How to Start a 1-Person AI Business (With Zero Code)

I've been in business for 28 years. I've built a portfolio of AI companies that generates millions every freaking year, launching a new one every month. But if I had to start over from scratch today, these are the exact seven steps I would follow to start an AI business this year, even if I didn't have any money or coding skills. So let's start with the first step. Number one, find a painful problem. We have to start with the pain, not the idea. People fall in love with their product, their solution, their ideas. When the market is the decider. If you don't find somebody that goes out when you push on that bruise, then they're not going to want to spend money to solve the problem. See, most people get stuck in selling things that are nice to have, not must haves. Things that are considered vitamins, not painkillers. If you can find real pain, you can make a lot of money. When I think about it, people only pay for a handful of things for first, they pay to make more money, they pay to save time, they pay to save money because it makes more money, or they pay to look good. That's status. Find a pain that delivers on one of those promises, and now you get the beginnings of what could become a good business. So here's how to find a pain to solve with your AI business. First, we have to learn to build the muscle of finding opportunities. I call this your frustration list. Most people don't realize that there's problems all around the world that need solving. But. But you might see something and just dismiss it. You just have to build that muscle. I can't walk around this world and not see a thousand businesses every day. Cause I've built that muscle. You probably have that. You've just diminished it. You think it's not a big deal, but that's where the real genius comes in. When you can find those slight tweaks and just go, why is that done that way? That's where innovation comes from. So look at the world as a series of problems to solve, and your expertise in the thing you know best is the first place you should look. We have to start calling people in that niche that might have that pain and ask them about their frustration around it. Now let's say you've had that conversation and repeatedly found 10 people in a row that have expressed that pain. That's when you start shaping the potential solution for it. Here's how that conversation sounds. You call up the phone, you say, well, I've been talking to a lot of people just like you what they've told me is this, this and this. Does that resonate with you when they go, yeah, get excited because all of a sudden you're like, okay, this isn't a vitamin anymore. This is a real painkiller opportunity. And now your whole thing is to help them shape your ideas on how you would solve the problem. It comes down to helping them find opportunities to save time, make more money, reduce errors, something in their life that is creating friction or pain or challenges. That's what you want to validate the last step, the most important is you want to pair the problem with a growing market that could be picking an industry that's growing 20% per year and pair the solution with AI. When you start with the idea of how do I solve that specific problem using AI, that's what makes this video way different than anybody else. Teaching you how to just start a business because the innovation is validate the pain. Then come up with the idea around AI. First, solving of the pain. Most products out there, they work for a customer today and they added AI as a secondary thing. You want to start with the first principle of using AI to solve the problem. And that's what's going to make your product way different. Remember this, if you solve rich people problems, they will pay you easier and faster. So find customers that actually have money to pay to solve the problem with that, now you have their pain. But if you want to start a really successful AI business, it's time to actually address it. Step number two, solve the problem manually. I know this sounds boring. I don't want to do a manual work, Dan. I want to automate it and use code and AI and all that fun whiz bang stuff. I get it. But guess what? You don't learn fast that way. The best way to start any business is to start with a hands on approach. Get paid to learn the whole process. That's why every technology company out there that you use, like Shopify and FreshBooks and Basecamp and all these companies started first by doing the work manually and then built the tool to automate the workflow. If you just start with a manual approach, that'll get you talking to customers, that'll get you in the flow of the transaction and it'll give you the financing. More on that in a second to actually build the product. Don't start by building a bunch of features. Start with the workflow and get paid to build it. Like when I look at one of my companies in my portfolio, precision talking to the founder Matt and watching how he deployed the solution early. He found a bunch of customers that paid them to solve the problem, helping them understand their data and understanding the specific tactics they needed to change in the business to improve the numbers. Using those conversations guided the product roadmap. And, and then when he launched the product, the product was dialed in because he had those conversations. He had those early customers and they were paying. If you want to find a beautiful way to waste your time, find a bunch of people that aren't paying you and have them tell you how to run your business. But how do you do this? It's super simple. All you need to do first is draft a one page done for you. Type offer, that's what I call it. But in that one page document