#2291 He keeps launching AI businesses

0:00This guy keeps creating companies using AI, including a digital marketing agency and software company. and he's going to show you how anyone listening to this can make money using AI. Let's get to it. Joe Affelbaum is the founder of Ajax Union, the digital marketing agency, and EVAI, the AI sales assistant.

0:20Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. All right, wait. You're comfortable saying what the revenue is at your two companies? What is it? um well we're the the revenue for ajax union is about a million dollars a year okay right now um and evie ai is approaching a million dollars a year okay great we're going to talk about five different ways for people to make money using ai and then we're going to talk about how you built these businesses so what's actually i'm going to jump to number five you actually created some kind of headshot software that people are paying you money for tell me what this is and why anyone else could do something like this.

0:58The headshot software that I built is actually a service for people because people don't want to use software. People, especially people on the internet, what they want to do is they want you to just deliver headshots for them. So I called it an AI photographer. I said, instead of hiring a photographer to come to your house, change a thousand different times and spend thousands of dollars of photographer, Why don't you give me$200 and I will deliver 10 amazing photos for you that put you in the perfect dress, in the perfect place for your brand and your business. And I will do it to you within 24 hours.

1:33And if you're not happy, you're not thrilled about every photo, I will change them and modify them until you're happy. And if you're still not happy, I will give you all your money back. How about that? And we had 100 people raise their hand and pay and say that they are interested in this. And the way that we do it is very simple. We have 30 different prompts that we use. We take your headshot from your LinkedIn profile, throw it into AI. It produces all 30 photos. And then we deliver it to you in an email. And we have a VA do it. The VA costs a total of$5 to do it. And then we deliver it to them.

2:06And we have a very nice profit margin. And the clients have dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of testimonials and examples. I have an entire photo gallery, which I can send you with all the photos that we've done. So even before the person buys, they see the whole photo gallery. Like, holy shit, I want a whole set of photos like this. These are amazing photos because they look exactly like you. And they are perfect to use on all your social media platforms. So wouldn't you pay$200 to get a bunch of photos done for you? You don't have to use software. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to give me your photo even.

2:36It's done. Done for you fully for$200. It's a very simple way that you go to people. And so the way that I get customers is I run a very simple Facebook ad. and I write, would you like headshots? And I show some example headshots, done for you, put in your email and phone number and Facebook has a thing called a lead gen form that automatically allows you to be able to collect someone's email and phone number. And then from there, it goes right into GoHighLevel and then GoHighLevel automatically sends them the examples because they want to see the examples, sends them the examples and then a form for them to pay if they want to get theirs done.

3:15and it's very simple and it costs about two dollars for every person to fill out the form and then for every x amount of people that fill out the form a person buys and it ends up being profitable and it just works and it's just like literally anybody can do this now if you don't want to run facebook ads if you don't spend five ten dollars a day trying this out then what you can do is just post on linkedin about it i posted on linkedin something called a linkedin poll it's one of my favorite ways to monetize linkedin a survey and then people voted i said would you like 10 headshots done for you without software that look exactly like you perfectly or do you hate headshots people are like i would love headshots so the people that said i would love headshots say we generally charge a thousand dollars to bring a photographer to your house but we don't have to bring a photographer to your house because we found an ai photographer that knows how to make the photos perfect with ai we will spend many many hours doing it for you all you have to do is pay us two hundred dollars we're charging cost price right now for the first 10 people and then people like i want to be one of the first 10 and by the way money back guarantee if you're not happy we'll fix it to the we send them the 10 photos they're like i'm thrilled these are great me walking down the street me standing by a desk me doing a power pose me on a sunroof me out of this me out of that and people are like wow this is amazing i can't believe your ai photographer does such a great job and that's it and the va is happy we got a va do it for us we taught him how to copy and paste stuff into a nano banana and then boom everybody's happy and okay so you're doing this using nano banana and nano banana pro yeah will you give us the prompt uh that i will I think everyone listening to this will get the 30 prompts that we use.

