I ❤️ AI Q&A: How to Scale Your Business from $0 to $1M ARR Using AI

Welcome. We are here live, streaming on all the channels that I try to stream to. Thank you for being here. It is Friday, right? Yeah, Friday. We are completing— actually, this is our second week of our AI Leadership, our AI Startup Accelerator in the AI Leadership Institute. So that's super exciting. I just posted week 2 homework. And then, then, you know, because I like to do the things that I ask people to do, so I just went in and started trying to create some social media. And this pro— this little project people are gonna have to do, it's no joke. It's kind of hard, but it will be fun. So thank you all for being here. Um, this is our weekly I Love AI call. Uh, what we get to do is talk a little bit about what's happening in my world. If you are here on the Zoom, we will also be breaking out into small groups to talk about a topic. Unless you all give me one, it'll be of my choosing, likely from my new book, which is now— I'm so excited to let you all know that people from all across the United States have sent me pictures of it in the New and Notable section at Amazon. I mean, at Barnes Noble. And so it's super cool. But also, we are live on Amazon right now. So I should tell them, you can get this on Amazon as well. And one of the biggest announcements is that this book will be available in audiobook format. So the audiobook, I haven't even heard it myself, but it will be coming out and releasing on the 20th of May. So just a couple weeks away. So I'm super excited about that. What's going on over there? Let's hope everything turns out okay. So yeah, so that'll be really fun as well. But on this call, typically I share with you a little bit about what's happening in the world of AI from my purview and my perspective. And then I also will share with you a little bit about some of the philosophies and talking points that I cover in my book. And then we also have a bit of a, well, a couple of different announcements that are coming up for events that are either ongoing right now or that will be starting very, very soon. But today I thought I would give you a bit of a treat. A few months ago, I was asked to do a founder session and teach a presentation about how to scale a business, how to start and scale a business from zero to a million in annual revenue. And some of you might think, especially if you're at the zero point or at, you know, early stage of that, that that 1 million point seems far. But I use a technique that helps us break that down into meaningful, accessible, attainable goals. And so I thought it would be cool if I ran through that presentation with you all, gave you a chance to ask questions. Many of you are already in the accelerator, but if you hear this and you are like, wow, I want to do that for my business, it's not too late to join. We had 2 more people join us today. So you're welcome to join us soon. The work will become quite intense and you probably will maybe want to wait till the next cohort, but right now is a perfect time. So I thought I would share with you that presentation. And so for those of you, you know, this is our free community call. It is also the community call that streams out live to everyone. So I will— let's see. I will share with you this presentation as I did for the HSBCs that I got a chance to talk to. OMG, my cat. That I got a chance to talk to just a couple months ago, and it was really fun. So if you have a note taker, now's your chance to get it started, because once I start the presentation, I may or may not see it. So this is your chance. Welcome in. Everyone, thank you for coming and being here. And like I said, right at the end of today, we will break for about 10 minutes, jump into a wonderful, um, opportunity to network and connect with each other in real time. It is only available to those of us who are in the Zoom room. So if you haven't joined the I Love AI community, which we are well above 1,500 members now, if you wanna join us here, you can do that very easily by just going to my name, Noelle, Noelle.ai. Just go to that website. You'll see an opportunity to join the free community. You'll also see an opportunity to join our premium community and our AI startup accelerator. So there's lots and lots of ways to stay connected and engage with us. But without further ado, let's take a look at this. Hopefully I have the presentation open. There it is. Here we go. All right. So I'm going to share this and put it actually in presentation mode. So it might take a second. Let's see. I feel like I might need to switch displays. Y'all are going to have to tell me. Let me see in the chat. Let me know what you could see. Do you see the slides or you see the notes? Someone's going to tell me. Oh, good. Oh, there you are. There you are. I see you. Thank you so much for being so very helpful. Oh, just kidding. It was someone's note taker. Awesome. Sanjoy, my favorite. Thank you. Thank you for being my friend and replying. Thank you. I needed your help very much. One thing I'll tell you, and this is something that I do for all my presentations, is that I leverage a tool inside of Microsoft PowerPoint that is called PowerPoint Translator, and it allows you to add live captions to your PowerPoints as you present them. So as you can see right now at the bottom of the screen, actually, you can confirm that you could see the live transcription happening on my screen. Can you see that? Hopefully you can. If you're in the Zoom room, let me know if you see it. All right, because if you don't, that might indicate that you're not seeing the right thing. All right, awesome, cool. All right, so hopefully you see it. Okay, oopsie, let me make sure. Yay, it does. All right. And that's not actually where I wanna start. So of course, all good things start with an idea. Excuse me, I did lose my voice a couple of weeks ago, so hopefully I'll be able to make it through. Actually, I guess a week ago. Feels like two, but about a week ago. But this presentation is all about kind of the future of AI