0:02 I've been in business for 28 years. I've built a portfolio of AI companies that
0:06 generates millions every freaking year, launching a new one every [music] month.
0:10 But if I had to start over from scratch today, these are the exact seven steps I
0:14 would follow to start an AI business this year, even if I didn't have any
0:18 money or coding skills. So, let's start with the first. Step number one, find a
0:23 painful problem. We have to start with the pain, not the idea. People fall in
0:28 love with their product, their solution, their ideas when the market is the
0:33 decider. If you don't find somebody that goes, "Ouch." When you push on that
0:36 bruise, then they're not going to want to spend money to solve the problem.
0:40 See, most people get stuck in selling things that are nice to have, not
0:43 musthaves. Things that are considered vitamins, not painkillers. If you can
0:48 find real pain, you can make a lot of money. When I think about it, people
0:52 only pay for a handful of things. First, they pay to make more money. They pay to
0:56 save time. They pay to save money because it makes more money or they pay
0:59 to look good. That's status. [music] Find a pain that delivers on one of
1:03 those promises. And now you get the beginnings of what could become a good
1:08 business. So here's how to find a pain to solve with your AI business. First,
1:13 we have to learn to build the muscle of finding opportunities. I call this your
1:16 frustration list. Most people don't realize that there's problems all around
1:20 the world that need solving, but you might see something and just dismiss it.
1:24 You just have to build that muscle. I can't walk around this world and not see
1:28 a thousand businesses every day because I've built that muscle. You probably
1:32 have that. You've just diminished it. You think it's not a big deal, but
1:35 that's where the real genius comes in. [music] When you can find those slight
1:38 tweaks and just go, why is that done that way? That's where [music]
1:41 innovation comes from. So look at the world as a series of problems to solve
1:46 and your expertise in the thing you know best is the first place you should look.
1:50 We have to start calling people in that niche that might have that pain and ask
1:54 them about their frustration around it. Now, let's say you've had that
1:58 conversation and repeatedly found 10 people in a row that have expressed that
2:02 pain. That's when you start shaping the potential solution for it. Here's how
2:05 that conversation sounds. You call up the phone. You say, "Well, I've been
2:08 talking to a lot of people just like you. What they've told me is this, this,
2:12 and this. Does that resonate with you?" When they go, "Uh, yeah." get excited
2:16 cuz all of a sudden you're like, "Okay, this isn't a vitamin anymore. This is a
2:20 real painkiller opportunity." And now your whole thing is to help them shape
2:23 your ideas on how you would solve the problem. It comes down to helping them
2:27 find opportunities to save time, make more money, reduce errors, something in
2:31 their life that is creating friction or pain or challenges. That's what you want
2:36 to validate. The last step, the most important is you want to pair the
2:40 problem with a growing market. That could be picking an industry that's
2:44 growing 20% per year and pair the solution with AI. When you start with
2:48 the idea of how do I solve that specific problem using AI, that's what makes this
2:53 video way different than anybody else teaching you how to just start a
2:57 business. Because the innovation is validate the pain, then come up with the
3:02 idea around AI first solving of the pain. Most products out there, they work
3:07 for a customer today and they added AI as a secondary thing. You want to start
3:11 with the first principle of using AI to solve the problem [music] and that's
3:14 what's going to make your product way different. Remember this, if you solve
3:18 rich people problems, they will pay you easier and faster. So find customers
3:22 that actually have money to pay to solve the problem. With that, now you have
3:26 their pain. But if you want to start a really successful AI business, it's time
3:31 to actually address it. Step number two, solve the problem manually. I know this
3:35 sounds boring. I don't want to do a manual work, Dan. I want to automate it
3:39 and use code and AI and all that fun whisbang stuff. I get it. But guess
3:42 what? You don't learn fast that way. The best way to start any business is to
3:47 start with a hands-on approach. Get paid [music] to learn the whole process.