4:47We even created a prompt generator that will create custom prompts based on different dropdowns that I'm going to send to Andrew as well. But we'll give you 30 amazing prompts that you guys can plug and play. You drop a picture of yourself together with the prompt into Nano Banana. You press go. You could use it in Higgs field if you don't want the watermark. You could use it in Evy AI. We have Nano Banana Pro installed into Evy AI, so you can use it within Evy AI for free, by the way, mind you. You could go to evi.ai.com, use it for free. And then you could also use it on Freepik. You could use it on Higgsfield.

5:17You could use it on Artlist.io. Or you could use it on GenSpark. Or if you like the watermark on the bottom right corner, you could use it on gemini.google.com. I didn't realize that Evie, your software actually does... Image generation. Yeah, and it does image generation, and it does it without a watermark. And it does it perfectly every single time. All right, right on. Okay, so give me some other ideas. I do like this overall idea of do services where the AI actually does the service and a human being interacts with the customer. Because like you said, people prefer to talk to people and get results, and they also value services more than they value logging into a website.

5:54So what are some other ideas like this that we could go through? I'll tell you something else that I did to make a significant amount of money. I used AI to help me teach people AI. Simple as that. So I said, do you want to learn AI? People are like, of course I want to learn AI. So I used AI to create a course about how to learn AI. And then I sold this course to people. And now how did I sell the course? I went on LinkedIn and I made a LinkedIn poll. And I said, does anybody here want to take a course on how to use AI? It's nine modules, pre-recorded videos, frameworks, checklists, cheat sheets, and all the prompts that you need.

6:29And I'll throw in a custom GPT for you that will help you in your business. And people are like, of course I want it. Of course this is something I want. I said, okay, if you want it, pay me 500 bucks. And a bunch of people paid 500 bucks and people are still paying 500 bucks. And I said, as an ongoing thing, if you want to meet me every single month for three hours, because I'm learning AI myself, it's$3 ,000 a year. And a percentage of those people upsold to the monthly class. So I just have to show up on Zoom. There's zero preparation done. I'm literally learning AI while they're learning AI.

7:02And they are paying me to learn together with me. So it's not like I have to have some type of certification. Most people don't even know how to log into ChatGPT and prompt. They go to ChatGPT and they're like, what's the weather? And it didn't work. And I'm like, okay, well, what the hell? You know, like let me teach you how to properly prompt. You have to prompt it to give you the prompt of how to prompt. And people are like, what does that even mean? And so there's so many people in the world that haven't even logged into ChatGPT or they logged in and they didn't get what they wanted, learning how to use tools and the basics.

7:33You know the basics. You know how to use Suno? Do you ever heard of Suno to make music? You log into Suno, you put in a prompt. People will pay you to teach them how to make AI music. People will pay you to put in a prompt into Suno and teach you how to make AI music. People will pay you to teach them how to go into Sora and make a prompt and make a video on Sora 2. People will pay you. Let's pick a different topic because I would imagine that people might pay me to learn how to, for example, do interviews or how to create a podcast, right? You're saying I could use AI to create my course for me.

8:04what are you doing to create the course? I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. I have an experience of knowing how to use LinkedIn really, really well. Okay. This is my experience. I know how to use LinkedIn really, really well. But I don't have the bandwidth or the budget. Let's say I want to bootstrap. I don't have the budget to create a course. Okay. So it takes a budget. When I created my first course called the Evergreen Networking System, I spent $275 ,000 to build a course and then ended up netting me over a million dollars in profit. it. But right now with AI, I was like, I came up with an idea one morning and I was like 99, 99.

