This $200/Month AI COO Runs My Entire 6-Figure Business

[00:03] I'm paying $200 a month for, right? And 3 months ago he didn't exist. Wait, you hired a 3-month-old? 3-month-old? >> [music]

[00:18] helping me manage my email inboxes. He gives me a morning brief every support for Piano >> No, Jacques isn't talking about a human hire. Instead, he's talking about Rocky, his new open cloud-powered AI operator

[00:31] that's not only helped inject a new sense of fun and excitement into Piano in 21 Days, his long-running online course business, but actually helped him become more profitable as well. March 2026 was my highest profit month

[00:45] [music] in the business since COVID times. In this video we're breaking down how you can set up your own 24/7 AI-powered virtual chief of staff or chief operating officer, how you can just stay secure, and how to set

[00:57] Ready? Let's do it. >> He He is my like my employee and like I said, he's better at customer support than me because he is instantly has access to everything. He is my like my

[01:11] employee and like I said, he's better at customer support than me because he is instantly has access to everything. So, he has taken my course, right? He has all the contacts behind my Piano in 21 Days course instantly. He has gone

[01:25] reason he's better than me is because I last made my course like 4 or 5 years So, I don't remember like instantly exactly what happened halfway through lesson 14, right? But he does. And so if somebody is somebody's asking about, you

[01:40] know, day 14 in the course, he can draft just an unbelievable reply. And then my customer support human actually reviews those and sends them out. So, that's just That's a few of many, many things

[01:52] that he's doing for me today. Yeah, and theoretically it could be trained on the last 10, 12, 13 years of your own customer support emails to kind of get a sense for the the tone and the voice and what what would make sense to even draft

[02:05] Yes, he has process gone through all of Days is a 13-year-old business and so the right context and information, but in my voice, too. Yeah.

[02:19] Okay, I am getting the gears turning here cuz I'm looking at this inbox with hundreds and hundreds of unread emails from subscribers and listeners and but also the rest of the business would not move forward if I did all that. So,

[02:34] that's a thing. SEO is definitely a thing. Building some kind of daily report dashboard, like how did you do yesterday? I think that would be really cool. Now, I think you have this, you know, kind of four levels of AI use case

[02:48] and I'm probably on maybe level two, maybe level three. Level one is just um uh chat GPT, you know, using Gemini, using Claude, you know, kind of question it kind of spits back something out. Level two is going a step further in

[03:03] building automations using Zapier, using Make. And this is kind of where I've been playing around with some assistance from Claude Code to build out these automations. If this happens, then this happens and that's been kind of fun.

[03:16] That's actually been really interesting. Like, okay, after the podcast recording automation fires, it gives me editing most exciting parts, I can put that in the video intro. That's all been super

[03:29] levels beyond that. You want to talk to those? so far. I think most people that are using AI are at level one and that's where I was 3 months ago, which is the chat level. We use AI from a chat

[03:43] perspective. We ask it questions. Maybe we get it to help us write an email or drafted ourselves sounds better or smarter. Uh level two automations. Level three is where things really start to get

[03:56] where things really start to get interesting and it's AI agents. And this is like the big buzz right now and this is really going to shape the future of of work in general and that's when AI can actually do work for you. It can do

[04:11] work on a computer kind of like a human can do. And I remember when agent stuff and it I was just it was just so overwhelming and I just kind of like AI has overwhelmed me for so long and because it overwhelmed me and kind of

[04:26] scared me a little bit, I just kind of stayed in my little chat GPT bubble in level one until about three three months ago and I jumped all the way from level one up to level four. And so I think level level four takes this concept of

[04:40] AI agent a step further and I call level four a personal AI operator. So it's four a personal AI operator. So it's it's an AI agent but it's your AI agent that is is only yours and you don't have to kind of start over every time. It

[04:55] continues to grow, it continues to learn and the the more you use it and the longer you use it, the better it is at doing the things for you in particular. Yeah, so it can be proactive rather than just kind of call

[05:07] and response. It has longer context window, right? If you have these sometimes it'll forget what you were talking about at the beginning. So it has more memory in that sense. What are some of the first steps to

[05:22] start to set this up? So Open Claw is currently free, open source. Um but then there's all these questions around security of like well what what do I give it access to? I don't want it to like start running rampant on my

[05:35] machine or on the internet or especially in the case of yours and mine, it's like Like we can't have it going out and saying stuff that isn't true.

