I've built multiple successful companies starting with nothing but one person and AI. Some of them are already making millions in revenue. But, did you know that over 600 businesses fail every single day in the United States?
Most don't fail because of bad ideas or bad marketing. They fail because they didn't ask the right questions before they started. So, before I start any one-person business, these are the three questions I ask AI.
So, the first one is what to sell. Everyone starts an AI business the same way. They see AI do something super cool, and then they try to build a business around it.
That's completely backwards. And I was doing the same thing way before AI was even a thing. I started building companies when I was 17, and I went almost a decade completely failing.
My first two companies, I asked the wrong question. First company was a vacation rental site. My dad had a cottage, and I wanted to learn some new technology.
Instead of building a business, I built technology. And then the guy who owned at the cottage. com, he kicked my butt.
Then I decided to build another company, a hosting company. Why? I thought, "Well, I'm paying somebody else for hosting.
I should own the hosting. " Web hosting is like selling salt. I'm sure somebody out there is making a bazillion dollars selling salt, but back in 1999, I wasn't that guy.
And both died because I started with the question, "What do I want to build? " Then I changed the question, "What problem are people already paying someone else to solve? " That one question allowed me to build Spheric Technologies, my first real company.
Because instead of starting with the technology, I went to find out who was already paying for solutions. And I discovered there was a whole bunch of companies paying other companies to build what was called enterprise portals, these [music] internal intranets. And because I followed the money, I found out where the pain was.
I asked, "Who is already paying to solve this problem? " That allowed me to find the customers. That allowed me to find my partners.
My partners brought me into deals. As a 24, 25-year-old, I was selling to Fortune 500 companies, all because I asked the right question. And only 4 years later, not only did I sell the company, I became a multi-millionaire.
Same person, same knowledge, same skill, but a different question. Now, today, I never start another company without asking this question first. Every single company starts with the market.
The market tells me where it hurts. They show me what they're already paying for, then I get paid to build a solution. Today with AI, it allows you to get even deeper, quicker, without trying to guess.
And I'm going to show you how to do that today. Because there's only two types of businesses. You're either a vitamin, nice to have, or you're a painkiller, a must-have.
One of them can make you some money, the other one will get you rich. When I think of vitamins, I think of things that like could make my life better. Tools to help me stretch, or productivity apps, or insurance for a problem I never experienced, but maybe it could happen.
I don't need them. I don't have an acute pain. But when I think of painkillers, this is a pill that solves an acute problem.
These are tools that help people make more money, get more leads, retain their team, hire quicker. Because most people have like hair on fire problems, and we need to get them the painkiller to solve those problems. I call this a frustration list.
When budgets get tight at a company, the first things to go are the vitamins. The last thing's going to go is anything that makes money, which is usually a painkiller problems. So, a lot of people ask me, "Okay, well damn, well how do I find painkiller problems?
" Well, the first thing is we have to develop the muscle. We got to see all these frustrations that are happening around us that sometimes we just go through life and ignore. When people start businesses, they usually struggle with finding good ideas.
I have the problem of saying no to a lot of great ideas. Why? I've developed this muscle.
These are the steps to develop this skill. So, what I want you to do is tomorrow, as you go through the world, I want you to write down anything that frustrates you. I'm talking about simple things, like why do I have to plug my phone in?
Why do I always have to open and close my garage door? Pretty much anything that makes you go like, "Ugh. " every day.
As you build this list, what you'll develop is the skill to see opportunities. Cuz people only pay for three things. They pay for money, things that'll make them or save them money, they pay for time, productivity, how do I get my time back?
It doesn't matter if I'm a CEO or I'm a manager or I'm an entry-level employee, and then they pay for status. How does this thing make me look? If you miss all three of those, then you haven't built a painkiller, you've just built a vitamin.
The point is to develop volume and write down as many things as you can to develop the skill of seeing potential ideas that become painkillers. And the way I see it is million-dollar businesses aren't built on $10 problems. You have to have serious problems that solve serious pain for somebody out there that's hurting.
