← Startup Stories - Mixergy
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- [00:00]
A
This guy keeps creating companies using AI, including a digital marketing agency and a software company. And he's going to show you how anyone listening to this can make money using AI. Let's get to it. Joe Alphelbaum is the founder of Ajax Union, the digital marketing agency, and evai, the AI sales assistant. The next new thing, presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. All right, wait, what's.
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B
You.
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A
You're comfortable saying what the revenue is at your two companies? What is it?
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B
Well, we're. The revenue for Ajax Union is about a million dollars a year right now, and EVAI is approaching a million dollars a year. Okay, great.
- [00:43]
A
We're going to talk about five different ways for people to make money using AI, and then we're going to talk about how you built these businesses. So what's actually, I'm going to jump to number five. You actually created some kind of headshot software that people are paying you money for. Tell me what this is and why anyone else could do something like this.
- [00:59]
B
The headshot software that I built is actually a service for people because people don't want to use software. People, especially people on the Internet. What they want to do is they want you to just deliver headshots for them. So I called it an AI photographer. I said, instead of hiring a photographer to come to your house, change a thousand different times, and spend thousands of dollars as a photographer, why don't you give me $200 and I will deliver 10amazing photos for you that put you in the perfect dress in the perfect place for your brand and your business, and I will do it to you within 24 hours. And if you're not happy, you're not thrilled about every photo, I will change them and modify them until you're happy. And if you're still not happy, I will give you all your money back. How about that? And we had a hundred people raise their hand and pay and say that they are interested in this. And the way that we do it is very simple. We have 30 different prompts that we use. We take your headshot from your LinkedIn profile, throw it into AI, it produces all 30 photos, and then we deliver it to you in an email and we have a VA do it. The VA costs a total of $5 to do it, and then we deliver it to them, and we have a very nice profit margin. And the clients have dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of testimonials and examples. I have an entire photo gallery which I can send to you with all the photos that we've done. So even before the person buys, they see the whole photo gallery like, holy, I want a whole set of photos like this. These are amazing photos because they look exactly like you and they are perfect to use on all your social media platforms. So wouldn't you pay 200 bucks to get a bunch of photos done for you? You have to use software, you have to do anything. You have to give me your photo, even it's done done for you fully for 200 bucks. It's a very simple way that you go to people. And so the way that I get customers is I run a very simple Facebook ad and I write would you like headshots? And I show some example headshots done for you, put in your email and phone number, and Facebook has a thing called a lead gen form that automatically allows you to be able to collect someone's email and phone number. And then from there it goes right into go high level. And then go high level automatically sends them the examples because they want to see the examples. It sends them the examples and then a form for them to pay if they want to get theirs done. And it's very simple. And it costs about $2 for every person to fill out the form, and then for every x amount of people that fill out the form, a person buys and it ends up being profitable. And it just works. And it's just like literally anybody can do this. Now. If you don't want to run Facebook ads, if you don't want to spend 5$10 a day trying this out, then what you can do is just post on LinkedIn about it. I posted on LinkedIn something called a LinkedIn Poll. It's one of my favorite ways to monetize LinkedIn, a survey. And then people voted. I said, would you like 10 headshots done for you without software that look exactly like you perfectly, or do you hate headshots? People are like, I would love headshots. So the people that said I would love headshots say, we generally charge $1,000 to bring a photographer to your house, but we don't have to bring a photographer your house because we found an AI photographer that knows how to make the photos perfect. With AI, we will spend many, many hours doing it for you. All you have to do is pay us $200. We're charging cost price right now for the first 10 people. Then people like, I want to be one of the first 10. And by the way, money back guarantee. If you're not happy, we'll fix it. Till there, we send them the 10 photos, they're like, I'm thrilled. These are great. Me walking down the street, me standing by a desk, me doing a power pose, me on a sunroof, me on a this, me on a that. And people are like, wow, this is amazing. I can't believe your AI photographer does such a great job. And that's it. And the VA is happy. We got a VA do it for us. We taught him how to copy and paste stuff into a nano Banana. And then boom, everybody's happy and okay.
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A
So you're doing this using Nano Banana and nanobanana Pro?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Will you give us the prompt?
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B
I will. Everyone, everyone listening to this will get the 30 prompts that we use. We even created a prompt generator that will create custom prompts based on different dropdowns that I'm going to send Andrew as well. But we'll give you 30amazing prompts that you guys can plug and play. You drop a picture of yourself together with the prompt into into Nano Banana and you press go. You could use it in Higs Field. If you don't want the watermark, you could use it in evai. We have Nano Banana Pro installed into vai, so you can use it with an EV AI for free, by the way. Mind you, you could go to ev.com, use it for free, and then you could also use it on freepik. You could use it on Higgs Field, you could use it on Artlist IO or you could use it on Gen Spark, or you could, if you like the watermark on the bottom right corner, you could use it on gemini.google.com I.
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A
Didn'T realize that Evie or software actually does image generation.
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B
Yeah, and it does image generation, and it does it without a watermark, and it does it perfectly every single time.
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A
All right. Okay, so give me some other ideas. I do like this overall idea of do services, where the AI actually does the service and a human being interacts with the customer. Because like you said, people prefer to talk to people and get results. And they also value services more than they value logging into a website. So what are some other ideas like this that we could go through?
