6 One-Person AI Businesses That Will Make You $60,000/mo (FULL Playbook)

0:00Today's guest Cody Schneider went through the exact playbook for six startup ideas and how to grow them to$60 ,000 a month MRR. And he didn't just give the startup ideas. He goes through the exact trend. He goes through the acquisition strategy. He tells you about all these AI tools and software tools that you can actually use to go and build this. And so this isn't just here's a few ideas, go and build them. This is here's a playbook for how you'd actually go and build this to get to something like 10, 20, 40, 60, 80K MRR. Cody Schneider on the pod. He delivers. Enjoy it. And let me know what you think.

0:50Cody, you know, if people stick to the end of this episode, what are they going to learn? I promise you, you won't fall into the tar pit that is AI automation agencies. And I'm going to instead convince you why you shouldn't do that. And you should make a productized service that uses AI automation to deliver a deliverable on like a monthly cadence or whatever that is. I mean, why that productized service is a way better business than the AI automation agency. Okay, so you're basically saying all the people that are pitching these AI automation agencies, disregard them. There's actually a way bigger opportunity with productized services.

1:27And you're going to show us how someone could go and create one, maybe some ideas on ones that they can steal and how much money do you think people can make using some of these ideas? Dude, you can easily make like 40 to 80 grand a month and like get to that like within six months. I have zero doubt that that's possible with this stuff. And also these businesses, like it's just a better business than AI automation agencies. Can we just break that down first? Like why that's it? So I know so many, I've had so many friends that have started these like AI automation companies and like every one of them, they last like 12 to 18 months and then they hard pivot into some productized service.

2:05And the reason for that is that the business composition or the biology of the business for an automation agency is just really hard. Like you have to be really good at getting like top of funnel leads. You have to be really good at sales because it's like typically kind of higher ticket. So it's like you're having to like go through that traditional sales motion. And then the revenue is one time, right? Like it's not like it's a recurring purchase. Like you do, it's project based. And so it's just a it's a hard business to build and scale. And so I think that that is like the biggest thing to think about with this is like it's just a it's a bad business to build.

2:41If you want to create something that has scalability, that has recurring revenue. And a lot of these, like if you're building an Internet business, that's the whole point of it. Like you're looking for the ability to be wherever you want to run your company from. Right. So it's remote. And then also something that has recurring revenue that's happening month over month. So you're not fighting tooth and nail to make sure that you have enough lead volume to pay your staff or pay your team or just even pay yourself. And so anyway, yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions on that or dive deeper on any of those things.

3:12No, I say let's just get into it. The promise that you need to make to people listening to this, though, is that you're not just going to give ideas. You're going to actually give, OK, here's how I would build this. 100%. I'm going to run through all that. I got like six of them for you. So let's just jump into the first one. So the first one that I think is a huge opportunity is med spa marketing. So med spas are this category that I had no idea how profitable they are. Like they average per location, 1.4 million to like 2 million per location in revenue. The customer lifetime value of one of these people, if you can like convert them, is like six grand, right?

3:53So crazy, crazy good revenue if you can basically help them get these customers into the business. So what I would do and my focus or how I'd go about this is I'd focus just on two things. It looks like all of the purchasing decisions that people are making are coming from basically paid ads on social, Instagram and Facebook and maybe TikTok, and then local SEO. So how I would go about the service that you're basically providing is going to be creating like Facebook ad content, running those ads for them, etc. And then you do reporting based off of leads that you're providing them, the new revenue that you're providing them.

4:33That's how you validate that you're actually, you know, like worth the money that they're paying you. And so basically running those Facebook ads and then doing Google Maps optimization. This is the service that you'd be offering these people is basically... Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building.

5:14So that's exactly why I built idea browser dot com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building. And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com.

5:55And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. creating those deliverables for the Facebook ads, for the paid ad side, and then also doing the Google Maps listing optimization. So on the Facebook ads, what I would do is say, hey, we're going to make you 10 pieces of new creative per month. You're going to use the, you know, ChatGPT API to make static images. You'll use HeyGen or Arc ads to make the dynamic images, or sorry, the like videos. And then what I would do to do like the research for these, this creative is use perplexity to go and scrape for Reddit and other social media for the problem benefits, like solution that the services that these med spas are offering.