If you got a migraine and I got a pill and it's $100 to get rid of that migraine, you're going to buy it from me. And here's a crazy hack for this. Call the consulting companies already working with those companies that are getting proof through what they're paying for to solve those problems.
Because those are the services that they sell. They wouldn't sell a service if there wasn't demand for it. So, that's how we do it manually, but here's how we use AI to accelerate things.
I use Claude, but any AI can work. We got to find the pains. So, write this into your Claude.
I want to start an AI-first businesses in [music] and insert your industry. That's where I already spend my time and it's where I want to build. That means it's something you know.
So, give me 10, this is key, observable and nuanced pain points that people in this industry deal with every single day. Not the obvious stuff everybody already knows, the specific ones you'd only catch if you were actually in the room. Only give me pains that are getting worse, not better, and rank them by how much people are willing to pay for them to be solved.
And ask me any question you need to get clarity. So, this is the exact step that I used to make sure that it's bulletproof. By definition, if you ask the AI a generic question, you will get a general response, which will get you a very basic business.
So, we want to be very specific around the pain points. With this, you'll get real specific problems people will pay for. So, now we figured out what we should sell that's a painkiller, not a vitamin.
Here's what you're going to ask AI. Question number two, find your edge. Finding a painkiller is just the start.
Question number two will help you figure out how to solve it in a way that only you can. For example, when my brother started building homes, he had an idea. How about I build the cheapest home?
Because if it's the cheapest home, then everybody's going to buy it. Obviously, people had a pain and they wanted to buy a home, but he built the wrong thing because he didn't figure out what his edge was. And it's why it didn't sell for almost nine months.
He realized his edge was working backwards from the customer and building something they wanted. He was willing to do something nobody else in the home industry at the time was doing, which is market research. He decided to grab all the potential buyers, go look at the dozens of different open houses on a Sunday, and ask them what aspect of those homes do they like, and took the best ideas and put it into a new design.
And he didn't then just go out and build the third and fourth home. Instead, he designed it, he got renderings for it, and then he pre-sold 16 homes with deposits before he ever put a shovel on the ground. That's what allowed him to scale one of the top home builders and now real estate developers in Eastern Canada.
The other thing he realized is that it takes some, on average, less than 100 days to build those kind of homes. So, what he decided to do is make a commitment to his customer, a promise of building the home in 99 days or less. And what's funny is I remember the first time he did a home show and other builders would walk by his booth with his 99 day promise, and they would say like, "That's not that impressive cuz we do the same thing.
" But they weren't willing to claim it. He figured out what his edge was. Early on for me, my obsession and passion for just writing code and building software and building any tool that anybody found useful, that's what I love.
Now I want to teach you how to do this for yourself. For you, it could be your skills, it might be time, it might be relationships that other people don't have. You got to mine what you have to figure out what gives you an edge in the market.
The reason why I was able to help my brother go through this process is because it's something I had to figure out the hard way. And that's why I teach other people the same way that I did it. And often times it's teaching business owners how to integrate AI into their business.
So, the question you got to ask yourself is how do you figure out what your unfair advantage is. Essentially, what do you know how to do better than almost anybody. [music] One of the things that my brother had that most home builders didn't have back then is a dedicated architect.
And because most people building homes just buy plans off the internet, especially if it's a spec home, and then just build it, there was no advantage. How do you compete in a red ocean like home building to create your own blue ocean, which is one that doesn't have competition, where you can differentiate and you're better. This one's about you.
It's what's unique to you, the thing that nobody else can do. And the hard part often times is you can't see your own advantage because you're too close to it. It's really easy for you.
So, you just assume everybody knows how to do this. You don't realize how special it is. So, it's easier to get an external source to tell you, which is where we bring AI.
So, here's what we need to do. The first step is you got to connect everything you have that it can use for research. I'm talking your Gmail, your Slack, your calendar, your social medias.
Make sure they knows everything about you so that it knows you better than you know you. For example, my AI has access to everything. I'm talking meetings, transcripts, trainings, all my financials, my whole life, all the decisions I've made for the last 15 years.
