How Dan Martell Turns AI into Revenue Streams

0:00The most effective people at work aren't working harder than everyone else. They're working smarter, inside better systems. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, is the AI chat that works inside every tool you already use. Always ready and already aware of what you're working on. It's a teammate whose only job is to help you be better at yours. With Go working with you, you can show off what you do best. See what Superhuman Go can do at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. Welcome to the podcast. Today on the show, I want to talk about an interesting video I've recently seen where Dan Martell put this out on YouTube.

0:37It has over a million views, I think like 1.4 million views, and it is called The Only 14 Ways to Make Money with AI in 2026. And he breaks down a bunch of different strategies that he personally recommends, what he thinks are the best things. This is like a 25-minute video. I'm going to try to summarize this for you in under 10 minutes. I'll talk about where I think he got it right, what I think he got it wrong, and some areas that I think he missed when it comes to making money with AI. So hopefully this is insightful. This should give you a whole bunch of new business ideas, give you some ideas on how you can make money with AI, and then talk about some of the things that I think he missed.

1:12And I'm also not, by the way, like I'm not throwing shade at Dan because I'm going to disagree with a bunch of the things he said. I'm not throwing shade at him. Obviously, Dan is a great business guy. He has an amazing business background if you've followed him for a long time. I don't think he's like a particular expert in AI, although he has become like a big expert in AI because he talks about it a lot. But it's, you know, it's not like he has a deep implementation background on a lot of this. He's an entrepreneur. He does a lot. I don't think he does a lot of the implementation, but he probably runs companies that do different things here.

1:42I'm just getting on biases towards the companies that he's run that have worked in this regard. So all of the disclosures out of the way, let's talk about what he said. So his 14 big business ideas that he likes with AI number one we'll start with his F tier list so the two that he doesn't like AI trading bots and faceless AI YouTube channels I agree with AI trading bots that's mostly going to be spammy scammy whatever I disagree with his faceless AI YouTube channels and not basically I disagree with that especially like put on F tier I mean if you had put on like A tier maybe it's not S tier whatever but like I personally know people I have a friend that is making$4 ,500 a month right now with a faceless AI YouTube channel.

2:23And I think he does a lot of like getting real clips of stuff, but I think he uses AI to help him with the editing and stuff. So I don't know if you call this AI or not AI and whatever. There's a bunch of stuff that you have to go, but it's literally just a shorts channel,$4 ,500 YouTube. You can do that. It totally can work. If you like video editing, I think it's a great business for you. I would also, he didn't really talk about this, but I'm sure he would have slated this into the F tier as well, just because it's kind of the same thing. But that is, I mean, quote unquote, faceless. Actually, yeah, I guess the faceless AI YouTube channels, I have a whole category of you could call it like faceless or nameless AI podcasts.

2:59And I do post them on YouTube as well with just some like AI generated images. But there are podcasts specifically, I have a whole bunch that are like help people fall to sleep podcasts. So people just listen to it. There's like a bunch of different ones. I think the most popular one I do is like boring history for sleep, something like that. And I get thousands of downloads on this tons of people and I think tons of people are listening to it. And last month I made$2 ,000 totally new venture I started I have, I have one of my employees who I gave them the project and kind of the blueprint and what I wanted them to do.

3:32They did it all got 11 labs to generate the audio posted on the platforms labeled it the right way that a bunch of stuff and I made$2 ,000 in ad revenue. We, and before anyone complains, how the ads work is we play ads at the beginning of the episode and then nothing for the next two hours. It's like a two hour long episode. So people can either skip the ads or listen to them at the beginning, whatever they want to do. And then they just get two hours of this and it's, you know, it's supposed to be boring. So it's not supposed to be super insane, but yeah, it's like these sleep history podcasts.

4:02It's faceless. It's AI, an AI voice. I try to find the best AI voice out there. Obviously they're not perfect, but sounds pretty good. And a lot of people listen to them and like them. So I would put that right along with faceless AI YouTube channels and his F list. I made$2 ,000 last month from it with really no work involved for me. I mean, I had someone that ran it, but when I say I had them run it, they actually generated 365 episodes. So, you know, in a couple of weeks, they generated an entire year's worth. They have them all scheduled out and they're just going to run for the rest of the year.

4:30We don't have to literally do anything. So anyways, the next one is his B list. He has AI copywriting, AI logo and brand design, AI virtual assistant, AI content repurposing. These are sort of like tasks you can do for people. They're sort of, I don't know, like freelance or Fiverr or those types of things. At the end of the day, I mean, if someone's going to pay for a job that needs to get done inside of their company and you use AI to do it, sure. But these ones all to me feel a little bit more like maybe agencies or jobs. It's just like a job. So anyways, he put them on the B list. I would say all of those are on the B list.