6:41Like, like, why would people basically do whatever the med spa service is off that that they're trying to promote? And so when you use, like all of this can be automated, right? Like the scraping for the research, the writing of the ad scripts, the writing, like the description of the ads that you're trying to create through the static image API. That's where the AI automation piece comes in, where it's like, you don't need to hire a graphic designer. You don't need to hire a video editor. Like all of these things can basically be handled by a lot of these AI tooling, this AI tooling. And then the other piece of this is then optimizing Google Maps.

7:21So if you go and you search on Google right now for like Med Spa, right, any location, like any location, first thing that comes up, huge Google Map listing, right? And the reason for this is this is a local like search, like Google has categorized this as a local search. And so it is super valuable if you can show up in the top three of this map pack. the only thing that you need to do to be able to show up there is basically optimize the profile there's tons of videos on youtube talking about this optimization the thing that we found to be most important is getting reviews making sure the keywords are in that listing and then also having images of the physical location in that listing as well if you do those three things and then combine that with building a directory listing so these are basically making whatever the like the name of the business, the location, the address, the phone number, any of this contact information.

8:17You go and you'll submit these to all of these different websites, like Foursquare, any of these old map websites. And the reason that this works is Google uses this as a metric to validate that this is a real listing, a real company. And so to do this, you can use one of Friends of the Show's companies, it's called LocalRank.so, I believe. And basically what you do, one click and it submits to all of these different directory listings. So that's kind of the service offering. I would charge something in the range of like two to three grand per month. And then how you actually go and get customers for this is all of their information is public, right?

9:02Like their contact information, their website information. they're probably going to be spending most of their time on Instagram and probably via email or phone. So it just turns into a process of reaching out to those businesses or running ads to them on Facebook. This is probably another strategy. You can target people who basically work at med spas on Facebook, run ads showing case studies, send them to a lead magnet to download some free PDF, talking through literally your exact service offering, like here's how to do this. And then what you what's going to happen naturally is people are going to download that they're going to give you their email, they'll give you their phone number.

9:41And they're going to realize, oh, this is actually a lot like a major pain in the ass to do this. I don't want to spend my time doing this. I'm going to go hire this company. The other acquisition channel will be doing YouTube videos talking through the case studies, name the video something like, I grew this med spa, you know, by x revenue from Facebook ads, or, you know, I grew this med spa by, all right, I got 100 leads from Google Maps for this med spa. Here's how I did it. Something like that. Literally just talk your book. And that's going to create the lead volume that you're looking for for this agency.

10:14And then the last thing that you're wanting to do is figure out some type of reporting that you can do to your clients so that it shows them basically the outcomes that you're promising that you're going to get. I would try to attach that to the thing that's closest to revenue, which is going to be leads for them. And you can use like something like Looker Studio or a company that we just launched this week, which is graft.com. Graft is basically like a chat with data to build dashboard solutions. So something like that to basically have a dashboard that you can share with them where it's like, hey, we did this work and look, it's actually working.

10:49We can show you that it's actually working. So what are your thoughts on faceless video to drive traffic? Like, should people do it? It works, man. We are my friends in the wine industry in the central coast of California. go to Rustic Wines if you want like a crazy experience they have this old barn and it's awesome it's right up against the Santa Lucia Highlands like outside of Monterey California but we've been running these ads where they're like basically like it's like faceless it's just a monologue talking over like videos from social of people like being at the wine at the at the winery there like in the tasting room in the vineyards like in the hills etc and they're just absolutely ripping because it's it feels like natural organic content so i think this could totally work for you like you don't even have to use ai avatars right have you seen real farm uh yes i have they do like where it's like uh it's almost like a templated format right it's similar to what jack fricks is doing yeah pull it up um real farm.ai i haven't used this product uh so i'm not sure um but the founder has a video of like how it works right here so we can just kind of look at it um so it looks like yeah you select the images it's basically text overlay yeah like like content right and then i know he does um it's like the like the slidable i don't know what those are called now on tiktok where you like slide to the right it's like a slideshow i think that's actually what the name of it is um exactly but i i saw something right now on tiktok i believe it i believe it it's it's also ripping on instagram dude i i had an instagram post get 195 000 likes what did it say it was just a static image of a tweet with audio and so i think that But this whole idea around take static images, put a voice on top of it, throw it on Instagram, throw it on TikTok.

