to activate the AI. I know AI is cool and there's parts of the business that you wish somebody else would take care of, but there's a fear because if it's doing that and you don't know how it's doing that, then maybe it's going to do it wrong. I would rather you try and have moments where you might have to get involved and fix something to not even try at all. If we don't create bigger problems, we'll never live a bigger life. How about we go out there and say, nah, let's try. Let's figure out what breaks. Let's use AI. Let's be a little crazy in how we think about it. What if it could literally edit a video here? What if it could do a whole sales call for you? Yesterday I'm talking to one of my founders and he's telling me how he has his whole sales process automated selling $700 a month subscriptions where he has a whole team that's still taking calls and now he has an AI doing the same calls and eventually the AI is going to do it better than the team and then he's going to flip-flop them and redeploy those people on separate things. That is a now thing. So either you're like my founder who did it to himself or somebody else is going to come into your market and just take all of your customers. So let me know in the comments below, what is the first task you're gonna go and apply AI to that you haven't done yet, that you've been putting off, that you're like, no, I'm committed to this, I wanna do that. Comment below and let me know. And remember, if you want my internal AI company OS playbook, just DM me @YouTubeOS on Instagram and I'll send it right over. And as promised, here's a video that'll teach you how to get AI to take over your whole sales pipeline.