How I use AI Marketing and Claude Code to make $$

0:00So you vibe coded a project, but then when you launch it, it's just crickets. No customers, no revenue, no passive income, nothing. Well, today's episode, we bring in Jonathan, a.k.a. Mr. Jice Cream Courtney, who teaches us, hey, how do you actually use AI to generate revenue to your vibe coded project? He starts the episode off with the foundations. He talks about what you need to know, non-AI related, in order to build a business. After that, we get to the fun, share your screen, Claude Code, Claude, little tips and tricks and what you can do. But I encourage you to listen to the whole episode because I think people who listen to the whole episode are going to be a dangerous weapon to understand not just how to vibe code, but how to get customers to your vibe coded project.

0:57We are back on the Startup Ideas podcast with Jonathan J. Ice Cream. J. Ice Cream. Welcome back. Mr. J. Ice Cream, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? What people are going to learn is how to actually make money using the AI tools and get users while also using the AI tools as sort of like a support. And I think the reason I want to talk about this is because there's a huge conversation around how to technically use all these tools, all of the cool use cases. I mean, I sit down and just watch your tutorials and then just go and do that stuff. But I think what's missing from the conversation a little bit is the practical element of, well, what's the point in having a business that's not making any money?

1:43so I want to go into that side of it I want to show you kind of what the job of a CEO is I want to remind maybe some parts of the audience what the job of a CEO is and I also want to show my blueprint for getting customers to buy things Okay so basically there's a lot of people who have vibe coded a thing and they put it out there and it's crickets and what you're going to show people is how to go from crickets to dollar signs. I wish there was something that would rhyme with crickets. Crickets to money rickets. Yes, exactly. Crickets to dollar signs. I would say that I use these tools like 20 % of how much you and your audience use these tools because most of my time is focused as a CEO on how do I actually make money?

2:41How do I get users? How do I increase revenue for myself and clients? And so I just want to bring that cold money angle to all of this. And most of the hardcore vibe coding stuff leave to you guys to make the cool products. Yeah, and for the people listening, watching this man named Jay Ice Cream, and you're like, why should I trust this guy with an hour of my time? You know, this guy looks like a German, a Berlin version of Greg Eisenberg. Who is he? Is he even real? The answer is you've made millions of dollars using a lot of these techniques, right? Yes, I run a couple of businesses. Some of them are multi-seven figures, some of them are seven figures.

3:27For example, facilitator.com is an example of one of my businesses that's out there, that's public, that people know about. I build businesses in the enterprise space, in the B2C space. and also help other people sell their stuff as well. So I do spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to make money and how to sell stuff and how to turn something that's not selling into something that's selling. That's what I have been doing for the last 14 years. Oh yeah, my main business is called AJ and Smart. If you want to find the main thing of it. Well, thank you for your life story. Let's get into it.

4:10Ah, shit. Okay, look, before we get into this, I think that what's really important is to understand, I really want people to understand if you're running a business, if you consider yourself the CEO of the business, there's a massive misconception out there. I'm on X all the time. I see this misconception building up that building stuff, being able to build stuff, and being able to build super complex systems using AI tools is basically your job and then somehow you make money. and I have a lot of CEO friends that are really excited about all the AI stuff and what I always ask is so cool, you spent four or five days doing all this stuff, you've built all these cool systems you've built all these automations and are you making more money now?

4:56Or are you making any money now? And I think these AI tools, if used wrong and if you don't really understand your role as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, you can just lose loads of time procrastinating. These can be procrastination machines that you're basically building for yourself. And so for me, I want to point people in the direction of the most successful people in the AI space. Do you know the name of the CEO of Antropic? Yeah. Do you know how he looks? I think he's bald, right? He's actually not. He's not. That was a good guess, right? CEO, bald. Yeah, CEO, bald. Okay, you know who the CEO of OpenAI is?

5:41Yeah, Sam Altman, good head of hair. Do you know the Levels.io X account? What's that guy's name? Peter Levels. Okay, all of these people are big in the AI space, right? They're all entrepreneurs, they're all CEOs. And something that they all have in common that no one ever points out is that these guys, at least 50 % of their job is promoting their businesses. And so for me, what I want to get in your head as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, if you're the person who's the founder, CEO, entrepreneur, your job is to promote your business. Of course, you want to build all the cool stuff. Of course, you want to make the thing.