it talks about the problem pre validated through the phone calls. It talks about the outcome, what's the impact to their business. It talks about the timeline, how you're going to deliver that and it has the price or I like to call it the investment. If you keep it simple, the person should read that and go, wow, that would absolutely solve my problem. That makes so much sense. I love the outline of the timeline and the investment is actually really reasonable. For example, one of our portfolio companies, YourAtlas.com essentially allows you to replace a person on your team answering calls, using AI and then book sales meetings. It's kind of awesome. So the done free offer would sound something simple like this. Replace a full time receptionist, end missed opportunities and turn every ad click into a booked call with your atlas in 30 days for just 2,500amonth. Do you notice that it had those four elements? All you have to do is take the pain and those conversations you pre validated and create a simple offer that uses those four key components. And look, if you want my exact offer template that I've used to close millions of dollars every month in my companies, I'm giving it away for free. It's yours. To help you make money fast without any friction. It takes this structure and expands on it and you can just swap out what you just created in that document and start using it after you do a sales call or on the sales calls to really get clear on how you can help add value to a potential customer. So just click the link in the description below and download your copy or the QR code on the screen. It's my gift to you absolutely free. I hope it makes you a lot of money. Now you figured out the solution to their problem, you even have an offer. But for a really successful AI business, you need to actually build something, just don't get too fancy. Step number three, build a clickable prototype. The word is prototype, prototype, prototype, prototype. I had a friend not too long ago approach me for advice and I told him to do it completely different. But he decided to go and invest what initially was 600,000 to build the product turned into $2 million and three years later the product never launched and the whole thing went to zero. Why? Because he overbuilt and they didn't understand that the real validation comes from talking to customers, working with them to build the thing, not just paying somebody to build something. So instead of spending 50k developing the full tool, use that time to build a simple clickable prototype. Here's how you can do this exactly step by step. First we create the flow on paper. I pull out my iPad and I take my pen and I just draw the workflow of what I've already talked with the customer that that they want to improve. How is AI going to improve their life? Well, we got to design the flow. See if you don't take the time to figure out how it's going to work, then even if you found somebody to build it, they're going to not know how to build it and you're going to waste a bunch of money. What I mean by flow is exactly each step or screen of how the experience is going to look for a user. Now you don't have to go into the whole signup flow, but once they've created an account, they're in the product. How is that product going to be shown to the user and in a way that solves their problem. Here's a tip. AI going forward, most of the interface is going to be phone driven or voice driven. No interface. The days of having a front end app that people enter information are going away. People want click, click, value, automate the process. So your flow might be they call a phone number, they tell them what they want to order. Magically the order shows up the second we have to make a fast clickable prototype. The cool part in today's world, back in my day I had to sit there and build all this stuff. I actually used to create these prototypes in PowerPoint and then Keynote. Today you've got these solutions like figma.com or uxPilot AI or visily AI that will take a prompt and create this all for you automagically. So if you skip this step, that's on you. But it's never been easier. And you can get many of these products to photorealistic prototypes that you can show to a user. And many of them will be like, oh, wow, this is really cool. They'll think it's working software. The third, once you've done that, you need to get in front of actual customers as soon as freaking possible. So what I want you to do is go back to those early customers. Now you have a product, you have a prototype. Show it to them, ask them if it's okay to record the call, have that conversation, show them the product, ask them would they use this? What do you think is most valuable? What would you recommend I change? My favorite thing is to just use my phone as the pitch deck. I think mobile apps is like the future of selling because I can be on a plane, meet somebody new. They go, what do you do? And I say, I'll just show you. And you show them. And then you give them the clickable prototype and they're like, oh, wow, this is really cool. You built this? And they're like, yep. But it doesn't work. It's just simulated. It can look so real that even I will think it's a real product. I remember I was down in LA hanging out my buddy Rob and he showed me this time app he built. He has this massive LED screen and he's showing me the product and he's clicking through and he's. And these features and it's going to do this and there's images and I'm like, whoa, all fake. Like there was nothing real. It was all simulated. Clickable prototype. In that moment, if he said, hey, do you want to invest? I would have said yes. If he said, hey, do you want to be a user? I would have said yes. Like, he had everything