3:51 That's why every technology company out there that you use like Shopify and
3:57 Fresh Books and Base Camp and all these companies started first by doing the
4:02 work manually and then built the tool to automate the workflow. If you just start
4:07 with a manual approach that'll get you talking to customers, that'll get you in
4:11 the flow of the transaction and it'll give you the financing. More on that in
4:15 a second to actually build the product. Don't start by building a bunch of
4:18 features. Start with the [music] workflow and get paid to build it. Like
4:21 when I look at one of my companies in my portfolio, Precision, talking to the
4:25 founder, Matt, and watching how he deployed the solution early, he found a
4:29 bunch of customers that paid him to solve the problem, helping them
4:33 understand their data and understanding the specific [music] tactics they needed
4:37 to change in the business to improve the numbers. Using those conversations
4:41 guided the product roadmap and then when he launched the product, the product was
4:45 dialed in [music] because he had those conversations, he had those early
4:49 customers, and they were paying. If you want to find a beautiful way to waste
4:52 your time, find a bunch of people that aren't paying you and have them tell you
4:55 how to run your business. But how do you do this? It's super simple. All you need
5:00 to do first is draft a one-page done for you type offer. That's what I call it.
5:04 But in that one-page document, it talks about the problem prevalidated through
5:08 the phone calls. It talks about the outcome, what's the impact to their
5:11 business. It talks about the timeline, how you're going to deliver that, and it
5:15 has the price, or I like to call it the investment. If you keep it simple, the
5:20 person should read that and go, "Wow, that would absolutely solve my problem.
5:23 That makes so much sense. I love the outline of the timeline, and the
5:25 investment is actually really reasonable." For example, one of our
5:30 portfolio companies, youratlas.com, essentially allows you to replace a
5:33 person on your team answering calls using AI and then book sales meetings.
5:37 It's kind of awesome. So, the donefor you offer would sound something simple
5:40 like this. replace a full-time receptionist, end missed opportunities,
5:44 and turn [music] every ad click into a booked call with your atlas in 30 days
5:48 for just 2500 a month. Do you notice that it had those four elements? All you
5:53 have to do is take the pain and those conversations you pre-validated [music]
5:57 and create a simple offer that uses those four key components. And look, if
6:01 you want my exact offer template that I've used to close millions of dollars
6:05 every month in my companies, I'm giving it away for free. It's yours to help you
6:09 make money fast without any friction. It takes this structure and expands on it
6:13 and you can just swap out what you just created in that document and start using
6:17 it after you do a sales call or on the sales calls to really get clear on
6:20 [music] how you can help add value to a potential customer. So, just click the
6:23 link in the description below and download your copy or the QR code on the
6:26 screen. [music] It's my gift to you absolutely free. I hope it makes you a
6:30 lot of money. Now, you figured out the solution to their problem. You even have
6:34 an offer. But for a really successful AI business, you need to actually build
6:38 something. Just don't get too fancy. Step number three, build a clickable
6:42 prototype. The word is [music] prototype. Prototype. Prototype.
6:46 Prototype. I had a friend not too long ago approach me for advice. And I told
6:50 him to do it completely different, but he decided to go and invest what
6:54 initially was $600,000 to build the product turned into $2 million. [music]
6:58 And three years later, the product never launched and the whole thing went to
7:02 zero. Why? because he overbuilt and they didn't understand that the real
7:05 validation comes from talking to customers, working with them to build
7:08 the thing, not just paying somebody to build something. So instead of spending
7:13 50K developing the full tool, use that time to build a simple clickable
7:18 prototype. Here's how you can do this exactly step by step. First, we create
7:23 the flow on paper. I pull out my iPad and I take my pen and I just draw the
7:27 workflow of what I've already talked with the customer that they want to
7:31 improve. How is AI going to improve their life? Well, we got to design the
7:34 flow. See, if you don't take the time to figure out how it's going to work, then
7:37 even if you found somebody to build it, they're going to not know how to build
7:40 it, and you're just going to waste a bunch of money. What I mean by flow is
7:45 exactly each step or screen of how the experience is going to look for a user.