[05:49] game and now there are competitors as well, but Open Claw is the free open source software that allows you to create this level four personal AI operator. And it is a fairly technical setup,

[06:01] okay? But I have a solution for anybody that's not technical. When you go to set it up, you use an AI like Claude, a chat, a level one chat Yeah. to help you set it up so that if you get stuck at any point of the way, it will be there

[06:14] to advise you. And that's actually how I use my Open Claw, you know, to this day is I have my like Claude advisor. So anytime I get stuck, like he it's so much smarter than me and helps me interact with Rocky. I'm not I'm not

[06:29] always interacting with Rocky through it, but that is one of my big tips is because it is a fairly technical setup and even to maintain is to have Claude the way. And you went with the Mac Mini setup, so

[06:44] it's kind of a completely stand-alone computer. And my initial thought was even Bluehost has like a virtual private server or these different you can put this on in the cloud for like 10 bucks a month or

[06:57] hardware for this? You don't need to, but one of the big concerns, probably the biggest concern with with Open Claw is security uh from from various different perspectives. And so I try to make mine as secure as

[07:12] we can do to make it as secure as possible is to run it on our own hardware in our own physical location. All right? And so yes, this can run on a virtual private server in the cloud, but I think the more secure way to do it is

[07:25] have it run locally. Got it. Got it. And ideally not on your primary laptop. Ideally not on your primary workstation. Is there like some reason why people don't do that? Yeah, not not only not

[07:39] hard no. Like everybody that's using Open Claw completely agrees this needs to run on its own computer, right? So think of it like think of it like hiring you hire a new employee, you're not going to just let them share your

[07:52] to have a computer and your employee's going to have a computer because if you employee access to your computer, they have access to all of your files, all of your sensitive information and that's just that's a security risk right off

[08:06] have it running on its own machine. It is its computer just like hiring your a Got it. Got it. So I've got an old laptop that I could probably set up for this. It's got decent enough hardware specs that it

[08:23] does it need to be like this dedicated Mac Mini box that everybody talks about? hardware to run it on because it's small, it's relatively inexpensive, and Open Claw works really well on on Mac OS. It doesn't have to be on Mac, but

[08:38] that is better. Um but it's it's also like it's not super resource intensive. to run it. So if you've got an old Mac laptop right lying around, that's a great place to get started with it. But a Mac Mini is just like the best the

[08:53] best overall solution for something like this. Does it have to be an Apple Doesn't have to be. No, it can run on Windows, it can run on Linux, but it was built it was designed to work best on a Mac. Got it. Got it. Okay.

[09:08] Yeah, so the the setup itself, the hardware setup and the software setup actually has a really good video kind of step-by-step how to get that done. So I will link that up in the show notes. I kind of want to skip ahead a couple

[09:21] steps to the maybe the training process or the you know, it it says give me a soul and like you propped it up and it's like hey, you know, what do you what do you want me to be? You know, I'm kind of an open book.

[09:34] Train me and let's talk about what kind of information you fed it to kind of give it that name and soul. When I there's two there's two things that I ask people to have ready when they're

[09:48] setting this up. One is a name. That's really fun like picking out the name for your for your new employee basically. You get to you get to name it. And I can talk later about where mine mine's name comes from if it's not obvious to to

[10:00] comes from if it's not obvious to to some. And secondly Is this is this a Hail Mary No, not not Rocky the boxer. No, it's Mary. I don't know I guess you haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen it yet, but

[10:15] I read the book. It was good. >> wildly popular book and and the the engineer alien guy is is probably he's probably my favorite fictional character of all time and it was just a perfect fit.

[10:27] But you also need to have what I call your operator brief. And this is just a brain dump of everything that you would want it to know about you. So feed I information you would you could give it at this point, but you want to you want

[10:43] to give it all of your business history, you know, as much personal history as I gave it you know, my my kids' names, their birthdays, where they go to school. But of course all the business history of of Piano in 21 Days, the

[10:56] online course guy. But then also like what I want it to help me with and what the cool things you can do with it is is not just give it specific tasks, but you can also just get kind of give it goals that you're trying to accomplish and let

[11:09] it figure out some of the ways that it can help you accomplish those goals. not feeding in like I I was thinking I like I could

[11:21] upload my book. So I could upload decades of transcripts. It's like not not quite yet. Just kind of a higher level overview. This is me. This is what I'm about. This is a little bit about my family, here's kind of the direction of

[11:34] the business and what I'm thinking you might be able to help with. Yes, about is is part of what you're setting up in the onboarding wizard, is that initial brief that you're giving to it. That's not a That's not a one-shot

[11:48] thing. We can always add to it. And so, for example, at this point, Rocky is episode I've ever done, every YouTube video I've ever done, every every online content, but I didn't feed that to him on day one. Okay, got it. And that's

[12:03] honestly like my biggest tip having done this for 3 months and starting to show other people how to do it is try not to go too fast because your your agent is building them, but sometimes, you know, you you set it

[12:20] the next days and weeks because we try to do too many things at once. And so, what I really recommend people do is really focusing on one thing, one system, one automation, one thing at a

[12:32] time, and really get that nailed down, dialed in before you move on to the next Got it. What did you start with? Okay.