for those of us who are called to take an idea, And entrepreneurs is another way of saying people who wanna solve problems for people. I mean, being a problem solver in my world, I call it a solution architect. When I wanna design, like I am always constantly thinking, how do I make things better? How do I reduce friction? How do I create a better experience? Like these are always, whenever I'm doing anything, I'm like, how can I make it better? And as an entrepreneur, typically you become an entrepreneur because you wanna own a problem that you know you can solve, or at least you're passionate about solving, and you're willing to do whatever it takes to solve that problem for a very specific audience. And sometimes you get the problem definition wrong. Honestly, transparently, candidly, right? Sometimes you pick the wrong problem. Sometimes you pick a problem you don't care enough about to actually go through all the things that are necessary to solve it. But as an entrepreneur, This is the journey. Now, for those of you who are not entrepreneurs, who do not have a side hustle or own your own business, this is just as in— important for an intrapreneur, which is how I spent the first 2 decades of my career, is I was an entrepreneur inside a company. I was looking to build new things, new solutions, new architectures to solve problems for customers that I would meet, that I would run into, that I would hear about. And one of the most critical things that you can think about and that you can kind of hone the skill of, especially in the world of AI, is really thinking about like, how do you become a very good listener? Because the world is already yelling about the things that don't work. I mean, just go to Reddit, maybe don't go to Reddit, but Reddit is a huge like collection of people going, this isn't working, this is broken. I wish there were things like this. Opportunity abounds. Another one, Product Hunt, right? Which is a website of products that are released and people are like, oh, I like it except it's missing this, or this is missing. Also reviews on Amazon, another great place. Feedback on, uh, on Facebook, right? Like comments on posts. There's— people are always willing to share their perspective, good or bad. And so as an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, I'm constantly looking for ways to solve problems that people are talking to me about. And that is kind of what the genesis of this discussion was. So I of course always like to start with my people. This is my beautiful family, my wonderful dad, my son Max. He's the reason I got into tech. He's the reason that I continue to push and fight the good fight in technology because he was born with a condition known as Down syndrome, but the world has never been more available to him in a world that he could just press a microphone, right? Spotify, YouTube, you know, Google, like everything now, ChatGPT, everything now has a microphone button that he can use. And that is super inspiring to me because it allows him to press a magic button. He can then use his voice and things happen. He can create a playlist. He can learn about a topic on YouTube. He can, find music that matches the videos that he's watching. Like he has a lot more control over his existence, over his participation and his contribution into the world. And that is why I do what I do. It's what I'm excited about. I do also have a podcast, a couple of them. One is Good Morning AI. If you go to the, uh, noellerussell.ai website, you can find, um, that podcast, but you can also find it anywhere podcasts are played. It's on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube Podcasts, and about 6 other platforms. So you can take a look. Uh, it has some of my talks that I've recorded. It also has some really cool conversations I've had with leaders all around the world. Um, so I hope you will enjoy that. And of course, if you do enjoy it, please let me know by leaving a positive review or sending me a message and asking me to cover a certain topic, um, or idea. I also am very passionate about leadership. And so I started what's called The Lamplighter Effect. It's a leadership podcast about an acronym that I've come to know and love, uh, that I created around the principles of leadership that I try to embody every day. And they happen to be reflective of this Lamplighter principle, right? So Lamplighter is an acronym. I'll just cover the first 4 so you get the gist. Uh, but LAMP stands for love, ambition, mindfulness, and purpose. And so this gives you an indication of the kind of things that I want to focus on as a leader. Recently, I was asked what the core values of my company, AI Leadership Institute, was. And, and I shared with them that of course, lamplighter leadership is the main core capab— you know, core, um, characteristics I look for the, in the leaders that I, um, partner with. But I also, we have a couple of things that we say around here, like, where we learn by doing. We're doers, not talkers. We show versus tell. The ethos of our organization is that we build systems that are profitable, scalable, safe, helpful, and harmless, right? Like that we wanna make sure that whatever we decide to build, that we weave into the fabric, into the DNA of those projects, we weave in responsible AI so that it can't be plucked out like a process or a checklist or even a team when a new leader comes on board. We allow responsible AI to be the way we live and breathe in an AI project, not just a special system we add on into to the— at the end. And that's, I think, important for you to know as I talk about these processes, because they are very intentional. You know, a lot of people— anyway, I won't, won't share it all, but there's a lot of different things that we do, um, different processes and frameworks that we have that that help instill these principles into companies that we work with. Now, of course, I've had a good run. I actually got another cool little box to add. Um, company just listed me in one of their top 20 thought leaders in agentic AI. I also was