I've slurped it all in so that it knows everything. So, in that same chat, where we already have our pain killer identified, here's what we write. Based on everything you know about me, where do I have an unfair advantage?
What can I do better than 97% of people? And the second step is if you need to give it more context, make it interview you. This is where you write.
Now, interview me about the last 10 years of my work. 10 questions one at a time, then tell me what my unique edge is. And like, here's the pro tip.
Use your voice. It's way faster and it provides more context. So, I use a tool called WhisperFlow where it asks the question, it prompts me, and then I can reply talking to it, it transcribes it, and way quicker talking.
Now, once you get an answer, the third step is to make sure it fights you on the answer. Essentially, you don't want it to just be a yes-man. So, this is where we write.
Be brutally honest. Is that actually rare or am I overrating myself? Where would someone who's done this their whole career actually crush me?
You want to make sure that it's not just making you feel good. Now, you cross-reference those answers against the first question. You've got the painkiller we picked and the edge we just found.
Where do they overlap? Give me the one place where my edge is the reason this problem gets solved better than anybody else could solve it. If they don't overlap, say so.
So, pain alone is a market, edge alone is a resume. Where they cross is actually where the business is. And that's the reason somebody will pick you over everyone else selling the same thing.
For me, my edge is helping other business owners use AI to scale so they don't build a business they grow to hate. Why? Because I went through it personally.
And I know the pain that I felt and how hard it was to figure out the path forward. It's why I teach so many people to do it, which is why I built my AI company OS. Full playbook on how to integrate AI into every department of a business.
I'm talking marketing, finance, delivery, all of it. And if you want it, just find me on Instagram and DM me AI business and I'll send it over. When I work backwards from a real pain a customer had to figure what I need to sell, and then I added my unfair advantage, which is the fact that I would do this for free, then I had an edge that made me successful, which brings us to our third question.
We have to find real buyers and test the market. Question one told us what to solve, question two told us how we stand out, but unfortunately, neither one of those get us paid. The only thing that actually makes it worth it is getting a stranger to part with their money.
You need to get a wallet, which AI can help us get. As you build a business, people will tell you, "That's such a great idea. You should build it.
Come back when you're done. I'll use it. I'll pay you for it.
I'll be your first customer. " And I will tell you, they're lying to you. They don't mean to, but they're not being honest because if you actually ask them for money in that moment, they wouldn't give it to you.
That's why we have to do this test. When I started my fourth company, Flowtown, I wanted to know if they would actually pay for it. So, what I did is I created a landing page.
I had them go through the whole sign-up, go through all the different screens, and even put in their real credit card to validate and confirm they're willing to pay. And guess what? 20% did.
That number told us everything. And then I would just say, "Unfortunately, our servers are over capacity, and we're not able to take new customers on. " But here's the deal.
There were no servers are over capacity. There was no product that was even built. That simple idea, that's why I call it the Wizard of Oz.
It's the man behind the curtain. I simulated the real transaction to validate, to ensure a customer is willing to pay with a credit card before I built anything. There's nothing more expensive than building something that nobody will pay for.
And that's just something I've done in every company I've built since then. We've launched 12 companies in the last 18 months, and we've done this process with each one of them. We wanted to test before we built.
Did they have a painkiller problem or a vitamin problem? Question three for me is both validating that there's demand for what I want to solve, and for the way I solved it. It's not would somebody pay, it's would they pay for it the way I'm solving it.
And an even better question is how do I get a real payment over the next 7 days? Here's what you need to understand. You need to prove it before you build it.
This is why we need to figure out. People fall down the path all the time. I got to register my Instagram account.
I got to build the perfect design. I have to have a logo, a business card, all before they ever even find out if anybody wants this. So, the right question is does anybody wants this enough to pay me right now?
Cuz here's the way I look at it, certainty brings currency. You sell before you build every single time. This is how we use AI to test even faster for a third question, and there's four parts.
First, we have to ask the cheapest possible test. We don't want to spend a bunch of money to validate anything, so we need to figure this out. So, the prompt is this, based on the painkiller and the edge we landed on, design the cheapest market test that gets me one real payment within the next 7 days.