[12:47] question, and maybe more like where should people start maybe a little more appropriate. And so, if if that's where we're going, then I would say probably like business dashboards, right? I'm sure a lot of listeners maybe have side

[13:02] hustles or or full-time businesses already, and one thing I struggled with before was just like data visibility because it would be in all kinds of you, Nick, but like I use a lot of tools, right? I'm using Kajabi and

[13:16] ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel, and I've got WordPress websites. I've got data places. And being able to kind of aggregate that into one like business dashboard, which like I've got spreadsheets set up and I've got a

[13:31] virtual assistant that tries to do some of that for me, but now Rocky's got dashboards that are updated like real-time. I can see instantly where things are instead of waiting for a human to do it and it's all in one

[13:44] place. It looks pretty. Yeah, it saves and it trouble of having to log into all these different places, too. Yeah, saves time and money. I'm thinking, yeah, could it pull in

[13:57] yesterday's affiliate earnings, yesterday's traffic numbers, number of email sign-ups from Kit, number uh you know, Mediavine earnings, YouTube earnings, like there's this cool dashboard that I kind of have in my mind

[14:11] of of what it might be able to build if if it had access to all this stuff. Absolutely. Yeah, and then I mean this is not where I'd suggest you start, but I'm seeing if it can replace my bookkeeper. Cuz one thing I struggle

[14:23] with the with the financials is I'm not getting my books for the previous month until about halfway through the next month. And by by that point it's like almost worthless. And so by by getting up-to-date books in real-time at any at

[14:38] any time I want, that's really valuable for my business and so that's that's a project we're working on right now. In sports, there's this saying that speed is a weapon and the same is true in business. If you're missing calls or

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[16:54] One more time, it's gusto.com/sidehustle. of things? Cuz this has historically been an important driver, uh, both on the YouTube side and the organic side, like, you know, how to learn piano type

[17:08] of keywords is important for you. So, I used to pay a guy a lot of money every month to do SEO. Uh, like $3,500 a month. He did great work. He got us on the front page for awesome search terms like how to play

[17:23] awesome search terms like how to play piano, right? And it was great because we did all that work pre-COVID, and when COVID hit, everybody and their mother piano, and we were showing up on the first page for search terms like that.

[17:37] Yeah. Um, but eventually I was like, well, you know, we're in a to pay him this anymore, let's just let it ride. And the problem is that I let it ride without doing anything to it for like 4 years. And so now that I have

[17:53] Rocky, I was like, hey, you know, and this is this is another like tip for how tell it what to do. Do something called reverse prompting. Like don't don't say, hey, go work on my SEO, say, hey, how can you best help me with SEO, right?

[18:07] And get it to think about how it could be most effective for something like that. So that's certainly how I started. And so what it what it first did was a full audit. And so we connected it into Google Search Console co-

[18:20] Google Search Console via API access, and it could see all the data, and it could see um, what pages are um, doing really well, what pages are getting zero traffic, which pages are

[18:34] um, too similar and really should be combined. It found a bunch bunch of broken links. And so it just did a full site audit with recommendations. And so like fixing a bunch of things that it found. And now it's actively um,

[18:48] monitoring and uh, helping me rank for new things. It built a new SEO dashboard that we can watch, and it's writing new relevant articles in my voice, right? And so the guy that I hired several years ago to do SEO, he's amazing. He

[19:03] still he still runs an SEO agency. As you can imagine, he uses AI in his AI uh, in his SEO agency now. He came and did a workshop for my clients a few months ago and it's like a 2-hour long masterclass on AI SEO. Well, guess what?

[19:19] I could take that 2-hour video and say, "Hey Rocky, watch this training and follow it." And so basically what he's doing is he didn't he didn't try to reinvent the wheel on how to do SEO. He's following proven methods from this

[19:32] He's following proven methods from this guy that I trust on how to best do it. You got it cuz there's some risk involved like stuff that ends up getting you in trouble. Um but not just kind of

[19:45] generating the audit audit report, but actually fixing the broken links, actually making updates to the pages in your voice, actually creating you finding relevant keywords and then writing the content there. That's really

[19:59] cool. I mean that's like a little virtual employee in a box. talked about the security already. Most of the things that I've given Rocky access to is read-only. The vast majority. This is one small example

[20:12] where where I have played with giving him right access. So he does have right access to certain areas of my WordPress site. So when I'm saying he's fixing the broken links and he's writing articles and he's updating articles, like he's

[20:26] actually doing that. Yeah. >> But I am very careful again. Um well, no, it's not it's not exactly like that because he's you know, he doesn't use things like humans do, right? So he's got back-end API access

[20:39] to these things. He's not just logging in on a browser and navigating WordPress Okay. So did to peel it back one step, so Open Claw is the kind of operating system for Rocky, but

[20:51] then he's got to go out into the internet and he's got to call other the AI of your choice. In this case, it sounds like it's Claude. Um so having sounds like it's Claude. Um so having the Claude paid version plan allows him

[21:04] to you know, do stuff and think, right? Is that kind of how how it works? Essentially, yes. Let me clarify a couple of things, okay? So, Open Claw is free. It's open source. That is the main engine

[21:18] I don't know what the right metaphor is, but because you really are plugging in a brain into it. You've got to you've got to tie in some AI, some large language model into it for for the smarts, right? So, no, I

[21:35] don't have Claude tied into mine because as of April 4th Claude actually banned people using Open Claw using their models. Okay? Okay. >> Um so, but last month

[21:50] >> Um so, but last month Open AI, who makes ChatGPT, actually for lack of a better word, acquired Open Claw. What they really did is they hired the creator of it. And so, Open Claw now is under the umbrella of Open AI. So, my

[22:04] my understanding is they're going to continue to more and more optimize ChatGPT, GPT 5.4, um and and newer models to run really well with Open Claw. So, the way I've got mine set up today is I'm on the $200

[22:19] a month ChatGPT plan. Okay. >> And Rocky is running on the latest and greatest ChatGPT model, which at the time of this recording is GPT 5.4.

