In this 20‑minute presentation, Nick Kugelman (Martell Ventures) explains how entrepreneurs can build fully automated, AI‑driven businesses without writing code. He frames the shift from "doer" to "director," treating AI agents as a junior team you direct. He walks through a five‑step system: (1) Attract – use Manus.ai to generate a warm lead list (e.g., 50 e‑commerce health brands) by prompting the tool to scrape social profiles, revenue estimates, and recent activity; (2) Convert – have the same AI draft personalized outreach emails or messages, track replies, and integrate with email‑automation tools like Instantly or SmartLead; (3) Deliver – let AI research a prospect (e.g., AG1), synthesize insights, create custom presentations or even publish them as a website, dramatically cutting weeks of work to minutes; (4) Automate – extend the workflow to handle scheduling, client feedback, content research, and other repetitive tasks, allowing a single person to run an organization; (5) Differentiate – despite full automation, success still hinges on human "taste, vision, and care" – the ability to judge quality, foresee future trends, and connect emotionally with clients. Throughout he emphasizes staying inside the AI tool, avoiding manual hand‑offs, and leveraging agentic workflows. He also offers a giveaway (subscribe, follow on Instagram, DM "giveaway") to meet his team and receive a custom AI system. The video includes links to all prompt templates in the description.
Chapters
ChatGPT is the kiddie pool of AI. While most people are chatting with AI, other people are running entire businesses without lifting a finger. And 99% of entrepreneurs have no idea this even exists. They're stuck manually doing work that AI could handle while they're on the beach. I'm talking leads, outreach, delivery, all of it. I launch a new AI company every single month in my venture studio, Martell Ventures, and I can tell you the only reason they scale is because I'm not the one doing the work anymore. AI is. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to get customers without even touching your keyboard. But before we go into all the steps, you need to understand the mindset shift that makes all this possible. It's called the director versus the doer. You are no longer the person who does the work. You're the person who directs the ship. The AI agents are your team, and your job is to tell them what to do, not do it yourself. Most people go to the AI, they chat with it, they take the response, they go somewhere else, they give it to somebody, the person replies, they take that, they go back in the AI and they're stuck in the middle. I want you to ask yourself, why am I leaving this tool? What am I doing with that information? Can I get the tool to do it for me? Stay in the tool. Don't leave it. Because if you do that, then you're building end-to-end automations, not being the person still stuck in the middle. The best way to think about it is treat your AI like a junior intern. Somebody that's smart, somebody that you like, somebody that can do a lot of things they can do, but you need to direct. So now let's get into actually how you do this. Step 1 is attract. We have to build the lead list while you sleep. AI can do everything that you've been doing. Just think about who your ideal buyer is and write down all the information, because here's what's crazy. AI can build all of that for you while you sleep. It can research, it can pull, it can gather the contact info, it can grab all their recent activities on social media. It can look for pain points that they've communicated to the world by looking at their profiles. Can you imagine Tomorrow morning you wake up to a warm lead list, people that are ready to buy, actually done the way you love. In the new world of AI, the skill that separates people is the ones that think in systems. System stands for save yourself time, energy, money, and stress. And that is what AI will do for you. I know what you're thinking. That sounds easier said than done. It's actually easier done than I've said. It'll take you less time to do it than the amount of time it's taken me to get you to this point in the video. So here's how you actually do it. Let's pretend I have a digital marketing agency and I help brands grow. I help them grow their online presence and I help them scale their revenue. Step 1, open Manus. Okay, it's Manus AI, but the URL is Manus.im. The reason I'm using Manus is because I've showed people that are 70 years old how to use the tool and they've started to automate their personal life. And it's the most approachable one to everybody. All my coaching clients, it's Manus. My team, Manus. For right now, it is the tool that will help you automate without you having to understand the technical sides of any of this automation. So we load up Manus AI. It should look familiar. It's how every AI tool works. So we fill in the prompt. Very simple. Find the 50 e-commerce brands in the health and wellness space active on Instagram and Facebook. That tells me they're early adopters or they're active. Who posts in the last 30 days, also qualifies them. Pull their company name, their website, their social media, their handles, recent topics, into a table. You can even add stuff like make some assumptions on what their revenues are based on what you find on LinkedIn. You can do a lot of stuff there, but I just wanna keep this simple and fast for all of you guys to get this result. So do this for your business. And the coolest part, to make this really simple for you, I'm gonna save all the system prompts, all the templates, everything I share with you below in the description so you can just copy and paste it for yourself. And then I hit enter. Step 2, It's going to open up a browser and automate the scraping of all the information that I need. This is things that most people pay interns for, agencies, or maybe you've been doing this for the last year and you no longer have to do it. It'll go and figure itself out. And if it gets stuck, guess what? It'll just ask you how to solve the problem. And you can notice it already found a website that lists the top 50 brands that I might want to sell to. It even asked me, do I want to do a wide research search so that I can make it faster and more accurate? In this step, Manus goes, hey, I've got this information. I can do this like massive research project, but it is going to cost some money. So it prompts you first so it doesn't go and just start charging your credit card. But because I just want the initial list, I don't need it to do that. But if I wanted to, it would literally spin up a bunch of different agents to accomplish this process to get it done faster. So it keeps doing the research, it finds