12:55Of course, whatever it is you're saying needs to be outstanding. For 95%, 97 % of people using tools like RealFarm, they're probably not going to crush it. But if you know how to tell stories and you tell interesting stories, yes, of course it's going to be valuable to get traffic to whatever it is you're doing. 100%. I think this is a part of the offering that you have, right? It's like you're keeping a pulse on what's working currently. And that's why they're paying you is to understand the formats that are most likely to succeed. Like a format that worked six months ago isn't going to work now.

13:30You have to keep refreshing the content and the formats that you're doing for your ads, just like you would do for organic. And so that's another value add. It's like they don't have to think about that. They're offloading that to you. And because you're working with multiple clients, you're going to see, oh, like this type of content works really well for med spots. I'm just doing it in different locations around the US. Right. Cool. What's the next idea? Awesome. So the next one on the list is Facebook ads for beauty e-commerce brands. And the reason why you should do this is they need to constantly make new ad creative because it gets stale really quickly.

14:06Right. They're running a ridiculous amount of, you know, basically just ad spend through these accounts. And so what you see is that the creative really quickly, you know, people will see that same ad too many times and then it loses the effect that it had when they initially launched that. So that's a component of this. Also, this is like business critical for these businesses. Right. You can see here like e-commerce ads agencies, like really quickly growing category, like very high value to create a brand within this. And how I would do this again using this AI automation tooling. So can use some type of research agent.

14:47You can build these. There's so many builds of this on YouTube talking through N8M flows of like, here's how to use this AI agent to research product pain points, like how the product can be a case for this. Scraping reviews, aggregating all that, and then pulling out the best hooks for the creative that you're making. Doing that competitor analysis. And then I would use something like a MakeUGC.ai. Do you know this company yet, Craig? no i don't they are a um it's a one of these ad creative uh like makers but their whole differentiator is that they um the person in the video can hold the product and so why this is like way more valuable to this is them here right so it's like trained on the actual product that you're trying to sell and why this is way more valuable to these beauty brands is a lot of the times they need them to like hold the product and then talk through, you know, what the product does or like their experience with it.

15:52Right. So I would use something like this, um, to actually make the creative of them holding the product and then same kind of structure, you know, have, have some type of deliverable, um, that it works like it will give you 20 ads a month. Uh, right. And then you're also analyzing the best performers, remixing those and looking at competitor analysis. So to get these clients and sell this to service, same strategy, basically go to YouTube, do your case studies in public, show the process of you actually doing it. Again, this is going to be hard for a lot of people to go and mimic. Show the breakdown of how you're using this agent to do research, etc.

16:33People are going to watch that content. You're going to get naturally inbound leads from that. And then the other side is you can probably post on LinkedIn and Twitter, just doing breakdowns of different ad types, different formulas that you're seeing work, different formats, etc. And then have a call to action basically to do a discovery call with you or some type of lead magnet. So that's your whole strategy around this business. And again, I would charge like 3k to 5k a month for this, if not more. I know there's some agencies that are UGC agencies that are traditional, they're using real humans, and they're charging so much money for this, like basically the creative development and, and, you know, six grand for five videos, it's insane.

17:13So if you can come where it's a lower price point, even more creative, and this is really the game anymore, right, is having more creative variations that you're testing on a faster cadence, and then doing broad targeting to Facebook or to Twitter, TikTok ads, etc. Because like, their algorithms are way better at finding what's going to get you the best row as so your job should only be like focused on that um uh that content or that uh that ad production process so what do you think about creating a directory of ads like is that is there too much competition there like is that on your radar how do you think about that i've seen so many companies doing this um and there's like i mean there i've seen like four startups get funded for doing this in the last like i feel like six months right that are scraping app libraries, like you put in your competitors and they aggregate all of it and they tell you the insights.

18:07I think that it works, but you're just looking only at your competitors. You're living within this ancestral ecosystem where everybody's copying each other. And so it doesn't allow you to create any pattern disruption within your ads. What's going to be way more effective is like you go and you scrape a Reddit forum and you find this random quote, you know, about acne cream and like somebody describes it in this funny way or a different way. And like you extract that using Claude and you're like, oh my God, like that's the hook. Right. And then you run that. That's going to create a totally different way or a different piece of content than what your other competitors.