listed as the number 1 thought leader in agentic AI. So though these say top 25, they, I'm actually in the top 10 now cuz I keep on working, right? I always say go big or go bigger. Um, and so I am on, I'm on a rampage to teach people what I know. About this technology and the really important moment we have in participating in how it's built and how it's shaped. So this discussion is really all about how to scale. And if you're in the chat, thank you so much. Yeah, Zams was the company, they just got rebranded. Zams was the company that, um, that highlighted me. So thank you to them. Thank you for, uh, placing me in the list, listing me in the top 2. That was pretty awesome. Um, but of course, as I discuss these capabilities, these different levels of building out a scalable business. If you have any questions and you're in the Zoom, please feel free to ask them. You could just throw them in the chat and we'll either cover them at the end or I will answer them as I see them. I have the chat up, so hopefully I'll have a chance to, to answer them as we go along. But the purpose of this talk was to help entrepreneurs specifically. They were in school, So they were still maybe thinking like, do I go corporate or do I go kind of build my own business? I'm a big believer in small business. I want to help small businesses. It's why I built this presentation. It's also why I built the AI Startup Studios is that now with the power of AI, I'm, I'm not sure if you've heard this yet, but there is a very strong belief that a single solopreneur will make their very first billion dollars as a solopreneur because of the AI workforce that they'll be able to create. So I'm not gonna go all the way to AI workforce generation, though that is a key, topic I'm working on right now. I am though gonna talk about what you can do right now to put yourself on track to use this technology to help you build a business. So this is the cycle, the circle of life, as they say, when it comes to building a business. I am a, um, licensee and business coach with, uh, an organization, uh, called 10X Business Coaches. Um, associated with a, uh, really strong sales leader and marketing leader, number one marketer in the world, has one of the largest, most profitable, profitable businesses in the world. His name's Grant Cardone. Um, he, I, I'm not, you know, I, there's a lot you could say about different people. I try to follow people that are, are in exhibiting or demonstrating things that I want. And he built an incredible business. He has a beautiful family. Him and his wife share the responsibilities in their business in the same way that my husband and I share our responsibilities. And it's awesome. And so as an example to that, I, I partnered with him. And this is one of the things, oops, one of the things that he ended up sharing with me that I was like, this is I, I built my business this way. This is what I did before anyone wrote it down. And so now that I have this framework, I wanna share it with you. And then I'm gonna even give you some prompts that you can use right now to actually do some of this work. And those prompts are available, of course, to our Startup Accelerator, uh, accelerator companies that are part of that accelerator. But they're also available to you if you send over a message. If you're not in AI Leadership Institute, Um, you'll be able to comment and, and let me know that you are interested in the deck and I'll send that over in a PDF. Um, and you could get all these prompts so you'll be able to use them as well. But the first thing before you start a business, and this is a bit contrarian, the first thing you have to do is you have to come up with a good idea. And some of you listening right now, you're idea people. Like you come up with ideas all the time. You might be like me and have like notebooks upon notebooks full of ideas as they like pop into your head. But getting an idea does not mean making $1 million in your first year, right? We all get ideas, and many of us get ideas only to later see that idea on TV, or we watch some other business get started. We're like, oh, I had that idea, right? But in our case, what we're gonna do is talk about how we take an idea and turn it into something that is revenue generating and scalable. And the first thing we have to do, number one, is clarify that idea. And the way that I do this is I encourage people to, well, identify basically 3 questions, right? What problem are you trying to solve? Who are you trying to solve it for? And what are, what are the biggest challenges for those people that this problem is going to, to solve? And when you answer those 3 questions, you get very, very clear on the idea that you have, the solution you're thinking about, who it's gonna be for, and if they actually do in real life have problems that your solution can solve. Normally, by the time you go through this exercise, you'll end up finding out that maybe your idea is cool for you, but not cool for a bunch of people in the world. And that's okay. I have lots of those ideas that never got off the ground. But when you do this work up front and you identify an idea, and you figure out, and the most important thing you'll notice here, it says idea/target. The next thing you wanna do once you figure out what problem you wanna solve, who you wanna solve it for, and what, you know, what alignment do you have to the problems they have every day. The next thing, the most important thing is how are you gonna measure success of that idea? Like what is your target? In my world, it's typically financial. Doesn't have to be. Some of you might be starting a nonprofit and it'll be, number of kids you can get off the streets, right? It could be very serious, very, you know, intentional work. Or it could be a financial number. How much money can you raise for those kids? Or how many customers can you get? In my case, I'm an entrepreneur. I build businesses. They are for-profit. So that is the lens upon which I'll be sharing the next few slides with you. But my idea is the only way to validate