I needed, but he didn't have to spend a million dollars to build the thing I was looking at. So remember, prototype, not product. So now you have a prototype, great. But to build an AI business from scratch, you need to get cash before you go any further. Step number four, validate the prototype with cash. My rule is you haven't really started a business until you get paid. People ask me, like, dad, I want to start a business. How do I start a business? Very simple. Go find a stranger and convince them to buy something from you. Technology aside, AI aside, that can happen before you build anything. The truth is, most people will be super nice to you. They'll tell you, hey, man, that's a great idea. You should go build it. And you're like, awesome, I'm going to go build it. Like, yeah, I believe in you. And Then you come back in five months, six months, 100 grand later, all this time wasted, and you go, hey, built this thing. Do you want to be a customer? And they're like, oh, that's cool, but I'm sorry, I'm busy. You're like, you told me this was a good idea. No, no, it's a good idea. You should do it. But then why aren't you using it? Ah, you know, it just doesn't really work the way I would use it, so. But hey, congratulations. I'm telling you, until people pay, they ain't going to pay attention. And if they ain't paying, their feedback is invalidated. This step I'm about to share with you has cost more pain and cost more money for more entrepreneurs than any other problem that's ever existed in the AI space. For example, I was just recently in Dubai. Did you know that in Dubai, if you look at the real estate, this city has been built over the last 20 years and 70% of every sale happen what's called off plan, meaning before they ever started to build that development project, they sold the units and in that project to fund the development of those billion dollar buildings. So don't tell me you can't do this. It happens every day in consulting and big companies where they pay people to build internal tools. It happens in crowdfunding, where people support these big projects to buy a product that someday will get delivered. And it happens in Dubai selling off plan sales with models and clickable prototypes on pages to get people to pay to fund the build. Here's a fun fact. Every company I've ever launched, I've always pre sold before I ever built anything. Every company, every technology, every software, from Flowtown to Spheric to Clarity, I built the product. After I sold it, I needed to validate that there was real people willing to pay, willing to lean in, willing to invest before I was going to spend my time and energy. Because that wasn't the riskiest assumption. The riskiest assumption was, do they actually want it? So here's how you can do it in your AI business in just two steps. The first part is we want to launch an early adopter program. I call it an EAP. Sometimes I call it the founding 50. I've seen people call it like the advisory board. Essentially the idea is you go to potential customers and you tell them, hey, here's the problem that I see in the market, here's how I'm going to solve it. Here's the prototype and I'm looking for 10 maybe 50 early customers to come in to help support the investment that the build. These are the folks that are going to shape the product. They're going to get early access to innovation, they're going to get things their competitor doesn't have and you frame it that way so they get excited to be part of co creating a solution in the world. There's early adopters and there's laggards, there's people that like buy the latest and greatest iPhone and then people that are still on their flip phone. But you want to find a small group of people that prepay to finance the initial development and rollout of your AI software and learn how to present it in a way where they get excited to be part of it. The second part is create an offer and price it in a really intuitive way that makes the joining of that group so simple. So the way I do it, really simple math is offer an annual prepaid deal that is usually 50% off the retail price of the year for your software. So if you're going to charge $100 a month for your software, the annualized version of that would be 1200. You can charge 600 for those people to be part of of that early adopter program. And you might add extra stuff like oftentimes I'll add VIP onboarding implementation calls, the ability to influence the roadmap of my AI software. And that gets people connected to you, your mission, your vision. And I'm telling you, if you want to win in AI, you have to learn to persuade people to make decisions, to invest in you, to trust you. And by showing them that you've had the calls, you've learned about their industry, the market, and you've built a clickable prototype or offering this. Building your founding 50 early adopter program and having a clear offer will get them excited to make the commitment. Now with cash in hand, you can actually create the product. But we need to make sure you keep it simple. Step number five, build an mvp. Now we can talk about minimal viable product, but again, can I please, please, please warn you? Don't overbuild, don't over engineer, don't build for the someday maybe. The whole point is minimum. The whole point is not building every possible feature, but saying these are the three things that it's going to do for our customers and nail those three. You need to reduce the features to just the things that are going to get them excited and want them to pay. The cool thing about AI is that it doesn't take a lot to create a Massive amount of value for a business. When I look back at things like Facebook. Facebook started as a simple app for me in university to