18:48I might look at the formats that my other competitors are using. Like, oh, we're seeing that like selfie videos are working or we're seeing that static ads are working. So that format stays the same. But I think that like the source content, if you just use the same language that all your competitors are using, you're not going to have that ad differentiation. So it's going to be way harder to stick out. Like, you know, think about how many ads somebody sees when they're scrolling Instagram, right? Like you have to, you have to have creative that that feels unique for that category. And what about from like a traffic acquisition standpoint?

19:17Like what about if you, if you're trying to create this agency, a lot of people create online directories to get SEO traffic and then you can convert that to agency leads. What about that? I thought, dude, I mean, you're running this playbook, so you can probably answer it better than I can. But 100 % that works. What I would probably do is like do like tweets and also LinkedIn posts that are like, I scraped 100 ads from beauty brands. I'll give you access to this library of them. Comment, you know, ads below to get access. And then it creates like that. it's a i mean it's what's working right now on linkedin right it's basically like that whole some type of asset comment to get it and then you go it creates that engagement flywheel for it 100 that would work i don't even know if you'd have to make it a product though i think you could just make it like it's a digital download or they give you their email and then they you send them a google drive link right so yeah i think like here's here's a bit of the sauce if if you're gonna go and do this uh well two pieces of sauce actually one is um yes there's a lot of online directories for ads creative but they're not verticalized so and now with ai it's easy to create like hyper niche verticalized like beauty even might be too horizontal like you can even go deeper and just be like these are the these are the most interesting ads for skincare men's skincare totally you know like totally men's skincare that have eczema right yeah exactly go that that specific and i think that there's totally an opportunity and the last thing before we move on with this one.

20:51Like I think there's two ways to structure this type of business. Like it could just be deliverables or it could be like we also run the ads for you. And it's probably a more valuable agency if you're running the ads because you're closer to revenue, right? Like if you show that, hey, our ads that we make are getting 5x ROAS versus the stuff that somebody else is making, which is only getting 3x, you're going to have a way like higher stickiness. And to do that effectively, again, just have reporting that's set up, right? Like there's so many of these tools. I'm going to keep shilling graft because I want you to use it.

21:25But there's so many different ways that you can basically validate the work that you're doing. But the closer you are to revenue, the easier it is to validate that work. Beautiful. All right. Idea number three. Idea number three. Okay, cool. So social media management for nutrition coaches. I'm obsessed with nutrition coaches and like health coaches right now. I think that anything that was a coach is suddenly like disruptible by AI first off. So that's why I'm like deep in this. But again, I had no idea how much money these people make and like how many clients they serve. So like the customer lifetime value is relatively small, right?

22:00So it's like maybe we'll say$1 ,000, but they'll service like 100 people a month, right? With their nutrition coaching. It's crazy to me. and this strategy the thing that i think is the opportunity is doing organic social media management because the clb is smaller you need to have some type of organic strategy this is the searches for nutrition coaches month over month for the last couple years so it's this growing category people are looking for this and i think the angle that you could go from is basically you make make images of food that are like recipes right you see people doing this on Pinterest right now, or they like have AI generate food.

22:36And then they like basically send them to recipe blogs that are written by it. So like really hard to compete in this category on Google Pinterest, you can actually compete really effectively in it. But I think you can do this for Instagram accounts, and then like tell client stories related to those photos that you're doing. And then the deliverables, what this ends up being is a post per day. And then you basically the measurements of success is the impressions and then the leads, I would drive them to some type of lead magnet, like, you know, 100 day, you know, recipe ebook, right? And then get their email, you put them into a drip nurture, like have it be the classic thing.

23:11But I think it's something like this, you could probably charge like two grand a month for it. And the acquisition strategy is really similar to the ones that we've been talking about. But I think the difference is you would do cold DMs to these nutrition coaches on Instagram. That's where I'm seeing kind of like this whole ecosystem live. And then also, again, running that, you can target nutrition coaches on Facebook with Facebook ads. You could do that same thing to some type of like educational YouTube video that's email gated. And then also do YouTube content where it's like, this is how I grew a client's social account and here's how many leads we got.