if that idea works is to identify What is the financial number I'm wanting to hit with that? Do I wanna build a $10,000 business, a million-dollar business? So for this, I framed the talk, how to grow a business from zero to a million dollars in ARR. So to break that down, that's about $85,000 a month. Break that down, right? That's like, what, $20,000 give or take a week. So we have to figure out How are we gonna build a business, a business that has something of value that can generate that kind of income? And that's kind of the work in the idea target phase. Now, once you've identified your idea, you feel good about it, you've got your audience, you know who needs it, you know what problems they have. Now you're ready to get attention. Notice I am not talking about go build the thing, go create a model, go build an agent. No, no, no, no, no. I'm just like, you've figured out the problem, you've identified who needs your solution. Now you're gonna go talk to them and actually find out if they want it. Like, just start talking to them, get attention. This typically means social media, though it could also mean calling people up on the phone, cold calling. It could also mean dialing for dollars. Um, it could mean hopping into your local Chamber of Commerce, right? It could mean any, any of those things. But getting attention means you are not building the product, you are identifying an idea and finding out, does the world even want it right now? The way I get ideas, um, you know, I'll wake up, uh, this happened to me a couple years ago. I woke up, got this brilliant idea to start a brand new brand called Lovefluencers, which was influencers that were not like cheesy and hit it, you know, sitting on a Lamborghini with bikinis and like money flying everywhere. Like I wanted to be an authentic influencer. I wanted to like show up in a hoodie, like be myself, um, but still be an influencer, still be able to, you know, influence people's decisions, buying, like all of those types of things. I still wanted to do that work. I still wanna do it in the package that I was looking at on Instagram. And so I woke up and I'm like, I'm gonna create Lovefluencers. But in the first thing I had to do in order to validate, is Lovefluencers even a thing worth building out? The first thing I had to do was get attention for it. So I went out and I built a— I grabbed a URL, right? Bought a domain, built a website, created an email address, set up a PayPal account, and then started talking about it. It was a landing page, just one page that said, if you are a Lovefluencer, and here's what I ended up doing. I did what I'm doing for you right now. I just started talking. Here's what I think Lovefluencers is. It is these 4 characteristics. If you wanna learn from me how to be a Lovefluencer, Sign up below. I'm not telling them I'm buying it. You can buy it. I'm not giving them a price point. I'm not telling them a date. I'm not saying it's a class. I'm not— it might be a cruise. It could, I don't know. But if they wanna learn what I'm thinking about teaching or the solution I'm thinking about building, I create a landing page and just put it out there. Now I'll give you some more recent examples. That did very well, by the way. Some more recent examples. I'm, I'm on a phone call with someone, uh, and I mean, I just got an idea with one of our AI leadership, uh, startup accelerator people. I was like, oh my gosh, we should do this. But I got an idea a couple weeks ago. Um, and we were just talking about how these municipalities inside cities, like they don't have access to this tech, right? Like you go to their website and you can't tell what, when the events are. I can't go like and find out like when is fireworks, when is the parade, when is the events, you know, when is the, um, little, you know, expo where they do like gift giving, like gift buying and stuff, uh, during the holidays. I just want to find this information, and I spend way too much time on these sites like looking for stuff. So I'm like, could you please just have a conversational agent that would tell me what I want when I want it? And so it gave me an idea. I should go. And so I created a website. I don't even know if I can remember what it is. Um, but it was like smalltownusaai.com or something like that. So I go grab a URL. That's the beginning of getting attention. Create a landing page. Now if you already have a company, this could be your company name slash subdomain, right? Company name slash your cool idea. Smalltown AI. Oh, that's what I think it was. Smalltown AI. I should go look and find out. Where's my phone? Where's my phone? I'll find out if I, if I have it, if it works, I'll, I'll send you all the link. But Small Town USA, like that was my idea. Go to small town municipalities and give them an opportunity to get a very low cost AI solution to just put on their website so that it's easy for a person like me to figure it out, right? Great question. So a question just came in from Sky. What's a good platform? To create a landing page. For those of you in the accelerator, you got free access to GoHighLevel. So you're going to use GoHighLevel for these, for this website, because it's AI generated. So you can build a website in less than 5 minutes. It also is templated. So GoHighLevel has created a bunch of templates. So that's what I would choose if you already have that platform. If you don't have a platform at all, you have to buy a domain. And when you buy a domain, you can also Many times they'll give you a free website with that domain for a short period of time, enough time to get some attention. I usually will buy like the lowest, it's like $10 a month to buy a website with GoDaddy. GoDaddy has a feature called GoDaddy Aero, I think it's called A-I-R-O, and it is an AI-generated landing page for you to do exactly what I'm saying, to collect information and collect ideas. I'm just gonna type it in really quick and see if I can find it. Small town AI. I don't know. Uh, nope. But it's funny because if you do small town AI, it is parked. So