5:03That's pretty fair in my opinion. His A-list, and I have some other disagreements here, he has AI to AI marketplace, AI voice agents, AI chatbot agents, AI venture studio. Okay, my biggest disagreement is the AI to AI marketplace. He's like, make this like marketplace where AIs can like talk to each other. It's like a whole new business idea for him. I mean, if he if he has so much conviction that I would just say he should go start that business and you know, go make all the money in the world that he believes is out there. I'd say it's pretty unproven. I haven't seen anyone scale that and maybe that will exist to some degree.

5:35I don't have a lot of conviction in that idea. And it seems like it's not something that necessarily has a lot of product market fit right now, just because there's not a lot of products out there that have product market fit in that. If there were some big ones, then I'd probably more fit on that. So I don't know, that one seems like a bit of a rabbit hole and probably just what he thought was a cool idea. AI voice agent and AI chatbot agents, those are great. But I think those actually fall more into two other businesses. One his AI agent development and AI consulting that he put in his S tier.

6:04And then so I don't I'm not going to cover those because I think those are just jobs that you do in two of the other businesses that he thinks are great. So we'll talk about them when we get there. His other one was an AI venture studio. And I mean, that sounds really fancy. But I mean, basically, what he's saying is like, throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And personally, I actually love doing that. I love experiment with AI. I have like 10 different websites and softwares that I've built, especially over the last few months, I had a really, we had a newborn baby who's really colicky.

6:31I'd stay up to like 2am a lot of nights rocking him. And so yeah, I would just sit through a cloud code and made a lot of websites. That one is very fun to me. I'm not going to say that creating an AI venture studio, meaning like making a whole bunch of AI little AI companies that do little things is like the fastest way to get rich on all of them. What I'll say happens is there's always 80 20 rule on this. I have 10 or 20 different projects or sites I made over the last three months. And at this point, I got them all out there. I got like a bunch of organic AI marketing done for them. And I'm now seeing which of those is making the most money.

7:04And I'm focusing on those and scaling them up. So I mean, like from a from a tactical perspective, I think this is a good idea. But like, I don't know, it's kind of interesting, because I wouldn't say like the AI venture studio is going to make a lot of money from all these ventures. But like, throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, and whatever is your most successful thing, run with it and scale it. I don't think that's necessarily bad advice. But also, all of these ideas could be a quote unquote, AI Venture Studio. So that to me seems more like a description of this entire process that he's describing here with all the videos, but whatever.

7:37Okay, let's talk about his four S tier businesses. And then I'm going to give you my secret or not so secret S tier business that I think people can do to make money today using AI that he didn't mention, even though his video is called the only 14 ways to make money with AI. Okay, there are most definitely more than these 14 ways, but These are the only ones he knows. Okay. So the next one is AI agent development. And that is basically building AI agents that you can deploy inside of your organization, inside of another organization. Things like customer support chatbots, you call that an AI agent and that you're developing that.

8:14I think his idea is like pick one of those specific use cases and just go really hard on it. We recently had on the podcast, Jamie talking about Search Saddle. He had a company that was basically doing that and it was kind of doing the AI voice agent from Dan's A tier and using it into an AI agent development company. The problem he found with that was there was just a lot of outreach and marketing. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad business, but I do think it's a lot of work. It's not like a very easy business. You're still, you know, just still just selling like a software to businesses who cares whether it's AI or not AI.

8:47It's something they got to subscribe to and pay for, and you've got to get them on board. So you got to do the marketing and the sales calls with that. You have to have an engine that brings in new leads. And Dan Martell, okay, the only criticism I have of all of his business, this video, I guess, in particular, Dan's a great guy, I'm sure, is he recommended in order to start any of these businesses going on your phone and texting all your friends and saying, who do you know that'd be interested in and then plug in any of these businesses. I don't, maybe it's just me, but I hate selling to my friends.

9:17And I guess this isn't so bad because he's like, who do you know that would be interested in? Not necessarily that they'd be interested. He says a lot of times when he does that, his friends are like, oh, I'd be interested in that. So I mean, I guess that's a good thing. I guess you can't be scared of, you know, pitching your products to your friends per se if it's really great. But I always hate starting by selling to family and friends. It's just it's my least favorite thing. There's a million random people out there that I'm sure you could get on call with and see if they'd be interested. Anyways, that's always been my direction.

9:47But I guess everyone is a little different. I just hate selling to family and friends. I don't have a problem selling things in general. Sales is fine and whatever. But yeah, I just don't like to pester people with financial commitments to me if, you know, whatever. Okay. So the other one that he has is a managed AI cybersecurity company. This one, I sort of strongly disagree with him, perhaps. In one sense, he says this is something that can make a ton of money, highly lucrative, highly profitable. 100 % agree with him. That being said, if you have no background in cybersecurity, when you have no background, probably in being a developer or coding or understanding a lot of like what actually goes into the back end of this stuff, I wouldn't recommend starting a cybersecurity company and manage AI cybersecurity company.