7:48 Now, you don't have to go into the whole signup flow, but once they've created an
7:52 account, they're in the product, how is that product going to be shown to the
7:56 user in [music] a way that solves their problem? Here's a tip. AI going forward
8:01 most of the interface is going to be phoneed driven or voiced driven. No
8:06 [music] interface. The days of having a front-end app that people enter
8:09 information are going away. People want click click value. Automate the process.
8:15 So your flow might be they call a phone number, they tell them what they want to
8:19 order, magically the order shows up. The second, we have to make a fast clickable
8:23 prototype. The cool part in today's world, back in my day, I had to sit
8:27 there and build all this stuff. I actually used to create these prototypes
8:30 in PowerPoint and then Keynote. Today, you've got these solutions like
8:35 figma.com or uxpilot.ai or visally.ai that will take a prompt and create this
8:40 all for you automagically. So, if you skip this step, that's on you. But it's
8:44 never been easier. And you can get many of these products to photo realistic
8:49 prototypes that you can show to a user and many of them will be like, "Oh, wow.
8:52 This is really cool." They'll think it's working software. The third, once you've
8:55 done that, you need to get it in front of actual customers as soon as freaking
8:59 possible. So, what I want you to do is go back to those early customers. Now,
9:02 you have a product, you have a prototype, show it to them. Ask them if
9:06 it's okay to record the call. Have that conversation. Show them the product. Ask
9:09 them, "Would they use this? What do you think's most valuable? What would you
9:12 recommend I change?" My favorite thing is to just use my phone as the pitch
9:16 deck. I think mobile apps is like the future of selling because I can be on a
9:20 plane, meet somebody new, they go, "What do you do?" And I say, "I'll just show
9:23 you." and you show them and then you give them the clickable prototype and
9:26 they're like, "Oh, wow. This is really cool. You built this." And they're like,
9:30 "Yep." But it doesn't work. It's just simulated. It can look so real that even
9:36 I will think it's a real product. I remember I was down in LA hanging out
9:39 with my buddy Rob and he showed me this time app he built. He has this massive
9:43 LED screen and he's showing me the product and he's clicking through and
9:46 he's and these features and it's going to do this and there's images and I'm
9:51 like, "Wo, all fake." Like there was nothing real. It was all simulated
9:56 clickable prototype in that moment. If he said, "Hey, do you want to invest?" I
9:59 would have said yes. If he said, "Hey, do you want to be a user?" I would have
10:02 said yes. Like it had everything I needed, but he didn't have to spend a
10:04 million dollars to build the thing I was looking at. So remember, prototype, not
10:09 product. So now you have a prototype. Great. But to build an AI business from
10:14 scratch, you need to get cash before you [music] go any further. Step number
10:18 four, validate the prototype with cash. My rule is you haven't really started a
10:22 business until you get paid. People ask me like, "Dan, I want to start a
10:25 business. How do I start a business?" Very simple. Go find a stranger and
10:30 convince them to buy something from you. Technology aside, AI aside, that can
10:35 happen before you build anything. The truth is, most people will be super nice
10:39 to you. They'll tell you, "Hey man, that's a great idea. You should go build
10:41 it." And you're like, "Awesome. I'm going to go build it." Like, "Yeah, I
10:44 believe in you." And then you come back in 5 months, 6 months, 100 grand later,
10:48 all this time wasted, and you go, "Hey, I built this thing. Do you want to be a
10:51 customer?" And they're like, "Oh, that's cool, but I'm sorry. I'm busy." And
10:55 you're like, "You told me this was a good idea." No, no, it's a good idea.
