The Exchanges

Q Okay. And then you discovered that you could do this yourself using AI tools, specifically Replit. How did you discover Replit?

A I discovered Replit because I don't even remember who it was. I wish I could give them credit, but somebody posted about it on LinkedIn. It was some VC. And they said, I just watched a founder, you know, put together this website and this new thing in like 10 minutes, something that would have taken months before. And, you know, using REPLIT. I was like, what does that mean? And it was literally the same day I had received this proposal from this dev shop in Ukraine for a 105,000 dollars. They had actually sent over, we'd already done some architecture discussions and they'd sent over a PDF with a proposal about here's how we're going to build the whole thing. And so I was like, I wonder if I could just drop this PDF into REPLIT. So I just drag it in and said, build this. And 10 minutes later I had, you know, at least the first version of that preview.

AI assessment note: “somebody posted about it on LinkedIn. It was some VC.”

Q about the evolution of the business. So it started out with that, with you getting a customer directly and teaching their people. At some point, you said, I'm actually not just going to be the teacher who comes in. I'm going to get referral, I mean, um, I'm going to get ongoing revenue, recurring revenue. What's the thing that allowed you to earn recurring revenue from customers? What's the service?

A Yeah, so I, I came up, and it was, I remember the moment I came up with it. I was on a call with somebody, and I had been selling these, you know, 15,000 dollar AI training days, right, and people would pay me. 15 grand to just come in and teach their 20 employees or their 50 employees or whatever it was to, you know, how, how it was, how it works. And we do an eight hour kind of AI, whatever. And, uh, and I was talking to somebody and I happened to know this guy. He was an old neighbor and owned a pool company and, uh, you know, good one doing, doing about twenty million a year. You know, he's doing great. And, um, and he said, man, John, we need help with AI. You know, can you come in and teach us and show us? And I said, yeah, absolutely. And I said, you know, I just thought on the spot right there, because he asked me the question. He said, well, what do you do ongoing? Like, do you come in and teach us again? I said, Absolutely. I do. Right. And I, I said, yeah, you know, we have this fractional chief AI officer model. Right. And when I'm saying we, at this moment, it's still just me as a solo guy. Right. Um, plus my, you know, Claude and everybody else helping me out behind the scenes. Um, but, uh, I said, yeah, we've got this fractional chief AI officer model. It's about the same price. It's 15 grand a month. And, um, but then you get me ongoing. And so, yeah, we'll do s…

AI assessment note: “we have this fractional chief AI officer model. It's about the same price.”

Q What's a, what's a weird thing that you're doing on Replit that I wouldn't have anticipated? Obviously, yeah, tell me.

A So I built a video game just to see if I could, like a full-on, like, It's called moon command and go to moon command dot AI. It's free. I just, I wanted to see if I could do it right. I decided to do that. And that was hard. That was hard. There were crazy things. I had it because it's multiplayer, right? You and I could jump on and we could play against each other right now. And so in order to have live real-time syncing of the game, there were all kinds of web sockets and things and communication and chats and real-time stuff that was, that took me to, you know, Replit has their, you know, their system kind of monitors You know, how good are you? Are you a level one developer, a level two, level three, four, and five? And before I built the game, I was a level four. I had built hundreds of apps on there, and that game took me to a level five.

AI assessment note: “So I built a video game just to see if I could”

Q And so were you also teaching software or just big concepts like this and then letting them know there's software to implement it with?

A I don't like the big concept teachers, right? There's plenty of them out there. I don't think they're bad. I just don't think it's very valuable. What I like to do is we'll touch on a big thing, but then we're going to go practical and into a piece of software, right? And I'll say, yeah, you could use this, you know, we might use Chattupt, but you can do this with Grok or with Claude or with, you know, deep seek, whatever the heck you want. There's a lot of different options out there, but These principles apply across all these things. Now let's try it. Everybody take five minutes and have a conversation with your AI about this. Great. What did, how did that work? What did you guys run into? You know, I, I'm a, I'm a practical teacher. I want people to come away knowing, okay, I can do this now. Not just, oh yeah, AI seems cool.

AI assessment note: “we'll touch on a big thing, but then we're going to go practical”

Q a consultant, you turn that over to somebody else, right? You might install HubSpot. Now HubSpot's a core piece of their business. Here, you've got it yourself. Okay, um, and then the other thing that I kind of missed and brushed past, actually, no, let's talk about pricing. How do you think about pricing? Why do you charge more than others who are doing the same type of AI transformation?