[22:31] a paid plan with one of these other tools to be able to you know, go out into the internet and and have him do your bidding. Yeah, or to to to do anything, right? He's worthless without being tied into

[22:45] cheaper AI models, and that's another mistake I made at the beginning. I was like, well, I don't want to spend $200 a month on an AI model, so I tried some of wasn't very effective. >> Got it, got it. Okay.

[22:58] So, building dashboards, helping with the SEO stuff, talk to me a little bit about the customer support or whatever was next on your wish list here. Yeah. Yeah, I think customer support

[23:11] what was a good one because I've got I have a customer support person, but her process before was okay, we get an email from somebody. Well, before I just draft a reply, I need to look at the the context history of our communication

[23:25] we've communicated with them? What have we discussed before? I need to log into figure, you know, is this a customer? Is this a prospect? Where are they in the Um and then okay, now that I've got all the context, let me think about a good

[23:41] reply, right? So, she's spending 10 minutes per email, right? So, now Rocky does all those things for her and what he does is he puts in the email so he he draft This is a This is another area where Rocky he he does not have the

[23:56] ability to hit send, right? He has read-only access to my email, but he also has access to be able to create drafts. So, in the draft, he's putting context for my assistant to look at. Hey, this is a prospect or a customer.

[24:10] This is the conversation history. And then he drafts his reply. And so now all she has to do is go in, see the context, vet the reply, make sure she approves it, maybe she tweaks it a little bit if necessary.

[24:25] per email, she's spending probably less than 1 minute per email. Got it. similar like Teresa has does an an awesome job on email support, but then there's always those that fall through the cracks on it

[24:39] those that fall through the cracks on it requires some level of decision-making and it's just I don't know. Yeah, so yeah, bringing in context history, bringing in you know, this other

[24:51] data plus years and years of content and support and being able to make a draft would uh definitely ease some of the mental burden for me. Yeah. And look, I I'm certainly not looking at him to replace me, right? I

[25:05] mean, there are tools out there to where you can have your own AI persona be on replace me, and I'm not looking for him to replace my team. You know, the the word I like to use is is amplify. I want him to amplify me and my team and my

[25:17] him to amplify me and my team and my brand and not not replace us. So, is it at that point when you're asking So, you kind of start off this prompt of like, "Hey, I could really use some help with with customer support.

[25:30] You know, what questions or context would you need to know from me to be able to do this job well?" Is kind of a conversation? of reverse prompting, right? You don't have to be the brains behind designing

[25:43] it with your struggle. Like, here's what I'm struggling with. How can you best help me solve this? Help me design the system to where you can help me solve system to where you can help me solve this problem that I currently have.

[26:03] of this, what else do you is on your on your wish list of like, "Well, shoot, could expand our reach here." Like, are you having it mess around with paid traffic and managing Google campaigns or anything like that?

[26:16] It is absolutely tied into my meta ads dashboard and making recommendations to dashboard and making recommendations to me for for ads. Um it's wellness, right? It is it is now my personal trainer, right? It's helping me

[26:29] with my workout plans um and nutrition and just tracking those things and keeping and helping to keep me accountable. That That's something that I'm working on right now is um a better overall system for

[26:44] prioritization, because that's something historically I've struggled with a lot. And that's an example of me going to Rocky and saying, "Hey, I'm really best help me?" So, he's got a pretty good understanding of my priorities in

[26:58] general and the things that I'm working on and the goals I'm working toward. He's not the best at like, "Hey, here are the three things you absolutely need to do today." Right? He can give me three good things to work on, but I want

[27:10] him to be like so good at like, "Jacques, to reach your goals and these three things today." And so, that's the system we're trying to build out right now because I want to be able to go to him at any time and him fully

[27:23] understand and advise me on exactly what I should be working on because that's that's a weakness in myself that I've I've always had that it would be great if he could be really good at at help helping to raise up that weakness in me.

[27:36] Has it come back with any proactive suggestions on well, I know that you're doing this, this, and this, but it seems like people who want to learn piano also need XYZ or like something, you know, proactive?