all the information I asked for, and then it creates a table into a spreadsheet. Done. Automagically. I know you're like, How did it do that? It's AI. Stop pretending not to know. Now you've got a list full of leads, but here's where most people fail. They either don't reach out to those leads because they're like, I don't think the person will buy from me. They get inside their head or they send them some generic message, just copy and paste crap that they find on the internet. That's where this next step comes in. Step number 2, I call this convert. We want to personalize the outreach. So now that we've got all the research done, it's got the lead list, I can now ask it to write personalized outbound messages. I can do email, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever way you want. And then you can ask it to track to see if there's been a reply so that you can get engaged. It's kind of crazy because it'll monitor your inbox and notify you when someone is interested. I use this all the time. I even built a custom GPT to personalize outreach so that if I have people on my email list and I want to invite them to something, it writes a very short and personalized email based on their situation, what they've posted online. Now it gets reviewed, but then that way it takes 90% of the effort off of my plate or my assistant's plate. Which reminds me of a quote I love to share with people, which I believe broke people get good at doing tasks. They like get excited about doing, doing, doing, but rich people get good at avoiding them. I am lazy. I do not want to repeat something I've done before. I call it DRY, don't repeat yourself. And if I can use AI to automate stuff that isn't a human connection, I'm doing it. So here's how we actually do it in Manus. First, you got to take the lead list and then we add this prompt, which is act as an expert in sales and marketing, draft a personalized email to each brand on this list, reference their recent social media posts or campaign. And this is my intro. I help brands scale their online presence and increase revenue without burning ad budget. Ask if they'd be open to a 15-minute call. It wrote the email. I can open it up, I can edit it. It's in my spreadsheet. Notice that it personalized the subject line, the text. You can customize this if you're like, oh, I don't know if I like that response. Cool, tweak it. Play with it. Just track it so that you know what your response rates are. I've seen all kinds of emails work. This is just an example to get you started. And again, I have the fill-in-the-blank template below in the description. Even though Manas can send those emails from your inbox, it can't mass do this. So that's where you're going to maybe want to connect a tool like Instantly, SmartLead, or something similar so that it can do the marketing automation for you. And I'm honestly not surprised if Manas adds that feature in the near future. Now that it's written the emails and you've sent them out, you could say, every 24 hours, review my email for replies to these outreach emails. If anyone replies with interest, not just telling us to stop, send me a notification, a message on Slack. You've got a reply from a potential customer. The point here is that I want to show you that it can monitor your email and let you know. That's what's called end-to-end agentic workflows. The cool part is now you just wait. You go do other work, and eventually if you get a response, it'll tell you. Now, before we keep going, I've got something exciting to tell you. I want to meet you. Yes, you. I've never done this before, but I've been bugging my team and I said, look, I want to meet the people that follow me. So I want to fly you out to hang out with me and my team and we're going to tour the office. We'll go for a hike. You'll come with me in one of my supercars. We'll even personally customize a full Agentic AI system for your business. But there are some rules. Number 1, you got to be subscribed to this channel. 2, you gotta be following me on Instagram. And 3rd, DM me the word giveaway on Instagram. And I will be checking that you're subscribed and follow me, so don't cheat. We'll be closing submission 1 week from the time this video gets dropped. So don't sleep on this 'cause this could be you. I'm excited. So if you've been watching and you feel like you're a fan and you're like, this is the time, enter in. All right, back to the AI workflow. So now you got leads, you've got meetings booked 'cause people replied, Now the pressure's on. You need to actually deliver. But most people get stuck here because they're drowning in work that they don't have time to respond. But that's about to change. Step 3: Deliver. AI does the work. Yes, I know you're the genius. You are the person and you're the artist and you craft things. But AI can actually do a lot of the deliverables. It's not just about organizing files and creating the final product. It actually analyzes data. It can find the insights. It can build branded reports for you. You can create the prompts that generates the output that these people don't know how to do because you're the expert. You review it and then you send it. That's it. Even at Martell Media, a lot of the stuff we do is very artistic, but there's processes that is manual. So for example, taking a transcript of a training I've done and extracting all my insights. I'm talking quotes and contrarian takes and one-liners. So now I have Manus that monitors a folder and as things get saved there, it analyzes it, processes it, and then it saves it in Notion. That way my team can pull all the inputs there and put the outlines together so that I can just sit down, have a lot of fun, and I don't have to think too hard. Most people don't understand that automation is the biggest form of leverage, and the coolest part is they'll give you speed. And if you don't have speed, that's the tax you pay for not having the clarity you need. So let's have some fun. Let's say that I just heard back from AG1, the green powder company, and now we're gonna use Manus to do all the research to give it a specific proposal. So here's the prompt. Analyze AG1's online presence, review their website, Instagram, Facebook, and recent ad campaigns from the last 6 months. Months. Find recurring patterns and insights. Focus on engagement. What posts, ads, and content formats drove the most interactions? What message worked and what didn't? Put all insights into a table. You can see it starts doing the research. It pulls up their socials, the website, all within the app automatically. I didn't have to go out and find their Instagram and give it any information. We already did the research before, and now we're just saying, hey, let's double down. Now