A You know, I really just looked at what would, what would they have to pay if they were bringing someone internal, right? You know, I believe that every company, every single company should have somebody in charge of AI. I don't care if it's, you know, director of AI implementation or a chief AI officer. Somebody needs to be in charge of AI and their job is to go around and keep people accountable. Hey, we have these tools. What are you doing? You know, are you trained on this? Do we need to do training on that? Do we need to do this? Why are you still doing this manually over here? You could, I can do that easily. You gotta have somebody that's in charge of this. And I also was bringing a level of, uh, sophistication in terms of, I, I'm not a 22 year old out of college. I had, I've been around the block. I've built companies. I've sold them. I know how to run a business. And so I just said, you know what, in order for me to provide ongoing support, and really this is what drove it in the beginning, in order for me to actually provide ongoing support, it's gotta be worth my time. So I'm gonna charge it kind of at a, you know, a good, good employee, 15 K a month to start. And, um, and then we'll, we'll go from there. And, and, you know, it's kind of like, you know, once someone runs the four minute mile, like it's easy to run the four minute mile for people that are at that level…

AI assessment note: “I really just looked at what would they have to pay if they were bringing someone internal”

Q But I still don't understand then why not build this social network thing that you had in mind instead of building this for other people?

A I went down this vibe coding kind of rabbit hole after I built this first thing called Echoes is what I called the app was the, you know, memories of the past, right? Um, so anyway, this Echoes app was cool, but then I said, oh, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could do this. And so I ended up, I, you know, a few months later, I'd built 20 apps and, and, uh, and then people started asking me, hey, Could you help me do stuff, whatever? And I said, hey, have you tried this? And, you know, I was able to do things for them so much faster, and I realized that there was an opportunity there, and then it just kind of, this just kind of happened.

AI assessment note: “I realized that there was an opportunity there, and then it just kind of”

Q What, what about AI? AI is such a big thing. Is it like, how do you prompt ChatGPT with questions? Is it how do you build with Replit? It's a, it's a company with multiple people. How can you teach one thing?

A Yeah. You know, there, there are principles. There are principles that are, that are good. It's learning how to think differently. That's what I really like to focus on is, you know, how do you, like today, there's a concept of like throwaway software. Like you can literally vibe code a solution. Like you might have a task that was going to take you six hours, but instead you could take 30 minutes and vibe code a tool that will do that task for you. And you may never use that piece of software again, right? But you wouldn't think like that back in 2020, right? Or before vibe coding was a thing. Right. Back when I started my company in 2016, that was not an option for me. And most people have no idea that AI is capable of just whipping something up quickly. They can actually execute on things and build stuff and do incredible things like that. And so learning, learning how to think a little bit differently, how to approach problems. There's principles like throwaway software, or even, even just a very simple thing. Like I mentioned earlier, have AI interview you. Right. That's a great skill that a lot of people haven't thought of, right? That helps you really flesh out an idea and ensures that you stay in control and your AI doesn't go off on some tangent on its own.

AI assessment note: “There are principles. It's learning how to think differently.”

Q the same thing that you sold to the other one. And now so far, what we're talking about is, um, for people who are just listening, he's nodding. Yes, this is enthusiastically. This is the way that he found his recurring revenue model. For one, I understand you went beyond teaching to actually become more of a CTO to having some kind of frameworks that you're installing. What is that?

A Yeah. You know, the, the fractional chief AI officer model that I came up with, I, I realized that there were three kind of buckets that, that made sense. And I said this on the first call and it has stuck, right? But it's S T E is the kind of framework that I like to say it's strategy, transformation, and education. I was already doing that education piece a bunch, right? I had been teaching people and coming in and helping them get up to speed, but I also had been doing strategy as well with a lot of these CEOs, you know, before A call or before an education seminar thing I would do with people. I would sit down with the CEO and having, I had the benefit of again, having been a CEO for a decade. And so I, I had experience, I had ideas. I could, I could actually consult at a decently high level. And so, um, I was able to say, look, this is what I think it means for your business. This is how things are going to change. Here's technology. This is what it means. And then that transformation piece in the middle there is a, and I'm really good at building. I can build stuff super fast. I can vibe code. I can show you guys how to do it and work with you, work Alongside you. But ultimately I want you to really start becoming an AI, you know, first company where AI is doing things. It's taking tasks away from you. It's saving you money. It's saving you time. It's giving you back time…

AI assessment note: “it's S T E is the kind of framework that I like to say it's strategy, transformation, and education.”