[27:49] proactive? No, it's And you could, right? You could like, "Hey, what am I not thinking of? Like, you know everything about piano in 21 days. Like, what are some ideas or

[28:01] just like and be like, "Hey Jacques, I have this really great idea." Like, it's not it's program, right? >> Yeah. Um and it's still running just

[28:15] code and it's got uh scheduled tasks and it's got a heartbeat, but it's it's not unfortunately to what you what you're saying is is no, not exactly like that, but we can get fairly close. This is what I found is, you know, I

[28:30] ideas than there are hours in the day, which on on the one hand is a good But, I end up being kind of the the bottleneck of like, "Okay, even if I'm using AI to build out some of these projects, like inevitably it comes back

[28:44] where it's like now there's this human review process, which is probably good, but it's still like now I got to carve out the time to like figure out the next like yes, it probably makes me go farther faster than I could, but it's

[28:57] still find myself being being the bottleneck robots run free, they could probably do better than better than [laughter] they the time. Do you have a specific example that we

[29:11] Well, I've been trying to build out a couple smartphone apps. One we talked about on a recent episode was inspired by this guy who was selling these watches that don't tell time. And the headline was like I make two to

[29:24] $10,000 a month selling this watch that just says now on it. I was like, "Oh, build a smartphone version of that or an Apple a smartphone version of that or an Apple Watch version of that." And the apps are

[29:37] built and semi-functional to the limited degree that I've been able to test them, but now it's like, "Well, now you need app screenshots and now you need you got to go through this whole approval process with the app stores."

[29:52] And it's like, "Okay, I'll I'll I'll get to that when I get to it." And it ends up kind of sitting on the to-do list for days and days before I get to it. So, first question would be did you I'm assuming you programmed the

[30:04] app using Claude code? Yes. Amazing. So, what I you know, I mentioned in the setup it's nice to use I use like my Claude advisor, right? And could you could do you could run your open

[30:18] Claude on ChatGPT and you could start on the $20 a month plan. You definitely need a paid plan, but I use mine so much that I had to upgrade to their $200 a And then if you also have say the $20 a month Claude plan, like really getting

[30:32] the the best of both worlds on those two top models in the world right now. And so I use my Claude advisor not only to help me set up Rocky to begin with, but on a day-to-day basis as a continual adviser. So, let's say for example,

[30:48] adviser. So, let's say for example, um I'm you and I use Rocky to program um you instead of Claude code, then I could have Claude come in and be help me with reviews, right? And I do that those exact things all the time. Like, I

[31:03] haven't done a mobile app yet, but Rocky will make me landing pages, he'll make me sales pages, he'll make me websites, things like that. And the first thing I do when he makes something is I give it to Claude to do the review. And so, I'm

[31:15] getting both Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 to put their brains together and make it the best possible thing first before I do my Okay. Any other mistakes that come to mind

[31:30] over the last few months, um either security-wise or just, that ended up being a dead end? Make sure you're doing like one main thing at a time. Don't try to do too many things at a time. That That really burned me.

[31:43] And make sure you're using good models. Um because it can be expensive. Like, maybe you're turned off by the fact that I'm saying $200 a month for ChatGPT. Okay, well, I would pay probably $20,000 a month for an employee that that is

[31:57] this good. Like, that's how much Like, that that's what he is. Like, he is a that that's what he is. Like, he is a $20,000 a month employee that I'm paying $200 a month for, right? And so, I'd recommend starting out I mean, you start

[32:10] with the $20 a month plan, but if you use it and you get value out of it, you're going to quickly want to upgrade. And you look at it as as an investment, and hopefully you get that much or more out of it that you're putting in. Look,

[32:23] March 2026 was was my highest profit month in the I mean, I've I've come on the podcast and told you how well Piano in 21 Days did during COVID because everybody wanted to learn piano. Like, it was wild

[32:37] numbers. Um, but business is going really well um, for this $200 a month employee, that's what I would say is more like a $20,000 a month employee. Yeah, even in the context of the $3,500 a month SEO

[32:50] agency to be to be able to place that plus this other role plus this other role plus this other yeah, it's it may seem intimidating and sure start with the $20 a month plan see where it gets you. Maybe you don't need it on 24/7 or

[33:02] interesting use case I wanted to ask you about was building kind of your virtual mastermind around these different personas like the you know, the skeptic person. It was like, oh, this is kind of

[33:16] but a different different personalities within Rocky to ask for feedback on up Nick. There's I mean there's just so many cool things that he's doing that them. But what you just mentioned is the AI council that he that he helped me

[33:32] build build. And look, I'm following a lot of like AI influencers, a lot of open claw users and a lot of these ideas are coming that that I get from them and then I can just like I can literally say, hey Rocky, go watch this YouTube

[33:44] useful we could be implementing. And this is one of those cases where a guy was talking about his AI council system and made it made it work for our our situation. Like

[33:58] we didn't copy it one for one. We optimized it as much as we could. What models and assigned them kind of a role like the strategist, the engineer, um, the devil's advocate so that big

[34:13] the devil's advocate so that big strategic questions we can input it into this council and they can kind of talk about it and debate about it and give us their recommendations. So Rocky's not one of

[34:26] the seven, right? He's the one that hands it off to the seven roles. Okay. And they take a few minutes to analyze the situation and and spit it back out example of of something running running through the council? Sure.