10:57 You should do it. But then why aren't you using it? You know, it just doesn't
11:00 really work the way I would use it. So, but hey, congratulations. I'm telling
11:04 you, until people pay, they ain't going to pay attention. And if they ain't
11:08 paying, their feedback is invalidated. This step I'm about to share with you
11:11 has caused more pain and cost more money for more entrepreneurs than any other
11:14 problem that's ever existed in the AI space. For example, I was just recently
11:20 in Dubai. Did you know that in Dubai, if you look at the real estate, this city
11:24 has been built over the last 20 years and 70% of every sale happened what's
11:30 called off plan. Meaning before they ever started to build that development
11:34 project, they sold the units in that project to fund the development of those
11:39 billion-dollar buildings. So don't tell me you can't do this. It happens every
11:43 day in consulting and big companies where they pay people to build internal
11:47 tools. It happens in crowdfunding where people support these big projects to buy
11:50 a product that someday will get delivered. And it happens in Dubai
11:54 selling offplan sales with models and clickable prototypes on pages to get
12:00 people to pay to fund the build. Here's a fun fact. Every company I've ever
12:05 launched, I've always pre-sold before I ever built anything. Every company,
12:09 every technology, every software from Flowtown to Spheric to Clarity, I built
12:16 the product after I sold it. I needed to validate that there was real people
12:19 willing to pay, willing to lean in, willing to invest before I was going to
12:23 spend my time and energy because that wasn't the riskiest assumption. The
12:26 riskiest assumption was, do they actually want it? So, here's how you can
12:31 do it in your AI business in just two steps. The first part is we want to
12:35 launch an early adopter program. I call it an EAP. Sometimes I call it the
12:39 founding 50. I've seen people call it like the advisory board. Essentially,
12:42 the idea is you go to potential customers and you tell them, "Hey,
12:46 here's the problem that I see in the market. Here's how I'm going to solve
12:49 it. Here's the prototype, and I'm looking for 10, maybe 50 early customers
12:55 to come in to help support the investment, the build. These are the
12:58 folks that are going to shape the product. They're going to get early
13:01 access to innovation. They're going to get [music] things their competitor
13:04 doesn't have." And you frame it that way so they get excited to be part of
13:08 co-creating a solution. In the world, there's early adopters and there's
13:11 lagards. There's people that like buy the latest and greatest iPhone and then
13:15 people that are still on their flip phone. But you want to find a small
13:19 group of people that prepay to finance the initial development and roll out of
13:23 your AI software and learn how to present it in a way where they get
13:26 excited to be part of it. The second part is create an offer and price it in
13:30 a really intuitive way that makes the joining of that group so simple. So, the
13:34 way I do it, really simple math, is offer an annual prepaid deal that is
13:40 usually 50% off the retail price of the year for your software. So, if you're
13:43 going to charge $100 a month for your software, the annualized version of that
13:48 would be 1,200. You can charge 600 for those people to be part of that early
13:52 adopter program. And you might add extra stuff like oftent times I'll add VIP
13:56 onboarding, implementation calls, the ability to influence the road map of my
14:01 AI software. And that gets people connected to you, your mission, your
14:04 vision. And I'm telling you, if you want to win in AI, you have to learn to
14:09 persuade people to make decisions, to invest in you, to trust you. And by
14:13 showing them that you've had the calls, you've learned about their industry, the
14:16 market, and you've built a clickable prototype. Offering this, building your
14:21 founding 50 early adopter program, and having a clear offer will get them
14:25 excited to make the commitment. Now, with cash in hand, you can actually
14:29 create the product. But we need to make sure you keep it simple. Step number
14:34 five, build an MVP. Now we can talk about minimal viable product. But again,
14:38 can I please, please, please warn you. Don't overbuild. Don't overengineer.