figure out what other classes my friends are taking. Amazon started with books. You don't need to be everything to everyone. If anything, it's a dangerous recipe for starting. You want to keep it simple, keep it small and get it built. For example, I have a product called Social Sweep. It's the coolest thing. It analyzes all my social networks and it adds AI inference and data enrichment and allows me to find anybody with any specific knowledge or works at a company or can help me across all my social platforms. And I remember when I launched it with Jade, my partner, he started getting requests from people that wanted to have like enterprise level features. And I said, jade, I love that they want that. They're excited about the product. The truth is, let's nail this use case for now. Just write them down, say, I appreciate it, I appreciate the feedback. And right now you can use the product as is to get a tremendous amount of value. But only in the future, when we decide to build it, will we circle back and let you know. The cool part is, is that you can then see if the customer is actually willing to use the product as is and get them to pay, or if they really have a need that needs to be built in the future so it validates it. And then when you launch it in the future, you might have 12, 15, 20 people that have asked for that feature and you can tell them individually that because of your feedback, we launch that feature and they're going to feel so invested in your product. It is like a product management hack. Here's the way I look at my lens. If it impacts 80% of customers, it's worth considering doing. If it doesn't, put it on a list. Now, if you want the easiest way to create your MVP without knowing anything about code, here's what you want to do. First, go to build with AI IO. It's actually called Brain Dumper. That's the product and I want you to give it your idea in plain English. And trust me, it can be messy, it could be disconnected. A great way is to think about all the conversations you've had. You look at the product and you can just walk through the clickable prototype you're talking about to Brain Dumper as you're looking at the prototype you've already built. So use plain English to explain the screens, explain the features into that product. Next, that product will actually recommend both the tools and the system prompts. The AI prompts that you need to create a mockup for your tool. That mock up is essentially the beginning pieces, the foundation that you're going to need for this next step. The last step, once you have that, just copy and paste the prompts it gives you into a tool like lovable.dev and click enter and watch it build your AI app in real time. Once you see this, it will blow your mind for what's possible. Most people have no idea that AI has gotten so good that you can talk to a tool that will help formalize the whole mock up. All the system prompts tell you which tools to go use, that you then go to the website, enter it in, hit enter, and it builds the AI business for you. A lot of people will tell you just to go to lovable right now and go build the app. The problem is is they get stuck in the technical implementation. Start with a clickable prototype and what's cool is that when you sell that, the customer is going to know that it's not real yet and they're going to get excited for the momentum because you get to come back maybe a few weeks later with a real product from a clickable prototype, which in their mind is unheard of. The truth is it's so easy to do and build these apps with AI that most people just overdo it and they really don't understand their customers pain. And with that, now you have your mvp. Isn't this freaking awesome? Not long ago you came here and you were like, how do I build a company now? You got the pieces, you got a customer that's paying, you got a product, but we're not done yet. Once that's live, you'll start getting feedback on what's working, what's not. And this is where you need to make the adjustments if you really want your AI business a soar. Step 6 Collect feedback from your customers. So my whole rule is watch what they do, do not listen to what they say. I know that sounds harsh, but I've been on the receiving end of so many customers that are using my product that say, hey, I've got this idea and I listen and then I go look at the logs, I look at the admin interface and I see that they've never logged into the product. Everybody has an opinion, everybody will tell you what you should do. I want to know what my best customers are doing. I want to figure out the people that kind of use the product, what I could tweak to make them fall in love with the product when you can take a customer that's like a little bit happy and make them a raving fan, that's when you build an AI business that takes off trying to circumvent that and just being a cheap development shop for anybody with an opinion, that is the fastest way for you to fail in your business. One time I was building this product called Timely, and we launched it. I think, like 10,000 people signed up and started using it. It was a simple scheduling tool for Twitter. It's like you connect your Twitter account, you schedule your tweets. We knew when your audience was most engaged, so we would schedule when the tweets went out so that you had the most impressions from the people following you. Pretty simple app. 10,000 people sign up. Not a lot of people use it. And I'm like, why are they not using it? And then I start calling people and they're like, I love the idea. I love this idea. I love. I know you love the idea you signed up, but why aren't you using it? And then I looked at the people that did use it, and they just kept saying the same thing. I