8:37I got 99 hacks and a pitch ain't one of them. I got 99 hacks. I woke up one morning and that's what I was saying. Cause there's a song, whatever. I got 99 problems. I got 99 hacks and a pitch ain't one of them for LinkedIn. And so I went on LinkedIn, I put up a poll and I said, I got 99 hacks. I literally wrote this and a pitch ain't one of them. Would you like to buy my 99 hacks? I sell them for a thousand dollars. Each one is less than a minute. Each one is less than a minute. And I will give you all 99 videos for$99, but I'm only doing it for 99 people. And if 99 people don't buy, I am not going to give out my hacks at all.

9:16So if you're interested, buy it now. And then I sent it to a bunch of people via DM and I said, Hey, here's the thing. and then 145 people voted. And so I created a Stripe link for$99 and I send it to 100 people. I didn't even have anything created yet. And then 100 people paid for it. So I had$10 ,000 in cash sitting in an account. So what did I do is I didn't have, I said, I'm going to spend this$10 ,000 to make the course, but I don't need to spend the$10 ,000. I can go to HeyGen. Have you heard of HeyGen? No. H-E-Y-G-E-N. You can clone yourself. You make a five minute video, dump it in there, and it makes videos for you.

9:52So I said, okay, well, these are my 99 hacks. Make me 99 videos. HeyGen didn't do a really good job of doing it, so I hired a VA to learn HeyGen for a couple dollars, and I said, go learn HeyGen. I have$10 ,000 to spend to build this thing. Go ahead and charge me$2 ,000,$3 ,000, and build me these 99 videos, and we'll launch it in a few months because you'll have to show me each one. I'll have to review it and make sure it makes sense. Anyway, and each one has to be under a minute, and they have to be really tight, and they have to add a lot of value. And so we went back and forth for a couple of months.

10:25He kept making videos on HeyGen, sending them to me. Finally, we finished all 99 videos, and we delivered it, and the clients are freaking thrilled. So, of course, you needed a human to interact with my personality. Now, in order to launch the website, I went to GoDaddy.com. Do you guys know what GoDaddy is? Of course. Before we go to GoDaddy, wait. just so i understand the content for a hundred different hacks that people had paid you came from where was you just recording into the mic or was it the ai no it was just all the content the ai created all the ideas i mean there are ideas that i had for my webinars and just in general how did you get all those ideas out did you i just dumped i just dumped i just yeah i just dumped a bunch of otters into the ai and i said here it produced me 99 ideas transcripts from uh from all these different webinars that you did and you said i want you to pull out my best 99 I want 99 ideas.

11:13And the ones that I didn't like, I deleted and came up with my own of stuff that I just know that I do. I've also been teaching LinkedIn for 10 years. But I have many, many, many more than 99 ideas. I just want my 99 best ideas. Essentially what you're doing is you're using AI to sort through it and find ideas. You're adding to it and you're also being the editor. Then you gave it to the VA and you said to the VA, I want you to use HeyGen to make good-looking videos. And it will take some iterations of me teaching. And then I went to GoDaddy. Sorry, and Hey Jen reproduces you? There's like a Joe that they created using AI?

11:44If you want to see an example of this, I actually went to GoDaddy, and I said, I'm going to buy a domain, 99hacks.club, because 99hacks.com wasn't available, and I wanted everyone to party in the club with me. So 99hacks.club, and then GoDaddy's AI built the whole website for me, A to Z. Suno made a rap song about the 99hacks that is playing right there on 99hacks.club because we're in the club. We need a rap song. And then there's two example videos that you could watch, which is two of the hacks. One of them is my Calendly hack, and one of them is my JoeLinkedIn.com hack, where you go to GoDaddy, you buy JoeLinkedIn.com or AndrewLinkedIn.com, and you forward it to your LinkedIn.