6:20But your actual key job, and then you build around yourself and build things that support that. Your key job is getting out there and promoting your business. And so when you look at someone that levels, when you look at Peter Levels, When you look at his X account today, the very first thing he has posted there is essentially a long form promotion for his photo AI tool. But people on X and people who are using all these AI tools, they're like, marketing sucks. Like, all you have to do is build it and then people will come to it. You just have to build great shit and then people will. That's not actually what's happening in real life.

6:56It's completely counterintuitive to the fact that you know the names of all the people who build all of your favorite tools because they're on every podcast because they're out there all the time making themselves known. And so this is what I really want to get across here just as like a preamble is that your job as CEO is not your job description is not, hey, I'm going to use AI tools and get really good at them. Your job is not, hey, I'm going to build cool like little products. if you are not able to promote those things no one's going to use them and it becomes completely like a little self-contained procrastination station that you're building for yourself like a analogy that i use for my friends is imagine you start a restaurant you're like this is going to be the best restaurant ever you spend an entire year augmenting every machine so it all works automated it makes the perfect food you know you've got the perfect system set up you can book everything it's so easy just go online but you literally never told even one person this place exists that will die pretty quick even though you get to do your little fun procrastination thing all that being said I love all the AI tools I'm going to show you how I'm going to use that how I use them but I want to show you how I actually use them in line with what my job is as a CEO which is actually it's my job to get users it's actually my job to make money it's actually my job to make deals while at the same time I happen to be the person who also makes a lot of the stuff that we sell.

8:27And so if you're making a cool thing, if you're making a cool product, like for example, Greg has ideabrowser.com yet, Greg, how much of your time do you spend promoting all your businesses? I mean, this podcast is a huge part of your job, right? Yeah, it is. This is something I think that has gotten a little bit twisted in the whole builder space because people don't realize, oh, Greg and Peter put crazy effort into making sure that their content is useful and valuable so that people know about them and therefore people can figure out what it is that they are offering to the world. and if you were never to do a podcast and if you were never to create any content, no one would have a clue about any of this stuff.

9:14And so for me, I just want to get that baseline before I go into showing how I would recommend thinking about selling stuff. So let's open. You know what? I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you a beautiful vibe coded blueprint for how I think about selling the whole or how I think about like selling stuff in general. so I put this together earlier just as like a I mean this is how I show it just to hold up to the screen this is how I show it to my clients like literally scrawled on a piece of paper but I was like I'm going on Greg's podcast I'm going to actually show this in a fancy vibe coded way so what I'm also going to do is show the AI use cases for these steps as well but I want there's no point in me doing this until people really understand the basics and understand how money is made in this selling products space.

10:10The first thing you talk about this, you talk about this all the time, but I'm just going to really take a step back and show the key ideas. The first step is you need to figure out how to get traffic from somewhere. And the only two categories of getting traffic are organic or paid. So either you're out here like me right now going on other people's podcasts, you're running events and networking, you're doing posts on social media, free content, or you're paying for ads on meta, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. I always recommend push that traffic not straight into the product, like not, hey, just buy my product.

10:48I always recommend push them into a holding pattern. So step two is the holding pattern. And the holding pattern is basically where you're just slowly warming people up. And it's like your email newsletter, it could be your podcast. So your podcast, for example, the Startup Ideas podcast is a great place that people get value from. You don't need to promote a lot of stuff there, but you're keeping people sort of in your space, in your world. And the attention is on you. YouTube content, posts on X that keep people engaged. This is basically the holding pattern. And that's almost like your daily content, your weekly content.

11:27the next thing and I think I would say a lot of people on x are okay at the first two so they know how to you know post and you know create a lot of followers create a lot of engagement but I almost see nobody who's good at moving people from now I have some people listening to me to that turning into money and so that's the next step the next step is thinking okay I've got all of these people they're watching what I'm doing they're excited about what I'm doing how do I move them to a selling event and a selling event is something like for example a webinar I talk about these all the time so you could do a live demo of your product and show people how it's being used you see like companies like superhuman doing this all the time you see almost all the AI companies doing demos where you can see how these products work and you don't even necessarily need to do a pitch at the end.