that might be mine. Uh, smalltownai.com. I might have parked that URL. But you want to like go in, create a landing page, and I'll show you some examples at the end. But that is how you get attention. Now, that's how you start. So you have to have a place to drive people to, to say, give me your email address if you're interested in this, right? But in order for people to even know that you exist, you kind of have to create what I call an algorithmic drumbeat on social media. And that attention getting will be you posting on social media, hey, I'm doing this thing. Hey, I have this idea. Hey, I have this solution. Are you interested? Would you like to talk? One of my favorite, most highest performing post was I created a new solution for this problem and I would put in the problem and then, um, I would say, uh, would you be interested in seeing a demo? And then the literally the image that I put on social media was like demo, free demo available. I think it said just text like black text on an orange background and people were like, I wanna see a demo. That sounds cool. What is it? Let me see. And especially my audience wants to, like, they're demo people. So I know my audience well enough to know that. That's why that idea target is so important. So once we get to attention, we get some attention, we grab a landing page, get attention, then we need to gather leads. That's why that landing page can't just say, hey, I'm doing a cool thing. It, it's literally its only job is to say, would you like to, to follow along? Would you like to get updated? Would you like to be magic word? Waitlisted for access to this solution, even if you haven't built it yet, especially if you haven't built it yet. Build a landing page that just says, here's what I'm thinking, here's an idea of what it's gonna look like. If you're interested in getting waitlisted for early access to this solution, sign up. Get their email, get their name. If you really want to, get their phone number if you like wanna go big. And as soon as they send your information, you're gonna call 'em up and be like, So what did you like about the solution? I, when I get to leads, you're gonna ask your initial leads, I'm gonna call it 3 basic questions. The first one is you're gonna present your idea and you're gonna ask them what they think and they're gonna tell you, ah, it sounds pretty cool, or, uh, I don't need anything like that. That's not for me. In either case, you're gonna follow up that question with, well, what did you like most about it? Or what did you like least about it? Your job in those first conversations with those leads that you get for a new campaign, your job is just to get in, cuz you haven't built it yet. So you wanna do a little product research. My goal is always to have 100 of these calls, and you could do that in about less than a month. You know, do a few, 20 calls a week, right? Or 25 calls a week. So you, and your job is, yeah, sure. Here's the cool thing is some people are gonna buy, what you haven't even built yet, which is awesome. But most people are gonna be like, well, you know, I really need this. This is really my problem. And you take vicious massive notes on the product, you know, roadmap that they are gonna lay out for you. And then at the end of those calls, you're gonna say, and this is my favorite, the third question you're going to ask, and for those of you in the accelerator, this is a sneak peek into next week. So yay. Um, You're gonna ask them, what would make this a no-brainer for you? If I had a solution that did this, what would you, what would it need to be? What would it need to do? What would the price need to be for you to be like, oh my gosh, I need that. I'm gonna do it. I want it. And many people will be like, I don't know. But some people are gonna give you a roadmap to selling to them, and that is gold. Like, you'll wanna do that. So that, that is how you turn those leads. You manage those leads and turn them into sales as you start having these conversations. And you hone your product to match what people are asking you for. Um, and of course, my hope for all of you is that once you get to that point, I will help you figure out, like, let's say you do make $1 million. What are you gonna do with that? Number 1, how do you manage the tax implications of that income? And number 2, most importantly, how do you make sure that you put that money in a way, in a place that it allows you to scale your business. And typically this is in the form of very intentional ad placement, paid ads, paid advertising. It becomes fuel to the fire. You do not wanna do ads at the beginning unless you wanna drive attention to your lead magnet, but you don't wanna put fire on something you don't fully understand yet. You're gonna wanna like go through this cycle, have real conversations with real people who tell you what it's gonna take for them to buy it, and then you build the product and now you use the revenue from those sales to actually point people in a direction of a much better formed idea. Awesome. Oh yeah, cool. Okay. Awesome. Oopsie, I went super far. Sorry. All right, so let's quickly go through these. The idea I wanted to give you some prompts so that you could just get some help analyzing this. These are simpler versions of prompts that I gave to— I gave a little bit more of a sophisticated prompt to our Startup Accelerator participants, but you could use these as well. Help me create a detailed persona for my product, for your idea, right? Whatever that is. Or analyze my business idea for, I'll just say AI Startup Accelerator in healthcare, finance, for HR professionals, right? Doing a gap analysis. Here's the cool thing. It depends on what model I guess you have access to, But now most of the models, Claude, Anthropic models, as well as OpenAI, they now have reasoning models and research models that'll make gap analysis and competitive analysis really cool. I've done some really amazing work in that area. To get attention, here are a couple prompts. Generate a content strategy. I like strategy. Strategy