- [05:56]
B
I'll tell you. I'll tell you something else that I did to make a significant amount of money. I used AI to help me teach people AI. Simple as that. Somebody. So I say, do you want to learn AI people? Of course I want to learn AI. So I used AI to create a course about how to learn AI. Okay. And then I sold this course to people. And now how did I Sell the course. I went on LinkedIn and I made a LinkedIn poll and I said, does anybody here want to take a course on how to use AI? It's nine modules, pre recorded videos, frameworks, checklists, cheat sheets, and all the prompts that you need. And I'll throw in a custom GPT for you that will, that will help you in your business. And people like, of course I want it, of course this is something I want. I said, okay, if you want it, pay me 500 bucks. And a bunch of people paid 500 bucks and people are still paying 500 bucks. And I said, as an ongoing thing, if you want to meet me every single month for three hours because I'm learning AI myself, it's $3,000 a year and a percentage of those people upsold to the monthly class. So I just have to show up on Zoom. There's zero preparation done. I'm literally learning AI while they're learning AI and they are paying me to learn together with me. So it's not like I have to have some type of certification. Most people don't even know how to log into Chat GPT and prompt. They go to Chat GPT and they're like, what's the weather? And it didn't work. And I'm like, okay, well, what the hell, you know, like, let me teach you how to properly prompt. You have to prompt it to give you the prompt of how to prompt. And people are like, what does that even mean? And so there's so many people in the world that haven't even logged into ChatGPT or they logged in and they didn't get what they wanted. Learning how to use tools and you the basics. You know the basics. You know how to use suno. Do you know, do you ever heard of Suno to make music? You log into Suno, you put in a prompt. People will pay you to teach them how to make AI music. People will pay you to, to put in a prompt into Suno and teach you how to make AI music. People will pay you to, to teach them how to go into Sora and make a prompt and make a video on Sora too. People will pay you.
- [07:55]
A
Let's, let's pick a different topic because I, I would imagine that people might pay me to learn how to, for example, do interviews or how to create a podcast, right? You're saying I could use AI to create my course for me? What do you, what are you doing to create the course?
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B
I'll give you an example. I'll give you an Example, I have an experience of knowing how to use LinkedIn really, really well. Okay? This is my experience. I know how to use LinkedIn really, really well. But I don't have the bandwidth or the budget. Let's say I want to bootstrap. I don't have the budget to create a course, okay? So it takes a budget. When I created my first course called the Evergreen Networking system, I spent $275,000 to build a course, and that ended up netting me over a million dollars in profit. But right now with AI, I was like, I came up with an idea one morning and I was like, 99. 99. I got 99 hacks. And a pitch ain't one of them. I got 99 hacks. I woke up one morning and that's what I was saying because there's a song, whatever. I got 99 problems. I got 99 hacks and a pitch ain't one of them for LinkedIn. And so I went on LinkedIn, I put up a poll and I said, I got 99 hacks. I literally wrote this. And a pitch ain't one of them. Would you like to buy my 99 hacks? I sell them for $1,000. Each one is less than a minute, Each one is less than a minute. And I will give you all 99 videos for $99. But I'm only doing it for 99 people, okay? And if 99 people don't buy, I am not gonna give out my hacks at all. So if you're interested, buy it now. And then I sent it to a bunch of people via DM and I said, here, here's the thing. And then 145 people voted. And so I created a stripe link for $99 and I send it to a hundred people. I didn't even have anything created yet, and then a hundred people paid for it. So I had $10,000 in cash sitting in an account. So what did I do is I didn't have. I said, I'm gonna spend this $10,000 to make the course, but I don't need to spend the $10,000. I can go to hey gen. Have you heard of hey Gen?
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A
No.
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B
H E Y G E n. You can clone yourselves. You make a five minute video, dump it in there and. And it makes videos for you. So I said, okay, well, these are my 99 hacks. Make me 99 videos. Hey, Jen didn't do a really good job of doing it, so I hired a VA to learn hey Gen, for a couple dollars and I said go learn. Hey Gen, Here's I have $10,000 to spend to build this thing. Go ahead and you know, charge me two, three thousand bucks and build me all these, build me these 99 videos and we'll launch it in a few months because you'll have to show me each one. I'll have to review it, make sure it makes sense anyway. And each one has to be under a minute and they have to be really tight and they have to add a lot of value. And so we went back and forth for a couple of months. He kept making videos on hey Jen sending them to me. Finally we finished all 99 videos and we delivered it and the clients are freaking thrilled. So of course you needed a human to interact with my personality. Now in order to launch the website I went to GoDaddy.com do you guys know what GoDaddy is? GoDaddy.
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A
But before we go to GoDaddy, wait, just so I understand the content for 100 different hacks that people had paid you came from. Where was you just recording into the mic or was it the AI?
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B
No, it was just all the content the AI created, all the ideas. I mean there are ideas that I had for my webinars and just in.
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A
General, how did you get all those ideas out? Did you apply?
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B
I just dumped, I just, yeah, I just dumped a bunch of otters into the AI and I said here, produce.
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A
Me 99 transcripts from, from all these different webinars that you did. And you said I want you to pull out my best 99.
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B
I want 99. Yeah, I want 99 ideas. And the ones that I didn't like, I deleted and came up with my own of stuff that I just know that I do. I've also been teaching LinkedIn for 10 years, but I have many, many, many more than 99 ideas. I just want to.
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A
What you're doing is you're using AI to sort through it and find ideas, you're adding to it and you're also being the editor. And then you gave it to the VA and you said to the va I want you to use hey Gen to make good looking videos and it'll take some iterations and of me and then I teach.
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B
Yeah and then I went to godaddy.
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A
Sorry and hey Jen reproduces you. There's like a Joe that they created.
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B
Using you want to see if you want to see an example of this. I actually went to GoDaddy and I said, I said I'm going to buy a domain. 99hacks club because 99hacks.com wasn't available and I wanted everyone to like, you know, party in the club with me. So 99 hacks club. And then a. Then, then GoDaddy's AI built the whole website for me, A to Z. Suno made a rap song about the 99 Hacks that is playing right there on. On 99 Hacks Club. Because we're in the club, we need a rap song.
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A
Okay?
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B
And then there's two example videos that you could watch, which is two of the hacks. One of them is my calendly hack and one of them is my joelinkedin.com hack where you go to GoDaddy, you buy joelinkedin.com or andrew LinkedIn.com and you forward it to your LinkedIn. So when you're on stage on a podcast like this and someone wants to find you what they're going to type in Warner. No one even knows how to spell Warner, but everybody remembers Andrew, everybody remembers Joe. So if you can remember joelinkedin.com you could remember my LinkedIn profile and you could easily find me. You know what I mean? So that's one of the hacks. So you watch Those videos on 99 Hacks Club completely free, no gatekeeping, no email required, nothing. You go in there. And by the way, we still have it up for 99. We're going to take off the coupon code soon, but we still have it up on 99 Hacks Club. And the crazy thing about this, Andrew, this is the crazy thing that we ran an ad asking people if they want the 99 hacks. And that ad cost me $3.80 per person. And a large percentage of the people buy the hacks and then buy Evvy AI Pro, which is $3,600 a year, your software. Okay, As a back end, I'm actually.