12:24So when you're on stage on a podcast like this and someone wants to find you, what, they're going to type in Warner? No one even knows how to spell Warner. But everybody remembers Andrew. Everybody remembers Joe. So if you can remember JoeLinkedIn.com, you can remember my LinkedIn profile, and you could easily find me. You know what I mean? so that's one of the hacks so you watch those videos on 99hacks.club completely free no gatekeeping no email required nothing you go in there and by the way we still have it up for 99 we're going to take off the coupon code soon but we still have it up on 99hacks.club and the crazy thing about this andrew this is the crazy thing that we ran an ad asking people if they want the 99 hacks and that ad cost me three dollars and 80 cents per person and a large percentage of the people buy the hacks and then buy heavy ai pro which is 3600 a year your software okay as a back i'm actually i'm on the site right now i don't interrupt the session here so i'm not going to hit unmute but i do see it this version of you on there that's not you that's ai joe everybody everybody everybody loves those videos and they i have so many if you go to my linkedin profile i have hundreds of testimonials of people that are basically saying this is the best freaking course they've ever taken and people do not you know most people do not know that that's not me okay all right i i see that and then i also see some overlays like when you say go to linkedin and do this thing there is a screencast of you doing it that's you doing it that's him doing it no that's the va putting it together the va is actually doing it got it so that's something that a va could do follow what you're saying and then create a demo just take a screenshot yeah okay all right so that's number one is do an ai service for people we talked about the headshot.

14:02Number two, make a course using AI. We see how to do that. Number three, you told me before we got started, offer a product or service that takes no time to create. You gave me the example of infographics. How are you doing it? Who are you selling it to? It's very, very simple. If you want, you can pick an industry. For example, I have picked an industry called the restoration industry. So Ajax Union is going to make a million dollars in profit in 2026 from offering things to the restoration industry. Do you know what the restoration industry is water damage okay fire after fire whatever so just for example i'm going to pick one franchise called serve pro okay and we're and we created infographics for serve pro to use with their clients to explain their process of how it freaking works of how this stuff works and so i said i have infographics that are ready done available for you it's a hundred dollars if you want the infographics with your logo on it i will hand it to you for a hundred dollars if you're not happy with it, I'll give you your money back.

14:58People are paying$100 for infographics that Nano Banana Pro created. And they're thrilled because they have an infographic they could use. Now, I'll give you 10 infographics for your business for$100 right now specific for your business. Now, could you imagine you have a collection of infographics that you made in advance and you have all the prompts and you go to a business and you say, within 24 hours, I'm going to work very, very hard, create these custom prompts for your business and make these incredible AI generated infographics and all you have to do is pay me a hundred dollars and you just create a collection of thousands of infographics.

15:33I could see somebody even making a service where they just have infographics that you pick. You push a button, it customizes it with your colors and your business and have a good day. Nobody's doing this right now, but you can do it because you're smart enough to go to Claude and say, make me a prompt for an infographic for my business. I drag your LinkedIn profile into Claude and then I said, make me 20 infographic ideas for this guy's business with their colors and their fonts and their everything. And Claude just makes me 20 infographic prompts that are perfect. I take that, throw it into Nano Banana with their logo and boom, it's done.

16:04And now I can have a collection, especially if it's a franchise, you have a collection of things that you can sell without even creating it again. You can sell those same prompts to everyone in the franchise. How are you reaching service pro businesses to sell to them? It's very simple. You just get in touch with their mothership and you become a vendor with their mother you find one company you get a relationship on linkedin you find one company then you become a vendor with the mothership and then you're in their marketplace and then you just start offering it to them you could hit them up on linkedin you could hit them up on their website the one thing that restoration companies need and many service-based and home-based businesses need is they need to pick up their phone they're an emergency service so when i call them up i say i need to speak to the owner of the business i have something i have a bunch of people that have emergencies with their water and i need a good way for you to explain it can i speak to the owner of the business so that we can give you some examples of how we do this.

16:51And then boom. And you've literally done this or this is a hypothetical? I've literally done it. No, I've literally done it. I can show you my Stripe account. People are paying for infographics right now. If you go to strategy.eviai.com, you could see examples of the infographics. Strategy.eviai.com slash infographics. You can see the examples of the infographics right now. And if you guys want to buy it, there's a checkout link right there. That entire landing page was created by AI. I didn't create that landing page at all. I don't use people to create landing pages anymore. The landing page, the stripe link, the examples, everything was done with AI.