[34:40] Yeah, so like I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my business, right? Online courses, right? The online course guy. I've I have wrestled with that pre-AI in terms of like, well, I also help people with memberships and coaching programs

[34:53] people with any kind of digital product. But now with AI, it's like, well, you know, AI's not going to make online courses completely irrelevant, but just go to AI and it can help you learn something. So, I'm just trying to

[35:08] business. I'm also really really pumped about this AI stuff and the AI operator stuff. And so the question is basically like, hey, given all of this history and information, like what should I do with my brand going

[35:22] forward, right? And so I gave that to the AI council and it's it's a better output than just rocking because there's seven powerful AI models analyzing the situation from different all different perspectives. Yeah. And ultimately what

[35:37] they suggested is and I think this is the direction I'm going is not like not completely getting away from digital products or anything like that, but go ahead and slowly transition to a personal brand, right? Instead of maybe

[35:50] my name and maybe that's what I should have done when I started this. And be kind of the AI guy for digital product creators. And so the tagline that they came up with was helping

[36:06] that they came up with was helping digital product creators scale with AI. I'm going to go. I mean, look, I've I've got courses for you. yeah? That's new on my YouTube channel. And you can see that my YouTube channel

[36:19] online course guy, right? >> Got it. >> And that's where we're starting the transition and seeing how it goes cuz I guy, still have the online course show. Yeah. Um I try not not not make big

[36:33] decisions like too quickly. I try to try to take it kind of slowly. So, we're starting on the YouTube channel and I'm just in general starting to talk more and more about this AI operator stuff. And I don't want to be just like a

[36:45] general AI uh influencer or anything. I want to I cuz that's my bread and butter. Yeah. >> I still do, too, with Piano in 21 Days. How that type of person can scale using AI, cuz that's exactly what I'm doing

[36:59] right now and what I'm loving doing right now. I don't think I've ever had >> [laughter] >> It's so much fun. we're you know, the our businesses are similar age and so it's always like well

[37:12] week. It's so that keeps it, you know, fun and interesting and exciting. But part of like well what are the little process improvements that you could do would be uh absolutely one to play around with.

[37:25] And maybe that's the best use case is if you already have a business to apply it to, where you can look at Open Claw as your new uh virtual assistant, your new operator or chief operating officer. What's your take on and you see this a

[37:37] lot in the AI influencer videos of like I gave Open Claw the marching orders to make me a hundred thousand dollars this month and inevitably it turns into month and inevitably it turns into selling something AI bot related. Like

[37:51] circular and sometimes Yeah, you have to be very careful because the the goal of a lot of those people is to get views and get attention, right? And so >> Yeah. how real is what is it um what

[38:04] those posts all the time. Like I gave you know, I gave my Open Claw $50 and I said, "If you don't make me money, I'm going to kill you." Right? And and the next day it had $3,000. Like, okay. Like, that's a cool story, but I don't

[38:19] >> Yeah, it's not repeatable is it? Like go find some edge on some polymarket bet and like, really? Exactly. And then the other the other thing that I see a lot is people like with Open Cola, you can actually create multiple agents, right?

[38:33] some people are creating a whole team and like they have their CEO and then they have their their marketing person and their copywriter and all these different agents running on the one Mac Mini. And I just don't think I think

[38:47] that is and then they have these great visuals of all of them like sitting at desks and doing work. I think that works really well for getting views, but in one of these cuz Rocky can literally do it all. And when you start creating the

[39:00] multiple agents, they don't all have all the same contacts. Right? Whereas Rocky has all the contacts and he can do all the roles. So, I think org charts are meant for humans and work really well, but when we start getting into AI

[39:14] agents, one agent can do so much more than one human. Yeah. Jacques, this has been fascinating. Again, definitely check out his video on goes step-by-step through the technical process,

[39:28] um the hardware, the software, you know, how to communicate it with uh with it really helpful video. We'll link that up. The onlinecourseguy.com/rocky is where to get your AI operator starter kit. Super helpful tool over there. So,

[39:42] we'll link that up in the show notes as well. And we'll be right back with Jacques from the onlinecourseguy and the onlinecourseshow coming up right after this. When you're a small business, it's a

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[42:08] the onlinecourseguy.com for round two. This is the business idea donation round where this is something you might start yourself if you had more that you got your AI operator in place

[42:20] run with. This is to me, you know, given all the context of what we just talked about, is an absolute no-brainer. And it is just an AI consultant. There are so many people, I mean, just

[42:34] look look where I was 3 months ago. Like I was in my chat GPT bubble. Most people are are using chat GPT and that's it. They're at that level one and a lot of these people are business owners that have so much potential for how AI could

[42:47] be improving their business. And so I think there is such a need for good AI consultants and it doesn't even have to be this open call thing, right? Even if I mean even if you out there listening are a chat GPT user and you start and

[43:02] application Claude, and even the model Opus 4.6 is just so much better than chat GPT in general. Like even if you make that switch, you're a better AI user and you could help business owners make that switch or you can help them

[43:17] implement systems, find out what they're struggling with and use AI to help them improve things. I think that is a great business to set up today once you're once you train yourself a little bit to be an AI consultant.

[43:30] Yeah, you only have to be a couple steps ahead of the people that you're working with and there's probably kind of a template that you could end up following or even a especially if you go into like niche down to a specific industry or

[43:42] business owner type of person where it's like, "Okay, tell me about your pains. you currently operating this? And let's see where there might be some opportunity for automation or some agentic help in those spaces."