12:26It's just, you now see how this product works. You now see how valuable it is. That's a live workshop. That's a live webinar. That's a live demo. I'm running these all of the time for myself and my clients and my partners. Second thing is an email campaign. This could be as simple as like a string of three or four emails that lead people in your holding pattern to actually making a purchase. And you see these all the time. You can see the examples of this all over the place. And by the way, I just got hit with a webinar campaign from Superhuman today because they want me to buy Superhuman teams or they want me to upgrade to Superhuman teams.

13:00And so I just got hit with a campaign to get me on one of their webinars. The other thing is, if you want to pay, and a lot of people don't realize this, you can retarget people with a paid campaign that are already in your world. So let's say you have like a couple of thousand emails that you've collected. You can actually put those into Facebook. And again, it's not like they take the exact email. It's not like it all perfectly lines up. You create a lookalike audience. And those emails can be used to retarget people on other platforms or similar types of people on other platforms to push them towards something.

13:41And the last thing, which people don't really think about, if you're building a holding pattern, and for me, if I look into my email, like, okay, let's see the last 30 people who signed up. Oh, this person has an email address at microsoft.com. We work with enterprise clients. Let me see if I can reach out to this person and jump on a call with them and see if they would be interested in working with us. And so the selling event, which a lot of people just call campaigns are the bridge between I'm holding people in this space to now I'm moving them over to they're buying something from me, they're getting a free trial or they're booking a call with me because they want to buy something expensive and if they don't convert, which most won't convert, they go back into the holding pattern and they stay there until the next selling event.

14:32And if you look at the example of Peter Level's X account, you could even take a look at Jason Freed's X account or any of the people that you associate with selling really great, interesting digital products who you wouldn't consider to be very marketing heavy. they are you know going on other people's podcasts to generate traffic which pushes people into their world whether that's their x account or newsletter or their youtube channels or whatever it is or the podcast their own podcast so it's from their traffic to your traffic then they keep people there this is where they're posting like their personal stuff and like peter is always posting about like how to how to cook steaks in an air fryer and all of this stuff is happening there That's not where you're generating traffic in the first place, but that's where that's happening.

15:24And then every so often, you'll see them make a clear push to selling. A clear push to, okay, I want to have people push towards this thing now. And you saw on Peter's account, he did this e-girl post, which is now pinned on his account as we speak. And then he posted the bump in sales that happened after he did that post. and so I'm not saying by the way that he's cynically sitting there and being like this is specifically a sales campaign and this is how much I'm going to make whatever not that that would be a bad thing or anything it's just that this is an activity that he's that that's happening from the holding pattern it's an activity that's not just happening randomly from an ad he's not he's not doing his sales pitch on podcasts that when he goes on other people's podcasts.

16:18He's going on other people's podcasts and people get confused about this, by the way, like why is this person like, why is the CEO of Antropic right now at Davos getting interviewed by Bloomberg, right? Is it, is it for the good of humanity? No, like his job is he's a promoter. He's moving people from here to the holding pattern, to their world, to understand it. When I'm watching the interview with the CEO of Antropic, Darius, I am thinking he's doing a really good job at doing this sort of pre-pitch to enterprises who are now going to understand, oh, Claude is the enterprise AI company. And so he's bringing people, he's creating that attention, bringing people into that holding pattern.

17:00And the selling events for Antropic, I mean, they have an outreach team because they're actually the company that goes and tries to get these big enterprise deals. But you know, you're following them on Twitter, you're on X, and then they post about Claude Cowork. You're in their world, you're in their sphere, you're hearing about these things. Again, those companies are huge. We don't have those types of budgets, but this is the general, I would say, loop that's happening the whole time. We're always trying to get new traffic and let me do this in a meta way. I'm on your podcast now. I would like to get traffic, right?

17:36I'm trying to expose myself to new people who might not know me yet. the next step is ideally people are going to start searching who I am because when you're on other people's content you don't want to make a pitch so people are going to do the work themselves to figure out who I am where I am, what I'm doing they'll then fall into one of my holding patterns it could be that they listen to the podcast, email, newsletter, whatever it is eventually as some of them have seen this week because we did a big campaign they're going to get pushed towards something Right now it's a webinar and that webinar will be pushed them again towards some people doing enterprise calls with us, some people buying cheaper B2C products with us, and then 90 % of the rest of them fall back into the holding pattern bucket.

18:29and as a promoter ideally you're waking up every morning and you're able to understand that this is like the the oxygen of the business essentially so for example if there's no traffic coming in if you're not doing any traffic building activities then there's not going to be enough people in your holding pattern because so that when you run a selling event there won't be enough people in that selling event or campaign which means you're not going to have a lot of sales And so for us, for example, we're running meta ads. I'm on this podcast. I'm always out there trying to get as many people into the holding pattern as possible.

