How much money are you making?

We're sitting at about 4.5 million in annual recurring. I started this business with just $400. As a one-man band, I was able to take it by myself with all of my AI tools to a million bucks. Let me just tell you exactly how to do this, right? Everyone's looking for, well, what do I do? How do I do it? Here's my process. Presented by Zapier, the AI Automation Company. John, do you remember when you'd reached a million dollars in revenue? I was like, man, I am, I took this to a million dollars by myself. And it was at that moment, actually, I was like, okay, I actually, I have enough budget to bring some people on. And so I'm going to do that and make my life a little bit easier. And it kind of snuck up on me. When I first started the

company, there were some pathways that I kind of went down that didn't work as well as others.

And I eventually found out, okay, companies really need not just some training and education and

show them what to do. They need somebody that is embedded into their company that is following up regularly and becoming

part of that company and so I built this fractional chief AI officer model and the cool thing about

that and that I knew as an entrepreneur was super valuable was this recurring revenue element right and so

at one point we hit the million dollars and by we I mean me I hit I hit this million dollars. And it was fun. It was fun. That was about 80,000, 90,000 a month. And it was actually I got to 110,000 a month. It was a little bit over that million dollars. I took my family when I hit a million dollars to get ice cream Sundays. I remember that. Do you do anything like that to celebrate you know what i started

doing is i started buying myself a pair of shoes every time i landed a new contract i was like these

are a hundred thousand plus dollar contracts each one i can afford two hundred dollars shoes or whatever

and so i i i filled my closet and i i actually stopped doing that because it was like i have

enough shoes at this point like i love i love shoes but you know i don't need to have 400 pairs. And by the way, for anyone who wants to follow along and build this type of business, we'll have a playbook in the comments along with all the tools and apps and software that John recommends. See it below. It all started because you said, you know what, I have an idea for a social network. I'm going to go and hire this agency in the Ukraine. What was the price they quoted you?

$105,000. Because you said, you know what, I have an idea for a social network. I'm going to go and hire this agency in the Ukraine. What was the price they quoted you?

$105,000.

Okay.

And then you discovered that you could do this yourself using AI tools, specifically

Replit.

How did you discover Replit?

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 repliles. It was like, what does that mean? And it was literally the same day I'd received this proposal from this dev shop on Ukraine for $105,000. 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, that preview. When you're talking about a social network, you just gave it the same request that you had to the

developers and the whole thing. It wasn't a one-shot thing. You're sitting down and you're massaging it

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