[43:58] I don't know. Would you play the content marketing card to attract business? Would you have an AI start cold calling people? How would you go about uh Yeah, so it I mean it depends on depends

[44:10] any platform yet, then just like starting content marketing might take a little a little too long. Um I think that the the easiest path for most people is just to tap into your existing network. I

[44:22] mean, most people know business owners, right? And and most people know people in general. And if you start just talking about this, I mean, I'm I've everybody I know about this both online and personally. And like I'm getting

[44:35] texts from random people. Like, "Hey, you know, your neighbor told me about would love to implement some of this stuff." I'm getting I'm getting random texts like that all the time just because I've started talking about it to

[44:49] to people that I know. So, I think if you're not a content creator already, Well, that was me last week. I was like, "Hey, should we do an episode about this stuff?" Cuz I just kept seeing your videos about it.

[45:01] content out there. I mean, look, this this stuff is wild. I One of my really good friends lives on the next street over, and I was I was telling him about this stuff, and he immediately went out and got a Mac mini, and I set it up for

[45:15] him because I wanted it to like make a YouTube video. Yeah. And he isn't I Nation. Like, he is now creating and selling coloring books on Amazon with his OpenClaw. Like, that's how he is making money

[45:29] selling coloring books that he's not creating himself. Okay. >> And he's he's he's made a made a brand new business out of it. Wow. prompting, too. Like, hey, let's go out and try and start a a business here.

[45:43] Okay. AI consulting for business owners, absolutely huge opportunity in this space. Tapping into the buzzword of the day. Everybody is aware of this. They know they need to be using it, or they're going to get left behind. And

[45:57] all of a sudden there if you can raise your hand and be that person in their network who can help them set it up, do some process build them their own little open claw operator, I think you can be a hero

[46:10] because you like the context savings of like look it's only going to be 200 bucks a month to run this versus the $3,500 agency or however much you were paying previously, this could be a big cost savings and it would be easy

[46:23] to pitch that way to say it well even I'll even I'll do it for free and you just pay me out of the savings over the next 2 or 3 months and we can go there.

[46:36] threat. First here is a marketing tactic that is working right now. This could be on the course side, this could be on the piano side. What do you got for haven't talked about that a whole lot. Nick, have you ever run a

[46:49] self-liquidating offer? No. sure. >> Not with not with any uh success or or [snorts] I first heard about these a long time ago and it's it's just always

[47:02] been on on the back of my mind to to try out and this is this is something we've been doing finally for the in the past few months is running a self-liquidating offer for Piano in 21 Days. And so if anybody's

[47:15] is that you run paid ads to a low ticket offer, ours is $27 and the idea is you want to relatively break even on the ad versus this front-end offer and then any

[47:28] profit comes from from upgrades or upsells kind of down the road. So what the piano course and turned it into a 5-day piano challenge. It's literally Okay. >> Running ads to that and there's an order

[47:43] bump and an upsell to where our average cart value is around $45 and that's around what we're spending in ads to get one customer. And then over the next week or 10 days, we're trying to get people to then buy

[47:57] we're trying to get people to then buy our $500 to $800 full piano in 21 days course. And when somebody does that, it's pure profit. So, that is something that is not a new concept, but it's new for us that uh that's going pretty well.

[48:10] have expected you to have had this dialed in uh years ago, but it is there's some moving parts involved. Well, how do I create a compelling offer coming in cold or relatively cold, I imagine, and

[48:27] then okay, have dialed in the the landing page and the upsells and the stuff cuz you got the the funnel the sequence dialed in after somebody opts It's like if I can get people in in the door for free, then everything else is

[48:41] door for free, then everything else is gravy. paying off in terms of uh conversion rates uh on the full course? Yeah, so if you if you look at it in terms of like ROAS, return on ad spend,

[48:55] we're we're about 2x. Um so, that initial funnel is is relatively breaking even. Yeah. And then a small percentage of those people that buy will then ultimately, um right now, for every dollar we're putting in, we're getting

[49:09] about $2 out on the back end. Yeah, that's fantastic. So, now kind of is a game of scaling up that spend and trying to find more people who want to learn Yeah, exactly. So, earlier when I mentioned, you know, Rocky is helping

[49:23] with ads, like that that's the ads that we're running. So, he's monitoring that. what's working, what's not working, and making suggestions on um on ads. You know, I'm not a big ads guy. I think you probably know that. And one thing I've

[49:36] found interesting about this ads experiment is um you know, people often compare like creating free content versus ads. Well, um you know, content continue to push out new content. Well,

[49:49] ads, too. You can't just make some ads, turn them on. Like, you've got to continue to make fresh ads for them to be effective. So, in a sense, when you're running ads, you still have to be a consistent content creator.