19:06Our biggest holding pattern is our email newsletter. And when I see that an extra 5 ,000 people have joined the newsletter, I can mentally say that means another 200 people will turn up to the next webinar. And that means another 12 people will buy something. And so the machinery starts to make sense. The motor, so to speak. Yeah. Oh, I should change it to the motor. And like the, by the way, look, check this out. I also have this little toggle here, which is, well, how do you use AI in all of these things? The reason I didn't have AI here up front is because this is the core element of your job as a CEO to make money.

19:53and then AI is supporting these elements. And I'll show you, I'll turn it on and I'll show you how I literally I'm using these tools. I'll open up the tools and I'll show you how I'm doing this. I'll show you how I'm creating a marketing campaign and I'll show you how I'm using Flawed in particular to support my marketing activities that make money or grow traffic or keep people in the holding pattern, et cetera, et cetera. So let's turn on the AI use cases.

20:26So for the audio listeners, what am I looking at? You are looking at, I have flipped a switch which says show AI use cases. And so we're now in AI use case mode and underneath each of the activities. So let's say we're talking about going on other people's podcasts. I have put a use case for how to use AI tools. and also in the background there are very beautiful stickers of me flying around all over the place and the cursor has changed to an ice cream. So it's gotten pretty serious I would say. I'm loving what I'm seeing right now visually and I never realized how similar you look to Jesus. Well now with the hair like this the next one of these blueprints will be the Jesus blueprint.

21:20And so what you have here, by the way, I put this as a Vercel. I made like a little Vercel version of this, if you want to put it in the description. We will. I vibe coded it in like 20 minutes, so it's probably barely holding itself together. But what I want to show you actually is, so I don't think we need to go into all of these things. maybe people can look those up or people can click on the link and they can see the ways to use AI for these things. I think the best thing and what I know about your podcast is people just want to see inside the software and see how it's actually being used.

22:00So will I just jump in and show how I, I'll show you in a very meta way how I prepared to go on your podcast today and how I also transitioned from using Claude standard to Claude code to go through the entire flow of this. Sound good? Perfect, sounds great. Cool, let's jump into little baby cute Claude. Now, what I'm going to show you, I think most of your listeners, since they're so technical already, they're going to be like, yeah, I already know about this. But I know from talking to a lot of CEOs over the last two weeks, most people still don't understand how to use Claude properly especially how to jump from Claude to Claude code when needed so this is a project in Claude code called sorry this is a project in Claude this was my essentially marketing assistant today for going on your podcast what I wanted to do was so you can see here in my little notebook I just collected all of the physical notes that I had on this promoter concept that I wanted to talk about with you at the start of the podcast.

23:18And then I wanted to work with Claude to number one, just create the graphic to explain to people. But number two, I wanted it to do some research on the last podcast episodes I did with you to figure out like what was working and what's not based on how many views and how many comments, etc but also I wanted to figure out like where in my angle like where in my script is it going to lose people's attention especially for your audience and the other thing is I am I don't prepare for stuff I'm like one of these classic ADHD entrepreneurs and so usually I just wing it and I wanted it to kind of work with me in a creating almost like an ADHD friendly kind of overview because I don't want to read a script either.

24:06And so the first thing I did here was I recorded just straight to my phone, like a 15 minute, like brain dump on all of the different things I was thinking about talking about in this podcast. And I dumped it into Claude and I had it basically turn that into, actually it's back here. I had that, I had to turn that into a adhd friendly scannable document that i could just read in the background while i'm talking to you so that i don't forget what to do and that uh let me just open that for you here so let's open the html so on another screen i have the notes of the things i don't want to forget in the background that I can fly through like this.

25:02You remember I talked about Dario, about Jason Fried, about levels. And the process of doing this and bringing up the blueprint, the process of doing this helped me also figure out, okay, when I was looking at this, I was like, maybe I should actually create the blueprint so that people understand what I'm talking about and create a visual of it. So step one is I dumped all of my verbal information into Claude and probably like everyone else is doing my um my prompts are all done by whisper flow so I'm talking to Claude as well so if you're not using whisper flow or something like it I would highly recommend using that so you can just like so I dumped my transcript or dropped my audio file in there then I just talked to Claude for a while and at the same time while I was doing all these little projects.