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A
I'm on the site right now. I don't want to interrupt the session here, so I'm not going to hit unmute. But I do see it. This version of you on there, that's not you, that's AI Joe.
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B
Everybody, everybody, everybody loves those videos. And they. I have so many. If you go to my LinkedIn profile, I have hundreds of testimonials of people that are basically saying this is the best freaking course they've ever taken. And people do not, you know, most people do not know that. That's not me.
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A
Okay, all right, I see that. And then I also see some overlays. Like when you say, go to LinkedIn and do this thing there is a screencast of you doing it. That's you doing it. That's him doing it.
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B
No, that's the VA putting it together.
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A
The VA is actually doing it. Got it. So that's something that a VA could follow what you're saying and then create a demo.
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B
Just take a screenshot. Yeah. Okay.
- [13:58]
A
All right, so that's number one, is do an AI service for people. We talked about the headshot. Number two, make a course using AI. We see how to do that. Number three, you told me before we got started, offer a product or service that takes no time to create. You gave me the example of infographics. How are you doing it? Who are you selling it to?
- [14:14]
B
It's very, very simple. If you want, you can, you can pick an industry. For example, I have picked an industry called the restoration industry. So Ajax Union is going to make a million dollars in profit in 2026 from offering things to the restoration industry. Do you know what the restoration industry is? Water damage, fire after fire, whatever. So just for example, I'm gonna pick one franchise called ServPro. And we're. And we created infographics for Serve Pro to use with their clients to explain their process of how it freakin works, of how this stuff works. And so I said, I have infographics that are ready, done, available for you. It's a hundred dollars. If you want the infographics with your logo on it, I will hand it to you for $100. If you're not happy with it, I'll give you your money back. People are paying $100 for infographics the Banana, the Nano Banana Pro created. And they're thrilled because they have an infographic they could use. Now I'll give you 10 infographics for your business for $100 right now. Specific for your business. Now could you imagine you have a collection of infographics that you made in advance and you have all the prompts and, and you go to a business and you say, within 24 hours, I'm going to work very, very hard, create these custom prompts for your business and make these incredible AI generated infographics. And all you have to do is pay me a hundred dollars and you just create a collection of thousands of infographics. I could see somebody even making a service where they just have infographics that you pick. You push a button, it customizes it with your colors in your business and have a good day. Nobody's doing this right now, but you can do it because you're smart enough to go to Claude and say, make me a prompt for an infographic for my business. I drag your LinkedIn profile into Claude and then I said, make me 20 infographic ideas for this guy's business with their colors and their fonts and their everything. And Claude just makes me twin infographic prompts that are perfect. I take that, throw it into nanobanana with their logo and boom, it's done. And now I could have a collection. Especially if it's a franchise. You have a collection of things that you can sell without even creating it again. You can sell those same prompts to everyone in the franchise.
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A
How are you, how are you reaching service pro businesses to sell to them?
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B
It's very simple. You just get in touch with their mothership and you tell, you become a vendor with their mother. You find one company, you get a relationship on LinkedIn. You find one company, then you become a vendor with the mothership and then you're in their marketplace and then you just start offering it to them. You could hit them up on LinkedIn, you could hit them up on their website. The one thing that restoration companies need and many service based and home based businesses need is they need to pick up their phone. They're an emergency service. So when I call them up, I say I need to speak to the owner of the business. I have something, I have a bunch of people that have emergencies with their water and I need a good way for you to explain it. Can I speak to the owner of the business so that we can give you some examples of how we do this? And then boom.
- [16:53]
A
And you've literally done this.
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B
Or this is a. I've literally done it. No, I've literally done it. I can show you my stripe account. People are paying for infographics right now. If you go to strategy.vai.com youm could see examples of the infographics strategy.vai.com infographics. You can see the examples of the infographics right now. And if you guys want to buy it is a checkout link right there. That entire, that entire landing page was created by AI. I didn't create that landing page at all. I don't use people to create landing pages anymore. The landing page, the stripe link, the examples, everything was done with AI. I used to have to use people to create this and to make landing pages and to. No, no, no, none of it. I go to Claude, I say, design it for me. I take that design that's broken, I give it to Gemini. I said, it's a beautiful Design. It's not working. Fix it. Gemini fixes it. I copy and pasted it into Go High Level. I press C Save and the landing.
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A
Page is live because so I do see this landing page. This is a Go High Level landing page. That's a platform you're using to collect email addresses and sell, right?
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B
Correct. I'm using Go High Level as the backend.
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A
I see. But you're using Claude to create the HTML that then you're putting into High Level. Got it.
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B
Correct. But if it doesn't work perfectly because I do have JavaScript and other stuff, I throw it into Gemini. Gemini debugs it and fixes it.
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A
By the way, you keep saying Nano Banana Pro and you keep highlighting the fact that it's Pro. Is there difference? I.
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B
There is. There's a difference. There's the original Hanano Banana and then there's Banana Banana Pro, which is Gemini 3. So there's. It's much more expensive to use Nanobanana Pro, but it's totally worth it.
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A
I'm on gemini.google.com and I see Pro in the top right. Because it's part of my.
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B
Yeah, you're using. It's part of. Yeah, that's not it. But anyway, regardless, they're not going to give you an option to use a previous one unless using the API. But just so you know, a lot of companies, they say they use nanobanana but they're actually giving you an older version of nanobanana. We have the latest version in evai which is much more advanced and much more expensive and we even let you try it for free.
- [18:43]
A
Okay. All right, that's. That's the third one. Offer some kind of service products that take no time to create because you're doing infographics. I can imagine. Frankly, High Level is such a pain in the butt to use. I never tried it, but my team cannot frickin stand it. They keep trying it and going trouble, getting trouble, you're saying? So I'm sure there are other people like, like me. You say go create that as a service for them. Ask their and the service is you tell me what you want in your landing page, I will create it for you.
