Free video course
How to Make Money With AI (The Honest Way, Not the Lazy Way)
Nine real steps, from your first idea to your first 100 customers. No guru. No hype. One example all the way through: Mike, an HVAC owner who loses jobs to missed calls, and the AI receptionist we build for him.
The nine steps
- Decide your goal
- Understand your ICP
- Understand the market
- Position it
- Product design
- Build
- Marketing: your first 100
- Customer success
- Funding
Chapters
- 0:00Intro
- 4:43Chapter 1. Decide your goal
- 6:27Chapter 2. Understanding your ICP
- 13:03Chapter 3. Understand the market
- 17:26Chapter 4. Position it
- 21:38Chapter 5. Product design
- 24:40Chapter 6. Build
- 28:29Chapter 7. Marketing
- 30:497.1 Preparation
- 37:117.2 The first 100
- 38:407.2.1 Launch everywhere
- 39:187.2.2 Stalk your competitors
- 39:557.2.3 Let search bring you to them
- 42:187.2.4 Post like your life depends on it
- 43:357.2.5 Buy attention
- 44:467.2.6 Go and talk to them
- 46:52Chapter 8. Customer success
- 50:17Chapter 9. Funding
- 53:39Outro
Prompt templates
These are the prompts from the video, tidied into templates. Fill in the parts in [brackets] and paste them into Claude.
Find your ICP
I want to build: [your rough idea in one or two sentences]. Act as a startup advisor. Give me 3 possible ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for this idea. For each one tell me: 1. Who exactly they are (job, size of business, where they are). 2. The one problem that hurts them most, in their own words. 3. What they use or pay for today to solve it. 4. How much they could pay me per month, and why. 5. Where I can find and talk to 10 of them this week. Be honest. If my idea is weak for one of them, say it.
From the chapter Understanding your ICP (12:26)
Research the market
My customer is: [paste your ICP]. Research this market for me. Read customer reviews, pricing pages and forums. Tell me: who already sells this, what they charge, what customers love, and what they complain about. Quote real complaints in the customers' own words.
From the chapter Understand the market (16:12)
Deep research on your competitors
Here are my competitors: [list their websites]. Run deep research on each one. For every competitor tell me: 1. Their headline. 2. What they promise. 3. What they charge. 4. Where they are weak.
From the chapter Position it (17:41)
Pick a design system
Here is my product design: [paste your screens and flows]. Which design system fits this app best, and why?
From the chapter Build (25:38)
Test it hard before you ship
Act in full critical mode. Test my app like a hundred different callers and users: the angry one, the mumbler, the wrong number, the one with a kid screaming in the background. Then act like a dumb user who has no idea how anything works, clicking around, lost. For each test, tell me what broke. Then answer one question: is this deliverable to a paying customer? Is it really worth [price] a month to [your customer]?
From the chapter Build (26:49)
Compare yourself to every competitor
Here are my competitors: [list them]. Give me a real evaluation, every competitor, every detail: price, setup time, booking, emergency calls, contract, fees. Then put it in a simple table: what my customer uses now on the left, me on the right.
From the chapter Preparation (34:39)
Build the landing page
Write the copy and design a simple landing page. Use these six blocks: [paste your six blocks]. Headline: [paste your headline]. Comparison table: [paste your table]. Keep it simple.
From the chapter Preparation (36:07)
Grade the page as your customer
You are [your customer, for example Mike, an HVAC owner]. Read this page for five seconds. Would you call? Grade it from one to ten. If it scores under eight, fix it and grade it again.
From the chapter Preparation (36:14)
Your SEO plan from a keyword CSV
[Attach the keyword CSV you exported from Google Ads Keyword Planner.] You are an SEO specialist with 35 years of experience. Explain it to me dumb. Make it funny. And go one point at a time. Which keywords should I go after first, and which pages do I need?
From the chapter Let search bring you to them (40:43)
Keep notes on your first 100 customers
Here are my customers and my notes on each one: [paste them]. Keep track of who is who, where each one stands, who went quiet, and who I should call today.
From the chapter Customer success (49:31)
Keep going
- Find a real buyer on Meta: Meta Ads Full Course for Beginners (2026), or read it on the course page.
- Running ads? DataCops sends your real sales to Meta, Google and more, with no code.
- Follow along on X: @SimulS007
Tools mentioned in the video are not sponsored.