is another word for planning, and you all have heard me say this before.. But if you don't, right? Uh, either, you know, I always say it like it's a, a saying out there. Some of you might know it, right? You could either, what is it? Like plan either, uh, make a plan or plan to fail, I think is how it goes. Or if you fail to plan, you could plan to fail. Uh, so plan, building a strategy is the way that you can design success for yourself. And here's the good news. Success leaves clues. These strategies can be reverse engineered from successful campaigns that are already in market, and our new research models are really good at extracting that information. So that's why I encourage you to do this. Also, it— some of you have a unique brand voice. My brand voice kind of has been cultivated over, I don't know, a couple decades. You might, if you're just starting, you don't have to wait a couple decades to figure out kind of what you wanna say. You can use an AI system to help you create a brand voice that resonates with who you are. Remember at the beginning I was talking about Lamplighter Leadership and Lovefluencers? All of these are different data points that I've supplied to a model so it understands who I am. You're gonna wanna do the same thing prior to asking it to do this work, right? You want a model that knows who you are. So when you ask it to help you develop a unique brand voice, it knows some elements of yourself that it can weave into that. Otherwise, it might not be super authentic. Now, these sub-bullets I actually include in the prompt as well. So I'll say, help me develop a unique brand voice for my, um, AI consulting business that will resonate with, uh, CIOs of businesses making between $1 million and $25 million a year in revenue. Basically where I hope all you will be after this. Right? You become my customers when you successfully hit $1 million. I will also tell the model, consider industry trends, competitor communication styles, create examples of how this voice would sound across different marketing channels. I will ask the model to do that, although you can also do that work yourself if you prefer. So I just— these are how I use these prompts to help me. Now, lead gen. This means I've now created a mechanism. So for those of you who don't know, I have a bunch of leads, lead generating, lead generation tools. One of my most, my top performing lead gen tool is a book called The, uh, 21 Laws of AI Solution Architecture. And I love that it's my top performing because it was written without AI. And I've got lots of AI generated ones that perform okay. Um, and I don't think it performed well or badly because AI was involved or not involved. I just think it's a good topic and people care about it and I just, wrote it before AI models was a thing, um, using models in the way that we do now. But creating something of value for the people you're trying to serve that they would look at it and they would expect to pay for. Like, the information in The 21 Laws of AI Solution Architecture, like, that is the heart of what I get paid $25,000 to deliver to companies. And I put that information in this book. So it's extremely valuable. It's very high energy like me, but it's very pragmatic. It's very tangible. And when you're willing to give, they always say like, give your secrets away. And I don't mean like trade secrets or code, but like give away the things that make what you do possible and sell the implementation. Because the reality is, is that I say, here's what it takes to be a good solution architect, but that's not enough. Like the 16 Laws, if you could embody them without my help, like you're a rock, you could do it, like you'd be amazing. You will make more money, you'll sell more stuff. Like, but most of the time you're going to need some help implementing those ideas. And that's why at the end of that book, I'm like, if you are interested in accelerating your success with this really valuable stuff I just shared with you, call me. And I— and like I said, it's one of my top performing lead magnets. So here are some utilities tools that you can use to generate leads. One, design a lead magnet strategy for my business. I might even go as far as to say, build me a lead magnet or create me a list of lead, lead magnet options, right? You want to include in that prompt your target audience's immediate problems. I would ask ChatGPT or your model of choice to help you define that. Because it will know more about your audience than you do. So I'd encourage you, it won't know the intricacies of problems if you've worked in that domain for 20 years, but it will have a, a, a broad understanding that will help you create a better strategy. So ask it to give you a, a sense of those immediate problems, validating your own understanding of the space. Also include, um, what would they be willing to exchange their email for?? And this will give you, again, tho— that value equation. How can you deliver unique value in that lead magnet? And again, this is very specific to your business type, and that business type really should be very specifically your I help statement. Who are you trying to help? How are you trying to help them? And then of course, once you get them, so let's say they download your 21 Laws of AI Solution Architecture, what are you gonna do with them then? Do not be like me. Now, granted, this is a short list, a short stack, but I was just at an event 3 days ago and I got like business cards, right? I've already processed a bunch. This is just what's left over. But you get business cards just like you're now gonna get virtual business cards. People are gonna reach out to you and say, I want your 21 Laws of AI solution architecture. And they're gonna give you their name, their phone number, and their email, or maybe just their email. Once you get that email, the quicker you respond to them with what they want, number one, but also with what you can do for them, number two, the more likely they are to transact with you. If you reach out to them within the first 5 minutes of them