14:43 Don't build for the someday maybe. The whole point is minimum. The whole point
14:47 is not building every possible feature, but saying these are the three things
14:50 that it's going to do for our customers and nail those three. You need to reduce
14:55 the features to just the things that are going to get them excited and want them
14:59 to pay. The cool thing about AI is that it doesn't take a lot to create a
15:03 massive amount of value for a business. When I look back at things like
15:08 Facebook, Facebook started as a simple app for me in university to figure out
15:12 what other classes my friends are taking. Amazon started with books. You
15:16 don't need to be everything to everyone. If anything, it's a dangerous recipe for
15:20 starting. You want to keep it simple, keep it small, and get it built. For
15:24 example, I have a product called Social Sweep. It's the coolest thing. It
15:28 analyzes all my social networks and it adds AI inference and data enrichment
15:33 and allows me to find anybody with any specific knowledge or works at a company
15:37 or can help me across all my social platforms. And I remember when I
15:41 launched it with Jade, my partner, he started getting requests from people
15:44 that wanted to have like enterprise level features. And I said, Jade, I love
15:47 that they want that. They're excited about the product. The truth is, let's
15:51 nail this use case for now. Just write them down. Say, I appreciate it. I
15:55 appreciate the feedback. And right now you can use the product as is to get a
15:59 tremendous amount of value, but only in the future when we decide to build it
16:02 will we circle back and let you know. The cool part is is that you can then
16:06 see if the customer is actually willing to use the product as is and get them to
16:10 pay or if they really have a need that needs to be built in the future. So it
16:14 validates it. And then when you launch it in the future, you might have 12, 15,
16:18 20 people that have asked for that feature. and you can tell them
16:21 individually that because of your feedback, we launched that feature and
16:24 they're going to feel so invested in your product. It is like a product
16:28 management hack. Here's the way I look at my lens. If it impacts 80% of
16:32 customers, it's worth considering doing. If it doesn't, put it on a list. Now,
16:37 [music] if you want the easiest way to create your MVP without knowing anything
16:42 about code, here's what you want to do. First, go to buildwithai.io. It's
16:45 actually called brain dumper. That's the product. And I want you to give it your
16:51 idea in plain [music] English. And trust me, it can be messy. It could be
16:55 disconnected. A great way is to think about all the conversations you've had.
16:58 You look at the product and you can just walk through the clickable prototype.
17:03 You're talking to Brain Dumper as you're looking at the prototype you've already
17:06 built. So use plain English to explain the screens, explain the features into
17:11 that product. Next, that product will actually recommend both the tools and
17:17 the system prompts. the AI prompts that you need to create a mockup for your
17:22 tool. That mockup is essentially the beginning piece is the foundation that
17:26 you're going to need for this next step. The last step, once you have that, just
17:29 copy and paste the prompts it gives you into a tool like lovable.dev and click
17:35 enter and watch it build your AI app in real [music] time. Once you see this, it
17:40 will blow your mind for what's possible. Most people have no idea that AI has
17:46 gotten so good that you can talk to a tool that will help formalize the whole
17:51 mockup, all the system prompts, tell you which tools to go use that you then go
17:56 to the website, enter it in, hit enter, and it builds the AI business for
17:59 [music] you. A lot of people will tell you just to go to lovable right now and
18:03 go build the app. The problem is is they get stuck in the technical
18:06 implementation. Start with a clickable prototype. And what's cool is that when
18:10 you sell that, the customer is going to know that it's not real yet, and they're
18:14 going to get excited for the momentum because you get to come back maybe a few
18:18 weeks later with a real product from a clickable prototype, which in their mind
18:23 is unheard of. The truth is, it's so easy to do and build these apps with AI
18:27 that most people just overdo it and they really don't understand their customers
18:31 pain. And with that, now you have your MVP. Isn't this freaking awesome? Not
18:34 long ago, you came here and you were like, "How do I build a company?" Now
18:38 you got the pieces. You got a customer that's paying. You got a product. But
18:41 we're not done yet. Once that's live, you'll start getting feedback on what's
18:45 working, what's not. And this is where you need to make the adjustments if you
18:49 really want your AI business to sore. Step six, collect feedback from your
18:54 customers. So my whole rule is watch what they do, do not listen to what they
18:59 say. I know that sounds harsh, but I've been on the receiving end of so many
19:02 customers that are using my product that say, "Hey, I've got this idea." and I
19:07 listen and then I go look at the logs. I look at the admin interface and I see
19:09 that they've never logged into the product. Everybody has an opinion.