23:43Again, try to get as close to revenue as possible with whatever it is that you're doing. And how big could this get? I think this could be like, I mean, as a solo person, like imagine you have 10 accounts that you're managing. I don't think that's unreasonable. Like if you're doing a post a day across social and you just use something like a meat assembly uh dot com uh which is like a social media scheduling app that allows for you to to basically get um be like a like a an okay from your client it's like a you know they have a client facing portal to okay the schedule you open that up yeah absolutely um i've never heard of that yeah it's my friend's company they're awesome um basically how it works um i can jump in here and show you.

24:24Oh, yeah. This ends up being. So basically how this works is you can have a bunch of your social accounts connected to a single portal. But what's really powerful is you can have this approval section where your client can just go in and basically approve each of the posts. And so this you can go and schedule these out within assembly and then have the final like, you know, approval process be handed off to them. They approve it. Those get scheduled out. And so this is a great tool to basically do this. You could run your entire business on top of this, basically. So for this offer. But yeah, questions around that?

25:03No, I like it. Awesome. Should we keep going? Keep it going. Number four. Cool. This one is close to my heart. I just know a lot about this. So I'm like, I think there's a massive opportunity. But making link magnets for webinars, I think, is a massive opportunity. So when you look at B2B, it's insane numbers. It's like over half of B2B marketers say that they hosted a webinar in the last year. And then it's consistently a part of their marketing process. But for a lot of webinars, the biggest problems are getting people to actually show up to the webinars, getting people to register. And then once the webinar is recorded, what do you do with that?

25:45How do you get people to consume that content? How do you resurrect that content? And I think link magnets are a great way to do this. So it's basically taking those webinars that you already have that back catalog and you go and you create ebooks and white papers or whatever it is that that industry is most receptive to. you basically create that media for them. And then again, turn it into a deliverable format where it's like, hey, we'll do whatever it is. It's like four link magnets a month, eight link magnets a month, et cetera. And then the acquisition strategy here is you just reach out to people who are running webinars and be like, hey, I made this ebook that's about this webinar.

26:26You can use it as a link magnet. Like here it is, right? You can create these super easily, again, with these AI automation tools, take the webinars, turn them into transcripts, take those transcripts, turn it into like, you know, these bolded lists, et cetera. And then, you know, format it into a PDF that's branded for them. And then for them, you basically show your work before they're even working with you. And then say you offer this as a service. If they're interested in it, they, you know, you jump on a discovery call. And then again, talk about how you're driving leads for these companies that are running webinars on LinkedIn.

27:02That's going to be the distribution channel here. You can use that organic strategy that we talked about earlier, where it's like LinkedIn posts with some type of lead magnet when you comment to get the lead magnet. That creates your own leads for you. I would just focus on webinar marketing. Get my access to my webinar marketing guide. People are just trying to figure out how do I get more people to show up to it. That's their measurement of success to typically at the company that they're working at. I think this is a really easy and powerful one. And it also like it's constant repurposing, right?

27:35Like you're, you're basically taking this like rotting fruit and you're, you're turning it into juice for them that you can, uh, you know, they can make more money off of this thing that they've already had some costs into. Yeah. And I know a bunch of people listening to this are, are, their eyes are glazing over cause they hear the word webinar and they're like webinar, like even, even though you have stats here saying that webinars are big they're like no but i'm seeing like a lot of like the gen z like instagram tiktok people creating webinars you know oh 100 right like it's the best it's the best for agencies and i don't think people realize this but like you giving away free educational information that shows deep expertise is one of the most valuable things you can do to get people to like trust you and and do your product right like and use your product or use your service because it's funny, like for high ticket stuff, like short form video is never going to sell a high ticket thing.

28:32I don't know why people even try. That is the wrong thing to be doing. If you're trying to sell something that's three to five, you know, 10 grand plus a month, there's 0 % chance you're going to sell through short video. You might be able to use short video to get top of funnel into like your like long form content, but just going short to that purchase is never going to happen. Webinars can be that bridge and they also can be incredibly powerful. Like we ran this when I was at Rupa Health. We grew this email newsletter on the back of the podcast and then we started promoting the webinars through it.