you can check out the full detailed analysis that would have taken any human weeks to put together. This is like 60 hours worth of work from the research to the leads to the personalized emails to now creating the proposal that you're going to send over to create some value in advance. When people say to me, it's like, I don't know how to make a business, I'm like, please stop. You can automate your whole business. You can ask AI how to start the business. You can ask AI how to create the business. You can ask AI how to generate everything. You can use AI to monetize. So now that's just the research. Now I want to make it presentable. So what do I do? Back into Manus. You can ask it, create a presentation report with these insights, go to their website, pull their branding, colors, logos, fonts, and replicate it in the presentation style. Make it look like it came from their team in terms of visual style. And now it starts creating a full presentation. It pretty much makes it look like something their team should have done, but you can get paid to do it and they're going to get excited because they feel like it's hyper-personalized. It's not some generic garbage, especially like when people use their own templates. It's like, why not customize it to the brand of the company you're talking to? And with AI, it can do it for you. It found the brand colors, it presented the information, it visualized it with the diagram, it created the overview of each slide. The best part is I can ask it to save it as a public link, and then I have a link I can email to them to make it really simple. Not a PDF they got to download. And they're like, holy cow, they built a custom website. With the presentation. So I have a presentation here, but I can turn it into a website by just asking Manus to publish it to a public URL. Now they've got a website with my presentation, which makes it look like the effort that I did to win their business is huge. Nobody's doing this. The people that are, are winning big time. Imagine you sell homes and you can personalize the proposal by asking the AI to go through their social media feed, pull pictures of their family, and merge the photos of the house that they asked you about with pictures of their family in the photos. Yes, it can do that. And then you send that to the potential buyer and they go, holy cow, the proposal is custom with photos from our family. They're going to tell everybody about you. They're going to be at dinner tonight telling their friends. They're going to be showing their coworkers. And this can all be done through AI with barely touching your keyboard. So now you've automated delivering fast and the clients are happy. But what happens when you actually want to grow? See, most people get stuck doing the same thing over and over again. And what you need to do instead is you got to stay ahead. And you do that by step 4: automate everything else you need to scale. You can run your entire organization from one tool. So for example, my assistant Anne uses Manus to automate all of her repetitive tasks. She used to have a small team, doesn't need the team anymore. The messages, the answers, the replies, the scheduling, all through Manus. So my question to you is, what are you going to do to stay on top of this? Because I'm just showing you the beginning. But if you don't pay attention, you're just going to get left behind. And just to get you brainstorming a little bit more, here's what else AI can do for you. So I'll give you 3 examples. And the cool part is I've got prompts for them all below in the description. You can do content research, you can do client feedback analysis, you can do business insights. Manus will handle it all. You just have to approve and execute. That's how we scale. So you've set all this stuff up, the automation, the systems. But this next question is the one that really holds people up. Step number 5. So what do you do now when AI can do everything? How do you actually differentiate yourself? The way I think about it is it always comes down to 3 things: taste, vision, and care. That's what makes you you. That's what makes you irreplaceable. That's why people buy from you. Business is not B2B, it's H2H, human to human. Let me break it down for you. Taste is you knowing what good looks like. Most people cannot tell you what a great Facebook ad looks like. AI can generate a bunch of ads, but only somebody with taste can know that. So you have to teach yourself. Vision, understanding where the future is going. And vision for me is seeing a future that doesn't exist yet, but should. And the third is care. And this is the H2H part. This is where you actually focus on the people. You understand what drives them, what are their motivation. You build your emotional intelligence. See, when AI can solve every problem, your heart is what makes you stand out. So to build your taste, you want to go and study the best examples of whatever you do. To build your vision, you want to start researching and understanding where the world's going and start communicating that with other smart people. To build your care, you want to start asking people, be curious about them, understand what makes them tick, and work on your own psychology. The reason I'm so excited about this is AI will give you all your time back so you can focus on being even greater at what you do. Which means you should get better, improve your skills around taste, vision, care, improve your ability to learn AI, automate more, teach it to other people, teach it to your team. Honestly, be a trusted resource for your customers. They're all struggling with the same thing. Now that you know this, why don't you show them? But here's the question: what are you pretending not to know? I tell people all the time, if you want to learn AI, ask AI. And people continuously come to me asking me, how do I learn AI? In that question, they're pretending not to know that AI can teach them, that AI's programming language is English, that this is the first technology in the history of mankind that can teach you how to use it better. The internet didn't do that. Mobile didn't do that. Crypto didn't do that. AI does that. I really want to challenge you to stop doing the work that AI can handle. Stay in the tool so that you can focus on the things that only you can bring to the table. And again, if you want all the prompts, they're below in the description. But if you want to participate in the giveaway and come hang out with me and the team and actually build some of this stuff with me, make sure you're subscribed to this channel, follow me on Instagram, and DM me the word giveaway. And if you want to use AI to scale your content, click the link and I'll see you on the other side.