reaching out to you, your odds of transacting with them, even if it's not immediate, your odds of actually creating a transactional relationship go up 80%. The odds of closing them after the first hour is like in the 25th percentile and it gets very dismal after that. Most of you get cards and you've never reached out to them. Here's the good news. In our startup accelerator, I actually will teach you how to revive leads that have gone cold, which many of you probably have. But when you build this lead magnet and you make it available on your landing page, which we just talked about, you need to create a system that's going to immediately follow up. It doesn't mean you have to do it. We have AI systems to do it now, but it does need to be personal. It does need to be specific, and it does need to be immediate. And that is something we can use, uh, an AI platform to support us with. So you will wanna create an email nurture sequence. I typically will tell it to create one, um, that is 30 days long, but that's a lot for you all. So call it 3 days, a 3-day email nurture sequence that ends in a call to action to get on a call with you and talk about your solution. And that way people are— I mean, at 2 o'clock in the morning, someone might be scrolling around and they find your lead magnet and they're like, ooh, I want that. They grab it, they're reading the ebook or looking at the infographic or watching the video that you recorded. So they're doing all of that. Meanwhile, at 8 o'clock the next morning, they're going to get an email automatically from your system that says, hey, I hope you enjoyed the download. Hope you had a chance to read it. Did you have any questions? The number, and then like, that's what you're gonna say. And then the next thing is like, the number one question people often have is whatever that question is. And you could create this neat nurture sequence, will create that sequence for you. You can edit it a little bit, but it'll help you with the copywriting that is often a big struggle for us, for a lot of us. So this allows you, so these production, these production type prompts. Their job is to produce you an outcome. So create a lead magnet, generate an email sequence, and put that system together. Now, of course, you're gonna get some sales. This is where I wanna share with you why $1 million is not as far away as it seems. You could get one customer to pay you $1 million. That might sound a little far-fetched. I get it, I get it. You might get there though. Or you could get 10 people to pay you $100,000. Now we're getting a little closer. When you start thinking about like AI agents and building agent solutions and staying in a client a long period of time, like $100,000 is not far. So now you need just 10 clients. But let's say that still seems out of reach for you. You might need 100 clients to do $10K with you. And if you break this 100 up, I am doing this like for the whole year, but oftentimes I kind of do this math in my head on a monthly basis., right? So $1 million broken over months is like $83,000, $85,000, $80,000. Well, to make it easy, $80K, right? $80K in a month would be— again, I might need one client pay me $80K to make that and do that twel— every month for 12 months, or 2 clients to pay me $40K, or 3 client— or 4 clients, right, to pay me $20K. I don't know, I'm losing track, right? Or 10 clients to pay me AK, right? And you can just break it up, uh, accordingly. I encourage you to create products all across this, right? So you would need to sell 1,000 things for $1,000, 10,000 things for $100. You get the idea, right? But look at the recurring. You could find one customer to pay you $83,000 a month. That'd be awesome. Or 10 customers pay you $8,000. That's not a bad consulting retainer. That's a little under what I currently charge. 100 people to pay you $833 a month. That's a community that you start where you actively coach them every single week like I do in the AI Leadership Institute. Or $83 a month and you shoot for 1,000 members. $83. Yeah, that's what I said, right? Or 10,000 people to pay you $8 a month. Here's the reality though, and I wanna share this with you. Is that it is actually going to require much less effort for you to get 100 people to pay you $10,000 than 10,000 people to pay you $8. A lower price point is gonna require much higher— I mean, imagine having 10,000 clients, 10,000 customers who've downloaded your app or built, and they're all giving you feedback and all, you know, giving you some good, some not great, some telling you features, like the amount of friction that comes with that. So my advice to you on your path to your first $1 million is to aim high. And what I do is I don't look at what I can offer first. I look at the price point and I go, what can I build? I'm gonna build something that's $10,000 and I'm gonna price it at $100,000. And now my job is to create something that's at least $10,000 in value. And honestly, I'm gonna make it 50 grand in value and I'm gonna sell it for 10. So what can I do in my own brain? And this is for you, right? What can you think about? What can you do? What offer can you create? What value can you give? This could be in the form of training, implementation, consulting, marketing, sales support, back office support, Agentic AI solution development, AI chatbot development. Right? What can you build that would be worth $10,000 to a client? And I now have proven beyond my own self-doubt 10 years ago, I've now proven that this is, this is possible. Not only is it possible, it's extremely common. I mean, you can even sell a keynote now, right? You could sell a keynote that you do for a customer that delivers value, educational value to them for 10 grand. So What we wanna do is we wanna create an offer collection of products that we offer that meet different levels of this. And that will help you understand kind of how you might build. And I always say like, I wanna have 9 or so products and those products will be in 3 different forms. Do it yourself, meaning I'm gonna teach you and you're on your