Q Wow. Yeah. That is such, it's such a good site that elevates your brand instead of, you know, making it look like, like another education site. But that still doesn't mean that people are going to come to you and say, you know what, we're, we're a government agency. We're looking to hire people. How did you find them?

A They found me. And that is where another, another place where AI can just make you an expert in things. My, maybe one advantage that I have on maybe just an average person who's just getting started is I had been a CEO of a company that raised money and been through an exit. And I had been there for eight years and, you know, I, I've been around the block. And so I knew things that mattered and, you know, some things that matter to, to appear and to show up in search results is you gotta have stuff like SEO and now GEO. Right? I had Franklin Covey reach out to me the other day, and they said, hey, um, we'd love to work with you. We need, you know, we need some help on this stuff. I was like, awesome. How'd you find us? And they said, ChatGPT. Right? ChatGPT said, you guys are, you guys are one of the best out there. I was like, amazing. That means that my work on GEO, and by the way, what, how did I do this on Replit? I found actually the best company out there that does GEO. There's a great funded company out of Silicon Valley. It's just as awesome GEO. I don't remember the name of the company right now, but I, I handed that website to Grok and to ChatGPT, and I said, do as much research as you can in this company. Figure out exactly what they do and report back to me. Tell me Down at the technical level. What are they doing?

AI assessment note: “They found me. And that is where another, another place where AI can just”

Q And so what are the things that installed on your website?

A Oh, it just installed all the, just, you know, the meta tags and the robot text LLMs and the FAQs and all the things that the chat GPT, all these geo engines are looking for. Right. And so it just had the structure. It had all the data that was there and it's nothing more than just certain files and tags and things that have to be done in a way that, you know, are, you know, appropriate and optimized for that. And so Because I did all of that stuff, people are finding me. I looked at my Google analytics this morning. I sent it to my team because I was actually happy about it, but it said that, um, out of the, uh, let's say, I'll just tell you the numbers. Uh, in the last week I've had 876 people visit our website from organic search.

AI assessment note: “meta tags and the robot text LLMs and the FAQs”

Q sell for less. You're always selling for more than I expect you to. Um, when you're selling, sell this, a framework for you is the strategy education transformation, then ultimately look for that bigger opportunity, and the big thing that you saw was sell software to assist the service that you just sold. So essentially you see people, what people want, create the software. Am I missing anything in there?

A Yeah. No, you, you, you nailed it. The one thing I'll point out on the software piece is the software is what makes it sticky, right? What we, you know, we had a few early clients. They're like, Hey, great. Thanks for building all this stuff out. You know, we're good. Right. And we're like, okay, cool. We made 60 grand. That's good. But we were good. And in four months we transformed their company. Right. And so we said, okay, what can we do to start building in, you know, something that's going to make us stay around for years and years and years. Right. And, uh, you know, selling annual contracts as opposed to these, you know, a 30 day by 30 day, whatever, you know. And we, of course, I, I, I put a, you know, I got rid of barriers like, hey, we're not going to make you sign an annual contract, or it's not going to be a certain project. Like, you want to fire me like any other employee? That's fine. Because that's about the price we're charging. About an employee, right? 10 to 15 grand a month. Our average, our average customer at this point is 17,000. But, uh, monthly. With some of them being, you know, obviously higher. So, um, The, the real big thing that it, that has turned that and, and that Jenna obviously is going to open up even more, but all of our clients now we've installed a Jenna for, they're, they're never going anywhere. We've changed their lives forever. We're …

AI assessment note: “Yeah. No, you, you, you nailed it. The one thing I'll point out”

Q subscription. It's all that stuff. Um, which is why later on, I do want to go through some software that does work for you, but why don't we take a moment to actually talk about one software we both like Zapier. I usually talk about my sponsor right now, but as somebody who has experience with this, do you want to talk about what your experience is with Zapier instead?