- [19:11]
B
Level boom, done in a second service that would not only. Not only that, that is our back end to the infographics. So somebody's like, oh, I want to host this infographic somewhere with a landing page. I say work with Ajax Union. We'll set up the whole thing. It's too. We have a website that I bought from Godaddy unlimited digital marketing dot com. I like the two D's in there because it reminds me of Dunkin Donuts. I like having 2ds in my domain. So. So unlimited digital because every time I drive next to Dunkin Donuts, you know, those two big Ds, you know what?
- [19:38]
A
But I have, I feel like you have an addiction to domains. Everything has to have its own domain and QR code. I also feel like you really don't like that there are two Ds in there, but you need people to know it. And you're doing a smart thing by calling attention to the fact that there are 2Ds or else they'll miss it. All right, since I'm calling you out on stuff, I got to call you out on this. You just said you're going to make a million dollars with Ajax Union on something. But then when we started and I asked you what's your revenue? You said it's about a million dollars.
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B
Yeah. So right now, whenever we add, whenever we add revenue to the business, all the revenues, profit, like right now, every single dollar. We built our infrastructure. So what happened was when Covid hit, we lost 75% of reoccurring revenue overnight.
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A
What's the people who don't know it? What do you do?
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B
We. So when you interviewed me first back in 2012, we were, we just hit the ink. We were just gonna hit the inc 500. So we did half a million, a million, 2 million, 4 million. And we were growing. I wanted to get the business to be a $10 million business, but I knew that. And we had 75 full time employees. And I knew that in order for us to be able to get there, I would need to hire another hundred employees. And at one point I was like, I'm done. This is so hard. The culture, the problems. Everybody wants more money. The clients want to pay less money. We had a high churn rate. We had a lot of problems. So we're trying to figure it out. And I really wanted to build software. I remember telling you that I wanted to build software, but I did not have the guts, the balls to build software. I was really scared. But I hired developers and I hired designers and my dream was to build software because I knew software was scalable and I wouldn't have to have employees. What I didn't know is that years later gohighlevel would come out where now I can have an agency that can be majorly scalable and I can pick up customers by the masses and charge Very, very little. And have a skeleton crew of virtual people that, that are experts in this, that I personally have to become an expert first and train them. But, you know, like, so. So when Covid hit, you know, we grew the business significantly. When Covid hit, suddenly I basically lost my pants. I lost everything. Plus I was going through a divorce, plus my partner had just left me, plus we were having issues, so many different issues coming from all, all places. And I was very, very dejected. I felt really, like, terrible. I was like, okay, I'm never going to build a software. I'm never going to do anything. And I. And I felt very, very bad. I need a lot of therapy and a lot of coaching and a lot of, a lot of energy from the whole world to kind of just keep going because I, you know, I published five books and I was so successful and blah, blah, blah. And now I feel like I'm losing my pants and I'm losing everything and I'm losing my net worth because I'm going through a divorce and I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and blah, blah, blah. And my life is a total mess, and I'm feeling like a mess. And then November of 2022, Chachi Beatty comes out, and I'm like, holy, holy crap. You have no idea what we're about to do. And so I start on this journey to building infrastructure to be able to build something. I went to Mexico, I had a conversation. I would talk into Chat GPT every single day. I went to Mexico and I had a deep conversation with Chat GPT and it said, now's your time, dude. Now's your time to build software. And I was like, I tried so many times and I failed. I don't know if I could do it. Chat GPT is like, I'm gonna help you. We're gonna do this together. And it helped me. It helped me come up with an mvp. It helped me work with developers, it helped me test everything out. It basically helped me through the process of getting my first customer. And as a result of, of having Chat GPT as my co pilot and my support system and then eventually Claude, because ChatGPT wasn't smart enough. So I leveraged Claude and then eventually Gemini, and now I kind of you and now Grok. Grok. I spoke to Grok for an hour yesterday while I was driving my car to Brooklyn to have. To have to have menorah lining with my kids. And so I have conversations with all the different AI, sometimes at the same time. And I Build relationships with them and they get to know me deeply and they give me these ideas to help me be able to generate products and services, to be able to grow. So I feel like 2026 is going to be the year because now we finally have something. We finally have a product. We finally have an industry that we're going after. We finally have what we need in order for us to be ready to scale. I purposely did not want to scale the business until I had something that I knew I could scale without people. Wait, that's my issue.
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A
Ajax Union. I remember when I interviewed you, you were doing SEO. And I also remember this. Hang on a second. You had the best way of getting early customers. You would go into Craigslist posts that were job posts looking to hire someone to do SEO and you say, hey, I saw your job listing. Why don't you hire my agency to do this? It's going to cost you less than hiring a full time person. That's how you got your first clients. Like, I love that kind of hack attitude for building your business. You expanded beyond SEO to digital marketing. What I'm trying to understand at Ajax Union is what is, what's the service that you're offering that's so easy to create that it doesn't cost you that much money to do?
- [24:25]
B
We basically resell go high level. We're an AI agency now, so everything that gets done gets done with artificial intelligence. You need. So basically somebody comes to us, they need a logo, AI creates the logo and we keep modifying it until they love it. Then AI creates a style guide. AI creates the lead magnets, AI creates the landing pages. AI creates the automations. You call, you call any of our customers. AI picks up the gosh darn phone, you text the word demo to 973-841-8868. That's 973-841-88678. You text the word demo, you will get an EVAI demo instantly sent to you. I'm not doing that. Go high level is doing that. And it's unlimitedly scalable. That's why we call it unlimited digital marketing. And so now we're able to pick up customers. Now the problem is with people that say resell go high levels. A, they don't know how to use it. B, they don't have an industry they're targeting. We figured out both things. We figured out the industry we want to go after. We got the initial customers, we tested it out and now every customer that we add, every few thousand dollars that we add in Revenue to the business goes straight to the bottom line because we can handle 100, 203. And I've done this before so many times. But, but I didn't want to do it in a non scalable way. Here's the kicker. When I started Ajax Union, I used to hire one new employee for every 10 small businesses I would take on. Mm, that was a very, very expensive thing. Very expensive thing. Now I could take on 100 customers and I don't have to hire anybody. I could take on 100 service customers for Ajax Union in 2026, even at $1,000 a month. And I don't have to hire a.