own to do it. I'm not gonna help you, I'm not gonna call you, you get no personal time with me. I'm just gonna give you a video and you're on your own. That is a paid service. Then the middle one is done with you, kind of like what we're doing right now where I actually sit with you and get on a call and we hang out together. Um, and then the last one is where we provide done-for-you services. So do it yourself. Done with you, done for you. And that's kind of how I break apart my products in order to— when I start negotiating with someone, I don't negotiate on price, I negotiate on value. Like if somebody's like, oh, $10,000, I'm like, okay, well how about this? How about we add another course to it? That's a $5,000 value. How about we add books to it? That's $10,000 value, right? Like how do you use inventory to negotiate as opposed to price to negotiate. Never change your price. Use inventory instead. Hopefully that is valuable to you. There's lots of different ways to manage revenue, and like I said, if you're interested in this, most of you are not here yet, but if you are, I always like to think about helping customers identify opportunities for retaining customers, onboarding and customer retention, and upselling, as well as new opportunities for revenue.. So this, you can use this of course for your own business, but if you're a consultant, these are really cool ways to brainstorm ideas you can bring to your clients, to your customers, um, as well. And of course, you all know I wrote a book on scaling. I'm a big passionate fan of scaling. Scaling is often a function of like what you are doing and the level of responsible development you've done in building that framework. So whatever you built, if you've done it in a way that is helpful, you know, harmless, honest, you'll be able to scale that level of integrity, um, indefinitely. And so these are some of the prompts that I've used with my clients to help them think about how do they scale their team, how do they scale their business processes, how do they create SOPs. Um, and this is again, as a consultant or as an advisor, these are really great valuable inflection and reflection options that you can give to your clients. So as I close this part out, you have more power than ever, uh, at your fingertips. This is something I do on all of my keynote stages. So I always encourage you to think about it the same way, right? With great power, we have more power than ever. Like we have the ability to create entire software solutions without writing a line of code. Like it is incredible what we can do. But with that power comes, well, you, you probably know it. Yeah, see you later, Tara. You probably know it, but with that power comes great responsibility. It's incredibly important to understand kind of that you now have the ability to do incredible things with this AI, these AI systems to accelerate your success. But you really need to make sure you do it safely and responsibly. These are some of the use cases that I mentioned to them. You'll get this in the deck if you choose to, to, if you want it. And all of this leads to, of course, what many of you are already a part of, which is our AI Leadership Institute. And it includes, you know, our, our certifications, which there's like 5 of. It includes our bootcamp, which is actually our AI Business Bootcamp. That's our sales and marketing training as well as our sales execution training, how to actually have a conversation in the world of AI. These kind of calls are 60-minute Q&A calls. And now we of course do, uh, our ability to kind of chat it up with each other. And of course we do live learning labs every single month. This month I can't— oh, I just yesterday I decided on what it is, but I can't remember what I decided on. So I'll let y'all know next time. But every month we do a new live learning lab. Last month, um, we worked on using a new model. Month before that, we worked on building a digital twin. Like every month we try to do something new. Fingers on keyboard to build out a solution to hone our skills as responsible AI leaders that we're doers, not just talkers. And I think it's really useful. Obviously you also will get access to, like right now we're running an accelerator. So everyone who joins the leadership community also gets access to the accelerator. You, if you have a startup or a side hustle, you get a chance to join, listen to the videos, do the homework, and scale your business, which is pretty cool. You also get access to my favorite bot builder platform, which is what I'm selling to those, uh, new, uh, small town USA clients. Um, it is a Chatbot Builder subscription. It comes with 3 million tokens. I mean, it is phenomenal. And, uh, and of course, like I said, the accelerator. So it's pretty cool if you choose to. Many of you are members already. Thank you for being members. But I thought it would be cool to just show you the talk I did for the HBCUs and for all the entrepreneurs there. It had lots of good content in it. I hope you don't, um, mind that I shared with you the whole presentation. It was an hour presentation. So, um, there you have it. Uh, for those of you who wanna stay, I will be here for Q&A, but I also wanna give you a chance for the last 10 minutes right now, if you are here, to have a chance to connect with each other depending on who's in our room. I might just, uh, stop the recording and give us a chance to connect live in, in person. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen really quickly and give us a chance to say hello. Let's see here. Yeah, so I'm, what I'm gonna do is stop the recording. So thank you everybody. Stop the live. It's been awesome. If you wanna join us for the Q&A and more importantly for the live meet and greet session that we do, please don't hesitate to join. Noelle.ai. Join us in the I Love AI community and, uh, we'll see you soon. Thanks for being here. Don't worry if you're here in the Zoom, we're gonna, um, take a few minutes and we're going to, uh, hang out together. So hold on, let me stop it if I can find it.