A Yeah. For those of you who don't know Zapier, it's, it's, it's a connector, right? It connects one thing to another thing, right? Maybe you've got an idea. Maybe you want help with your social media posting for your business, right? And you say, okay, we can do this. Um, well, we got to just think through the process. Well, we got to get, we got to get everything to, you know, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. And there's tools out there. There's great tools out there that you can, you can find that, that will auto post for you, but we got to send something to that, right? Okay. Well, Zapier can connect those things for you, right? Maybe you want to drop things into a Google drive and then that Google drive connects to Zapier through a zap like they have right there, and it will automatically set that, that connection up for you. You don't have to be technical. It's, it's for, it's for people like me, by the way, I don't know how to code, right? Um, it's for people like me that want to get in and do some, you know, create crazy, you know, um, automations, right. And figure that out. And so now we got to go a step back further, right? How are we going to get content into Google drive? Well, maybe you use something like Replit and Zapier together to have it use an AI to auto-generate content and then auto-create an image with Nano Banana using Google's image tool and then connect th…

AI assessment note: “It's for people like me, by the way, I don't know how to code”

Q Any out there tools that you're especially excited about? Anything that's a little bit weird?

A I mean, I would say, I mean, I would say NemoGlaw is pretty out there, uh, for a lot of people. Uh, you know, a lot of people are scared, scared to use it. And, uh, I was terrified. I have never installed it on a personal machine. Like I just, I, you know, I, everything I'm doing on a virtual machine so that if I need to, you know, and I don't give it access to everything. So yeah, there's right ways to do it. There's right ways to do it. But I would say Nemo Claw is an out there tool people know about, but, but not a lot of people are using because they're afraid of it.

AI assessment note: “I would say NemoGlaw is pretty out there, uh, for a lot of people.”

Q point it's almost 10,000 different apps you can connect with. Alright, so go to Zapier and let's continue on with this story. Um, At that point, did you shift your business completely and say, I am no longer in the IQ test for AI. I am now in the business of helping enterprise, even if it's midsize companies, um, learn or teach their people AI. Is that what you did?

A Yes and no. And here's where my, my original business plan served me well because I became, or I had, I had built this image of, I am the general AI proficiency Institute. And not only that, I'm a .org. Right? And there's just this added level of trust to a dot org and an institute and whatever, and it enabled me. To get the big deals with businesses. They said, oh, well, you obviously are an institute. I mean, yeah, we'd love to work with you. I mean, I got those kinds of things. I had governments from Australia reach out to me and say, hey, seems like you're the worldwide standard on this. You know, can you, can you, you know, assess all of our people? And I'm like, absolutely I can. Right. And I'd never done that before for government, but

AI assessment note: “Yes and no. And here's where my, my original business plan served me well”

Q to your playbook, which is Teach the big ideas, not the, not the tactics today. So the big ideas are throwaway software and then the tactics today just undergird it. And that might be something like, I'm going to show you how to create a throwaway plugin for Chrome using Claude code. You're going to install or Claude the, the actual app itself. Okay. Am I with you so far?

A Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I, I, one of the things that I think is, is crazy just to go back to something you said a moment ago about, about the Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, right? Everyone's got a business idea. They watch, watch shark tank and it's, you know, it's, it's fun, right? Oh, I could do that. That's so awesome. Right. And then. You won't pay 20 bucks. Like I, I, I paid, I paid a 100,000 dollars plus times 60 engineers for my last company that I started. Right. And that's why I had to go raise millions and millions of dollars. And so I have never looked at a replica bill and even been like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I paid.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.”

Q a I'm not a full-time person because I've got all this experience. Okay. The anchor was a really big one. Brand seems like a really important part of everything you do. Even the way that you talk about your experience. I had a funded company. I am somebody whose time is valuable. All of that. The website has this feel to it. You chose a.org. What's your philosophy on brand?

A Well, let me answer this in a different way. Software is almost useless. It's almost worthless now because anybody can create it. My eight-year-old made his own version of Roblox and built 20 games inside of it, and he did that in a day with Replit. You know, I just said, you know, he said, I want to play the computer, Dad. I said, no, but you can use this Replit tool, and he spent, like, 400 dollars of credits just building crazy stuff all day, but I was like, whatever. It'd be way cheaper for me to let him go play Roblox or Minecraft or whatever, but I wanted him to learn, and, and so I loved that, but, but anyone can do it now. Anyone can build that software, and so because of that, well, what's the moat? Distribution. Right. And how do you get distributed? Well, people need to know about you, right? Very simple principles here, right? Gary V talks about all the time, right? His, his new book, day trading attention. Just, you don't even have to read the book. Just think about that concept of day trading attention. And by the way, read the book. It's good. But if people don't know about you, they're not going to buy from you. Simple. If they know about you, they might buy from you. So now you're at least in the conversation. And so your brand has to be something that's memorable. It's easy. It has to, it has to make sense. It also has to be trustworthy. That's a big thing. St…

AI assessment note: “your brand has to be something that's memorable. It's easy. It has to make sense.”