17:24I used to have to use people to create this and to make landing pages and to none of it. I go to Claude. I say, design it for me. I take that design that's broken. I give it to Gemini. I said, it's a beautiful design. It's not working. Fix it. Gemini fixes it. I copy and paste it into go high level. I press save and the landing page is live. Because so I do see this landing page. This is a GoHighLevel landing page. That's a platform you're using to collect email addresses and sell, right? Correct. I'm using GoHighLevel as the backend. I see. But you're using Claude to create the HTML that then you're putting into HighLevel.

17:56Got it. Correct. But if it doesn't work perfectly, because I do have JavaScript and other stuff, I throw it into Gemini. Gemini debugs it and fixes it. By the way, you keep saying NanoBanana Pro and you keep highlighting the fact that it's Pro. Is there a difference? There is. There's a difference. There's the original Nano Banana, and then there's Banana Banana Pro, which is Gemini 3. So there's, it's much more expensive to use Nano Banana Pro, but it's totally worth it. I'm on Gemini.Google.com and I see Pro in the top right because it's part of my... Yeah, you're using, it's part of, yeah, that's not it.

18:27But anyway, regardless, they're not going to give you an option to use the previous one unless using the API. But just so you know, a lot of companies, they say they use Nano Banana, but they're actually giving you an older version of Nano Banana. We have the latest version in heavy ai which is much more advanced and much more expensive and we even let you try it for free okay all right that's that's the third one offer some kind of service products that take no time to create because you're doing infographics i can imagine frankly high level is such a pain in the butt to use i i never tried it but my team cannot freaking stand it they keep trying and going trouble getting trouble you're saying so i'm sure there are other people like like me you say go create that as a service for them.

19:05And the service is, you tell me what you want in your landing page, I will create it for you in high level. Boom, done. Done. In seconds. Not only that, that is our back end to the infographic. So somebody's like, oh, I want to host this infographic somewhere with a landing page. I say, work with Ajax Union. We'll set up the whole thing. We have a website that I bought from GoDaddy, unlimiteddigitalmarketing.com. I like the two Ds in there because it reminds me of Dunkin' Donuts. I like having two D's in my domain. So unlimited digital, because every time I drive next to Dunkin' Donuts, you know, those two big D's, I love that.

19:37You know what, but I have, I feel like you have an addiction to domains. Everything has to have its own domain and QR code. I also feel like you really don't like that there are two D's in there, but you need people to know it. And you're doing a smart thing by calling attention to the fact that there are two D's or else they'll miss it. All right. Since I'm calling you out on stuff, I got to call you out on this. You just said you're going to make a million dollars with Ajax Union on something. But then when we started and I asked you what's your revenue, you said it's about a million dollars.

20:02Yeah. So right now, whenever we add revenue to the business, all the revenues profit. Like right now, every single dollar, we built our infrastructure. So what happened was when COVID hit, we lost 75 % of reoccurring revenue overnight. What's the business? So for people who don't know it, what do you do? So when you interviewed me first back in 2012, we were just going to hit the Inc. 500. So we did half a million, a million, two million, four million. And we were growing. I wanted to get the business to be a$10 million business, but I knew that, and we had 75 full-time employees. And I knew that in order for us to be able to get there, I would need to hire another hundred employees.

20:41And at one point I was like, I'm done. This is so hard. The culture, the problems, everybody wants more money. The clients want to pay less money. We had a high churn rate. We had a lot of problems. So we're trying to figure it out. And I really wanted to build software. I remember telling you that I wanted to build software, but I did not have the guts, the balls to build software. I was really scared, but I hired developers and I hired designers, and my dream was to build software because I knew software was scalable and I wouldn't have to have employees. What I didn't know is that years later, Go High Level would come out where now I can have an agency that can be majorly scalable and I can pick up customers by the masses and charge very, very little and have a skeleton crew of virtual people that are experts in this that I personally have to become an expert first and train them.