19:14 Everybody will tell you what you should do. I want to know what my best
19:18 customers are doing. I want to figure out the people that kind of use the
19:22 product, what I could tweak to make them fall in love with the product. When you
19:26 can take a customer that's like a little bit happy and make them a raving fan,
19:30 that's when you build an AI business that takes off. trying to circumvent
19:35 that and just being a cheap development shop for anybody with an opinion. That
19:39 is the fastest way for you to fail in your business. One time I was building
19:42 this product called Timely and we launched it. I think like 10,000 people
19:46 signed up and started using it. It was a simple scheduling tool for Twitter. It's
19:49 like you connect your Twitter account, you schedule your tweets. We knew when
19:53 your audience was most engaged, so we would schedule when the tweets went out
19:56 so that you had the most impressions from the people following you. Pretty
20:00 simple app. 10,000 people sign up. not a lot of people use it. And I'm like, why
20:04 are they not using it? And then I start calling people and they're like, I love
20:07 the idea. I love this idea. I love I know you love the idea you signed up,
20:10 but why aren't you using it? And then I looked at the people that did use it.
20:13 And they just kept saying the same thing. I don't know what to tweet. So it
20:17 occurred to me that one of the best ways to fix the [music] problem is to
20:20 actually put some recommended tweets based on who they are and what could
20:23 work really well. So that when they came in, they could just click add to Q and
20:27 then it would go out and then they would get a response email. that little
20:32 interface prompt, change activation, people that signed up for the product
20:36 and actually tweeted to 70% on their first visit. That's how we solve the
20:40 customer feedback problem. Most people will tell you it's great, but their
20:43 actions say something different. You need to talk to them. And that is a big
20:47 idea when it comes to being an innovator in the AI space. But here's the
20:51 challenge. To collect customer feedback and actually make it useful, you need a
20:55 process. So here's how you can do it today. The first thing we have to do is
20:59 we have to set up a weekly customer interview process. I love this. To me,
21:02 it's the customer advisory board. It's a handful of customers that you consider
21:06 your ideal customer. And you want to talk to them. You might have 50 of them.
21:09 You might have 10 of them, but every week you want to be talking to get
21:12 feedback to get familiar with their frustrations around using your product.
21:17 Now, you have to tell them, "Hey, I know you don't want to hurt my feelings, but
21:20 I can't make the product better if you're not honest with me. So, I would
21:23 really appreciate if you could be really critical around how the product's
21:27 working for you or not. Then you take all of that feedback and then you
21:30 categorize it into the different buckets of essentially features within your
21:33 product. Because you might know that like I've got a reporting feature, I
21:37 have a messaging feature, I have an integration feature, [music] but which
21:40 one is the most important to actually nail to make the product your AI
21:45 solution even better? So then we have to put the feedback into those buckets from
21:48 different [music] customers and then sequence the priorities based on what
21:52 you know as the founder that's going to be the most valuable to the market. For
21:56 example, if you know that there's not enough integrations, you might take all
21:59 the feedback where people talked about the integrations to their systems and
22:02 say, "Okay, we're going to spend the next two weeks fixing those. What are
22:06 the first three we should focus on based on those buckets of feedback?" So third
22:11 with that you want to sequence the biggest challenges that most of your
22:16 keyword paying customers are facing. When I think about it it's an XYaxis.
22:21 The Yaxis is how many people would use that feature and impacts in your product
22:26 and the X-axis is how many people are paying right now or want to use that
22:30 feature or the market would pay for but they're not because you don't have it.