25:57I'll just go back here. Sorry. While I was doing all of this, I was having it teach itself instructions for this particular project. So at the end of every one of these chats, so I gave it an initial instruction. It was like, I'm going to be a guest on Greg Eisenberg startup ideas podcast today. You're going to be assisting me with putting together a strong content angle, strong ideas, and strong strategy for delivering the most value to his audience. This is currently the most popular episode I've done with Greg. And then I had it at the end of each chat. I said, hey, Claude, this was great. Now I want you to give me a pastable set of instructions that I can put into your instructions for this podcast as we continue along with this episode.

26:42I also had it do in a separate chat. I had it do research on you. And so we also created a research document. So a research file. So it doesn't have to do that research fresh every single time and every single chat. It already went through your X account. It already went through your YouTube account. And all of that led to me being able to create a really simple overview and then move on to, hey, okay, let's create an infographic that represents how I want to zoom out of the big picture for customers and show them how this whole creator flow works. And by the way, prompts again, prompts of this detail are only really possible if you're able to verbally play with them and just talk them out.

27:31And the cool thing here for anyone who doesn't already know how to do this is in normal Claude, in the Claude project with all the context I've given it, I had it build this blueprint for me. and when I was relatively happy with it. So when it was at like this point where it's actually already, oh yeah, so it gave me this first simple version of it and I was like, this is pretty fine. Then I asked it here. I said, cool, I'm going to move this project over to Cloud Code. So I'm going to take the HTML file, but what I need from you is to create a Cloud MD file that gives you the Cloud Code, the entire context of this project, as much context as possible.

28:11And so in this moment, I had to create the Claude MD file, the Markdown file, and spit out the HTML file, downloaded all of them. And then I moved over to Claude Code, where I actually started building this little piece of software, this little piece of like one-off marketing software. I'm sure your audience already deeply knows how all of this stuff works, but it's kind of fun anyway, just to see how it got brought over. So here you go. So I created a project folder then on my desktop, which was about this podcast. And I said, okay, I'm working on this promoter blueprint. Take a look at the Cloud MD file to give yourself context.

28:54And then I wanted it to move into ask user question mode or plan mode. and I had it just grill me on the ideas for the podcast again, which gave me even more context to work with, which then spat out the promoter blueprint that I showed you, even though we spelled it wrong. Then I had to put it on GitHub, spit it out to Vercel so that we are where we're at right now. It sounds like a lot of stuff, but all of that took about one hour, I would say. and almost all of it was happening in the background while I was doing other stuff as well. And so that's like a really super simple flow for any sort of CEO or marketer to go from, okay, I'm researching something to now I'm making a marketing element that I can use.

29:50In this case, I'm using it for the traffic part of my flow. And I mean, if you want to see a more complex setup, for example, if we go here i'll show you like where i'm actually building how i'm actually building out campaigns at a deeper level let's say um a campaign that will i hope make 450 000 this week will i can't guarantee that it'll make 450 000 i think it will though at least 350 based on the hundreds of workshops and webinars you've done, it sounds like, from what we talked about, it sounds like you're going to do between$250 ,000 and$500 ,000. Yeah, it's usually in that range. So we have like 4 ,000 webinar signups right now, so we're hoping it can go much higher.

30:53So we're doing, basically, this is my AJ and smart marketing expert brain. So this is where I, when I'm not like building something, when I don't need cloud code. And actually I know I could just set up all of this on cloud code, but somehow I prefer using this interface when I'm just focusing on marketing stuff. It just, I like to see the overview. So this is my marketing copywriting machine essentially. And you can see I'm using it for a lot of stuff here. and it is my first place I go to when I have a new email campaign that I want to run or when I have a new webinar that I want to run. And the important element here is that I spent a lot of time setting up the files in the document.

31:45So I have the books that I've written. I had one of my favorite things here is a 17 ,766 line doc, which is me finding other people's marketing emails and just compiling them and then learning from them, having Claude essentially boil down the main learnings and add them to the Claude MD file, which I'm still playing around with so it doesn't get too overwhelmed. But let me just show you how I would normally then move from the traffic phase, maybe to the like sell phase or something. So what I'll do here is I'll say, okay, so I just finished a podcast episode with Greg Eisenberg. The topic was how I use AI tools as a CEO.