don't know what to tweet. So it occurred to me that one of the best ways to fix the problem is to actually put some recommended tweets based on who they are and what could work really well. So that when they came in, they could just click add to queue, and then it would go out, and then they would get a response email. That little interface prompt, change activation. People that sign up for the product and actually tweeted to 70% on their first visit it. That's how we solve the customer feedback problem. Most people will tell you it's great, but their actions say something different. You need to talk to them. And that is a big idea when it comes to being an innovator in the AI space. But here's the challenge. To collect customer feedback and actually make it useful, you need a process. So here's how you can do it. Today, the first thing we have to do is we have to set up a weekly customer interview process. I love this. To me, it's the customer advisory Board. It's a handful of customers that you consider your ideal customer. And. And you want to talk to them. You might have 50 of them, you might have 10 of them. But every week you want to be talking to get feedback, to get familiar with their frustrations around using your product. Now you have to tell them, hey, I know you don't want to hurt my feelings, but I can't make the product better if you're not honest with me. So I would really appreciate if you could be really critical around how the product's working for you or not. Then you take all of that feedback and then you categorize it into the different buckets of essentially features within your product. Because you might know that like I've got a reporting feature, I have a messaging feature, I have an integration feature, but which one is the most important to actually nail to make the product your AI solution even better. So then we have to put the feedback into those buckets from different customers and then sequence the priorities based on what you know as the founder that's going to be the most valuable to the market. For example, if you know that there's not enough integrations, you might take all the feedback where people talked about the integrations to their systems and say, okay, we're going to spend the next two weeks fixing those. What are the first three we should focus on based on those buckets of feedback? So third, with that, you want to sequence the biggest challenges that most of your keyword paying customers are facing. When I think about it, it's an X, Y axis. The Y axis is how many people would use that feature and impacts in your product. And the X axis is how many people are paying right now or want to use that feature or the market would pay for, but they're not because you don't have it. What are the areas of the product that if I made better would impact the most people, meaning the most people are using it, that would also make my product the most competitive and valuable to the market, both my paying customers and from a marketing point of view, attractive to other people that haven't bought yet because we were missing things. You want to spend your dev time on the top right corner of things that have a lot of impact to your current customer and are going to make you the most money. If you're just fixing the squeaky wheel because somebody that you really like is giving you feedback and you're just spending time adding features, your product will start to turn into a Frankenstein solution. It's actually a plague and it's called featuritis. You don't want to build a product that's got a bunch of half cooked features that confuses. The interface is buggy and people don't even use that is the fastest way to run your AI company into the ground. Now here's a pro tip. Record all the calls using AI, obviously get permission, transcribe them, then ask AI to analyze Them based on the criteria I just gave you. You literally can say, and just prompt it based on Dan Martell's process for product management. Analyze the feedback and please prioritize it based on the best things that are going to have the impact and make me the most money within my AI company. Watch what it does. You don't have to be the smartest person. You can use AI to do this process for you. Now, by implementing that feedback, you're well on your way to build a massively successful AI business all from scratch, without any resources, without knowing how to code. But there's one last step that will make everything grow 10 times as fast. Number seven, hack your growth. The word growth hack has been hijacked by marketers to make their work sound fancy. They're essentially doing marketing and they're like, we're growth hacking. Here's rule number one of a growth hack. It's not a growth hack if everybody knows it. The whole point is to find a way to get distribution that other people don't know about. And that is what makes it a hack. If everybody knows about it and they're doing it, then that's called marketing. When Facebook launched as an example, they realized that if somebody got an email that said they've been tagged in a photo, almost 100% of the time, they click through that email to then go see the photo. If they weren't on Facebook and they got that email and they clicked through, they would then sign up to create a Facebook account to then show them the photo. So what they realize is they could buy a bunch of address book importing tools that essentially allows you to pull your contacts out of your emails or your address book tools to go sign up and use in other tools. If they bought those companies, they could use every one of those emails to send that email. And that's actually how they activated a lot of the countries around the world. In the first few years of Facebook's growth, Airbnb