10:32Yes, Claude can like go and do a security audit for someone. And that's really cool. But like, if you don't understand what Claude's doing, you're going to miss stuff. And also, I think there's like a lot of liability that comes along with that. What if you go do a security audit for someone, you make them implement this whole, you know, cybersecurity system. And then I mean, you don't really know what you're doing, you have no training or background in this. And all of a sudden, some cybersecurity event happens. And they're like, why don't you protect me? And you're like, I don't know, Claude, why didn't we protect them?

10:57And Claude's like, Oh, we didn't protect them. But you know, it's just seems like a nightmare. I think it's always more comfortable, and you'll be more efficient starting a business with a background that you know something in. And if I'm not saying that you always have to, because like, you know, at the end of the day, no one knows everything about everything, you got to learn it some somewhere. But I think you should probably do a lot of research and become very comfortable and get a lot of training in the domain before you would just go ahead and launch. And it felt like this video was pitched at like anyone out there just wanting to start stuff.

11:26Just go start any of these things. I wouldn't do the cybersecurity one if you have no background, no training, no research in that particular domain. Okay. AI consulting. AI consulting, I think, is like a step behind the AI agent development one where it's basically you go in. We talked about it, I think, in one of the last couple podcasts, but you go in, you analyze what a company needs, you analyze some of their issues, and you recommend how they should improve their processes. You tell them what tools. I've done a lot of AI consulting for companies in the past, a lot of big, you know, Fortune 500 companies or whatever.

11:58Go in, usually it's like inside of a department or with a specific issue or problem they're solving, they're like looking at, they want to know how to solve it. I give them recommendations and ideas. You lob it over to them and you walk away. That's pretty cool. The AI agent development takes it one step further and you actually go and implement what you've recommended, I think you can make probably a lot more money on the AI agent development where the AI consulting might be more like per hour basis for some of this stuff. Like if I'm working with a big company, I think like a year ago, and my prices have come up since then a lot, but like a year ago, I was charging when I was getting started with this, I was charged 500 bucks an hour to go in and listen to what their problems were and to give them ideas and recommendations.

12:36And they got to do all the implementation. The last one he recommends is AI lead generation. pretty straightforward. You're just using AI to go gather leads and give them back to sell them to people. There's people that do like rank and rent websites, right? So you'd be like best concrete company in Tucson, Arizona. And then whenever someone calls that phone number or fills out the contact form, you go to concrete companies and are like, Hey, I have someone looking for this job. I'll sell it to you for a hundred bucks. You make a deal. You sell them all of your leads for a hundred bucks and they go close them for$2 ,000 for the concrete job.

13:08So I think that's kind of the same idea. You make kind of like rank and rent using AI and then you do lead generation throughout. The last one that I absolutely love, well, there's a couple like if you know me, I make a decent amount of money very passively with AI generated music on Spotify. So I think that's kind of cool one. I would throw that somewhere in like the faceless AI YouTube channel F tier that he had, except I don't think it's F tier. I think it's a great one or kind of a podcast. It's like content. There's like content that you can create that you can get. There's like different monetization, whether that's ad platforms or streaming revenue or whatever.

13:41So I would say like podcasting, I've done a lot of, I've done a lot with music streaming. And the final one that a lot of people don't know that I do, that is data licensing deals. Something like this podcast that I'm recording right now, inevitably at some point in the future, I will sell this podcast audio and video to multiple people to do general purpose AI training. I'm not going to, they don't get my likeness. They don't get my, they don't get a train or clone my voice or what I look like or anything, but they can use the transcripts. They can use the audio. They can use the video for general purpose, AI training.

14:13And I make, you know, you can make a decent amount of money. You can make$90 an hour. Um, if you're doing like multi-purpose multi-person. So like if it's Jamie and I both talking, we can make 90 bucks an hour on some deals. Some deals will pay more. It depends on what they want and, and how they want it put together and how high quality your thing is, but, uh, or how high quality your actual video is. But anyways, I think that's a very interesting one. You can also go and aggregate it. So I'll go to other people that have the content already recorded and put it all together and sell it and take a commission off the top.

14:45There's a lot of really interesting ways to do this. If you're interested, like if you have a podcast or you have some sort of video data set and you're interested in licensing it, actually I have a company, it's called fiundfiand.com. I might even leave a link in the description. You go check that out. And if you have a data set or you want to go gather data sets together and join in some of our deals that we're doing. You're welcome to do that. I think it's a really cool way to make money with AI. But otherwise, the number one thing I would recommend if you haven't already is go check out our AI Hustle School community.

15:17Every week we drop the breakdowns, the inside scoop. We show you like the inside analytics dashboards on all of these businesses, how much I'm making from all of my different side hustles and businesses, the stuff we don't post publicly or share on the podcast publicly, all the revenue numbers. Go check it out, the AI Hustle School community. We have over 1 ,300 members. It's only$19 a month to join. You get over 100 different training videos that we've recorded on a ton of different side hustles, how we actually do them step by step. So if you're interested in that, go check out the AI Hustle School community.

15:45We'll also leave that linked in the description. All right. Thanks so much for tuning in, guys, and I will catch you all on the next episode.