- [25:59]
A
New rep because what you've got is essentially prompt engineers. And you told me, we had dinner in New York and you said, andrew, I do not trust people with experience. I want to find the right person. I'm going to train them because I'm so methodical in my training. But essentially that's what it is. You are hiring people who are smart and you're saying, I'm going to train you to be a prompt engineer who also knows how to use go high level. And as a result, you're going to be able to build everything that our customers need.
- [26:23]
B
And not only that, once I have the frameworks, the checklists, the scripts, the agents, everything set up and all the prompts for an industry, I'm the king of the industry. You don't. I don't need to reinvent the wheel. The key is instead of servicing every type of company, we're only going to work with a specific industry and we're just going to set them up and we're going to work with specific franchises and we're just going to go. And that's how we're going to build that business. Now, in terms of evai, we have a whole nother target that we're going.
- [26:50]
A
To get into heavy. So now what we're saying is that you've got this agency and what you're working with is just with. You're only working with franchises. That's it.
- [27:01]
B
And restoration franchises.
- [27:03]
A
Only restorations franchises. Oh, I didn't even realize you were that focused.
- [27:07]
B
Okay.
- [27:07]
A
And that's. Go to a local person and say, look, I've sold to all your other franchisees. I can build this for you. I got it.
- [27:14]
B
No, I built it. Not I can build it. I built it. It's ready to go. You just give me $1,000 right now, I'll set you up. If you're not happy, I give you your money. Back because we're only taking one person per market.
- [27:24]
A
Is it a franchise? Is who's making the calls? Is it a human being making those calls?
- [27:28]
B
A human being makes the initial call because it's not legal to have AI, but we drop voicemails and then an AI picks up when they call back.
- [27:34]
A
Okay, drop. Okay. And dropping voicemails, that's also high level.
- [27:38]
B
Go high level.
- [27:39]
A
Go high level will do outbound calls for you. That's not like in. That's them themselves.
- [27:45]
B
That's them themselves. Now there is a great dialer called a wave dialer, which I use as well. I pay 49amonth for the wave dialer. Wavv. Totally worth it. I make 480 calls in one day just by allowing the dialer to just run. 480 people will be touched and drop. Voicemails will be dropped if they don't pick up. And if they pick up, it pauses the campaign.
- [28:05]
A
Okay. And then is a human being at that point taking the call? If it, if they pick up, if.
- [28:10]
B
If they pick up. If they pick up on an outbound call, a human being has to do it because it's not legal for an AI to do it. But if they call back and AI picks up the phone now I have the option, I see it ringing, I have the option to pick it up from my cell if I want, or any team member gets it on their dashboard.
- [28:25]
A
Okay, all right, we're gonna get into the software that you built, but let's just continue on with these ideas. The next thing you're saying is, look, if you want to make money with AI, just teach AI. And the thing that's interesting about you is we had talked maybe at this point, it was almost a year ago, and you said, I don't know it that much. And to me you were blowing my mind with the stuff that you were doing. And everyone else around the table felt like that. But you said, I am learning it and people are paying me to learn from me. And as a result, I've got pressure to learn. I've got an audience and I've got more reach because of this. Is that still possible though? Or do we have enough AI teachers out there?
- [28:55]
B
Dude, you have no idea. Tony Robbins just came out with an AI course. You know when Tony Robbins comes out with an AI course and then I join his AI course and he's not teaching anything that's super valuable in there. And people pay $1,000 to learn how to create a custom GPT that by the way, sucks. So I'm in his community and I'm just adding value. And people are signing up to my products and services just because I'm adding value. And there's 600,000 people that attended his class. 70,000 people decided to sign up for a. $50,000 people are still paying him $37 a month. To do what? To be in a circle community that he didn't even create. The whole thing. It's just a circle community is just insane. Look up the AI advantage. Look them up on school. He has a school community that's free as a circle community that's $37 a month. I'm in it. And all the people are in it are hungry to learn AI. And they're not really teaching AI. They're teaching you how to create a very basic custom GPT. And you know what? Those are all potential customers for all of us. For you, for me, for anyone that wants to teach AI. And there are hundreds of communities like that where they're not really teaching anything. And if you can actually add some value and if you could teach someone how to use Notebook lm. Do you know what Notebook LM is?
- [30:08]
A
Yeah.
- [30:08]
B
Yeah.
- [30:09]
A
I like it because it creates podcasts for me.
- [30:11]
B
Insane. So I like it because it creates infographics for me and podcasts and now it does videos and it does slideshows. It creates full on Google slideshows. And so like, I'm like, what? And if I, I can just literally make a class on NotebookLM and people will buy it and you could make Money just teaching NotebookLM.
- [30:29]
A
Okay, so if I'm, I'm on this community, I didn't even know this existed, by the way. Can we just say Tony Robbins feels lost to me? Like ever since the whole info Mark, info, whatever, television, infomercial thing died, he has been lost. He went and started talking to all the get rich quick online scammers for a few years. That didn't work. He's now doing AI. He's done a bunch of random stuff anyway. But what you're saying is this community has 65,000 members. Go figure. 470 of them are online this second. You're saying you'll just go in and see that they're not getting anything useful and you'll, you'll talk to them?
- [31:06]
B
I'm converting them. I'm converting them one at a time, building one at a time. It's very simple. I go on Apollo. Apollo IO. Have you heard of it?
- [31:16]
A
Yes, yes. They are like info. Info Zoom.