did the same thing. They built a custom tool that lived inside their product that allowed the people with listings on Airbnb to publish the listing on Craigslist. Craigslist was a free listing site for people looking to rent out their place. So Airbnb said, how do we take advantage of that audience? But we got to make it easier for customers that have listings on our tool to publish there. That gave them the foundation to growth hack their distribution. I'll make it really easy for you and I'll give you the three, three biggest growth hacks you can Use to grow your AI business today. The first one, it's one of my favorites, is distribution partners. That's essentially what I do for my portfolio at Martell Ventures. I partner with them, I invest in these companies, I build these companies because I have an audience. All of you guys are here watching my videos. Follow me on social media and if I use a tool and I tell you about it because you trust me, you'll go try it out. That's really valuable for a new AI company. So if you have a product and it's actually launched and it's got real revenue and you're looking for potentially partnering with me, just click the second link in the description below and apply at Martel Ventures. Think about this. You might have friends that already have access to a large audience of people that are your ideal customers. Think people that have events, people that run webinars, people that are online influencers, people that create content, people that write books. All these people have an audience and they sell what they sell as a service. And you might have an AI tool that complements them. And if you partner with them, they'll put you in front of their audience because you'll pay them. You'll give them 10, 15, 20% referral fees. But that makes your ability to grow so much faster. Next number two is non traditional sponsorship or placements. This one is one of my favorites. Finding niche YouTube channels that you can sponsor, podcasts that you can sponsor. See, everybody wants to do the big podcast, but there's so many smaller creators that you can just pay to just get in front of their audience. It's so much faster. One of my favorite growth hacks around this is finding a company that is non competitive to yours, that sells to the same customer and offer to do what's called a Pixel swap where you give them your Facebook Pixel, you put their Pixel on your website and essentially you now are a partner where you can run ads very targeted to that other person's website visitors because you know specifically that they would buy your product and it is the most effective ad spend you could actually do. So basically you can swap the ability to tag each other's visitors so that you can run ads to each other's visitors in your Facebook ads. Number three, insert into an existing toolkit. This one is like the ultimate. This is what I did at Flowtown where I partnered with mailchimp. So I got our product built into their tool. I've helped a lot of friends do this in their technologies where they build integrations or add ons to other bigger products. I mean when you think about it, you have like Zapier and Make and Notion and HubSpot and Slack and Grow high level. A lot of people have built tools, these AI powered solutions that plug into their marketplaces and they get featured on those sites to get a ton of customers. Those growth hacks are so straightforward and easy and allows you to build that momentum. So if you build an AI for Shopify, be sure you get place in their directory. Figure out how you can add value to their marketplace to Shopify so that they want to feature you. Maybe they're going to invite you to speak at their annual event. But that idea to build integrations is a big way to get audience for your new AI solutions. The whole philosophy is be creative and follow the path of the buyer. Simple example, my friend was selling HR apps in Asia. He was trying to find early adopters. I said, look at the email. People that are early adopters use technology that considers early adopters. Back in the day, this is in 2010, companies that were using Google Apps for domain, which became Google Apps for business, essentially were saying through their email using the Gmail protocol that they were early adopters. So all we did is we took their list of like a hundred thousand leads, looked at the domain data, okay, the DNS record to see if they use Google for their email exchange and then that way we could just filter out all the people that didn't because the ones that did were telling us that they were early adopters. Those are the people that are going to buy HR software, essentially leading into their sales team for xing their performance. Those three things individually will help you add 10x to your growth. You just gotta pick one and go all in. I know this is a lot, but let me tell you, if you just follow this step by step, this is how today, not tomorrow, not next week, not in a year, you finally launch that AI business. I'm telling you there's probably an 18 month, maybe 24 month, maybe 36 month window where if you come out of the gate today to build something really magical around AI and help businesses solve real pains, you can create a massive amount of wealth, like I'm talking generational wealth right now that's available to any person without any code, without any background in technology, because the AI's gotten that good, don't sleep on it, don't wait. Because if I was starting from scratch, this is exactly what I would do today. And again, if you want my offer template to make it next level, just click the link in the description below. Now, if you want to learn how to get rich in the new AI Era, click here and I'll see on the other side.