How to Earn Your First $100 with AI

From someone who has grown his own AI and automation service business to $72,000 per month and now runs communities teaching others how to do the same, here's how to actually make your first thousand dollars online with AI. Now, I'm making this video as a sort of rebuttal because I've seen a lot of people recently enter the AI and automation space without having built these systems. The terms "artificial intelligence" and "automation" make a lot of sense, and there is unquestionably a lot of money to be made from them. However, they are not simple. So, just because something is simple and just because something gets a lot of attention does not mean that it is easy. And I'm going to make that case in this video and then I'm going to give you guys a simple road map to avoid falling into the trap that I'm seeing a lot of people do right now. So, to make a long story short, the make money online landscape cuz rest assured that's what this is. It's the same as the drop shipping trend, the web design trend, and the social media marketing agency trend from a few years ago. exactly the same thing is taking place right now. has been overrun with numerous opportunities that are misleading. Now, it's true that AI has created a window for opportunities, but it's not in the way that most gurus present it. The way that most people are pitching it right now is it's like a passive income scheme. Okay? You are being offered AI businesses as though they require no effort on your part. It's going to make you money while you sleep. Let me tell you something. This specific business model, which people are selling you, but not totally formulating, is an agency service business model. With this, you can't make money while you sleep. You need to get on sales calls with prospects. You need to hunch over laptops or MacBook screens, building, dragging, and dropping systems. You need to be whiteboarding flows. You must engage in activities like prompt engineering. So, reality check. The vast majority of these AI gurus have never built any successful businesses outside of just selling courses. If you want to make a determination as to how exactly to get up and running, focus on people that have actually done the thing that you want to do, not just people that talk about it. Okay? And also, passive income schemes rarely work for beginners without existing audiences. What you'll find is, and if you're a beginner, maybe this won't make the most sense to you, but there's a difference between inbound marketing and then outbound marketing. So, inbound marketing is when a customer comes to a business. In order for a business to get some sort of inbound marketing, obviously, that business needs distribution. It needs to be popular. It needs some way to get the word out. right now. If you are a beginner business and you have no idea what the heck you're doing, you have no capital to invest, you have no ads to whip up, you have no idea how to position your product, you can't really do inbound marketing very well, if at all. So, what most of these businesses, accelerators, and courses are pitching you is inbound. In reality, if you're a total beginner, more or less, the only way that you can actually generate outsized opportunities is through outbound. So, it's not just sitting on your butt and, you know, hearing the chuch-ching noises while you sleep. What you have to do is you actually have to go and you have to hunt, you have to prospect, you have to, you know, get on the phone, you have to dial, you have to record Loom videos, you have to send cold emails, you have to put yourself out there over and over and over again. Additionally, you'll discover that's not very sexy. So, very few people ultimately talk about that. But if you want to make a business uh work from scratch, especially in like a bootstrapped way, you can't focus on the inbound. Inbound just doesn't work. Okay? For this reason, you should be extremely skeptical of anyone who sells inbound to a completely novice audience. And then ultimately uh marketplaces end up flooded with tens of thousands of people that try the exact same thing that are being promoted. Now what I mean by this is unfortunately simply by virtue of the fact that beginners obviously want simple things that they could follow step by step. Tactics and strategy are often confused. To be abundantly clear strategy and tactics are very different things. A tactic is something like uh cold email copy. A tactic is something like a script. A tactic is like, I don't know, some sort of like advertising that you're copying. The strategy is the deeper reasons why you choose the tactics. It's like human psychology. It's like sales skills. It's like uh market understanding. Okay? Therefore, you won't be able to adapt to changes in the market if you simply spend your entire life trying to replicate the strategies, which is ultimately what these courses and programs teach you to be very good at. When markets get saturated with millions of people doing the exact same tactic, the only people that actually make it are people that understand the strategy because people that understand the strategy can generate new tactics anytime they want. But people that understand tactics, they have no idea what the underlying strategy is. So they are screwed. So don't be one of those tacticon people. Be a strategy only person. Now obviously the question is how the hell do you do that? Well, you avoid these businesses that focus on selling products. To make a long story short, when you're starting out as a beginner in entrepreneurship, you basically have a fundamental choice between two types of businesses. You have a product based business or you have a service-based business. Product based business is selling something like a widget on Amazon. Let's say it's e-commerce for the most part. It's stuff like information products, right? Called products for a reason. A service on the other hand is something that you do for somebody. It's like a landscaping gig. It's like HVAC. Similar to plumbing. It's similar to SEO, PPC, AI, and automation in digital marketing. Now, the core advantage of service businesses over product businesses is they require very little upfront investment. The only upfront investment you basically have to make in a service business is you have to use your time and you have to use developed skills to manage and fulfill the expectations of clients. But a lot of the time, you don't really have to invest that much money. And typically, nowhere near as much money as a product based business because you don't have to make the product. The benefit to this for beginners is if you are choosing a service business, you get this learn while you earn advantage that allows you to generate cash flow while also simultaneously deepening your understanding of client needs, industry problems, things like marketing, things like sales, and ultimately automation opportunities. So my recommendation for you is pick a service business. Okay? Pick AI automation agency as a model. Don't pick, you know, make a digital product and put it on some Notion template that's generated using AI and then try and sell it through inbound ads. That stuff just really doesn't work, guys. It it sucks for me to say, but if you're a beginner, you have no idea where to even start with that stuff. It's much better focusing on the simple 0ero to one stuff that at least gets a few dollars in your bank account. And once you have that, you can worry about building these higher level flows and funnels and all that stuff afterwards. So, the service model allows you to monetize your skills. That's the main part. You are making money from your skills. And you don't need any external funding for that. Additionally, every client project becomes a paid case study. You get to learn while you earn for your growing business portfolio. And then you get to use that business portfolio to sell more people. If I could do like a simple SOP, that stands for standard operating procedure, something you're probably going to be building a lot of in business, this is what it would look like. You have lots of skills and you have lots of time. The development of the product will take time if you take a product-based approach. A lot of the AI people are saying, "Well, it takes you five minutes. You whip up a template, a prompt, send it out." Those just aren't very high quality yet. So, you can't exactly do that. You then launch your marketing for the product because you start with the product then you do marketing afterwards. You might need another month for that. Okay. If you get your first sales, which is a big maybe because you don't really know what you're doing, you might make your first thousand or $2,000 in like a few months. That might take a like a crazy amount of time. As a beginner, the number one thing you don't have is you do not have feedback. And if you want to like stay in entrepreneurship and not fail like the 95% of people that try this, you need some sort of positive feedback as quickly as possible. Contrast that with a service-based approach. You do, I don't know, some sort of free or very low paid work to get your first case study. Make use of that case study to market your first paid project. You then deliver some results. You make some more money. You take all that money, you reinvest it in skills, okay? Skill stacking. As a result, you acquire knowledge of sales, marketing, and lead generation—all crucial skills. Then you scale. And then finally, after you've scaled a business and after you've done all this, by the way, in like one to two months instead of four to six months, then you can just productize your service and then turn that thing from a series of steps that you have to do every time you onboard a new client to something like a product. Anyway, what does this mean? This is the definition of double dipping. And anytime you're in business, you look for opportunities to double dip. So, I gues