- [31:19]
B
Exactly. It's like Info Zoom. But what Apollo does is if you enter somebody's first name, last name and company name, or first name, last name and LinkedIn URL, they will give you their email address. And so I just email a thousand people at a time and just say, hey, I know that you're learning, but I created this crazy prompt. If you're interested in the prompt, I'm happy to send it to you. There's no cost. I know. And the title is Tony Robbins Community. Now a thousand people get an email and they all a percentage of them. Not everyone's gonna respond, but a percentage of them respond. I'm super interested, by the way, if you're super interested in that, I'm doing a three hour class. I can show you a free replay. If you go to evergreen.com aicircle you can watch ev y r g r e n.com aicircle there's a three hour class right there. Here you go. I give it to them and they're like, holy, this is amazing. How do I sign up to this? I was like, oh, you have to fill out a questionnaire and blah blah, blah. Or you could just pay2.49amonth and you get in the door. Now people are signing up for 249amonth just like that. And all it is is a zoom meeting that we have once a month for three hours. So think about it. Imagine you put, you imagine the value that you get for spending three hours from me. And you're watching me vibe code. You're watching me create music with AI. You're watching me create custom GPTs. You're watching me like pin grock against Gemini and they're having a conversation with each other. You're watching me be able to create lead magnets for your business, create strategies. And you're like, holy, this is. Imagine the brain of a CEO that's been doing digital marketing as an agency for 17 years, who before that was a web developer, web designer. So I understand HTML, I understand all this stuff. And now I'm, I'm dangerous enough to show you how to build a Chrome extension. By the way, I built over a hundred custom Chrome extensions myself with AI, Myself. Just myself. In the middle of the night.
- [33:00]
A
Like what?
- [33:01]
B
Just for example, let's say I want an extension that will go into the school community and then go through every single person and put it into a spreadsheet. For me, it goes to every person, puts their first name, their last name, where they're located, their LinkedIn, everything. I just watch it, it does it. Boom. Just like that.
- [33:18]
A
And you, you did that using Grok.
- [33:20]
B
No, I did that using Gemini.
- [33:22]
A
Sorry, Gemini.
- [33:23]
B
I go to Gemini.
- [33:26]
A
Chrome extension and then I get into Apollo. You get their contact information, you send.
- [33:30]
B
And then I email them. Boom. And they respond.
- [33:34]
A
I knew that you were doing something like that. I didn't think you'd feel comfortable saying this publicly because you had said it at dinner. You said, look, I'm taking all these customers from these junkie communities.
- [33:43]
B
You think Tony Robbins has the time to watch this? You think Tony Robbins cares? Like I'm live right now? Do you think Tony Robbins cares? And by the way, I'm not stealing. I paid for the community. I pay. I pay money because he charged my credit card. I'm getting my money's worth.
- [33:56]
A
Great.
- [33:57]
B
Okay.
- [33:57]
A
All right, we're going to go to the, the fifth technique, which is build basic software. Give me the build basic software to make money with AI. And then let's talk about how you went beyond beyond basic. But, but what's an example of how I could build software?
- [34:10]
B
Very, very, very, very basic software. A very basic software is something called a prompt generator. Do you know what a prompt generator is?
- [34:19]
A
Yeah, but isn't that built into like Claude console into. Into ChatGPT?
- [34:22]
B
Do you think anyone ever heard of cloud console? Besides you and a few other nerdy people in Silicon Valley or in Austin, Texas, nobody even knows that Claude exists. Okay, if you go walk into any Home Depot or walk into any Lowe's, walk into any Walmart, walk into Trader Joe's and ask anybody, do you know what Claude is? They'll be like, what the flip are you talking about? If you ask people, do you know what ChatGPT is? They'd be like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Most, how many users are in chatgpt? 700 million, period globally that ever even logged in. But there's 7 billion people in the world. That means most people have no clue it even exists. Most people in the world don't even know. And the people that know it exists and they have an account with it, they don't even know how to use it. And they forgot they even created an account with it. So how do you create.
- [35:04]
A
So this is one simple example, very simple tool.
- [35:08]
B
So this is what you do. This, this is what you do. You find a type of prompt generator to create prompts, let's say for example, for cartoon graphics, and you could, you could either do this as a monthly fee or you can do this as a one time lifetime access fee. And Then you put up an ad, whether it's on Facebook or whatever, and you say, I will create. I will give you a generator that will create unlimited cartoon prompts for your business that you could use for social media. It's only $59 for lifetime access or $10 a month. Use it unlimited.
- [35:37]
A
Okay.
- [35:38]
B
And by the way, it's not even using AI credits because it's all JS, it's all JavaScript. So you create a framework that you don't even need a backend for that. You sell access to that. They're either paying monthly 10 bucks a month or they're paying a lifetime access $59. And then you're done. And then you step away and then they create as many cartoons as they want.
- [35:59]
A
If I'm building a website that does this, the, the prompt generator, what would you recommend that I build the site in?
- [36:06]
B
How do I. Gemini. Gemini. You go to Gemini, the whole thing.
- [36:09]
A
And put it up on online.
- [36:10]
B
That's it. You put it up online. You can put it up online on GoHighLevel if you want, which I do recommend. I love GoHighLevel. And if you need a go high level account and you need access to it, just let me know. I'm happy to teach you how to use it. I'm teaching, Happy to whatever, have my staff help you. But bottom line is you could do it anywhere. There's a million different websites that you could use. As a matter of fact, click. Claude has artifacts right now that can host, and so does, so does Google. Google has artifacts that can host, so does GoDaddy. You can go to GoDaddy and build it on GoDaddy if you want. GoDaddy now has a new AI coder. They had, they built an AI coder to compete with Gemini and so GoDaddy has one as well. But you could use any of these tools. It'll make you the prompt generator. It'll work perfectly. It'll work perfectly every single time. And then as a matter of fact, here's another thing you can sell. You can sell access to custom GPTs. People will pay monthly fee to access your custom GPT that you literally just created a prompt with Claude and they're like, I want that custom GPT. I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a custom GPT that writes five sequence cold emails, five step sequence cold emails that in a specific industry for recruiters. So you say, I'm going to sell you for $10 a month. I'm going to sell you Access to my custom GPT that's only available for my $10,000 a year customers. I'm going to give it to you for $10 a month if you're happy with it. Let's talk more about you becoming a $10,000 a year customer. But for right now, pay 10 bucks a month. Right now, month to month. If you're not happy, you can cancel. We'll send you an email every single day reminding you to use it. And then you go ahead, you say what the topic is, it'll create a five step sequence for you. Just like that.