22:34 What are the areas of product that if I made better would impact the most
22:37 people? meaning the most people are using it. That would also make my
22:41 product the most competitive and valuable to the market, both my paying
22:45 customers and from a marketing point of view, attractive to other people that
22:49 haven't bought yet because we're missing things. You want to spend your dev time
22:53 on the top right corner of things that have a lot of impact to your current
22:56 customer and are going to make you the most money. If you're just fixing the
22:59 squeaky wheel because somebody that you really like is giving you feedback and
23:02 you're just spending time adding features, your product will start to
23:07 turn into a Frankenstein solution. It's actually a plague and it's called
23:11 featureritis. You don't want to build a product that's got a bunch of halfcooked
23:15 features that confuses the interface, is buggy, and people don't even use. That
23:19 is the fastest way to run your AI company into the ground. Now, here's a
23:23 pro tip. Record all the calls using AI. Obviously, get permission, transcribe
23:27 them, then ask AI to analyze them based on the criteria I just gave you. You
23:31 literally can say and just prompt it based on Dan Martell's process for
23:34 product management, analyze the feedback, and please prioritize it based
23:38 on the best things that are going to have the impact and make me the most
23:42 money within my AI company. Watch what it does. You don't have to be the
23:46 smartest person. You can use AI to do this process for you. Now, by
23:50 implementing that feedback, you're well on your way to build a massively
23:54 successful AI business, all from scratch without any resources, without knowing
23:58 how to code. But there's one last step that will make everything grow 10 times
24:03 as fast. Number seven, hack your growth. The word growth hack has been hijacked
24:08 by marketers to make their work sound fancy. They're essentially doing
24:11 marketing and they're like, "We're growth hacking." Here's rule number one
24:15 of a growth hack. It's not a growth hack if everybody knows it. The whole point
24:18 is to find a way to get distribution that other people don't know about and
24:22 that is what makes it a hack. If everybody knows about it and they're
24:25 doing it, then that's called marketing. When Facebook launched, as an example,
24:30 they realized that if somebody got an email that said they've been tagged in a
24:35 photo, almost 100% of the time they clicked through that email to then go
24:39 see the photo. if they weren't on Facebook and they got that email and
24:42 they clicked through, they would then sign up to create a Facebook account to
24:47 then show them the photo. So, what they realize is they could buy a bunch of
24:52 address book importing tools that essentially allows you to pull your
24:55 contacts out of your emails or your address book tools to go sign up and use
24:59 in other tools. If they bought those companies, they could use every one of
25:03 those emails to send that email. And that's actually how they activated a lot
25:07 of the countries around the world in the first few years of Facebook's growth.
25:12 Airbnb did the same thing. They built a custom tool that lived inside their
25:16 product that allowed the people with listings on Airbnb to publish the
25:21 listing on Craigslist. Craigslist was a free listing site for people looking to
25:26 rent out their place. So Airbnb said, "How do we take advantage of that
25:29 audience?" But we got to make it easier for customers that have listings on our
25:33 tool to publish there. that gave them the foundation to growth hack their
25:37 distribution. [music] I'll make it really easy for you and I'll give you the three biggest growth
25:42 hacks you can use to grow your AI business today. The first one, it's one
25:45 of my favorites, is distribution partners. That's essentially what I do
25:49 for my portfolio at Martell Ventures. I partner with them. I invest in these
25:52 companies. I build these companies because I have an audience. All of you
25:55 guys are here watching my videos, follow me on social media, and if I use a tool
25:59 and I tell you about it because you trust me, you'll go try it out. That's
26:03 really valuable for a new AI company. So, if you have a product and it's
26:06 actually launched and it's got real revenue and you're looking for
26:08 potentially partnering with me, just click the second link in the description
26:12 below and apply at Martell Ventures. Think about this. You might have friends
26:15 that already have access to a large audience of people that are your ideal
26:19 customers. Think people that have events, people that run webinars, people
26:23 that are online influencers, people that create content, people that write books.
