How to (actually) get rich with AI in 2024​

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1. (AI)ntegrator

The beauty of this model is you could easily build this into either a one person consulting gig that generates 6 figures a year in salary or you could build out a full-fledged company doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in recurring revenue.

The way it would work is very similar to an already thriving industry that’s used worldwide to generate trillions of dollars of value:

It’s called Lean Engineering.

If you’ve never heard of Lean, don’t sweat it…

I personally didn’t have a clue what it was until around 2017 when I started working with my buddy to build Escape Climbing, which was a business that manufactured plastic rock climbing holds.

Now, in the manufacturing world, efficiency is king. Your ability to reduce waste in your supplies, your processes, or your inventory by even 1% can easily translate into millions of dollars of additional profit.

The philosophy of Lean Manufacturing was popularized by Toyota and their unique methods for delivering a remarkably consistent and reliable product year after year.

So, other businesses started to look at what Toyota was doing and they started asking themselves,

“Alright, well, how do we do that?”

And this gave birth to a new industry of Lean Engineers. Guys and gals that travel from business to business helping implement the Toyota Engineering practices to drive efficiencies through the roof.

Now, just to give some context on how lucrative this business can be, at Escape we would’ve paid a Lean Engineer tens of thousands of dollars to come in and consult on our systems during a time when we were only doing $2-3M of topline revenue.

So now, let’s take this same concept and apply it to AI.

See, there are already SO many AI tools out there that could help businesses of all sizes save tons of money right this minute.

The problem for most of these businesses, though, is they don’t have the time, energy, or desire to go out and learn which systems they should be implementing because the landscape is changing so quickly with new AI tools cropping up every other day.

The other problem, and this is the big one that you can help them solve, is HOW do they integrate these systems with their current processes.

For instance, perhaps there’s some wicked awesome (AI)ccounting tool that you know how to integrate with Quickbooks or Xero or some other accounting software which constantly audits the books for any duplicate invoices and then automatically contests them (which happens way more than you think and truthfully, most businesses completely miss).

Solving this one problem could easily save thousands of dollars a year for a business doing around $1M of revenue.

Another example would be to help small businesses improve the quality of their marketing by coming in and training their team on how to effectively use things like Midjourney to create social media images, or ChatGPT to improve their copywriting. 

Now, the reason I love this (AI)ntegrator idea so much is because pretty much every business on the planet at the moment is a potential customer…but you could start right where you are with the small businesses in your own town or city, cause I guarantee they have no clue how to integrate these tools.

In fact, most of them are probably so overwhelmed with their day-to-day operations that the idea has never even crossed their minds, and so if you could find a way to get your foot in the door with these business owners the sky is the limit for your earning potential.

Now, there’s really two ways I can think of off the top of my head for packaging something like this…

You could either go very niche around a particular substack within a business like finance, marketing, or operations, and then you come in with your set of tools for improving that one department.

So you become like the Marketing AI guy or the Finance AI gal. If you’re already working as a professional in one of these areas in your 9-5, then that’s where I’d start because you already know the ins-and-outs of your arena.

The other way is to do business wide audits where you just shadow for a couple days looking for the areas ripe for integration, and then you come back and say, here are the improvements we can make to your current systems and here’s the quote for us to come in and integrate and/or train your team.

Regardless of which way you do it, because there are currently so few people offering a personalized service like this, you literally have a blue ocean of opportunity, so don’t sleep on this one.

The next business of the future I want to share with you is very similar to the (AI)ntegrator, but instead of improving businesses, we’re gonna go to the masses to improve lives.

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 2. Personal (AI)ssistant

In the same way that businesses don’t yet understand how to implement AI tools to improve their operations, most of us don’t have a clue how we could start implementing these technologies to improve our lives.

Now, I got to thinking about this one because I have a friend who hired a woman to organize their home. 

She came in and looked at their closets, their drawers, their kitchen, their everything, and then she created an organizational system for them. She went out and got the storage bins and the shelves and the labels and just put everything in its place.

Now, I’m convinced that if people are willing to pay for that service, just think how much more willing they would be if you could come in and help them create a Smart Life.

A Smart Life is like a Smart Home, but on steroids.

And there are so many cool ways you could implement this.

The most basic way would just be to sit down with the person and teach them how to integrate certain tools into their day like AI schedule optimizers, virtual travel agents, or grocery shopping assistants.

See, there’s a bunch of tools out there with really basic functionalities that would have a massive impact on the quality of people’s lives, but they just have no clue that they exist AND in most cases, people don’t want to go down a bunch of rabbit-holes that may or may not lead somewhere worth going.

So, save them the time of researching and learning, and just show’em what they need to know.

The next level of this Smart Life concept would be to help people actually integrate the hardware into their homes.

Which is really cool, but there’s a massive problem with this model that I don’t love…

It’s this: People are cheap.