- [37:42]
A
All right, so these are basic software examples. Evie is a lot more sophisticated than that. Evie essentially helps. It's like a LinkedIn manager designed to help people sell and to create content, right?
- [37:55]
B
It's an AI. Yeah, it's an AI assistant for sales for social media. So, for example, if you want to write content, evai will write up all your posts from now until forever. It'll create your images, it'll help you draft comments on posts, it'll help you write what messages to send people. It'll save profiles and research to people instantly. Like everyone in the room that was in the room. When I spoke to a group of agencies that you were talking to about Bootstrap Growing, I knew everybody that was in the room and I knew everything about them. Because evai put together a detailed list of every single person and who their target market is and what their messaging is and what they've achieved and all their contact information and everything. Just for me, knowing who's in the room. I told EVAI it did its research and put everything together.
- [38:36]
A
So how did it do that? I gave you email addresses of people, right? Did I give you their LinkedIn?
- [38:41]
B
I don't need their LinkedIn. You just Google their email address and the LinkedIn comes up. But if you save it into Apollo, Apollo automatically gives you their LinkedIn.
- [38:47]
A
Okay, and so then you put that into. Where? Where is it? I'm on Abby. There's a profile.
- [38:55]
B
If you go to save profiles. Yeah, you go to save profiles. You can upload bulk. There's a place to upload Bulky that.
- [39:00]
A
I can add on there, or I can add it one line at a time. And then what?
- [39:03]
B
Or you can go to. Or you can go to LinkedIn and press save Profile. When you go to their profile, if you have the Chrome extension, you can press Save Profile. It'll download everything from their Linked into evai, and then it'll give you the ability to find them on Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, X, whatever. And then it'll give you AI agents that sit on the side that you push one button and it researches everything about them all over. It'll tell you what podcast they've been on, it'll tell you what articles they've written. It'll literally tell you everything about them. And you can write notes about them as well. And you can put them into lists and it'll show you their recent posts that you can comment on if you want.
- [39:37]
A
Okay, so how do you go from an idea to actually building this software?
- [39:41]
B
What you need to do is you need something called an S. Yeah, I need to first build something called an srs. Do you know what an SRS is? An SRS is a software, a software specification. So what is a software specification? You need very, very details about what it is that the software is going to be. That's what you need in your life. And so you can go to AI. Let's say, for example, Grok. I pay $30 a month for Grok just to talk to it. It's my therapist. So I'm walking the dog. I open up Grok. I'm like, hey, Grog, good morning. I have an idea. It's okay, what's your idea? And I tell it, I have an idea. I want to set up a goal setting masterclass. I want people to identify what their values are, their issues, their beliefs. I want people to figure out their roles. I want people to set goals. I want to come up with a strength finder assessment so they don't have to pay $20 to the Gallup Center. I want to be able to come up with an enigram disk assessment. This da, da, da. I gave it a list of everything that's in my head that I wanted. And I said, give me some software ideas for a simple way for me to do this. And then it gives me a couple of different frameworks and different software ideas. And I say, okay, make me a detailed SRS out of this. And it gives me details of every specific page and what page I need and what's going to be in the page and the business logic and what's going to happen in there. And then I can. Then what I do is I use that to create prompts within CLAUDE for different pages to create one page at a time to be able to really get the MVP done. And so I create initially HTML pages with the framework that basically shows me how the page will work with demo data. And then I know that it works and I see that it works. And Then I can create a backend with Gemini and connect it to Supabase, or I can use lovable dot dev or Bolt New or there's so many different tools. Base 44, you can use any of those tools and you just basically give it the SRS along with the example HTML files and it'll literally build the whole thing that works, including authentication, including stripe integration. You have to of course give it your API and all the stuff and everything will work perfectly and you'll be able to use it. Now the downside is scalability. So if you want to scale, you probably need to get a cto, a developer or someone to actually look at this, make sure it's GDPR compliant, make sure that it's cybersecurity friendly, make sure people can do SQL injections, maybe make sure people can do reverse prompt engineering. I would even hire people to brute force and test your app. And I hire developers to test my app and try to hack it. And then they tell me how they hacked it and then I patch it and that's what I do.
- [42:09]
A
So you didn't have a human being code up this site for you? Even a human being with AI, you did it yourself this way.
- [42:16]
B
The first version I built MVPs, I have about 200 additions to that I already built that are working, that I created myself using artificial intelligence. And when the refactor is done at the end of this year, in the two weeks my refactor will be done, the developer will go through each one and slowly module add them to. So I do have full time development team working on VAI now that is doing things correctly with a proper back end, with a proper integration, with proper safety, with proper compliance, with proper privacy, with proper cybersecurity rules. All that's being done by a human being. But the initial mvp, the initial minimal viable product of something that has a front end and a back end, I do that myself. I'll sit down, brainstorm with AI, because I'm the product manager, really, you know, like I'm the ideator, I'm the person that knows what the real issue is that the customer needs to solve. And if I had to work with a developer back in the day to work with a guy named Andre, I would give him the idea. He would come back to me three weeks later with an MVP. Now I give the idea to Gemini and within 45 seconds I have my MVP done.
- [43:21]
A
What about this? I am looking again at the interview that we did back in 2013 and you were telling me back then I was running an ebay business. I was doing some real estate. I had this little IT business on the side and it was just like I was spinning ideas. So many different things. Now feels like you have even more ideas than you had back then.
- [43:38]
B
So what happened was, what happened was I was not able to get Ajax Union to a million dollars in revenue until I did. I started just focusing on doing one simple product, the anubi plan. Articles, blogs, classified ads. And I dropped ebay and I dropped real estate and I dropped all the businesses. That doesn't work now. What I found is with EVAI is I can do a million different things with as long as they're within the context of evai. I have a business partner named Tammy. She's my integrator. Without her I would be all over the place. She has a PhD in mathematical neuroscience. She writes, she can write algorithms, she can predict the future. She's like really, really amazing. Without her I would be like bouncing off the wall. So most of the ideas that I present to her, she basically says no, we're not doing that. No, we're not doing that. No, we're not doing that. Because I'm the idea monkey. And she makes sure it's in line. But at least 200 of my ideas, she said yes and she's ready to implement them. But many of the other ideas that I come up with, she's like, unrelated. Have a good day. Goodbye. Like I want you to start like.