26:27 All these people have an audience and they sell what they sell as a service.
26:30 And you might have an AI tool that complements them. And if you partner
26:34 with them, they'll put you in front of their audience because you'll pay them.
26:37 You'll give them 10, 15, 20% referral fees, but that makes your ability to
26:43 grow so much faster. Next, number two is non-traditional sponsorship or
26:47 placements. This one is one of my favorites. Finding niche YouTube
26:51 channels that you can sponsor, podcast that you can sponsor. See, everybody
26:55 wants to do the big podcast, but there's so many smaller creators that you can
26:59 just pay to just get in front of their audience. It's so much faster. One of my
27:03 favorite growth hacks around this is finding a company that is
27:07 non-competitive to yours that sells to the same customer [music]
27:10 and offer to do what's called a pixel swap where you give them your Facebook
27:13 pixel. You put their pixel on your website and essentially you now are a
27:17 partner where you can run ads very targeted to that other person's website
27:22 visitors because you know specifically that they would buy your product and it
27:26 is the most effective ad spend you could actually do. So basically, you can swap
27:30 the ability to tag each other's visitors so that you can run ads to each other's
27:34 visitors in your Facebook ads. Number three, insert into an existing toolkit.
27:39 This one is like the ultimate. This is what I did at Flowtown where I partnered
27:43 with Mailchimp. So, I got our product built into their tool. I've helped a lot
27:47 of friends do this in their technologies where they build integrations or add-ons
27:52 to other bigger products. I mean, when you think about it, you have like Zapier
27:55 and Make and Notion and HubSpot and Slack and grow high level. A lot of
27:59 people have built tools, these AI powered solutions that plug into their
28:04 marketplaces and they get featured on those sites to get a ton of customers.
28:07 Those growth hacks are so straightforward and easy and allows you
28:11 to build that momentum. So, if you build an AI for Shopify, be sure you get
28:16 placed in their directory. Figure out how you can add value to their
28:19 marketplace to Shopify so that they want to feature you. Maybe they're going to
28:22 invite you to speak at their annual event. But that idea to build
28:25 integrations is a big way to get audience for your new AI solution. The
28:30 whole philosophy is be creative and follow the path of the buyer. Simple
28:35 example, my friend was selling HR apps in Asia. He was trying to find early
28:40 adopters. I said look at the email. People that are early adopters use
28:44 technology that considers early adopters. Back in the day, this is in
28:49 2010. companies that were using Google Apps for Domain, which became Google
28:53 Apps for Business, essentially were saying through their email, using the
28:57 Gmail protocol, that they were early adopters. So, all we did is we took
29:01 their list of like a 100,000 leads, looked at the domain data, okay, the DNS
29:06 record to see if they use Google for their email exchange, and then that way
29:10 we could just filter out all the people that didn't because the ones that did
29:13 were telling us that they were early adopters. Those are the people that are
29:17 going to buy HR software. Essentially, leading into their sales team, 4xing
29:22 their performance. Those three things individually will help you add 10x to
29:26 your growth. You just got to pick one and go allin. I know this is a lot, but
29:32 let me tell you, if you just follow this step by step, this is how today, not
29:39 tomorrow, not next week, not in a year, you finally launch that AI business. I'm
29:43 telling you, there's probably an 18month, maybe 24 month, maybe 36-month
29:48 window where if you come out of the gate today to build something really magical
29:53 around AI and help businesses solve real pains, you can create a massive amount
29:57 of wealth. Like, I'm talking generational wealth right now that's
30:01 available to any person without any code, without any background in
30:05 technology because the AI's gotten that good. Don't sleep on it. Don't wait.
30:11 Because if I was starting from scratch, this is exactly what I would do today.
30:15 And again, if you want my offer template to make it next level, just click the
30:19 link in the description below. Now, if you want to learn how to get rich in the
30:23 new AI era, click here and I'll see you