Compared to a business, people are willing to pay a WHOLE lot less money for productivity gains.

Which means you’re gonna have a very hard time scaling this business to 7 figures and beyond if you’re working with people one-on-one.

But that doesn’t mean we should abandon this idea entirely…

In fact, with just a simple tweak of this business model, it could easily generate 9-figures of revenue.

Which leads us to the next business of the future:

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 3. Media (AI)mpire

Of all the opportunities before us, this is definitely my favorite because it utilizes two of the most powerful forms of Leverage (Technology and Media).

If you want to learn more about these two forms of leverage (plus the other two Labor and Capital), check out this video.

Okay, so the core of your Media (AI)mpire is going to be education. 

See, the formal education we all got in school is antiquated and based on teaching people “general knowledge”. But these days, people want to learn “specific knowledge”, that is skills that are going to immediately improve their lives or earning potential.

Now, over the next few years what do you suppose is going to be a skill or technology that pretty much every human on the planet is gonna want to learn how to use?

That’s right… AI.

In particular, I believe people will want to learn how to use AI to improve their 4 Spheres of Influence which are their Mindset, Health, Wealth, and Skills.

It would be so easy right now to carve out a niche as THE person teaching people how to use AI tools to improve their lives.

Now, there are a couple different ways you could monetize this.

One way would be to create an online course or an academy that guides people through which tools to use and how to implement them, but the big problem with this option is that the landscape of AI tools is changing rapidly day-by-day, so you run the risk of your material either becoming obsolete or you have to commit to continually updating it.

That’s fine, because I still think this could be incredibly lucrative. However, a better way might be to pursue one of these three options:

1. Newsletter
2. Youtube Channel
3. Podcast

Okay, let’s start with a Newsletter, which is actually one of the coolest ways to build an audience, deliver value, and yes, even make some really good money, and truthfully you could make a newsletter covering any topic, but I just see so much opportunity within the AI space at the moment given how new it is and how relatively few people are talking about it.

And I’ve personally seen how this newsletter model works from my friends Sam Parr who created The Hustle before selling it for tens of millions of dollars to Hubspot and Shaan Puri who pretty much copied Sam’s exact playbook when he created the Milk Road, which was a daily newsletter for Crypto, which he also recently sold for a couple million dollars.

There’s a lot of angles you could take in creating an AI newsletter, but I think just aggregating all the new tools, use cases, and stories from that week could be immensely valuable.

And the great thing about a newsletter is how easy it can be monetized once you’ve established an audience.

You could sell ad-spots to companies wanting to promote their AI related tools to your audience.

You could create an affiliate relationship with companies who have tools you like to recommend.

Or, if you want to get crazy, you could offer a paid subscription tier where you offer exclusive premium content.

I really like this model because of how easy it is to start and maintain. You just need a landing page and a way to collect emails through a software like Beehiiv or Substack which are both really inexpensive.

Of course, you do need a way to get in front of people to let them know about your newsletter, which leads us to the next two options in building out a Media AImpire: Podcasting and YouTube.

We’ll group them together, because they’re very similar in a lot of ways.

But the truth is YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet and pretty much everybody listens to podcasts these days, so I really can’t think of a better way to get in front of an audience to deliver value and build a relationship.

And again, one of the really cool things about these media platforms is how little it costs to get up and running.

To be on YouTube, you really just need a camera with a microphone (I mean, your smartphone could definitely work).

And for a podcast, you don’t even need the camera!

The most obvious direction you could go with the YT channel or podcast would be to do product reviews, state of the market updates, and tutorials. What you really want to think about here is, what are people going to Google? Then, create content designed to rank high for those search terms and then bam, you’re off to the races.

Seriously, this is green pastures for days… very few people are currently producing content on these topics which means it would be incredibly easy to build an audience which could then be monetized in a hundred different ways ranging from Google Adsense, to paid sponsorships or affiliate marketing.

The downside of this particular model is that it will take time and effort to build an audience, so don’t expect to make tons of money right out of the gate.

But, you could easily start building this out as a side-hustle and then make the jump to full-time once it starts gathering momentum.

Alternatively, I love the idea of layering this business with the first idea I gave you of becoming an AI Integrator.

So, maybe while you’re out there working with businesses to integrate AI with their current systems, you’re also creating content about what you’re doing. You’re just sharing the journey.

The beauty of this is you really just have to document what’s working and what’s not for the businesses you serve, and as a result you solidify yourself as an expert within the space which brings you more consulting work which in turn gives you more content for the media empire, and so it goes.

It’s a virtuous cycle.

The key, though, is to take action.

Stay Hyperfocused, My Friend.

AV

P.S. We’re getting closer to releasing more info on Beyond the Apex University. This community includes every course I’ve ever created, monthly group coaching calls with, weekly accountability sprints, and so much more.

Shoot me an email here with the words “beyond the apex” and you’ll get a special early bird discount on launch.