- [44:36]
A
Keep track of even the 200, I don't know about 200, let's say even a dozen ideas, you can keep track of a dozen ideas that I don't keep track.
- [44:43]
B
I don't, I don't keep track of anything. I just give it to my team and my team, team keeps track of things so I don't have to. The. The ideas that I'm. When I come up with an MVP for something, people are not paying for that MVP initially. It's something that's going to be included into evai. So right now the only software besides the Ajax Union, which somebody else is running for me, I have a full time person that's running it. So I don't actually have to run it. That he's been working with me for 11 years. So I have somebody running the company. Then he meets with the clients, he does all the things that needs to be done. But. And they meet with me every single day. I have this thing called review at leadership and they meet with me every day to get my input on stuff and we go back and forth on stuff, and then they go do whatever they have to do and move on. But in terms of like my baby, the thing that's going to be the hundred million dollar gorilla, that's EV AI. But the 200 things that I'm doing and the. The Chrome extensions and everything I'm building, it's all tied into EV AI. Everything is tied back into EVAI. So everything I'm doing is to get every AI in the customer base. We have 23,000 users in 40 countries around the world. But our. But we're not offering a billion different things. What we're doing is we're adding new features as an extension for what people need to do in order to have a proper sales assistant. That's the key. The key is every person in their life needs an assistant to do the things that they don't need to do. For example, Andrew, if you want to be top of mind with someone on LinkedIn, the most important thing you can do to be top of mind with someone if they post content is to comment on their content. That's the most important thing. So I built an intelligent AI assistant that can reply to anyone's content in any language, with any tone, with any goal, with any Persona, with any LLM. All the LLMs are tied in right there with images, with whatever you want. You can reply in on any platform, not just LinkedIn. It works on Facebook, on substack, on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok, on YouTube videos. You can comment anywhere. And so this tool is an assistant that will intelligently help you be able to know what to comment on without ever leaving that platform. That's the key. You don't have to leave the platform. And you could use a keyboard shortcut, mind you. So if you put a keyboard shortcut in, the comment just appears perfectly in the way that you need it. Think about the power of just that.
- [46:55]
A
That's the Chrome extension, which I haven't used the web app. I'm using the web app. You're saying you get the Chrome extension anywhere where you see some content from somebody who you know or from anything. You just start to hit the keyboard shortcut and magically a reply, a comment appears.
- [47:10]
B
And then you could decide if you want to post it or you want to change it.
- [47:13]
A
Okay, all right, I got to close out with this one question. How are you wearing such a thick jacket for this interview? We've been talking for an hour.
- [47:19]
B
I literally, I'm not. First of all, I love the heat. That's number one. I love Hot. That's number one. Number two is I just walked in from shoveling the snow outside. I love shoveling snow. And so it snowed like crazy. I just walked in. So I was freezing outside because it's like 20 degrees here in New York and so I just. And I just walked in from outside and I was so cold. So I just sat in here with my coat and it really warmed me up and. And your energy warmed me up, too. But.
- [47:44]
A
And you're still, you're still with the jacket.
- [47:47]
B
I'm not sweating. I'm feeling really good. Yeah.
- [47:49]
A
All right. I am in Austin where it has been below freezing and I am cold, but I'm going to get the heat back on. I don't like the heat on when I'm doing these interviews, but. All right. But you brought the fire, man. You did it. Thank you for doing this interview. What's the best place for people to find you? I'm assuming that it's LinkedIn is where you like. No, you probably want somebody to go to a page with a lead capture form so that.
- [48:10]
B
I mean the easy, the easiest thing is if you send the word demo D E m o to 973-841-8868 or you send anything there, I'll see it. It'll pop up on my phone. It'll pop up on all my staff's phones. 973-841-8868. You can happily do that. So that's number one. That's easy way to. If you want to follow me, just go to joe LinkedIn.com really easy to find joelinkedin.com you can also check out my 99 Hacks at 99 Hacks Club. I'm always happy to add value if you need support. Remember, I'm just like a little step away. My cell phone's on LinkedIn, so you can easily find my cell there. So definitely check out my LinkedIn. The reason I like people going to my LinkedIn because LinkedIn has caller ID. So when you hop on joelinkedin.com I'll actually see that you hopped on. But do send me a dm, let me know that you heard me on Andrew's interview. And if you need to email me, I'm joejaxunion.com joe@ajaxunion.com feel free to drop me an email. I've written five books on Amazon, so definitely check out my books. And I just want to say that if you need help with anything, I'm here to support you. No, to no small question if you need to meet somebody. I have this vast network of people in ypo, in entrepreneur. I'm part of the Entrepreneurs Global organization. I'm going to Japan. These are companies that are all over a million dollars in annual revenue and I'm meeting with them and we're networking and building relationships. One of my forum mates, it's in my Forum, just joined Tiger 21. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but they're a big investment group. He sold his company for, for a large eight figure amount. But these are the people you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And so I'm grateful that I have incredible folks that are fast growing CEOs helping each other, making a difference. So I know what it means to mentor and to support and to help. So if you need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm always happy to help out.
- [49:53]
A
All right, thanks for doing this. All right, bye everyone.
- [49:57]
B
I am very, very, very, very excited about rebuilding post divorce Andrew. I. I can't even tell you how difficult my life was around Covid. In that whole time I was very down on myself. But I'm just very, very grateful that I was able to recover. And now I have the tools and the ingredients to be able to truly be able to grow something magical that can help many people for many, many generations. So I'm very excited to be doing this and I'm very excited that I'm in it. Yeah, I'm very, very excited. I lost a lot of weight too. You, when you interviewed me, I was 100 pounds heavier.