No pre-existing website, no brand, no logo, or business registration before I spend hours building anything. And then number two is have it write the offer. So, ask it, write the one-page offer, a clear promise, timeline, and price.
Nothing else. Third, make it build the actual path for a payment. So, write this prompt, now give me the 10 people I should contact first, the exact message to send, and the follow-up to ask for the money.
Not a call, not a demo, cash. Number four and the final step, then make it find the hole before the market does. So, we want to write, why would some people say they want this and never pay?
Ask it, what is my riskiest assumption and how do I test for that one first? Now it's giving you a cheap test, you've got the offer, and you bulletproof it so you know they want it. Send that message that it gave you the offer out today, and take deposits from whoever's willing to lean in.
Now, here's an important thing, we want to go manual before we start automating anything. Before we even know what people are going to say. So, we do the first 10 by hand before automating a thing.
And I know with AI, you might want to start automating or even scaling this up. You're like, 10, I can do 100. Stop yourself.
If you scale things up too quick, it's the wrong move. So, for test, we have to pre-sell. So, now we know what we're selling as a painkiller, we have an unfair advantage on an edge, and we're pre-selling to get people to pay us with money to prove they actually want what we have, the way we're going to solve it.
Now, here's the thing. You could do all those three things and do them perfectly and still walk away with nothing because there's two mistakes that kill all of it. The first one I was guilty of for the first 7 years.
Number one is you fell in love with your solution. I wanted to build stuff. I was interested in the technology.
What I should have did is fell in love with my customer's problems because that's what I needed to learn. I needed to understand exactly what they felt was a painkiller and how they wanted it solved, not what I wanted to do. Theory and ideas will tell you what could work.
A real person opening their wallet tells you what actually does. That's why we would go through this whole process so we're not delusional. So, the first time you go through it, make sure that you're not lying to yourself and you really test your assumptions because the second thing is we got to make sure that AI doesn't lie to us because as great as AI is, it is world-class at being a people pleaser.
It will sit there and tell you you're smart and you're awesome and it'll be a cheerleader for you and you could do no wrong. It doesn't want to tell you that your idea is dumb. It would never say that.
Instead, it's going to tell you to go do it. It's going to tell you exactly how to do it even if it's not the best one. That is a trap and you don't even notice that it's happening because you never question it and everybody wants AI to agree with them.
Everybody needs, especially in the early days when we're starting a business, we're just like so fragile that any negative feedback could derail us and we just decide not to do it. But, please don't allow yourself to fall prey to this. You have to push back on the AI and ask it to be a ruthless mentor.
Be brutally honest. That's the language I use in my prompts and that's why [music] for every single answer, make sure you give this to it. You got to flip it back.
Now, push back on me. Tell me why this fails. Where am I kidding myself?
In the military, they call it red teaming. You essentially attack your idea or your plan based on what you think the enemy will do and make that a habit and do that as often as possible. You have to put yourself on the other side of the coin.
You have to say like, why won't this work? How do I think about it? And then from that, you can actually do the things that are going to protect you.
So, doing those things will help you not only find the right thing to buy and give you your edge, but it's going to allow you to validate so you don't waste that much of time and energy building something nobody wants. Now, here's what I've learned. Building companies for the last 30 years is essentially realizing that my whole life is the byproduct of questions questions I ask myself.
The quality of my questions dictate the quality of my life. And I want to encourage you to be more curious, to seek continued growth, to decide that a properly timed question, even a question you repeatedly ask yourself, on the backside of that is potential for you to become a even more. So, out of those three strategies, figuring out what you want to sell, your edge, or how to test it, which one did you like best?
I need you to leave me a comment below to let me know that you picked that up, because the next time you start your business, cuz it may not be your first time, you're going to use that strategy to avoid making that mistake. Now, remember, if you want my full playbook on how I integrate AI into every department of my business, just DM me AI business on Instagram, and I'll send you the company OS. And if you want to learn how to make your first 100K, click this video next.