[50:02] you posting these? >> Meta, yeah. We're We're doing it on Meta Instagram. Okay. And so, still kind of do a short-form hook type of video where they get somebody in and present them with

[50:16] this 5-day piano challenge? Exactly. Yeah, I'm just creating a bunch and bunch of like 30-second videos, and some work really well, and some don't. Did you ever test going direct to the free lead magnet with an

[50:31] order bump? Cuz there's a couple ways to do the self-liquidating type of thing where it's like, "Okay, if I expect to pay a lower cost per lead for, you know, the free opt-in, but then hopefully some people buy the the order bump, or maybe

[50:44] they sign up for the $27 challenge like on the thank you page or something." where they're opting in for the freebie, and then on the next page, they get that low-ticket once they opted in for something free. I haven't tested that

[50:59] exact model. What I have done in the past is run ads to my free workbook and then they just go into my normal funnel that eventually tries to sell them the big course, and that's never really worked very well for ads. But,

[51:12] but what you're suggesting would be something good to test at some point. My gut would say that the people who bought the $27 thing and and bought the upsells, my gut would say they would be more likely to convert down the road

[51:26] than just a regular freebie opt-in person. behind it. Mine is going well so far, but if I could just snap my fingers and convert what I've created to

[51:38] suggesting, I think it would be a good test. And who knows, maybe I'll put Rocky on it one of these days. >> We'll see. Maybe Add it to the to-do list or or have my open claw assistant try and set this up

[51:52] for me. Let's move to a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now. going to cross open claw off the list and make you come up with something >> That's fair. I You just ruined the joke that I was going to say. Look, I do have

[52:06] you're using it. Are you familiar with Whisper Flow? This is the voice-to-text thing. I'm not using it but have heard of it. All right, like changed my life. Unbelievable. So, Whisper Flow is a is a

[52:19] voice-to-text but it's AI-powered. Okay? So, all I do is I hit a hot key on my keyboard and then I start talking and it will convert my voice to text. But it's AI-powered so it fixes

[52:33] I'm going to the store today and I need to buy some milk. Actually, I mean I mean butter. It will type out, I'm going buy butter, right? It fixes any mistakes. It removes ums.

[52:46] It will format things nicely. And so, when this is especially helpful when you're interacting with AI and prompting AI as much as I'm doing, it's so much more efficient. And so, Whisper Flow is an absolute

[53:00] popular. And at this point, I could not live anymore and it's amazing. >> [sighs] >> Everything going going voice to search. Cool. Whisper Flow, we'll link that up

[53:12] in the show notes for this episode as well. How about your favorite book from the last 12 months? I'm going to go fiction if that's okay and it's it's Project Hail Mary. It's it's my favorite book. I've read it

[53:24] three times and the third time was was recently to my 10-year-old daughter who loves space. It is a sci-fi space book. And the movie recently came out and we is a family-friendly movie. Um fortunately. And I think she loves it as

[53:39] much as I do and And where that's where the namesake uh you haven't read or seen Project Hail Mary, I absolutely love it. Sweet. We'll link that up as well. Definitely a good

[53:52] link that up as well. Definitely a good read, fun story. So, our mutual friend rejection challenge many, many years ago. And so, my rejection challenge was I'm going to invite Andy Weir on the podcast because The Martian started out

[54:05] as this self-publishing project and we had this connection to this place in California where he was working and living. And you know, he's like, "No, I'm working on my next book." So, that was my That was my rejection. It's my

[54:17] um what else has got you excited this year? So, you got Rocky firing, you got these ads firing. What's What's the future hold for for you this year? Maybe the rebrand on the online course guy stuff. I think the biggest thing is just

[54:31] people. That's I I was so pumped when I got your text the other day. Like, "Hey, talk about it?" Because, you know, I didn't reach out to you, which I've done this cool online course stuff. I would love to share it with your audience."

[54:44] that just like made my day that it resonated with you and you wanted to share with the audience cuz I think that like whether we like it or not, this is here. Like, AI is here and AI agents are here. Um and like I said, I was so

[54:57] overwhelmed and scared by it that I didn't really do anything with it. But, now that I have, it's it's just unbelievable and I'm just having so much fun. And so, I'm going to continue to um work with Rocky, but then also share

[55:10] this information with people and help them set it up uh for themselves so that benefits that I've experienced. Yeah, this is as much for the listeners as it months. I know I should be doing something with it, but dedicating the

[55:24] time to learn it and figure out how to set it up. It's like, "Oh, do I need my own hardware?" And like, "Oh, okay." But, this has been super helpful, inspired me to to go ahead and take action on it. Again, check out the AI

[55:36] online course guy. theonlinecoursesguy.com/rocky. You'll be able to download that for free, watch the setup video, and start playing around with it. I think that's probably the best way to learn is just plug it

[55:48] in, see what you can get it to do, and and start to get this renewed sense of energy and excitement towards your business. So, Jacques, again, really appreciate you stopping by. The online course show, of course, if

[56:00] you prefer podcasts, we'll link up the YouTube channel as well. And let's not forget Piano in 21 Days if you want to go learn how to play piano fast. Big insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for

[56:12] everyone. sidehustlenation.com/deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to

[56:25] share it with a friend. Fire off that text message. Somebody who needs some life, let them know about this one. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen, and I'll catch you in the next edition of The Side

[56:38] you in the next edition of The Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.