21:29but you know like so so when covet hit you know we grew the business significantly when covet hit suddenly i basically lost my pants i lost everything plus i was going through a divorce plus my partner had just left me plus we were having so many different issues coming from all all places and i was very very dejected i felt really like terrible i was like okay i'm never going to build a software i'm never going to do anything and i and i felt very very bad i need a lot of therapy and a lot of coaching and a lot of a lot of energy from the whole world to kind of just keep going because I, you know, I published five books and I was so successful and blah, blah, blah.

22:02And now I feel like I'm losing my pants and I'm losing everything and I'm losing my net worth because I'm going through a divorce and I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and blah, blah, blah. And my life is a total mess and I'm feeling like a mess. And then November of 2022, ChatGPT comes out and I'm like, holy, holy crap. You have no idea what we're about to do. And so I start on this journey to building infrastructure, to be able to build something. I went to Mexico. I had a conversation. I would talk to ChatGPT every single day. I went to Mexico and I had this deep conversation with ChatGPT and it said, now's your time, dude.

22:41Now's your time to build software. And I was like, I tried so many times and I failed. I don't know if I could do it. ChatGPT is like, I'm going to help you. We're going to do this together. And it helped me. It helped me come up with an MVP. It helped me work with developers. It helped me test everything out. It basically helped me through the process of getting my first customer. And as a result of, of having ChatGPT as my co-pilot and my support system, and then eventually Claude because ChatGPT wasn't smart enough. So I leveraged Claude and then eventually Gemini. And now I kind of use, and now Grok, Grok.

23:12I spoke to Grok for an hour yesterday while I was driving my car to Brooklyn to have, to have Manorah lighting with my kids. and so I have conversations with all the different AI sometimes at the same time and I build relationships with them and they get to know me deeply and they give me these ideas to help me be able to generate products and services to be able to grow so I feel like 2026 is going to be the year because now we finally have something we finally have a product we finally have an industry that we're going after we finally have what we need in order for us to be ready to scale I purposely did not want to scale the business until I had something that I knew I could scale without people.

23:49That's my issue. Ajax Union, I remember when I interviewed you, you were doing SEO. And I also remember this. Hang on a second. You had the best way of getting early customers. You would go into Craigslist posts that were job posts looking to hire someone to do SEO. And you say, hey, I saw your job listing. Why don't you hire my agency to do this? It's going to cost you less than hiring a full-time person. That's how you got your first clients. I love that kind of hack attitude for building your business. you expanded beyond SEO to digital marketing. What I'm trying to understand at Ajax Union is what's the service that you're offering that's so easy to create that it doesn't cost you that much money to do?

24:24We basically resell GoHighLevel. We're an AI agency now. So everything that gets done gets done with artificial intelligence. So basically somebody comes to us, they need a logo, AI creates the logo, and we keep modifying it until they love it. Then AI creates a style guide. AI creates the lead magnets AI creates the landing pages AI creates the automations You call any of our customers AI picks up the gosh darn phone You text the word demo to 973-841-8868 That's 973-841-8868 You text the word demo You will get an EVAI demo instantly sent to you I'm not doing that Go High Level is doing that And it's unlimitedly scalable That's why we call it unlimited digital marketing And so now we're able to pick up customers Now, the problem is with people that say resell go high levels, A, they don't know how to use it.

25:12B, they don't have an industry they're targeting. We figured out both things. We figured out the industry we want to go after. We got the initial customers. We tested it out. And now every customer that we add, every few thousand dollars that we add in revenue to the business, goes straight to the bottom line because we can handle 100, 200, 300. And I've done this before so many times, but I didn't want to do it in a non-scalable way. Here's the kicker. When I started Ajax Union, I used to hire one new employee for every 10 small businesses I would take on. That was a very, very expensive thing.